aevaI've been thinking a lot lately about the art education I got 20 years ago, and the importance that was placed upon learning how to really see what is in front of you, how to deconstruct the technical aspects of other works, looking at a lot of art, collecting good reference images, and talking about art.
This process is really important for developing and maintaining the technical skills of working in traditional media, because if you are not able to establish cultural and observational reference points you lose the ability to "see" as you work. Like, after you have been working on something for several hours everything sorta looks correct and wrong at the same time, and if you don't have something to ground it you'll drift in ways you don't want to.
It is also a really important set of skills for learning, because you can go to an art museum and look at works that inspire you and figure out (or make an educated guess at) the technical processes that their author used to make them, and then you can apply your learnings to making something new. You don't go to the museum to find things to copy without understanding.
One of my peers from that art program once remarked to me that she's seen interesting things happen in the works of artists that either don't have this training or only reference art made by other amateurs - work that is not anchored in either a cultural tradition or naturalistic observation or both tends to drift in strange ways
the example she gave was a self taught artist who only referenced manga, but was not familiar with the techniques or anchors the mangaka they were copying themselves knew, and so said artist's style ended up exaggerating all of the stylistic elements of the manga they were referencing
my point to all of this is, I don't at all believe you can look at / watch / read / listen to something and not be changed by it even in a small way. the human brain is a hungry for patterns to learn from, and everything you learn is eventually pruned or mutated through continuous re-encoding. you need to keep absorbing high quality examples and information throughout your career to preserve your skills. I think this applies generally.
this is why I think slop is so damaging, especially so as it gets harder to spot, because you're feeding yourself with vacuous garbage that superficially resembles information. if you accept it as valid, every related skill that you've worked hard to sharpen up to that point is fundamentally at risk because as they get re-encoded they will be adapted to accommodate the miscategorized noise.
now, not everything you see in the world is going to help your career as an artist, and I think it's true that there's plenty of things you can internalize that are destructive to your ability to make the things you want to make. that sounds pretentious, but I don't think it is: a simple example is internalizing the idea that you shouldn't make art because you don't already have the skills to do it with perfection is effective at preventing many from ever developing those skills.
anyways, my conclusion from this right now is it may be a good idea as a professional programmer who wishes to retain her hard earned skills, to make a regular habit of going to the museum as it were~~regularly reading the source code of successful projects that have non-superficial high standards, understanding how it works, why it works, why it is the way it is, and also looking at the history of how it grew over time.
I say "non-superficial" because strict adherence to a random grab bag of engineering best practices is not holding yourself to high standards if you don't understand any of them. That's just posturing.
Fabian Giesen@aeva These last few years have broken something deep within me and I have no idea what to do with myself now.
It's not about the generative whatever particularly, that's certainly not helped but it's mostly yet another manifestation of something that's been eating at me for way longer.
@aeva I want to understand, and to be understood.
That's not the only thing about me, but it's a core tenet about my personality and my construction of identity.
Almost everything I do flows from that in one way or another.
That's why I default to these long, rambling info-dumps, for example.
@aeva Probably my most formative single childhood experience is, over and over and over again, running into and beyond the limits of what my parents were able to explain to me (they really tried, but especially pre-internet, which this was, you run into a wall of how many difficult research-requiring questions of a precocious child you can actually answer in any given day), and likewise, my continuing inability to explain what's in my head.
@aeva My parents were gracious about this, other adults in my life, less so.
Shout-out to the teachers at my nursery school who decided that a 4yo couldn't possibly actually want to know how a differential transmission worked and that therefore I must be some attention-whoring little bitch who loves to pick up words I don't understand and who should really shut the fuck up. (Not in those words, mind - this was a CATHOLIC pre-school! - but the sentiment was there.)
@aeva er, lots more to unpack there I guess (not for here!) but suffice it to say that the preemptive infodumping is a tic I picked up right around that time (I was verbal pretty early, but the infodumping started then - there's "video evidence" from my uncle, who had a camcorder. Very clear diff between me before/after entering nursery school).
So, er, yeah. Some damage there. Anyway, the over-explaining/desperately wanting to be understood has _deep_ roots.
@aeva More to the actual point, like it or not, this has just turned into a schema of what I look for in personal relationships.
(It's just been really hard all my life to find anyone who can actually follow along when I get going.)
Anyway. What does this have to do with the current mess? I'm getting there, but first another, much more recent episode.
@aeva This was a few years ago, on Twitter.
A mutual, who I'd met in person, replied to me posting a link to a new blog post with something to the effect of "Oh great! Always love your posts. Usually don't understand a word though."
They thought they were giving me a compliment, what they actually gave me were the seeds of an existential crisis.
And I know it was hyperbole, but the "don't understand a word" has been living rent-free in my head ever since.
@aeva It's one thing if at some point two thirds through a post I go off on some tangent that matters to me but that 95% of readers don't care about.
But "don't understand a word"? I really, _really_ try to make my technical writing as clear as I know how to and if the end result is, apparently, incomprehensible gobbledygook, then what the fuck is the point of writing any of it in the first place?
@aeva So that's _that_ light-hearted tangent.
Now, finally, on to my actual point.
As alluded to in both of these digressions, I deeply care both about understanding what I am doing, and about being understood.
Often to my detriment. I shouldn't care as much as I do. It's not something I can turn off. And like it or not, it's directly intertwined with my need for human connection.
@aeva Figuring out a solution to a problem, having a seed of understanding within it, and getting to share that seed with others is, not to mince words, the only reason I put up with any of this shit.
A friend mentioned his pet theory a while back that shepherding LLMs sucks for people who like programming because that means now they have to be managers and that's a different skill set.
@aeva That's not _entirely_ wrong but it's missing the point by a mile if you ask me.
It _is_ a different kind of activity, but it's not "management" either.
You get to play-act as the world's worst micro-manager constantly telling your "agents", who never learn a damn thing, to try again.
Mentoring or managing somebody (hopefully!) involves some kind of development where they learn something and grow into their position.
@aeva That's not what's happening here.
You're in a groundhog day loop with an intern with infinite stamina, ADHD and hopped up on 3 cans of Monster Energy cranking out piles of code between bouts of tachycardia, and every hour they hit the neuralyzer and need everything explained all over again.
I don't know what ring of hell exactly this is, but it _is_ a ring of hell, and it's not "management" by any sane definition of the term.
@aeva Mind, I'm not actually doing any of this stuff. But. BUT.
There are _so many_ people around me who are, apparently, dead set on treating the scenario I just described like it's a desirable outcome instead of a dystopian nightmare, and actively working towards it.
I guess if you treat programs as some necessary evil that's a speed barrier between you and all your glorious plans working out, there's some sense to that.
@aeva It just so happens to be that if you're some misguided rube like me, apparently, who cares about how programs can be some concrete embodiment of entirely abstract ideas that you could otherwise never communicate to anyone, this is just casually shitting on your life's work and going "yeah who needs THAT".
And I _hate_ how this sounds melodramatic and petty but I have no other words for it.
@aeva This is not about the tools themselves. There's _so many_ problems there, and much has been written about it, but that's not what I'm getting at.
The thing that's _really_ getting to me is just how much of the SW world, including so many people around me, is going "oh yes, finally" about this.
I've always felt pretty alone in my caring about things the way I do but was telling myself that I did find my people who care about things the same way in the end. Evidently, no.
Daniel Fortes@rygorous @aeva I just want to say this: Thank you for these words. I have always followed the stuff you write. I am not an extremely accomplished developer or anything, and it has been rough lately. I'm getting tired of being disappointed, seeing people I had only respect for joyfully hoping on the hype train (that will end who knows where), so it gives me some solace when I see technically talented people like you that still have their heart in the right place
Kraftwerk-Das Model Collapse@dfortes @rygorous my new normal: someone posts about their flashy new software project that sounds interesting. I go to their git repo and check - open source, no LLM config files. Great. continue watching intro video "... Like anyone dipping their toes into agentic codi—"
record scratch, freeze frame, unsubscribe, flag as "don't you dare recommend this again", eat a few square feet of carpet, set browser on fire
record scratch, freeze frame, unsubscribe, flag as "don't you dare recommend this again", eat a few square feet of carpet, set browser on fire
krig
Daniel Gibson@rygorous @aeva
I find this very relatable, thanks for putting it into words <3
Yes, this whole mindset that code quality and understanding "your" code doesn't matter (when overall software quality wasn't too great even before LLMs) is a dystopian nightmare that I don't know how to deal with.
It's just a form of ignorance that doesn't compute for me at all and I don't want to work with people who think like that
Cameron Watters@rygorous There are at least a few of us still around with zero (or negative?) interest in LLMs who enjoy building excellent software and find co-creating with other humans an essential aspect of software creation.
Paul Khuong
John Kaniarz@rygorous @aeva The impression I get from the “oh yes, finally” developers is that this is actually release from their hell. They’ve been the LLM for the past decade. Cutting and pasting from Stack Overflow. Playing guess and check with the automated A/B testers in production. Agile practices that only work when everyone is an interchangeable cog. Now they’re finally free… until the LLMs replace them entirely.
Laurent Bercot
λzyd@jkaniarz this is getting dangerously close to "they're gonna miss me when I'm gone!!111" type self-talk.
Just, no.
This is used by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons, not all of them bad, and much though I loathe these tools and the way we got them, the genie is not likely to go back in the bottle anytime soon.
What the price landscape and usage patterns will end up looking like is anyone's guess. But I don't think this will just go away.
@jkaniarz It still happens to coincide with a view towards my profession that is almost entirely incompatible with my own desires which is what this thread is about, and I don't see any future where I don't have to grapple with that bit.
Jens Finkhäuser
TommyTorty10This is sorta what I've accidentally stumbled into doing lately. I got a job at a local museum through luck and family friends, so I'm fortunate to have freedom to just code as a hobby and for a few old clients who value quality over quantity.
I've been thinking lately that I wouldn't mind if current things were more permanent if I had more hours of work and higher pay.
SnowFox@rygorous @aeva I care about my code, and I also care about tracking down why other people's code is the way it is and will chase down a line of code past moves/reformats until I find where it was introduced.
It saddens me that in the future I'll increasingly chase a curiosity down to its initial commit and be left wondering whether it came out of an LLM.
(Tangent re: understanding code, my personal guideline is to write code so it is easiest to *understand* as a whole, which sometimes means longer lines with shorter variable names, even if it makes it "harder" to read line-by-line. I'm sure the corporate style guide hates that!)
Aras Pranckevičius@rygorous all of this resonates. There (still?) are people in SW world who care about things very deeply. Maybe dozens of them!
btw, I am reading your posts or info-dump threads here or on slack, and I do understand everything!
Tom Forsyth@aras @rygorous I think I am lucky in that most LLMs fill me with a visceral sort of body-horror disgust - deep in the Uncanny Valley. It means I don't have to think too much about the consequences of their adoption because I just fucking can't, and I don't have to have some tedious "logical" argument about it. If that means I can't work - oh well, fuck the industry, hermit time.
The Seven Voyages Of Steve@Doomed_Daniel I'm sorry man, this stuff sucks so much
slembcke@TomF @aras You know The Neverending Story? Either the book or the movie, for this part?
So there's this famous scene in the climax of the movie (which is about 1/3rd into the book), where the protagonist (Atreyu) and his horse are stuck in the "swamp of sadness" and the horse is slowly sinking into the swamp and drowning.
This scene has "traumatized" (in the TikTok sense, i.e., given The Sad, not actually traumatized) a generation of kids.
@TomF @aras In the film, it's a pretty messed-up scene, but it works, it's certainly memorable, it does what it needs to do, and I don't subscribe to the idea that "children's" media should sugarcoat things like this, because sometimes fucked up stuff does happen. Anyway, tangent.
The actual reason I bring this up is context, and especially the version of this in the book that hits even harder. Believe it or not, the film version is _really_ pulling its punches.
@TomF @aras In the book, the horse (Artax) can talk, and as it's sinking into the swamp of sadness (exactly what it sounds like), it's telling Atreyu how actually it just wants to die, and to please let it sink.
And the wider context is that at the time Fantastica (Phantasien in German) is slowly disappearing into The Nothing and as I recall (it's been a while) at the time that Swamp is on the edge of The Nothing that is slowly eating up everything.
@rygorous @aras I do wonder if I'm a little more resilient because of my terrible memory. I forget stuff all the time. What I mainly remember is that I *did* know something, and that I *could* know it again. Actually knowing it right now - I'm perfectly used to that not being the case for plenty of things.
@rygorous @aras
But it means that this state of mind is, I think, very similar to people who "solve" problems using things like LLMs, in that hey - we both got the job done without really understanding why and how it got done. We're just using a recipe. The only difference is - I know I did know why, and could know why, it's just slipped my mind for now. So I have a little empathy for that pragmatic view. I said a LITTLE. It's very small :-)
But it means that this state of mind is, I think, very similar to people who "solve" problems using things like LLMs, in that hey - we both got the job done without really understanding why and how it got done. We're just using a recipe. The only difference is - I know I did know why, and could know why, it's just slipped my mind for now. So I have a little empathy for that pragmatic view. I said a LITTLE. It's very small :-)
Miss Aemilia🎀@TomF @aras @rygorous
I didn't go hermit, I just ran away. I saw the fact that not only was I directly working for evil (I'm not saying who my boss was. But there's a chance you know them.), but every near contribution I made to the tech industry as a whole contributed to a system of genuine evil. /1
I didn't go hermit, I just ran away. I saw the fact that not only was I directly working for evil (I'm not saying who my boss was. But there's a chance you know them.), but every near contribution I made to the tech industry as a whole contributed to a system of genuine evil. /1
Jørgen 
Leszek Godlewski@aras @rygorous (1/2) Can I pick your brains about one thing, though? To me, programming is 3 parts:
1) the problem solving: coming up with a data representation and an algorithm to process it,
2) the important code that's fun/engaging to actually type, think: perf-critical fast path, parts of architecture that are key to getting point 1) right,
3) and then there's the boilerplate and infamous "glue code".
1) the problem solving: coming up with a data representation and an algorithm to process it,
2) the important code that's fun/engaging to actually type, think: perf-critical fast path, parts of architecture that are key to getting point 1) right,
3) and then there's the boilerplate and infamous "glue code".
Bartosz Taudul@TheIneQuation @aras For me it's the neverending Vulkan validation layers whac-a-mole and the dozen screens of callstacks that tsan spits out for every single issue. I absolutely H A T E figuring out and fixing that stuff, because it's just soul-draining busywork.
@rygorous @aeva the whole ordeal has been tremendously isolating indeed, and I was already pretty cut off by becoming heavily disabled due to Long Covid - turns out a lot of people abandon you quite dramatically if you have"nothing to offer" anymore, or remind them of a still looming danger they'd rather put a firm lid on. And yeah I do think these things are connected on a larger scale, later Covid years were a masterclass in politics normalizing sending reality to a nice farm
@rygorous i feel every word of this so hard, and i just want to say i cherish your infodumps and i know exactly the alienation you are feeling from all of this. i've learned so much from you both directly in our conversations and from reading your writings, and i hope you never stop.
@rygorous i'm incredibly disheatened by how many career programmers are ready to just give up and live a simple life feeding coins into slopmachines. i'm... not optimistic that people will change until it all breaks, and i would be astonished if any of them took responsibility for it when it does, buut i am also heartened by the good many people here who want to burn down the darkness factory
@rygorous idk i have this tendency to try to take big impossible problems that i can never fix on my own (like being stuck in a shin megami tensei spinoff game where magic chat bots turn the general population into mindless thralls and randomly send people previously healthy people into violent psychosis) and come up with contingency plans that afford me some small measure of control, and doubling down on curiosity is one of those schemes
@rygorous my rant earlier is a branch off an idea i had today. i think it is only a matter of time before my clients are all slop cleanup projects while the client is still feeding everything back into the slop machine, and because i am a manager, i feel i need to start developing methods to keep people's heads sharp as they slog through this tsunami of liquid shit, and continue to provide the white glove service to our clients
@rygorous i need to keep morale up for an entire team of hungry minds so they don't burn out and leave
@rygorous i was recently visited by an uncle i hadn't seen since a funeral in early 2020, and i was worried i spent the whole time airing out my anxieties (while enthusiastically explaining all my contingency plans), but he remarked to my parents privately afterward that he's always found me to be a very joyful person and was happy to see that's still the case
@aeva Yeah I'm actually in no state for any of that rn.
I'm basically getting nothing done right now, haven't really since maybe last Oct or so?
I can still do mindless Jira tickets and customer support and building releases, but anything more involved than that? Crickets.
(This is not a secret, my boss and my whole team knows this.)
I was kinda surprised two weeks ago to not be laid off, to be honest.
@aeva took me a loooong time to notice that it's not one of my usual up/down cycles (which I'm used to at this point), but (presumably) another depressive episode. It's been many years since the last big one.
(Yes, I am booked to see a professional, but you don't just get appointments two days from now, so kind of in limbo right now.)
@aeva anyway right now as a result I have an "engineering fellow" job title with a "junior engineer" set of responsibilities and an absolutely fantastic outlook on things, with my Green Card waiting for renewal (which is taking a LONG time), all stuck in the US as an immigrant while the country is Super Into those right now, with not just the AI crap but also 2 new wars this year (so far)
@aeva IOW, sorry to vent but yeah I've really had better days
Owen AndersonFor what little it's worth, I always love reading your posts, digressions and all, and learn from every one of them. Honestly I wish I was capable of the kind of intense, focused insight you have.
I hope we can all figure out a way to support each other through all this shit.
jrovirab@rygorous I treasure your blog posts. It takes a lot of effort for me to understand them and i don't retain the details, but I always keep them mind-bookmarked for when I might need them.
I left your company a year ago demotivated and wanting time for my family. Also hoping motivation for a new project would come naturally. It hasn't happened yet but I don't have much free time anyway.
This experience probably doesn't help you, but here you have it anyway.
Andy Robbins