Good thing AI can’t fail.

Check the notes.

We are primates, and when we put all the martial arts together (MMA) it turns into a match of who can get on top of and neutralize their opponent. A bear doesn’t have any way of attacking a primate if the primate can get to its back. As a human, we wouldn’t have the dexterity or strength to get around, cling onto a bear and choke it out, but a bear-sized gorilla probably could and once it does that it’s neutralized every mode of attack the bear has except writhing around and pushing it into other objects.

I don’t know, but they’re physically capable of it. I once had an anthropology professor who demonstrated the difference between simian-like arms and quadruped-like arms, and the major part of it was noting that you’ve never seen a cat spread their arms out like the Vetrivian Man (they can’t). In the evaluation of ape vs. bear combat I don’t want to discount the capability of the ape to grasp, latch on or choke.

I could see a gorilla choking a bear out though, the bear isn’t going to be able to strangle the gorilla from behind.

Yes and no, because I think a thing fiction can’t do is repeat itself, so they must find interesting new angles in which they could reflect possible futures. The very much most likely future of whatever the thing is becoming an ad-laden, buggy, infinite-money ponzi scheme until it’s abandoned 3-72 months after its release and thrown into a landfill isn’t that interesting to see episode after episode.

Yeah but do you really know this industry? 😉 Thanks for elaborating!

This is awesome context. Do you know of places consumers could go to find those slightly less mainstream SKUs? I’m assuming you mean it could be like a dual display port version of monitor vs a hdmi/displayport version or something meant for the PAL region vs NTSC (as examples)?

I mean, yes, there are AI companies, but if you want to be creative with AI these days, it’s actually not owned by the same few people. There are thousands of open source models that can be run on a midrange consumer GPU at home.

But most people who weren’t making art/music/code before weren’t making art/music/code because they weren’t interested in it. Having a tool that magically makes a bunch of shit you already didn’t have any interest in that barely rises above a vague novelty isn’t going to ever suddenly make someone interested in it.

The problem with AI is that every large company is using it to make search, information, and every product and tool worse because they are out of ideas, they actually believe(d?) that the AI was or could be sentient at some point, and, of course, promising AI would do X was a really good way to get through Q1 in 2024. And Q2, and Q3.

Can’t tell if this is new timey advice from a rich person or old timey advice from a gentleman.

That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the detailed reply. I think one of the reasons I feel like I’m slower than I want to be is I tend to think a lot about those kinds of edge cases. My main problem now is learning to find the right-size for prototyping/building.

That said, I’ve written thousands of loops at this point but I’ve only done an input loop like that in python once or twice (in classes as I recall), so that specific method of getting the application started would probably be in that “I’d be embarrassed I’d need to google that” category. But I think once I got started I’d code out a decently competent prototype of a basic store (I’ve built an ecommerce store before so I’m familiar with some but not all of those edge cases). I would never think that code would be ready to ship though.

Thanks for this.

I mentor lots of people and i met with someone last week for the first time, and as we were chatting he mentioned several times things like “So I just asked the AI what to do, and then did that exact thing”…. Uh, so… I don’t use AI that way.

I started using it basically as soon as it came out and I started like everyone else, writing out all these requirements into the system, marveling at how it just spit back out a whole program, and then obviously ran into all the pitfalls that that entails.

So, these days, my AI use is limited to what I’d say is syntax conversion/lookup (like “What’s the syntax for instantiating and adding to a set in python?”) and anything I’d immediately verify.

I should also say I’m aware of leetcode/things like that. I play around a lot on Codewarriors and see how others put together solutions and learn a lot from that. I really enjoy the silly grindy aspects of coding like figuring out how to extract all the content from a json object that should be a string but can’t be a string for <reasons>, and building larger/complex systems like game engines (engines to make my games work, not the underlying engine). Components/react and that style of development makes a lot of intuitive sense to me as well.

Anyway I say all that to say I’d be sort of embarrassed to use AI during an interview like I’d be embarrassed to need to google anything, but it would be primarily about syntax and I’d be as likely to distrust anything the AI was saying as to use it unless it aligned with what I’d expect the code to look like.

Do you mind if I ask what a “weeder” task might be vs. a more involved one? As someone who hasn’t worked on a dev team before, I only vaguely know what you mean by “We were hoping to say they needed to write some tests to get a code review”.

I work in software (relatively high up), just not as a developer. Started to take development classes at night to pursue it as my own interest, and work on websites/games for myself. When I’m working, I guess my favorite thing to do is to approach work systematically, and my regular job keeps me pretty well-informed about the front-end aspects.

I really appreciate the suggestion. I’ve written some small contributions to public projects, but (I think I mentioned in the past here) not being a dev by trade I have held back some of it because it doesn’t work perfectly and I don’t have any interest in maintaining it/fixing it for others (as I’d like to be working on games, etc). Anyway this was very helpful, thanks (I got super busy yesterday and couldn’t respond).

I have a question, as someone who struggles with a little developer imposter syndrome. I don’t work as a dev, but I’ve coded from the ground up (using AI initially but basically only these days for syntax checks or to help accelerate writing something routine), including multiple websites (initially in React/Tailwind but lately in raw HTML/CSS), games (using python/godot), etc, for my own purposes primarily (as I have a completely different day job). Is that typical of a candidate you’d see in an interview? Are you having to screen candidates like that for whether they know what they’re talking about or are you referring to more junior people (assuming that what I’m profiling isn’t super junior)?

Eh. It’s kind of a shit day, not even Russian generals being undone by their greatest weakness, Russia, is moving the needle.

I’ve been using open webui (search for it with those terms) to run local models in a docker container served from Llama for the last few months and I love it.

Sometimes I serve apps with Flask, he wanted to get into some python as well

Yeah, OK. I just watched a complete novice ask ChatGPT how to go through installing node, pip, and creating a react app (of course ChatGPT being of 2021 suggested CRA). After 2 minutes, his confidence was soaring. And then he tried to run the react app and ran into an issue that required 2 days of troubleshooting for him to resolve. (When he asked me about it I told him he could have just deleted the file and moved on.)

So, yah, just let the CEO type in the code into the magic box, what could go wrong.

My 9th gen intel is still not the bottleneck of my 120hz 4K/AI rig, not by a longshot.

Yeah I got mind refurbished also, so someone else took the first hit on driving it off the lot (and waiting for it to be built). I guess they didn’t use it to its full extent though. That didn’t make it “cheap” though.