I have been trying to learn programming unsuccessfully for many years (I still ocasionally get a burst of energy, try something, then eventually abandon it halfway). In the end, I just accept that I don't have the kind of thinking that makes this effort enjoyable and I cannot achieve anything good.
But, to be fair, LLMs also don't solve any problems for me in any meaningful way. I have to do a little bit of very simple coding at work and I would say that I struggle with LLMs as much as I do when I try to solve them by myself. The code works in a moment but when it gets extended, it breaks, I spend a lot of time troubleshooting. Last week I had to rewrite the code myself as my attempt to prompt fixes with LLMs just kept adding bugs -- I can't say my rewrite is any good (I need to traverse graphs and I don't know how to do it properly so I just used whatever algorithm I found in a book lol), it will probably break the next week when I need to change it or add something but I hope at least I'll be able to fix it faster as I have roughly an idea what's happening.
I haven't measured how much time I spend on things with or without LLMs but the subjective experience is pretty poor -- I work in an "engineering-heavy" company, the constant feeling of not understanding my own work among people who have master things that are 10x more complex is pretty depressing. When I program something poorly, I can at least explain what I did and what my idea was, even it was a bad one, waking up to build failures and spending an entire day relearning my own project is not good, man.
As for the obvious argument -- "you're using it wrong" -- I might be? I did try to learn prompting and I don't think I do any obviously stupid stuff like specifying a persona. At this point I feel half-insane as a frequent sentiment is that non-programmers can generate code for functioning software with LLMs, perhaps it's low quality code but it works. Except for me -- a non-programmer who fumbles it every day! I don't even need anything complicated -- they're Python extensions for a Sphinx project!
Yeah, people on HN don't do anything for the pleasure of anything but to be productive and provide value to whoever. So, don't bet on people here understanding this mindset.
The business/money and startup culture is only a part of HN. I'm here because computers are cool and news hits here fast (also the comments can be interesting). I don't care about IPOs, unicorns, celebrities, AI, etc. I like to see the new Asahi Linux updates, Dolphin progress reports, new OpenBSD releases, discussions about vim and emacs or other unix tools, stories of repairing old arcade hardware, that kinda stuff. Some guys on IRC used to post HN links all the time and at some point I became one of them. Perhaps I'm a minority, but I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.
I also wanted to mention the Noon Universe, but I have to point out that two of the most famous books of the series(Трудно быть богом - Hard to Be a God[0]; Обитаемый остров - The Inhabited Island[1]), which are also my favorite books of the series, are also sort of set in a dystopian world. They had to sneak some dystopian worlds into the utopian universe to make it more interesting.
I'd say that everything post Hard to Be a God had either a streak of disillusionment or something like anxiety over, idk, incomprehensability of the universe and progress, but early works were pretty uplifitng.
"Noon 22nd Century" was very optimistic and inspiring, I really liked it as a kid and dreamt of becoming like the scientists in these stories. Even something like "Far Rainbow" had a grim plot but an uplifting sentiment regarding the nature of human spirit so to say? The tragedy happened but people faced it with strength and honor, so to speak.
Is this really true? Or are we counting like the games kids made in a computer lab somewhere.
Or there's this 87% number, but it's based on "no longer a legal way to buy it," not that it's not archived/preserved: https://gamehistory.org/87percent/
> Or are we counting like the games kids made in a computer lab somewhere.
We don't have to count amateur projects but the commercial releases in the US is not the entirety of the gaming history. There are other countries with their own rich gaming histories and other platforms (e.g. browser, mobile) that don't get the same attention as American releases for PC or popular consoles.
I cannot play a single game from my childhood, they were early flash games "for girls" and they were not in English. Nobody archived those.
I have, and it has never been good for my purposes. In English, I just can't find things I need, in Russian, I find things I wish to never see again, tbh.
What is your experience with it?
Edit: The best search for my purposes historically has been on Pinterest. Unfortunately, not anymore. I normally search for visual artifacts (photos, art, schematics, etc), out of all search engines Google is still the only one that is somewhat functional for me in this regard.
I tried DDG, Kagi, Yandex. None of them worked for me.
As a non-technical person compared to the rest of HN, I think this has always been the problem of software made for non-technical audiences. The design was driven by programmers’ heuristics and trends in technology stack (e.g. if a company can hire a lot of JS devs bc JS is trending, they will choose JS even regardless of whether JS is the best choice for the problem).
There was a brief stint of UX, ergonomics and HMI getting traction in enterprise, and, imo, the biggest technological achievements in consumer software has been in the realm of UX in twenty first century. But it lost its importance, I suppose, as you don’t need to make good software to make money off consumers.
Whatever capabilities AI gives to programmers in terms of speed of development, etc, doesn’t change the fundamental behavior —- commercial software is not developed for humans. It is developed for investors, markets, around operational needs, based on CEOs whims, developers’ personal itches, relying on approximation of human experience that gets regurgitated through layers of commercial processes of product managers, UX researchers (who, if present at all, often don’t get invited to the conversation until there are buttons to move in a GUI of an already existing product). Where human experience is considered, it’s from the perspective of our natural weaknesses with the goal to exploit them to maximize profits. Hence why 21st century tech gave us all the dark patterns, feeds, social media, LLM chatbots, etc.
Even when I talk to individual engineers who are committed to creating something good, wholesome, something that they can be proud of -— many think and reason about the problem in a way that sounds like they are trying to engineer human experience the same way one would engineer instructions for machines.
It will never get better, IMO. AI only exemplifies what already exists.
I think the UX and stability related quality will drop at such a bottom low, that some crazy companies will revive the arcane practice of UX and even study it with users.
I am not super optimistic that it happens fast, but we will end up in a situation that everything becomes tedious, annoying and broken. Companies who will do it right will inspire the whole ecosystem. It will be satirical to see the full circle happening, but it's inevitable if we want to keep going with digitalization, even if it means to bring back more hardware buttons.
I am adjacent to UX as a field, and, IMO, it’s in deep crisis itself. I don’t know when or how “ergonomics” in tech became “how to sit in front of a computer” and “design” became “creating visual assets” but even people who work in the field often reduce their jobs to simplified and corporate-optimized simulacras. I am less confident about what’s happening in academia but based on my casual browsing, it’s not better.
You need good experts to do proper research, and those haven’t been able to learn, practice, or improve their craft in any serious manner for a while.
Evidence-based UI design maxed out in 1995 with the release of Windows 95. Evidence-based design was popular in all sorts of areas back then. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) I think is the gold-standard of set and costume design and the modern cartoon mostly follows that design. Cargo pants were in style. The MTA in New York City used this map[0] which was designed by sociologists and psychologists to be maximally useful.
The late 90s is when fashion appears to have started taking over. Apple's logo went flat grey in 1998 and Windows XP was released in 2001 and it's only gone downhill from there. Perhaps it was inevitable. When other people can see your UI, people will start using it to signal things and companies like Apple will cater to that. The designers will then be given way too much power with no accountability and then all evidence-based design gets thrown out the window.
Perhaps this is what you're seeing in academia also?
people have been complaining about software going downhill ever since hand crafted assembler was replaced with C and a compiler. it's the classic "old man yells at clouds".
It's all too easy to dismiss valid concerns as it's just the boomers/somethings complaining about "back in my day" and everyone getting on their lawn.
Software definitely improved for many decades, then at some point started going downhill. Where that happened is up for debate. But UI/Software/Quality is NOT one of those "oh it's just the new generation complaining about the old days" or old people "reminiscing".
I have been trying to learn programming unsuccessfully for many years (I still ocasionally get a burst of energy, try something, then eventually abandon it halfway). In the end, I just accept that I don't have the kind of thinking that makes this effort enjoyable and I cannot achieve anything good.
But, to be fair, LLMs also don't solve any problems for me in any meaningful way. I have to do a little bit of very simple coding at work and I would say that I struggle with LLMs as much as I do when I try to solve them by myself. The code works in a moment but when it gets extended, it breaks, I spend a lot of time troubleshooting. Last week I had to rewrite the code myself as my attempt to prompt fixes with LLMs just kept adding bugs -- I can't say my rewrite is any good (I need to traverse graphs and I don't know how to do it properly so I just used whatever algorithm I found in a book lol), it will probably break the next week when I need to change it or add something but I hope at least I'll be able to fix it faster as I have roughly an idea what's happening.
I haven't measured how much time I spend on things with or without LLMs but the subjective experience is pretty poor -- I work in an "engineering-heavy" company, the constant feeling of not understanding my own work among people who have master things that are 10x more complex is pretty depressing. When I program something poorly, I can at least explain what I did and what my idea was, even it was a bad one, waking up to build failures and spending an entire day relearning my own project is not good, man.
As for the obvious argument -- "you're using it wrong" -- I might be? I did try to learn prompting and I don't think I do any obviously stupid stuff like specifying a persona. At this point I feel half-insane as a frequent sentiment is that non-programmers can generate code for functioning software with LLMs, perhaps it's low quality code but it works. Except for me -- a non-programmer who fumbles it every day! I don't even need anything complicated -- they're Python extensions for a Sphinx project!
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