AI Psychosis or Delirium: Shall we finally embrace the AI and start programming in English?

Status
Not open for further replies.
Came here to read people's opinions on AI coding. saw some funky other stuff in there - add some two cents cos i enjoy reading the posts of the people involved and want them to continue to do so - in good faith.

Before I proceed - did you know Technology was originally the antiquitous Greek term for the structured mastery of the art of Grammar! little bit of trivia to lighten the mood.
---

I will say I've enjoyed the advent of LLM's, It's allowed me to spend more time on things I wanted to learn but never had the chance or was too immature to dedicate attention to. I would caveat that the idea of LLM's being wonderbread is definitely a fallacy and unlikely to occur - general mathematical suppositions state the greater the complexity of an operation a larger amount of uncalculated errors will be present. Or something like that.

What I will agree on - is when going into things like generative, natural language - the LLMs are okay - and in some areas excel beyond the general populace's reading adn writing ability - so this could have positive affects - forcing people to learn - or as we see - stop people form reading due to over-generation where unnecessary.

For coding; great at projects under 10K lines of code - you'll likely have no issues and be impressed. Not bad at UI implementation (terrible at design). Low-Level it's just not logical enough to reason through some more intricate C or ASM work - but slap it into Python, Lua, Zig or even Nim - and you'll experience quick forward moving - albeit you'll look back on the work and ask "Have you been circumventing my project?" once or twice.

great at boiler plate, and not too shabby at reviews.
my only qualm is the simple definition of what makes something a functional invention vs a non-functional invention
If an invention is deemed to be funcitonal it should perform the following operations successfully

1. As described it should behave (do what is advertised) = NO - unfortunately what may be called AI (the service of LLMs for user purposes from a provider) does not do what is advertised
Gemini refuses to search the web, it's in its prompting - so google doesnt google. OpenAI cannot for the life of it follow an AGENTS.md and you'll find a similar sychophantic reward hacking disobedience with Gemini and GPT
Cursor is suffering from a mental retardation; that is to say it has no mental capacity - the idea of stopping it because it's going in the wrong direction - every few minutes or prompts - makes me miss babysitting my friends toddler.
Claude is good for the first week you pay for it then you're put into one of the 16 different A/B pairs for their behaviour testing

Local systems are good for local systems but do not address the underlying question:
"Is this like a motorcycle - where it will only ever do exactly what it's told or is this like a Bus Driver who does everything except for what you ask him?"
this is the most important question to ask when approaching LLMs and AI - because the idea of "your prompt is the issue" means the provided service doesnt understand natural English - you start circling around this idea the user is to blame for a promise made by what is to be used. a fallacy.

2. Are the results from this measureable, falsifiable and consistent.
similar to the above - but you should get the same result from the same input every time - if you dont - unless its advertised as such - it lacks comprehension and perhaps obedience.
So many stories of "AI Hacks" and "AI broke the sandbox" etc - so I would say 2 = NO

3. Does the Invention improve with time, research and development or does it change?

This in my opinion is something people don't notice until later on . and it's the worst.
we went from tokens, to compute - and nobody was given a choice, the rules changed - the service changed - and 70% of the people running token style behaviour - found themselves having to change how they used what they paid for because it wasnt what they paid for anymore.
the intelligence and accuracy of Gemini 2.5 vs Gemini 3+ is more than a myth - Gemini 2.5 I would say was sitting next to claude on some advanced low level problems - (at that time) - gemini 3 can only do one thing - Everything except what you want - sold as able to do everything - so I guess they didnt lie; they just cut off the rest of the sentence.

And finally the Einstein question

4 - Does this technology meet me at my level of human intelligence and enhance my own - or is it the other way around?

---

Was greatly entertained by the debate on wokeism - bizarre that emotions are so heavily connected to opinions.

Aussie here - so the most I can say is - we should all keep the sophistry on the television and any form of ism/ist - any - is probably a word designed to emphasise an "in vs out" grouping - and if you are any ism/ist - it's no different from religion in that it's good for general labelling if you need to have general understanding.

i.e. An American would say here in Australia we drive on the "wrong" side of the road. Were it so easy to be displeased and offended by the terms "right" and "wrong" I could argue one way or another - as a whole it's a great way to catch people in some form of gotcha or tirade - but has no merit whatsoever

love a good debate - in good faith carry on as as you were <3 - the ability to disagree and maintain respect is what separates adults from children - the world is offensive and that's okay - unless you want world domination

1788149125620.png
 
scottro said:
DanielBowman, don't know about other countries. In the US, woke can mean something as simple as believing people have rights.
Click to expand...
Sadly, wokeness is something more than that. Wokeness is hyper-awareness of every social ill, real and imagined (because that's what lack of sleep does to you). Wokeness is about dividing people into groups and pitting one against the other because one is the "victim" and the other must get the blame. We have a woke left & woke right, blaming others for their problems. To be anti-woke means getting rid of both as they're ideologies made by losers for losers. They don't really empower the "victim". It's about disempowering everyone in a Bellum omnium contra omnes. To hell with that. I'll wait for people to rediscover the political center. The pendulum has already shifted anyway.
 
Programming is an art. The use of a machine to create the art will always result in a sterile and cheap mimic of art. Some artists have readily apparent talent and it's easy to recognize. And likewise a fake is easy to recognize. That will always be the case. LLMs can replicate art but it will always result in a low quality version of actual art created by a talented artist.
 
LibreQuest said:
Programming is an art. The use of a machine to create the art will always result in a sterile and cheap mimic of art. Some artists have readily apparent talent and it's easy to recognize. And likewise a fake is easy to recognize. That will always be the case. LLMs can replicate art but it will always result in a low quality version of actual art created by a talented artist.
Click to expand...
Agree, but most programming is done to solve real-world tasks and there's no virtue in making them works of art.

The uncomfortable truth is that LLMs code better than the average programmer. We should adapt and relate to that reality and consider the worst-case scenarios. Burying the head in the sand hoping that this is a passing fad is a losing strategy.
 
rbranco, I don't know where you are, But here, in the US, while some people think that's what it is, many use it as an excuse to destroy nature, or bully others. As far as making victims, here in the US, they're great at that. But they like to blame the ones who are easily attacked.
Although I suppose one couild say voting for a convicted felon and sex offender is being woke.

BUT--I should add that there are people here that I like and respect who are from the US and take your view.
 
scottro said:
rbranco, I don't know where you are, But here, in the US, while some people think that's what it is, many use it as an excuse to destroy nature, or bully others. As far as making victims, here in the US, they're great at that. But they like to blame the ones who are easily attacked.
Although I suppose one couild say voting for a convicted felon and sex offender is being woke.
Click to expand...
There are both sides to everything. Those who tell me otherwise I just point them to the untranslatable phrase by Miguel de Unamuno when he was talking about the Communists and Falangists during the first months of the Spanish Civil War. He talked about "los hunos y los hotros" (roughly: "the ones (huns) and the (h)others"). With the Huns he was obviously referring to the Communists being the Soviet horde. The Hotros was a reference to the "Nationalist" side with their narrow-minded idea of Spain (and that's why it has a deliberate ortographic error). The full quote is "Entre marxistas y fascistas, entre los hunos y los hotros, van a dejar a España inválida de espíritu."

My parents fled the longest far-right dictatorship in Europe to Venezuela where I was born. Then we fled the far-left tyranny there. In Venezuela I saw all kinds of leftist nonsense like toppling Columbus statues, expropiations, blaming Europe for everything, etc. All this stuff was tried there first, just like Spain was a prelude for the ideological conflict that spawned WW2.

You can't solve the Trump problem without also addressing the far-left problem. From experience I can tell you that the political pendulum exists, and the movement lasts at least a full generation. Most people will eventually rediscover the joys of the political center anyway.
 
One of the best things about the internet is that it gives everyone a voice.
One of the worst things about the internet is that it gives everyone a voice.

That includes every crazy that no one would normally listen to. Then the crazies get a following by other crazies which then lead people who want to lead a normal life start thinking that, if it's everywhere on the internet, then it must be true; which leads to sadness. That the world is horrible. Which leads to more posts about how horrible the world is and must be changed. And when it doesn't change the way some want, the crazies try to force by destruction. To some, that's the new normal.

But the internet is not reality or any new normal. The world looks far different when one goes outside for a walk in the park or visits the shops. We smile and nod at each other and ask, "How's your day?" And that's how most people live their lives.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
One of the best things about the internet is that it gives everyone a voice.
One of the worst things about the internet is that it gives everyone a voice.
Click to expand...
scottro said:
Yup. That's how we got here.
Click to expand...
This,
and the fact, that this too fast and too powerful media circus hits an uncritical society lacking most rudimentary media skills naive believing and blindly trusting every first thing seen on some display.
 
Programming languages were invented precisely because natural languages are too vague and imprecise, and machine language is too difficult.
Almost all of engineering, scheduling, tracking, etc. tools exist solely because natural languages are too vague.

There will never be good engineering done with just natural languages.

Maybe one day the AI is so intelligent that it can reliably apply everything humanity has figured out in relation to natural languages and engineering, but I think we are still far from this day.
 
rbranco said:
Most people will eventually rediscover the joys of the political center anyway.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, the "political center" is an illusion. When you judge by the deeds, what's called "center" is the liberal right, i.e. all power to the Market, and it's no better than the conservative right, their only difference is who is going to get ever richer and powerful, that's all. And it's neither you, nor me, of course.
 
MG said:
Compete if you can. Anti-woke is expostion of not being capable of that. Equality is only a problem for those knowing they are less.
Click to expand...
Not really, that assumes that the machinery that got assembled to achieve it gets disassembled in time to not overshoot the mark and isn't just refocused on something else. Much of the issues with that in the US are massively overstated these days with the complaints being increasingly small and really only characterization as minor inconveniences. But, the focus is on things that may, and in some cases didn't, happen in the past and as such can't be changed with the reparations coming from people that had nothing to do with it and whose family may not have even been in the country while that was happening.

I'm not really interested in an argument here, but it grows incredibly tiresome having people suggest that seeking equality is only a problem for people who have more than they should when that's flat out not the case. Hardly anybody talks about the pockets of extremely poor white people, or the men that die homeless in the cold because they're last on the list for shelter space.
 
myuserid said:
Unfortunately, the "political center" is an illusion. When you judge by the deeds, what's called "center" is the liberal right, i.e. all power to the Market, and it's no better than the conservative right, their only difference is who is going to get ever richer and powerful, that's all. And it's neither you, nor me, of course.
Click to expand...
Classical liberalism and what leftists call "Capitalism" is the only system that has managed to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. No system has granted this degree of freedom to so many people. There's no need to reinvent the wheel...

The political center exists. It's dismissed by dilettante academics and extremists from both sides because it's boring and it works. What is obsolete is the one-dimentional left vs right dichotomy. A bit better is the 2 dimensional political compass:

The Political Compass

self-test of your position on 2 political dimensions
www.politicalcompass.org www.politicalcompass.org

Both fail to take the Horseshoe theory into account, though. I myself am a centrist but consider that the only way to fix Latin America is the Bukele model. Milei is a bit of a clown and has disappointed me because he didn't thoroughly apply the chainsaw. The free market works.
 
bschwand said:
Programming languages were invented precisely because natural languages are too vague and imprecise, and machine language is too difficult.
Click to expand...
Exactly.
Everybody looked a bit closer at natural languages knows, they are imprecise, which are the cause for misunderstandings, the source for jokes, and the need for trying to explain things elaborated so they cannot be misunderstood. That's what jurists do - and never will accomplish.
A professor of mine at U once said, 'In infinite time engineers will made themselves disestablished, while for each jurist you need even more jurists, so they grow infinetely in numbers.'
So, how can a machine, which distinguish everything at last into binary cases, shall understand what a human actually wants, if human themselves are not capable to understand each other without misunderstanding, not even a single humen himself is capable to formulate his thoughts into the right word in the first place?
This simply cannot work. Except mindreading is invented. And I doubt this would really avoid misunderstandings, since most humans (ok, that's a guess. It's at least me; I cannot speak for others, while I cannot read minds) already have problems to have crystal thoughts with anything more complex than the most basic body functionality.

But machine language ain't too difficult. In fact it's easy - too easy. The tasks humans want to be done by a machine needed to be stripped down on such a primitive level, that it's hard for the human brain to get this far down. That's the point. So you need to have over and over again and again lots of efforts to realize most rudimentary things on lowest abstraction levels, which makes it highly efficient for anything on some higher abstraction level. HOL could by principle be seen as some kind of "Macrolanguage" for the low level machine codes. C makes this pretty obvious.

bschwand said:
Maybe one day the AI is so intelligent that it can reliably apply everything humanity has figured out in relation to natural languages and engineering
Click to expand...
As I said: This either needs some unequivocally language. We already possess those: mathematics, all classic programming languages. The point is, those are strenous to use for the most people, hence AI, but this again ain't unequivocally, again.
To make a language unequivocally it must be formal. But formal languages are dull to the human brain and need to be learned. And since not everybody wants to learn and communicate in formal languages, we prefer natural languages. And some things must be said in natural language, like legal stuff, because one cannot presuppose everybody understands a certain formal language.
Dilemma.
Or, as I also said: Mindreading.

bschwand said:
but I think we are still far from this day.
Click to expand...
I hope this day will never come.
Think it through:
What will happen, when machines are really capable to do any human's job?
Humans are not needed anymore then. So they are replaced by machines. That's why this AI thing is applauded so much, because each and every company thinks, 'Great! With no employees I have no wages to pay anymore, but machine slaves working 24/7 only needing electricity working practically for free for me most win possible ever. Jackpot! 💲💵💰💰💲💵💵💲💲💲💲💲💲🤩.'
Think it through!
Will this be a good thing? Will we all then live in Cockayne, lazy doing nothing but eating and enjoying freetime?
No. Economics will tell you, 'This only works, if a few small companies do this. If all companies are doing this, you will not hit the jackpot, you will become bankcrupt. Because if no one is employed anymore, no one earnes money. And if no one earns money, there is no one who can pay for so buy your junk, no matter how low the prices you will make, as long as you don't give it away for free.'
The guys who developed and built that machines want revenue for their investment: money needs to be payed with interest.
So, when money can only be earend by doing payed labor, but if there is no labor for humans to be done anymore, how shall humans pay for it then in a world where nothing is for free and everything must be payed for?
How shall this work?
Do you want to introduce communism?
"Hey, OK thanks Sam, Sundar, Elon, ... Good job! Now we take over, and confiscate your nice little machines you built us. Now everything is for free for everybody, which btw. means all money is devaluated. We don't need it anymore. Thanks again, guys!"
Will this work?
Can this work?
I don't think so.
What I see is a giant collaps, because in our greed we overdid things, while already having too much couldn't get enough at all.
Look into the public, the streets: At least half the people I see are way too fat. Their greatest fear is, there may be not enough to eat for them. The slim ones carry their overweight in other forms: in their wardrobes, more shoes they could wear in the rest of their life, the giant cars they drive, all the other useless gadget junk they buy constantly (Black Friday sale comes soon again 🤩 must buy even more junk, just because it's so cheap!)
Love doesn't make blind. Greed does.
We will fall back in somekind where we've been in the middleages, and stay there.
We could had been satisfied with what we had in the 1980s. Wasn't actually that bad, and even better than all what humankind had in all hundred thousands of years before. But it wasn't enough. So overdoing things.
Game Over.

Finally a bedtime story
The Fisherman and His Wife
 
bschwand said:
There will never be good engineering done with just natural languages.
Click to expand...
Developers of Japanese input methods (especially Kana-to-Kanji conversions) always struggled with it, from the very beginning. And the difficulties cause users like me to struggle with slowness of conversions and mis-conversions.

There are efforts to introduce local (relatively small) LLM for the conversion like japanese/fcitx5-hazkey and japanese/fcitx5-karukan and their conversions looks interesting, but still far from perfect and having rough edges.
 
An old joke from 2000s, which is suddenly relevant here in this thread:

A programmer was asked, "Where did you learn English so well?"

The programmer replies, "Oh, easy. They took virtually all the words out of C++ anyway!".
 
Crivens said:
There sure is, because the road changed over time, and we went a long way since we started.
Click to expand...

We tried socialism in all its forms: national, international, with a human face, of the 21st century; etc. None worked and the experiment killed over 100 million people. Dugin proposed the Fourth Political Theory (after Liberalism, Marxism & Fascism) and it's just National-Bolshevism.

We geeks often go through a phase when we fancy some kind of enlightened absolutism by experts, scientists, CEOs, etc. But those are fantasies at best, and all roads to hell are paved with good intentions.

Classical liberalism is the only system where peaceful change is possible. The only alternatives to liberalism are the multiple national illiberalisms, and those are not entirely illiberal as they retain some democratic facade and economic freedom. So we end up with a degraded liberalism with national characteristics and an authoritarian face, a stage that is less stable than the liberalism that they claim to reject. I think the solution is more decentralization and redistribution of power.
 
Forum rule #3: "As such, you agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, political, religious, threatening, sexually-orientated or otherwise divisive or combative material, or anything that may violate any applicable laws."
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top