You say a lot of dumb ____ (but to be fair, I said a lot more when I was
your age), but your disdain for transient is on the money. I'm a
satisfied magit user, but transient is a blatant UX error and a
confounded implementation. Some guy spends his 20% time hawking an
entire suite around transient. No one cares.
Dayum, given Transient's prickliness (I always feel like I'm walking on
eggshells when I'm in it) I've never dared to C-s. But I tried this,
and yeah, the transient reverts to a plain text buffer, and you're left
in the lurch.
"The distinction of free versus open-source is moot."
Access to source code and subsequent modifications are still a concern by end users.
Sorry to say the experience of 'open source' was not very successful in that regard, because it was designed to not force vendors to publish their changes.
Yes, a thousand times yes. In stackoverflow, both questioner and
answerer spends a few paragraphs on their life story before getting to
the point. AI will not only happily listen to your life story, it will
almost certainly link some part of its answer to it, thus validating
your existence.
As in chess, stock trading, and combat aviation, people at first
believed humans ought to curate computer-generated strategies. Then it
become obvious the humans were unnecessary.
No doubt, I am simply being pragmatic. I will keep hand-holding AI when needed, it is increasingly less needed, good. I am not a skeptic, I will keep using AI to the limits of its ability the whole way, but one quickly learns its limits when you try to do some professional work with it.
It’s still plenty useful of course, but it absolutely needs constant babysitting for now, which is fine. I like AI coding tools that acknowledge those limits and help you work around them, rather than just pretending its magic and hiding its workings from you as an autonomous background process. Maybe soon such need for control will become obsolete, awesome, I will be the first one onboard.
PS:
Chess AI is definitely superhuman now, but Stockfish is a small NN surrounded by tons of carefully human-engineered heuristics and rules. Training an LLM (or any end-to-end self-supervised model) to be superhuman at chess is still surprisingly hard. I did some serious R&D on it a while back. Maybe we’ve gotten there in the last few years, not sure, but it’s very new and still not that much better than the best players.
Most real-world stock trading is still carefully supervised and managed by human traders. Even for automated high-frequency trading, what really works is to have an army of mathematicians devising lots of trading scripts, trading with proper deep-learning/reinforcement-learning is still surprisingly niche and unsuccessful.
Also combat aviation is far from being automated, sure they can bomb but not dogfight, and most drones are remote controlled dumb puppets.
I do agree with your point generally, but any good engineer needs to understand the details of where we are at so we can make real progress.
That is a bit uncalled for, I like to be lean and technically precise as much as the next guy.
I am not talking about "deep IDE integration" in a wishy-washy sense, what I care about as a professional engineer is that such an integration allows me to seamlessly intervene and control the AI when necessary, while still benefiting from its advantages when it does work well on its own.
Blindly trusting the AI while it does things in the background has rarely worked well for me, so a UX optimized for that is less useful to me, as opposed to one designed to have the AI right where I can interlieve it with normal coding seamlessly and avoid context-switching.
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