Stephen King on writing; “Look- here’s a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. […] On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. […] The most interesting thing here isn’t even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It’s an eight. This is what we’re looking at, and we all see it. I didn’t tell you. You didn’t ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room… except we are together. We are close. We’re having a meeting of the minds. […] We’ve engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.”

Is human endeavor really just "neurons" and "reward pathways", skinner boxes nonsense? A writer writes, hoping his writings reaches the mind of others. A painter paints, hoping their paintings communicate a thousand words from his spirit's depths. I think the act of making effort is more than mastery, it is a commune with oneself, and others.

You can definitely use it as an incredibly powerful learning tool. I've been using it to guide me through Haskell and I've learned so much more than I did in college when I had spent way more time on it (that time being 10 years ago so I had forgotten most of it). It's invaluable being able to go and ask the AI questions and have it rephrase the parts you don't understand. I spent a good hour with it figuring out exactly what the traverse function does (`traverse (\x -> ['z', x]) "ab"` probably doesn't do what you think it should).

Spoiler: The <> combines lists as cross joins (for-loop within another for-loop). The lambda maps to new lists ['z', 'a'] and ['z', 'b'] (strings are just char arrays). It then computes the various combinations to recombine them so ['z', 'z'], ['z', 'b'], ['a', 'z'], ['a', 'b']. Note it's not all permutations since you don't have ['z', 'a'] even though that's actually one of the "base" arrays we got from the lambda. It took me a long time to really internalize that and it's still probably not a function I'd reach for.

It is kind of cool, though, that you can do `(,) <$> lista <> listb` and you get a nested for loop.

This advice is so contrary to good outcomes that I am astonished. Even aside from the amazing utility of funding super smart people to follow their curiosity about the world, maths, species, string theory, neural networks, etc., just keeping it to coding, you don’t want engineering to just implement specs, you want curious people to dig under what is being said; the space of potential solutions in software is so great that you can’t waterfall your way into the best solution; it is a search, and one where the quest for elegance and abstraction and beauty enable not a ten X coder but a solution that catapults the company 100 or 1000 fold over the competitors with less elegant solutions. It’s the whole ideal behind Paul Graham’s beating the odds. It’s the story of companies that grew 70% a month while their competitors tried to make plans. Maybe you all are too young but companies that innovate and constantly delight the community are possible and systems that implement the software can be amazingly more elegant and expandable than expected. on the outsourcing, the places I have seen outsourcing succeed it is because the company can find and pay more minds either that precious gift of abstraction and simplicity and created or renovated systems so well that the outcomes based teams were just scratching their heads in wonder, if they had enough wit.

I have seen inelegant minds generate big balls of crap with AI and I have seen people wield them like scalpers thru the space of possible solutions.

I don’t disagree with using LLMs, but some puritan call for industrial efficiency as the answer is really missing the story on the last forty years of software innovation.

If the parent and grand parent represent common attitudes, no wonder so many companies are constrained by ugly software.

I really can't get behind this. The idea that our jobs being interesting and fulfilling was just a happy little accident, a weird artifact of capitalism, and that if that goes away, oh well, too bad. Back to the thankless back-breaking grind. It's just the way of the world.

That's just so defeatist and pessimistic.

Completely right. I think what is suprising about this wave of automation is that until now automation happened to more manual, blue collar work. I for one didn't really think that it will happen to software development up until some months ago.

> I think that is horrible for society.

Why do you think that?

Someone already did this, and it was a dancing bear of a thing. Cool that it worked, pretty boring in practice. The sims-like Inzoi was built around this idea as well and the blandness really put people off.

I'd love to see it happen, but until I see an AI write a compelling story worth reading, I'm glad people are still doing the heavy lifting.

> Imagine the next generation of Skyrim where rather than picking prewritten dialog options you can have natural conversations with NPCs.

Back when Animal Crossing: Wild World was announced on the DS, and I heard that you could send letters to your neighbours and they would respond, naïve 11-year-old me was hoping for something along those lines.

Of course, it didn’t even come close.

If this comes to pass, it will destroy one of my favorite aspects of gaming: talking about shared experiences. If my gaming experience is randomly generated and yours is too, there's almost nothing we share.

Having experienced LLM driven gamedev, I watch the movement with utter disdain. I recommend you to do the same, to actually play the products of such endeavor that you bought with your own money, for more than a dozen minutes.

> Imagine the next generation of Skyrim where rather than picking prewritten dialog options you can have natural conversations with NPCs

And of course those dialogs would be uploaded to the cloud and sold. Can't wait

You don't need to wait for the LLM driven NPCs. It already exists and has been done for years. It's always, always, always absolute dog shit and doesn't add anything to the game. Voice acting is whatever trash the LLM puts out. You get the same roundabout sentences that LLMs put out.

Character customisation already exists. AI won't make blending textures easier or harder.

>game artists would change from making 3D meshes, textures and animations to being authors of storylines and styles.

You fundamentally misunderstand game artists if you think that the meshes, textures and animations they make _today_ isn't driven by a storyline and styling. That's the absolute core of everything artists do. Otherwise we'd have reusable animation packs everywhere, like every default UE5 game does and nobody would redo a 50th running animation.