I haven't tried using an AI to write prose, but I use Claude to write code daily and it spits out the worst comments I've ever seen, along with some surprisingly good ones.
Would we not expect AI fiction to be the same? A stream of poor and excellent taste, not particularly original or surprising, samey in hard-to-define ways, but capable of being hammered into a good story by an editor.
> Would we not expect AI fiction to be the same? A stream of poor and excellent taste, not particularly original or surprising, samey in hard-to-define ways, but capable of being hammered into a good story by an editor.
That could also describe many human writers…
AI writing seems to have a quality ceiling, or an ick floor if you prefer to think about it that way around, but is OK compare to bad human writers.
I'm still committed to the career suicide that is refusing to touch generative AI beyond the supped-up auto-correct/-suggest that has replaced the older method in my IDE (replaced, such that if I turn it off I also lose what I had before), but seeing results others around me have pulled out of the hat I have to admit the tech can produce serviceable work if properly fettled by a person afterwards.
I don't think you're committing career suicide. I've seen people get serviceable results out of it, and it always involves reading the code in depth. Reading the code being slower than writing it, they're almost never getting a speed up.
That being said, the better coders I've seen aren't looking for a speed up, they're generally looking for something to bounce ideas off of, or to get a first draft going to defeat writer's block or something (I guess this is technically a speed up, but not the way people mean when they describe slinging tokens around). It's generally to wind up at a better solution at the end than to get a sustained speed up (which seems to only be possible in boilerplate heavy domains, but those were previously slowed down by the boilerplate and are really only coming up to speed with everything else, at significant cost).
I think “taste” is probably the right word. Steve Jobs’ quote about Microsoft is very relevant: “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.”
Replace Microsoft with LLMs and the same quote applies. They have no culture, no connection. The code or comments they produce will not effect any future LLM session and they current have no concern how it will effect future humans except for maximizing engagement for the human at the console today.
Fiction is no different. Unless there’s a feedback loop the LLM just spits out text and will never see it again. The LLM will never meet the readers at book signings, weave in personal details that could only be known for experience.
It’s probably perfect for the write-by-committee style of movies and shows being created today. Just like organic food or locally made products, there are already creators putting Human Intelligence badges on their work and there will probably be a market (though niche) for that until human supremacist laws push it underground.
We call the entire genre of toasted sandwich a toastie. A grilled cheese would thus be a cheese toastie, the addition of tomato would make it a cheese and tomato toastie, and so on.
As a non-grilled-cheese speaker, I don't intuitively understand why you can't have a grilled cheese and tomato. Words do mean things, but why is "cheese and tomato toastie" an allowable variation while "grilled cheese and tomato" is banned? The difference seems arbitrary and capricious!
It is completely improper to add tomato to a grilled cheese sandwich. It's not that the two things don't fit together; indeed, they do fit together beautifully.
But combining them all into one sandwich is absurd.
And by absurd, I mean something loosely akin to: Ketchup is good. Fries are good. Steak is good. All of these things can fit together very well in one meal. And while it's OK to put ketchup on fries, it's absurd to soil that meal by putting that same ketchup on a steak.
If tomatoes and a grilled cheese sandwich are to be components of the same meal, then that's a wonderful thing indeed. But that is a result which is unilaterally accomplished by including a bowl of tomato soup.
As a fundamental part of the natural order, the inclusion of tomato soup is the only right and pure way by which this combination of flavors may be reached.
I think you're seeing a compound word because it's part of your native dialect, whereas I'm seeing each word independently.
If you think about "grilled", "cheese", and the silent "sandwich" as different words composed together, then it should logically follow that you can use anything you want as a sandwich filling and then grill it.
Sandwiches can contain anything, just like a taco can. Everyone knows that.
But when a sandwich contains cheese along with other additional internal ingredients, the act of grilling it is metamorphosical. In this irreversible process, it ceases to be a sandwich and becomes a melt.
So while a tomato and cheese sandwich can be an amazing and delicious thing, a grilled tomato and cheese sandwich is impossible.
To say that it is any other way would be like saying that a caterpillar and a butterfly are the same thing.
This is something of a circular argument. Bob doesn't waste energy on on-call duties, so he implements more features, so he's a prolific engineer, so he doesn't have to waste energy on on-call duties.
Yes exactly. I'm not sure whether Bob is a hyper productive engineer, but in any case, Bob is an engineer hyper focused at shipping new stuff out the door quickly. Which is great! We need Bobs. But we also need the company to run and scale, and Bob might not just be the right guy for that.
The French president notoriously said a few weeks ago in June during the third (!!!) heat wave of this summer “who could have predicted [it]”… that’s the level, at the highest layer which decides on policy.
Governments have been working on this for more then 20 years now. 40 maybe. As long as I've been alive at least. It's just that all of the actions to try and deal with this have been continuously undermined by fossil fuel industries and right-wing politics.
Hansen is still going and has been ringing the alarm that we have deeply under estimated the relative carbon loading and heating potential on emissions. There is a real fear that we have locked in a lot more warming potential than the models have been predicting via several factors. Namely carbon warms slightly more than anticipated, more methane releases, great water vapor levels as a result of the previous two and reduced reflective materials decreasing our relative albedo.
There is a national election in Sweden this year. Which parties or blocks are against construction of thermal power plants, and which are against it? Thermal power plants are primarily fueled by oil or natural gas. Party platforms are public and posted on their websites.
A few years ago EU voted to define two technologies as green. One was natural gas, and the other was nuclear. Which parties voted for natural gas, and which parties voted for nuclear?
There is a EU decision to phase out ICE in cars. A good continuation would be to issue a similar decision to phase out ICE in the energy grid. It would be nice if both sides could just join together on such decision.
For me, it has degraded to the point where I simply presume that no significant promises are going to be kept after the election anyway. The respective parties will promise what they think they need to get the votes, and will then target whatever is relevant for the ever-evolving social-media driven zeitgeist.
"A completely fossil-free energy system" ("Ett helt fossilfritt energisystem" (1)) yesteryear and now lower fuel prices than 20 years ago (adjusted for inflation, yes).
Fuel prices is one of those things where people will complain about Iran war driving prices up, and then in the next sentence complain that low fuel taxes will encourage consumption. The reduction in taxes has basically removed half of the price on gasoline, but with the increase in global market price this has only resulted in a minor price reduction in total. For diesel the price is still above that of last year.
It will be interesting to see if researchers will find any significant behavioral change from having half the fuel prices compared to nearby countries. Personally I doubt it will be a significant statistical difference, but it is a perfect time to get some real data if people treat fuel as a necessity and pay what the market demands, or if its a luxury product where consumption goes up and down based on price.
Right-wing politics being opposed to environmental action is so weird when back in the day right-wing politicians didn't have such an issue with it (for example this speech by Margaret Thatcher: <https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107346>).
This is downvoted, but exactly right. Moreover, government is not a singular entity. Blaming the whole government just serves to take the blame from actually guilty and attributing it to those whonwere doing the right thing.
No, its that all the action consistently denies the fact that human societies can not keep i together if degrown. The policies produce regression aka facism.
I think there is some nuance to this. It isn't likely that we will go back to the way it was before industrialization, we are too far past that. But we will head to a new normal that could be manageable.
Problems have solutions, predicaments have responses. We are in a predicament, and the quicker and more direct we can respond the better chance we have to adverting the more nasty paths of the future.
I'm surprised a formatter does that. Prettier in the JS world likes to jam destructured arguments onto one line, but it will leave them alone if there's a comment.
Fizzbuzz is interesting because it relies on either the candidate remembering the modulo operator, or the interviewer allowing them to write a modulo function. I can understand why a candidate could forget how to find the remainder from an integer division.
The bigger issue is not having seen fizzbuzz before, really.
I've always wondered how people who write code could possibly be unaware of the modulo operator. In the 8-bit and 16-bit CPU era, or even just when working with data types of that width, one has to be aware of wraparound / overflow if the value gets too large and that's what modulo is. Is it just developers who came of age in the 64-bit CPU era that have this gap?
When one's primary handling of numbers comes down to either linear (single-dimensional) lists or money, then you won't use modulo very much.
But any time you're walking over a discrete multidimensional list packed into a linear list, or walking over any discrete periodic signal (one very common example would be walking a linear array of screen pixels, walking over pcm samples in an audio waveform, literally 100% of GPU programming and 90+% of SIMD programming) you will want to be able to translate between "how far from the start am I" and "how far into the current cycle am I", and modulo handles that.
Similarly for almost anything involving time calculations (and for the same reason: because they are periodic). Modulo is literally described as "clock arithmetic" after all.
So you are absolutely correct that there do exist avenues in programming which can dodge this particular raindrop, I hope you aren't opposed to the idea that they are at least few and far between? ;)
>I hope you aren't opposed to the idea that they are at least few and far between? ;)
Absolutely not. Part of the reason why I mentioned the areas that I work in, are for that reason. I suspect that the vast majority of software jobs are of the kind I mentioned.
As the HN user 'strken' correctly pointed out, fizzbuzz can stump an experienced job candidate if he has never used the modulo operator.
Fizzbuzz is not the least bit interesting on a technical level. It's interesting because even though it's trivial to "cheat" (you can just learn/memorize Fizzbuzz specifically), it still works because people so incompetent they can't even write something as trivial as Fizzbuzz are unlikely to have heard of it.
Fizzbuzz is used to confirm an already present suspicion of complete incompetence, not to assess skill (ability to pass is not a meaningful signal).
I said "interesting" but I really meant "bad". You might as well test someone on whether they remember bitwise operators.
I feel that you did not address the specifics of what I wrote. It's a silly test because it's meant to cover the bare basics but it still relies on knowing/remembering the modulo operator, which junior hires might reasonably not have seen. If everyone didn't already know about fizzbuzz it would be even more stupid.
I’ve personally experienced devs who could not sum a collection of ints, “in any language of your choice”.
I’m not talking about devs who got hung up on integer overflow issues (or even off-by-one errors), but rather “just couldn’t get started at all”. I have no idea what they did before or what they expected to do if they got the job, but I doubt it would turn out well.
Yep, I've seen that too. I start with "sum an array of ints" due to the known problems using fizzbuzz, and there are software engineer candidates who can't or won't do it. Nobody believes you until they see a candidate like this themselves.
My pet theory: A lot of companies are very, VERY big, and a clever person who doesn't know how to do their job but can identify a weak manager, can simply get lost in them. Hiding away getting the paycheck, but doing nothing except convincing their manager they're doing things. I've definitely met a few people in my career that I believe were doing exactly that.
I don't have a good explanation for how candidates with zero ability to write code can make it through a hiring funnel to sit in front of you. Maybe they don't know what they don't know.
No, fizzbuzz trips people who already have a job because they make two for loops, make too few IFs, or generally don’t have a logic mindset and get out of the interview saying “This is not something that’s asked for in the job!”
Obviously it is unreasonable to continue walking with a stone in your boot because you want to adapt to it; equally obviously it is unreasonable to expect your boots to last forever without repair.
Would we not expect AI fiction to be the same? A stream of poor and excellent taste, not particularly original or surprising, samey in hard-to-define ways, but capable of being hammered into a good story by an editor.
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