I disagree with humans being the CNC machines. In both cases, humans instruct the technology to create the designs, but it is the machine which is digging into the product to create the visual patterns.

Then you'll be pleased to know it was.

I started a tiny bit before you, but close enough that we'd probably be considered the same cohort so to speak. My enthusiasm has largely waned, for sure.

For me AI and general fads don't play a big part in how I feel.

Don't crucify me, but for me it's a vocal (and seemingly large) part of the tech community itself that I'm burned out on. As a professional in tech, it's literally soul crushing to sit in front of a computer screen all day long. Yes, that's oversimplification, but being stuck indoors, mostly sitting in front of monitors or sitting in meetings, just has destroyed my mental health. But, it's the sterile corporate mind games and managers and project managers and crabs in a bucket mentality amongst developers that really act like a wooden stake to the heart.

Even after all that, I still had/have some tech related hobbies, and those same personalities are so off putting that I had to set them aside. Granted, the whole sitting in front of a screen in my "off hours" when I could be up, out and about, doing things is also a huge factor.

Won't get into the job aspect of things too much, but as an example from my hobbies: I'm so tired of people who feel compelled to yuck others' yum. I'm using the wrong version of Linux. Why would anybody ever choose X library when Y exists? Oh, you did something with AI, why do you hate humanity?

So, basically I'm tired of "you people" (not all of you, some of you, maybe even most of you are a blessing) in addition to the soul crushing aspect of being in front of a screen all day is what's killed my enthusiasm.

I feel your pain. I started IT in '94. Saw the excitement (AMD breaking the 1GHz barrier, High-speed internet, to name a few), then saw it go downhill just as fast.

Hey me too!

I'm having way more fun buying up all the tech of the 2000s and relearning it all. Its just more interesting to me

For stuff not techy, climbing is very fun and affordable and a good way to meet people.

Your feelings are valid. The "rise" of "AI" has been a net negative for my subjective experience, too.

On my good days, I still enjoy programming, but I just ignore AI, and if it is too forcefully suggested, I just blacklist the purveyor.

On my bad days, I don't have enthusiasm for anything, but I still program because this project isn't going to get done any other way. I've tried throwing AI at other things, and it screws things up so badly it takes me more time to fix it. And, sometimes it "lies" and I don't catch it immediately.

I have a good selection of subscriptions on YT (and Nebula), communities on Lemmy, and Follows on Mastodon, and I start there when I just want to enjoy the web. I intentionally avoid following algorithmic suggestions of unknown quality (and defintiely turn off any sort of auto-play); I find I will spend time on that stuff nearly without bound, but it's less enjoyable than what I (or other humans) have curated.

I started programming in '85 as a child. I used to be a professional Haskell programmer. I'm open for work. (All I need is vim and some API docs and I can write anything from C to JavaScript to Lean.)

Where once was a vast and lush landscape of innovation and ingenuity, now is only a desert of grift and profiteering. The optimistic nature of our youthful tech enthusiasm has transformed into a cynical and substanceless husk, aged too fast by the years of consistent disappointments.

But if anyone at work asks, then yeah, sure, I'm really excited about the next iPhone or AI generated email signatures or whatever.

Machining always needs more bodies. Take that programming experience, translate it to g code and whatever software the shop is running for parts, and make that bank.

Honestly I doubt you'll hit a salary anything like IT but its rewarding work. I LOVE manual machining. Problem solving and working out complicated parts and features is a fun challenge from day to day.

How did AI help linux noobs? Sounds interesting.

I have a dozen hobbies, but don't know a way to make a living except IT. Haven't had a good job in nearly two years, don't give a fuck about tech any longer, so lost.

You say that, but you have to remember that LLMs produce the average output of their training materials. Not the best, but the average. And there's a lot of code out there that is simple. Only the outliers have the magic combination of conciseness AND quality AND complexity.

LLMs also have no understanding of context outside the immediate. Satire is completely opaque to them. Sarcasm is lost on them, by and large. And they have no way to differentiate between good and bad output. Or good and bad input, for that matter. Joke pseudocode is just as valid in their training corpus as dire warnings about insecure code.

I read a comment once that still rings true - "Hallucinations" are a misnomer. Everything an LLM puts out is a hallucination; it's just that a lot of the time, it happens to be accurate. Eliminating that last percentage of inaccurate hallucinations is going to be nearly impossible.

I feel you. My hobby is electronics. I will be designing some circuits with an old Arduino that I have...

That's on me, I meant the equivalent of a "trust me bro" , in this case an anecdotal "me and the people I know all say..."

showing Claude submissions is sufficient for analyzing code in the context I believe it is good

Yes, in the context you provided it makes sense, as a response to my question which specified examples of larger projects/workflows, it does not.

Im not here to argue either, I asked a specific question and your answer didn't really address any of it, i was just pointing that out.

I too find it frustrating but it seems for different reasons.

I really really dislike the way it's being sold as a solution for things it's in no way a solution for.

They do certain things fine, good even, but blanket statements like "their code is great" without appropriate qualifiers is contributing to the validation of these bullshit sales-oriented claims of task competency.

1: agreed

2: then I think you are missing the fundamental limitations of the current approaches, but we can agree to disagree on this.

3: see 2

I agree with jobs on the chopping block, though i think that's in large part due to poor due diligence and planing by management, but that's nothing new, the same thing has and is still happening with offshoring (throwing more people at a problem generally won't solve design and governance issues).

I also think the current systems aren't capable of being a viable replacement for anything above junior level stuff, if that ( not that that doesn't present it's own problems )

I think the difference in opinion comes from my belief that LLM's and the current tooling around them aren't fundamentally capable of replacing existing resources, not that they just don't have the power yet.

Putting increasing large compute in a calculator won't magically make it a spreadsheet application.

Fuck yeah, friend!

Funny that you say that as a sysadmin, because while I hate AI as an artist, mostly because I've spent years learning 3D modeling and photography and now AI can replace my skills, I find LLMs super useful for doing basic sysadmin tasks.

I no longer have to read manpages and documentation just to try to find simple options or commands, if I need a simple script or config, AI writes it for me, it makes administrating my systems much faster. It's like having an IT friend who's always online and knows every tech.

My guess is that you feel the same way about LLMs as I feel about image/video/3D generative AI.

<3

Let me help you:

AI does create a lot of slop - but at the same time, a lot of people don’t know what capabilities exist and what’s just marketing/hyperbole.

They read “AI will replace software engineers” and think that they can just talk to an AI and spit out working production level code.

Not saying that’s you. I don’t know your work.

1. It doesn’t know your machine unless it has local access. How will it know where you’re installing if it doesn’t know your directory tree?
2. it doesn’t know that it needs to import other modules or how separate functions need to interact. Not until you build it out and track what you’re doing and how the functions interact. It’s just documenting the work you do.
3. It defaults to basic framework from which to build - just like we would.

You don’t sit down and write 8,000 lines of code just one line after another. Shit - it could take me 3 days to figure WHERE to put 2 lines of code.

1. Claude web and Claude code can be split into dedicated projects or containers.

This allows specific contextual awareness. The more work you do in a project the more you can build off of it.

Organizing into context aware containers allows you to massively improve your code base because it actually accesses the code itself. Less guess - less slop. Not “no slop” just less.

It doesn’t replace everything, but recently I had Claude code evaluate ~43,000 lines of code. I verified its audits manually, and let it do its thing. I still had to make corrections on some assumptions it made but I fixed 110 critical bugs in an afternoon because of this system I’ve described.

If you’re expecting to say “build me x” it isn’t going to be successful.

Treat it like it’s a tool in the toolbox, not a replacement for good practices.

To your other note - the first time I tested Claude code I was blown away. Then the 2nd or 3rd time it took over… I felt like I lost my purpose. I need to be involved, not replaced.

I just changed my interests to open source stuff, theres a world of cool stuff if you keep
Digging around.

For example lately I have:
Been editing with kdenlive and it’s been amazing.
Playing with Meshtastic and thats been fun.
Trying new things all the time.

Hehe, I have been aware of suitcase model railways for a long time, probably about two decades or so, but never felt like I had the skill to build one before.

At the end of the pandemic I got hit with dual flat feet, dual heel spurs and a bad knee at the same time.

It was a bad time for me, every step hurt, to the point that I ate six paracetamols and a few ibuprofen every day just to cope, and when walking home from the bus after work, I cried hard due to the pain of every single step.

During this time, I snowed in on videos about making dioramas, especially this video stuck with me:

https://youtu.be/HEG3d0cMuv4

I loved the weathering and how real it looked.

Anyway, I got help for my feet and knee, and mostly moved on from the videos, but never forgot about the above video.

I got laid off at my earlier job and got this job, it is far more stressful, and I have been feeling depressed, so I have been looking for something to do.

I recently did some simple wood working stuff, and found I quite enjoyed it.

So I decided to give this a try.

I have a workbench at home, in a utility room in my apartment, it used to be occupied with a shit load of rum and other alcohol, but last weekend I went and bought a small Billy bookshelf at IKEA and turned that into an fairly elegant bar shelf.

(Just a quick note, just because I have a lot of alcohol at home and live alone doesn't mean that I drink a lot.

I mostly collect because I find it interesting to have a selection to pick from.

I drink alcohol maybe once every other month, often less.)

So now I have a workspace, I need to make room under the workbench, get a chair and some proper lights and I can start the project.

As someone with similar feelings in general and a similar history, I feel you are blaming only the latest and worse effects on tech and of tech on society.

I started my career in parallel with mobile devices and smartphones. The whole idea of new possibilities, new ways to interact with tech, miniaturization, etc., is what called me most as it was a huge field starting and I tried to find my path forward. I've seen from close, real close, how an incredible tech, full of possibilities has been slowly been captured by the market capitalists that inevitably always ended up controlling the direction of every company.

This is not caused by crypto, this is not caused by LLMs. The origin is greed and capitalism. Decisions being made to make number go up.

Really, crypto is a fascinating tech, it's not the fault of the technology that crypto-bros came to conquer everything and misuse it and abused it to make a quick buck.

LLMs are impressive, think about it, we have managed to completely break the Turing test. We have machines that sound so human that mostly everyone is in a constant suspicion that everything they see is made by an LLM. LLMs sound so human that they are full of confidence and mostly always full of shit. Just think about it, AI is just a representation of humanity, what we do with it just represents and highlights the issues in society.

The reality is that those two, have just suffered a faster, the fastest we've seen yet probably, tech lifecycle - growth, hype, plateauing, and eventually decline and enshittification of any service related to the tech.

Consider search engines, their demise is not because of AI, AI is just the last blow. I used to be very good at finding what I wanted, I knew how to use the tool to make the best of it. Slowly over the years much as I want, I cannot get the results I want without a lot of effort. I haven't somehow become shit at it, the tools and the tech have been modified and changed until it has become useless, the whole point is not finding anymore, but making you search as much as possible.

Consider the mobile hardware field as it is now, compared to the years when it started blowing up with all kind of devices and possibilities. The market has been captured, a few companies remain, releasing the same thing over and over with the latest and bigger number each year. Slowly the whole wild world we had of custom roms, has been captured so that if you get out of the fenced field your apps won't work because it is not safe. Apps check that you are using them in an unmodified and perfectly controlled OS where you own nothing. Apple has always been king of fenced fields, but now Google is doing all it can to imitate it, squeezing in and trying to capture as much of their open field into their very high fenced safe areas. They want to control the source of apps, the developers, and remove the freedom from the devices. It's crypto and LLMs at a slower pace. Working for so many years as a developer I can feel how I'm more and more tied up to the whims and wishes of companies that don't pay me the salary, I keep bringing this up and make a safer path for the future but the company that does pay my salary doesn't care, they just want the latest BS and hyped concepts.

People like you or me, we have a special vantage point. We know how we can still fight that, we know what are the alternatives, we know what the tech could become. We need to bring that knowledge to everyone, keep pushing for FOSS solutions, keep teaching everyone that tech is not difficult, it's not magic, but it requires learning and education. It requires not falling on the path of less resistance, and fight against lobbying and market capture. It's tough, when we just get so tired of constantly fighting it. What I think you find so tiring is not Crypto and LLMs but how tech is being guided to its demise, to become a tool for control and nothing more.

Hey now, also don't forget that the Epstein class is forcing OS level identity verification on all devices now

To your point then: what are your thoughts on this project? https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler I'm not particularly interested in this use case right now but it seems more in line with what you're interested in.

I think it shows a lot of limitations but also a lot of potential. I don't personally think the AI needs to get the code perfect on the first go -- it has to be compared to humans and we definitely don't do that.

I really really dislike the way it’s being sold as a solution for things it’s in no way a solution for.

Yes, of course. I think it's important to look passed the blowhards and think about what it's actually doing: that is the perspective I'm trying to talk about this from.

I'd push back on your point here with a few things:

The primary one being: the code doesn't need to be perfect or even above average -- average is perfectly fine. The idea here is comparing the AI to a human, not to perfection. I see this constantly with AI and I find it a bit disingenuous.

I do truly believe what I said above will be possible within my career (I'm in my mid 30s), but it's not really what I'm worried about right now. I think the current code I see being generated is generally "good enough". I'm not comparing it to perfect: I'm comparing it to people.

I read a comment once that still rings true - “Hallucinations” are a misnomer. Everything an LLM puts out is a hallucination; it’s just that a lot of the time, it happens to be accurate. Eliminating that last percentage of inaccurate hallucinations is going to be nearly impossible.

I don't see any reason you have to remove all hallucinations to get a good tool for autonomous development: humans aren't perfect either. We compensate for that with processes and checking each others work, but plenty still falls through the cracks.

LLMs also have no understanding of context outside the immediate. Satire is completely opaque to them. Sarcasm is lost on them, by and large. And they have no way to differentiate between good and bad output. Or good and bad input, for that matter. Joke pseudocode is just as valid in their training corpus as dire warnings about insecure code.

Have you seen output in which satirical code is actually included? I'm well aware of things like https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison and the potential here. And do you not believe that either (a) these types of trivial issues would be caught by a person whose job was just to audit output or even (b) this type of issue could be caught by specially trained domain limited AIs designed to check output?

It's not only IT. I'm pretty sure we've peaked. We don't try to produce good products or services anymore, just ones that can get quick returns. Get customers and then make it worse, for the shareholders!

I still have products from >10 years ago which are great and work, but you can buy less and less things like that. Even in sectors that were super reliable.

I'm still cool with tech, but only if there is a radical shift in how it's being used and integrated into society as a whole. In my view, people are using tech as a crutch or substitute to supplement the limitations of biology. IMHO that is the wrong way to go about it.

The disgusting weaknesses of the flesh should not be supported by technology, but should instead be supplanted by it. The purity of the machine is not a stepping stone to some higher enlightened state, it IS the enlightened state. At the same time, we must shun the heresy of the Abominable Intelligence and instead wed the purity of true thought and knowledge to a vessel that is capable of fully encompassing its divinity.

The crude biomass which is generally held to be a temple is nothing more than the result of random trial and error. Inevitably it will fail. In that moment, only those who aspire to the perfection of the machine and the blessed strength of steel will receive salvation.

I serve the Omnissiah.

That sucks, that your passion for your job got eroded to this point.
The z scale train in a suitcase sounds like a really cool project. Share some updates along the way.

What? Sounds like the last time you tried it was a decade ago.

I was alluding to the wider web being fucking ass now. It has nothing to do with Linux. Thats why staying on your machine is a nostalgia trip to the good times.

OHHHH. In that case BARTENDER this person's next drink is on me.

Sure, AI can automate the work, but instead of maintaining quality, said quality of work is also taking a nosedive in tandem with the quality of materials.

Knuth wrote about AI solving one of his 30 year old problems:

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf

So it can be good in the right hands.

I can honestly say that I dread the future of tech, and the goat farm thing sounds really appealing.

I went to a local store the other day and saw 2 new flock cameras that went up. There was one person manning 8 self checkout stations, and there was a camera watching me scan and bag my own stuff while displaying a live feed of me. I hopped in my car, which automatically turned on GPS and then my phone started giving me "helpful" suggestions like " have you tried out this restaurant nearby?" and "it's been a while since you've been to the pet store to get stuff". I suddenly felt like a boiled frog, because I don't remember turning any of that shit on, or being notified about it being turned on, or seeing info about new surveillance cameras going up in the community. At this point, I want to buy some land in the middle of fucking nowhere and disconnect from all that shit, and I legitimately had a low-level panic about all of it.

Everything is a scam. It feels like no engineers exist any longer. It’s not even just tech it’s everything. I bought a jar from a major retailer and the lids don’t fit right on them.

It’s pretty obvious capitalism has run its course. What i don’t get is the amount of people helping destroy the world they have to live in or worse—they are having kids in a world they are actively making shitty for six figures.

Then they use their kids as the excuse to make the world worse for everyone else! “I can’t afford not to!”

Well, what you actually can’t afford is to keep doing this. Quit working for these public corps. Sacrifice everything to not work for them. I promise you’ll be better off after some pain. Coming from someone with no actual education that made it out you college grads can do it. I believe in you.

And your kids don’t need large Christmas’s and a new car at 16 with private school. They do need a functioning world.

We are not at the end of the road. We are not at the beginning of the end of the road. We are not at the end of the beginning.

I definitely get the impulse to doom. And I'm as prone to it as anyone. But when I look at crypto and AI, all I can see is the same analog fuck-ups made in prior generations. Beanie Babies and Labubus didn't ruin the stuffed animal industry. The Delorean and the Hummer didn't ruin the automotive industry. The Great Depression of 1932 didn't ruin the financial sector.

Plenty of things to be excited about in software and tech that lives entirely outside the cloistered hype-beast market. Raspberry Pis, 3D printers, 3nm chipsets built with ultraviolet lithography, solid state drives, lithium and sodium ion batteries with incredibly recharge rates, gorilla glass and carbon fiber, 5G+ radios, full voice recognition, self-piloting vehicles.

How is none of this thrilling? Hell, even just the advent of coding pipelines that can take a project from a funky coding idea to a deliverable feature in a few keystrokes is such a huge step forward in development. I can't hate the sales goons pushing junk when I'm so immersed in all the novel innovative applications of technology I've been watching bud itself up from the ground for the last 40 years.

Even LLMs on their face are such a novel application of graph theory. You can do so much cool stuff off a second hand laptop today. It's an exciting new frontier.

dont browse the web Facebook or any modern Google/iPhone Store apps.

The internet used to be a space for weird geeky hobbyists that more traditional plebs couldn't access or couldn't be bothered to fuck with. Now it's still that, but it has a bunch of shit for the rubes, too.

At some point, I feel like I'm talking to someone who says "I fucking hate Florida. Every time I go, I spend a week at Disney World and it's expensive and awful and loud and stupid." And here I am, out in the Keys, working on my tan and fishing and hiking and hooking up with cuties, having no problems whatsoever.

I just want to chime in and say this is exactly how you should use this Ai to code.

One method was to lower the quality of inputs. Plywood instead of hardwood. Then fiberboard/chipboard instead of plywood.

In fairness, hardwood is in limited supply. It takes a long time to produce, is expensive to harvest correctly, and typically means demolishing old growth forests to obtain. The "lower quality" products definitely have their trade-offs, but a lot of the quality issues are resolved through engineering improvements and materials sciences.

I would argue the real downside of lower quality inputs is the advent of "disposable" furniture (the IKEA brand crap most notably). Stuff that could have been designed to last, but isn't, and ends up in landfills after moving day as a result. Rather than a savings yield, what you get is a waste surplus.

And later, CNC machines stepped in to produce delicate and complicated designs in a fraction of the time - and frequently even more precisely and more cleanly - than anyone with a carving chisel could do.

And that is the part which is NOT being effectively duplicated in IT.

Lolwhut? We've come so far even in the last ten years, in terms of IDEs, deployment pipelines, and automated unit testing.

All modern web browsers are ass, even Firefox (though considerably less so than the alternatives that arent forks). So even browsing the web sucks now because most sites are business or corporations. So yes, you can visit your favorite blog, but its still not the same as it was in the 90s or early 00s. Fucken computers bullshit, its fucken sick

So yes, you can visit your favorite blog, but its still not the same as it was in the 90s or early 00s.

It absolutely is. I might argue podcasts have kinda usurped the old blogging space (or, at least, supplanted it). But I've got an RSS feed full of blogs I follow that are barely different that what I was looking at 30 years ago. The 90s is alive on Feedly.

Fucken computers bullshit, its fucken sick

Lolz.

I hope I never have to buy a car with one of those damn screens controlling everything.

I would ssy Usenet is the only place left that gives me 90s vibes besides maybe like batMUD and other old games. I literally stay away from the rest of the web thats not the fediverse, Steam, or GoG. The woods I grew up.in has been turned into a tacky suburb.

The origin is greed and capitalism

Really, crypto is a fascinating tech, it’s not the fault of the technology that crypto-bros came to conquer everything and misuse it and abused it to make a quick buck.

Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto is a fascinating read.

What I think you find so tiring is not Crypto and LLMs but how tech is being guided to its demise, to become a tool for control and nothing more.

I struggle with this, especially in my Socialist org. Everybody (Leftists) seems so anti-tech. I get it, the oligarchs and fascists currently own basically all tech right now, and are weaponizing it against us. But it really is useful tech in the right context ... we have to wrestle control back and fight!

I love Carplay, that being said it should be built to be controlled with buttons and knobs on the steering wheel.

This year, I have given myself a project, I will try to build a model railway in a suitcase. That will be a Z-scale tiny world in a suitcase.

I used to make miniature buildings out of things like balsa wood, spackle, etc for D&D. It became a challenge to see how closely I could simulate things like grass, torches, etc.

I've felt much of the same things. It's depressing. The Internet used to be cool. Tech used to be cool.

Fortunately, I've been doing more things in the real world. I've been fixing up an old car. It's fun to drive it even though it's slow and noisy and hilariously unsafe. I've been practicing archery with my kid. We are both getting decent. I've been writing more. I have been raising chickens, I now have 14 lovely girls who give me and my neighbors free eggs, and one bigass hateful rooster that keeps them safe. Lastly I've been teaching myself drone photography. I've been building a meshtastic network on my area.

So the Internet used to be cool but... I've decided that I'm going to just have to be cool instead.

I don't have any advice because I'm in exactly the same boat. I think finding other hobbies is probably the best option. It sucks because things were looking so good there for a while until the fucking tech bros ruined it. My problem is all my other interests require workspace that I don't have.

We should start a community of like-minded individuals who live in the middle of nowhere, prefer simplicity, and communicate through dialup. The dialup thing solely because it's easy to set up and has a low enough speed to avoid the mess the worlds turned into

"Community" and "Like-minded individuals" are mutually exclusive for my shut-in antisocial ass.

My initial thoughts are that my original ask was this :

because I’ve yet to hear about anything above a toy project that has had any verifiable success with AI code generation as a major component of their workflow.

and the example you provided was a toy project used as a publicity stunt.

On the technical side i don't know enough rust to be able to weigh in on the technical accuracy of the project.

The ability for current LLM's to churn out something that looks relatively good at first glance isn't my point of contention, most of us know it can do that.

I'm just looking for a single medium to large project that is successfully being used in production (close to production is also fine) that was created with significant LLM involvement.

There is so much talk around this, that the fact i haven't come across any mention of a successful deliverable (in the context i mentioned) raises all sorts of red flags for me, personally.

I'm not trying to catch you out, it's just that i haven’t seen one so i was wondering if you have, if you haven't that's fine, it's not a trap.

I think it shows a lot of limitations but also a lot of potential. I don’t personally think the AI needs to get the code perfect on the first go – it has to be compared to humans and we definitely don’t do that.

Iterative progress is generally the way of things, but most non-trivial agentic workflows already work with iterative code generation and testing so expecting a correct solution at the end of that process is more reasonable than you would think.

The difference between people and LLM's is the types of interactions you have with them, you can ask the LLM to explain why it did something, but if you've ever tried that I’m sure you can understand why it's not the same as the kind of answers you'd get from a person.

Yes, of course. I think it’s important to look passed the blowhards and think about what it’s actually doing: that is the perspective I’m trying to talk about this from.

As am i, I’m not against LLM usage, I’m against the pretense that it has capabilities it does not, in fact, have.

Selling something on the basis of it being able to do something it can't do is where term "snake oil salesman" comes from.

One plus point for recent tech trends, my Commodore 64 is seeing a lot more use!

The problem isn't the tools, but rather the sociopath executives and the individuals who won't stick up for themselves. Everyone loses when people don't stand up for what's right.