@mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
member since 27 Aug 2023 21:04
comments
- on Yeah use AI.. luddite in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 15 Sep 2026
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on Yeah use AI.. luddite in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 15 Sep 2026
That’s usually the case, in practice.
“There is no prototype.”
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on Yeah use AI.. luddite in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 15 Sep 2026
Solarpunk scoffing at anything but maximum efficiency for minimum price is deeply funny.
They used a computer they already own and made up for the difference with simple patience… what a corporate whore, right? How dare they want their personal machine to do private magic unless the numbers say infinite growth forever.
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on Yeah use AI.. luddite in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 15 Sep 2026
This isn’t One Hour Hot Dog. If you need a big huge fix right the hell yesterday, you fucked up last week. Possibly last year. And what’s gonna prevent that sort of company-liquidating blunder is a layer of crotchety obsessives who can spend a day reading and then commit one line. ‘Hit engine with hammer: $1. Knowing where to hit: $9,999.’
A system that’s pretty good at guessing a hundred places to try hitting has obvious value. Especially when undo is a thing. But this attitude of ‘the future is now, old man!’ is almost as off-base as the folks insisting a magic coding robot won’t help anybody.
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on Yeah use AI.. luddite in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 15 Sep 2026
It can’t really write maintainable code without a lot of re-prompting and corrections.
Which is a skillset being learned. One which users are presumably better at than non-users, since they’re practicing it. If the chatbot-that-codes Just Worked, there’d be nothing to discuss; we could consider human coding successfully completed. The people who don’t move up to proper computer science can get on with whatever they wanted software for. We only teach them all of this because they’ve got shit to do, and up until now, it’s been really really hard. Like if beginner astronomy meant telescope engineering.
Already the key complaint has become “maintainability.” That’s quite a high-level criticism. When I sass specific compilers, it’s for using register-juggling macros that could have been one hardware instruction… not for adding a feature from a one-sentence description, but in a way that will complicate any future refactor. Or would, if refactoring was not also something you can tell the chatbot to do.
Compiler developers are a hardened core of ultranerds. I couldn’t do it above a toy level. If I needed to understand how they work, in detail, then I would be in trouble. Thankfully it is sufficient to abstract all of their work into ‘C goes in ARM comes out.’ Or at least to mumble about intermediate representations and distract people with Godbolt before running away. Sure, ‘add a button above the widget’ is more pluripotent than a K&R-standard Hello World, but even the foundation you celebrate is layer upon layer of Don’t Worry About It.
AI coding right now is a blunt instrument. Those often suffice. And this one can already be used to remove layers. To obviate a fat framework. To translate to a faster language. To golf. Or it could format your hard drive if a website tells it to, IDFK. It is a higher class of footgun. We take those.
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on Yeah use AI.. luddite in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 15 Sep 2026
Compilers would look the same. You give some people a tool that turns fiddly low-level repetition into relatively painless double-checking. Then you yank that tool away, and oh no, they’re not as good at the fiddly low-level repetition.
What matters is - are these students worse-off, with the tool? It’s not going away. Foreverafter, a couple gigs of linear algebra will turn your to-do list into an actual running project. We have to ask if teaching the fiddly low-level repetition is the point… or just a means to an end.
You can scoff that compilers are objectively better, but they weren’t! Sometimes they still aren’t! We were teaching kids to consider inline assembly well into the Windows Vista era. Even now, compilers with decades of active development can have bizarre corner cases, which any hardened bit-banger of machine code would never write. But they’re all good enough that plaintext assembly has become an arcane third-year topic, and hexadecimal machine code is the realm of bare-metal maniacs.
Teaching math, kids have to know what numbers are, and how base ten works, and why the calculator says 11-3=8. But as you go up to college math it matters a lot less whether people can do shit in their heads… or even remember how. Open-book and open-calculator exams are still fuckin’ hard. They’re just hard because you’re trying to apply some obscure proof to a rat’s-nest of swooping symbols, instead of because you’re worried about having enough time to write out long division to umpteen places. The latter can be sufficiently approximated with two wooden sticks. We can assume anyone doing math professionally has two sticks. Continuously! As a given, for their job. Probably at home as well.
Teaching programming, you have to break people a certain way. No gentle and charming syntax can disguise the mechanized nastiness of what code is. Whatever semi-readable text you’re looking at will be squinched through a flake of tortured sand in a bazillionth of a second. But only after getting transformed at least two times in processes you kinda have to trust will be computationally equivalent, unless you want to minor in a branch of mathematics haunted by Stephen Wolfram. Ultimately there is a shockingly small state machine designed to trick you into off-by-one errors.
But once people can knock out fizzbuzz on a paper 6502… they’ve kinda got it. They’ve been inculcated. They will soon apply arcane patterns to a rat’s-nest of obtuse variable names. Ssshould they have to do that by hand? They’re not doing the assembly by hand. They’re not even looking at the assembly. They might never need to think about assembly again. So long as they’re playing spot-the-bollocks for a flurry of pull requests, that’s arguably a more useful skill than writing clean toy code from scratch. Especially in pen and ink.
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on Yeah use AI.. luddite in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 15 Sep 2026
There’s models that run on your phone.
“You won’t have a tiny pocket computer with you all the time” really is the exact same argument with different specs. And frankly I’m a lot more likely to do math without a computer than write code without a computer.
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on People keep saying Lain protocol 7 is made but with AI, but this video shows it isn't? in c/anime@ani.social · 29 Aug 2026
Corridor Digital seems to get it. They’ve dorked with it to fill in for missing frames. They’re using it to relight flat greenscreen shots for their D&D… podcast? Anyway those relit shots look like PS3 cinematics, but they’re putting real dudes in real costumes inside a video game, basically in real time. Nitpicking the quality is missing the point. Getting all the shots they’re doing, but “properly,” would take ten times as long and cost a hundred times as much. It’s the same dudes putting in just as much work as the previous season. Anyone shouting ‘not art!’ doesn’t mean things when they say words.
The same dudes also used neural networks to fix greenscreen. They rendered a bunch of scenes with complex alpha blending, and built a neural network on that synthetic data. Unsurprisingly, the example-based universal approximator is pretty good at approximating from similar examples.
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on People keep saying Lain protocol 7 is made but with AI, but this video shows it isn't? in c/anime@ani.social · 29 Aug 2026
If I had the right GPU, I’d be tempted to go back and use 2023-ass video generators to adapt an original story, just to demonstrate - no tool is immune to human expression. Of fucking course you can convey complex feelings despite visible constraints. Anyone going ‘well why didn’t you just animate it?’ is incorrect, in the same way as if they’d told an animator, ‘well why didn’t you just film it?’
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on People keep saying Lain protocol 7 is made but with AI, but this video shows it isn't? in c/anime@ani.social · 29 Aug 2026
Tool used to do thing it’s for.
Oh no, apparently.
The constant hand-wringing about killing art is especially rich here, since this art presumably could not exist without it. It’s an unauthorized fan work. (Or as unauthorized as Japan’s tightass copyright law permits.) Yet even this video prattles on about how carefully they’ve triple-checked the output… like the haters give a shit. They have a one-drop rule.
All that ultimately matters is, does it look good? And if you’re starting from a decent storyboard - it ought to. I dunno if AI’s gonna raise the ceiling for any creative work, but it should absolutely raise the floor for low-budget productions. If your style is not extreme camera angles and visible keyframes, this is the tech that will do a thousand hours of busywork in a couple minutes.
The trailer at the end of this blatantly has that AI vibe. Which is fine. CGI took ages to become invisible, and mostly got there by hiding what you’re not looking at.
For Lain specifically - I think they’d hew closer to the premise if they went all-in on generated video. Specifically, so they could produce unreasonable quantities of animation, and somehow deliver different versions to different viewers. Change the reason for common events. Change the outcome of things concluded offscreen. Change what really happened, behind a white lie someone tells later. Illustrate the modern problem of the Wired: a loss of shared reality. An epistemic crisis. We’re not disappearing into the network; the real world itself is trapped in hyperreality.
- on ‘Kingdom Hearts’ Anime Announced in c/anime@ani.social · 16 Aug 2026
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on Windows 11 PCs are about to get more expensive, and Windows 10 holdouts have one more reason to stay in c/technology@piefed.social · 15 Aug 2026
Linux is free.
It can’t read their mind… but it can read their comments.
Just like you, if you found their code, and went ‘why the heck is it like this.’