For me, this text fails the "bridge-building" test of communication. Because it talks about a subjective experience inaccessible to anyone else than the author, it's hard to engage with it.
So I have to wonder who is it for? The author herself? Why publish and share it then?
Why? Isn’t documentation just approximation of the code and therefore less informative for inference than the code itself?
I understand that the code doesn’t contain the architectural intent, but if the LLM writing it can’t provide that then it will never replace the architect.
Of course an LLM can make a thorough design analysis and extract architectural patterns.
But it doesn't have infinite memory and context.
On top of that, it may recognize patterns, but not their intent and scope.
Documentation is gold for humans and LLMs. But LLMs have been the very first major moment in this field that has very little, to no, engineering practices to focus on documentation and specs.
Its about the mental model of the codebase, mentioned by the GP.
Somehow my experience is that no matter how much documentation or context there is, eventually the model will do the wrong thing because it won't be able to figure out something that makes sense in context of the design direction, even if it's painstakingly documented. So eventually the hardest work - that of understanding everything down to the smallest detail - will have to be done anyway.
And if all it was missing was more documentation... Then the agent should have been able to generate that as the first step. But somehow it can't do it in a way that helps it suceed at the task.
I am a member of an expensive gym in our home town. It has a very good gym but also includes spa facilities. The only reason I pay the price is because it also includes a working area, and because I work remotely most of the week, I do it from the gym, so I have no excuse not to exercise and I also find the spa a good way to unwind. It's a nice way to avoid the long commute to the office but also get out the house.
Anyway, the point to the story is money doesn't buy class. The gym parking is gated and leads into a huge parking area. What happens is that a certain percentage of people consider themselves above everyone else and don't fancy walking the extra 20-100 meters to park in an actual parking, so they just park on the "road" that feeds into the the various parking areas, as it is close to the gym. This means it blocks one lane of that road and cars get backed up having to go around the parked cars.
I always hear announcements calling for the owners of certain license plates, and always know it was these cars. It infuriates me so much. Lately the gym has had to resort to cones along the edges of the road to stop the arseholes.
I just can't fathom such people. It feels so alien to me that I (I mean this literally) can't imagine what actually goes through your head to do that. For anyone who is this selfish, can you explain? Does it not occur to you that this is wrong? Or do you know it and just think "life is unfair, I do what is best for me"? I genuinely don't get it.
So yeah, a bit off topic, and I'm unsure if your 20% figure is too high, but there certainly are a lot of people in the world that are just not nice.
About 5% of people are narcissistic sociopaths. They don't believe that other people exist, or at least are anything more than actors in a play they control. Try not to elect one as President.
> Total disregard for common good, maximal selfishness.
Or lacking better alternatives for a decent life aggravated by having zero positive role models and a media/political culture whose only positive value is mo' money.
> I would say about 20% of people are like that.
That depends on region, language and the conditions described above. Placing a numeric value collectively on all of humanity conveys zero useful information.
Surely you don't believe that, given a random sample of 20 people, 19 of them will be amoral, selfish, and have no values? Surely this doesn't align with your real life experience - what are your colleagues, friends, family, neighbours and acquaintances like? Do they meet this ratio?
But with how compounding works, isn't this outcome inevitable in capitalism? If the strong government prevents it then the first step for the rich is to weaken or co-opt the government, and exactly this has been happening.
I wonder, will the rich start hiring elaborate casts of servants including butlers, footmen, lady's maids, and so on, since they'll be the only ones with the income?
As far as I can tell, the rich have never stopped employing elaborate casts of servants; these servants just go by different titles now: private chef, personal assistant, nanny, fashion consultant, etc.
Employing servants only recently fell out of favor in the years between WWI and WWII. Prior to WWI having servants was still in fashion for the wealthy. Naturally I meant paid servants. Enslaved and to some extent indentured servants obviously have little to no choice.
That said many of those employered in service industries and to some extent the gig economy have limited options and their participation is barely "voluntary" in modern capitalism.
Aside: seeing myself refer to the 1940s as "recent" is really highlighting my age. Soon I'll be relegated to a "grampa yelling at clouds" meme (but just the computer cloud variety)
Those particular roles were voluntary arrangement for much of human history, simply because people who fill them tend to be significantly better off than those who don't directly serve the powerful (and instead serve their economic interests, like e.g. agricultural slaves or serfs).
They already do and always have. They never stopped hiring butlers (who are pretty well paid BTW), chefs, chauffeurs, maids, gardeners, nannies.....
The terminology may have changed a bit, but they still employ people to do stuff for them
One big difference is while professional class affluent people will hire cleaners or gardeners or nannies for a certain number or hours they cannot (at least in rich countries) hire them as full time live in employees.
There are some things that are increasing. For example employing full time tutors to teach their kids - as rich people used to often do (say a 100 years ago). So they get one to one attention while other people kids are in classes with many kids, and the poor have their kids in classes with a large number of kids. Interesting the government here in the UK is increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school which is the nearest we can get to what the rich do (again, hiring tutors by the hour, and self-supply within the household).
They also hire people to manage their wealth. I do not know enough about the history to be sure, but this seems to be also to be a return to historical norms after an egalitarian anomaly. A lot of wealth is looked after by full time employees of "family offices" - and the impression I get from people in investment management and high end property is that this has increased a lot in the last few decades. Incidentally, one of the questions around Epstein is why so many rich people let him take over some of the work that you would expect their family offices to handle.
A lot of it is probably more part-time but, yes, people who are some definition of rich spend more money on people to do more work for them (cleaning, landscaping, accounting, etc.) Doesn't mean they don't do any of those things--and outsourcing some can be more effort than it's worth--but they don't necessarily cut their own lawn or do car repairs.
If you are rich "outsourcing" is easy because you have people to handle that for you. You have senior servants like butlers and housekeepers who manage the rest of the staff, for example, so you are not directly hiring cleaners.
This is the difference between the affluent and the truly rich.
It's fair that's probably the difference. You don't have a full-time personal assistant/butler/whatever you want to call it. But you personally outsource a lot of individual tasks that you don't really want to do.
In this day and age, how often do you actually need to have your car serviced? And there is no shortage of places that will do it for you in a few hours.
Similarly, if money were no real object within reason, I'm not sure what I would really need done on a day-to-basis that I couldn't just order or contract for pretty easily.
You clearly don't have enough cars. Once you get enough cars, especially if any of them are classic cars you actually want to drive occasionally and want to be in a driveable condition, you might want to have a full time mechanic.
>increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school
There is a whole lot more nuance here than you're giving the topic.
There is one side that wants to give their kids a good education, they have the resources and the motivation to ensure they come out ahead.
They are not the problem, the problem is the other side of this coin.
Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organizations. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization and have little ability to work with the outside world at large. They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.
I still remember being a kid myself and having to educate these other kids my age because they were missing large chunks of important information about the world.
> Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organization. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization
Not true in the UK. Studies in many countries (the UK, US, Australia) and others have shown that home educated kids have better outcomes than school going kids after correcting for parental education, wealth etc.
Yes, there are exceptions, but there are also bad schools and some terrible schools.
UK law also requires children to receive a "suitable and efficient" full time education and there are legal mechanisms for sending children to school if they do not.
> They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.
Stats in the UK show home ed kids are MUCH less likely to be abused, to self harm, or commit suicide.
Of course there are bad home educating communities, but there are also some horrific schools and the latter are a lot more common. Does that mean we should shut down schools?
The reason is resentment rooted in an inferiority complex. Russia's state ideology is that they're being oppressed by "the West", and they really believe it up to the highest levels of government. They're quite convinced that hurting their "enemy" this way amounts to securing their interest, because by damaging "the West", their own relative power is elevated and that makes them a serious player on the international stage.
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