this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
656 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

1550 readers
119 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] LargeMarge@sh.itjust.works -2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (11 children)

I'm not saying you can't be critical of it, but templating and syntax completion is in fact useful. Suggesting incorrect code is obviously bad, but all of this stuff is still relatively new and I'm sure it'll get better with time. Can't we at least try to be a little optimistic about what this stuff is capable of when we give our criticisms, instead of having knee jerk reactions that make this out to be the harbinger of the apocalypse?

Side point to address the linked article: yes, computing systems use energy. If our energy grid is overly reliant on the burning of fossil fuels that release harmful emissions, that doesn't mean we need to stop the advancement of our computers. It means we need to stop using so much fossil fuels in our grid.

[–] self@awful.systems 14 points 8 months ago (2 children)

syntax completion has existed since 1957, and templating (or macros that implement templates) has been in editors long enough I don’t think anyone remembers when they got added (but here’s TECO (1962) anyway. the implementations of these things that run inside your editor are lightweight, predictable, and don’t increase carbon emissions by 30%, and it’s really weird that you’re in this thread cosplaying as a programmer but somehow don’t know basic shit about how code’s written, actually??? why is that, I wonder.

yes, computing systems use energy

come the fuck off it. so much of computer science involves studying algorithmic efficiency, something you just tried to talk past. it’s how we know that the regular expressions and push-down automata we implement in editors to do fast efficient syntax completion are a better fucking idea than using some shit that does the same thing less reliably and consumes so much fucking energy doing it that it increases greenhouse emissions by 30 fucking percent

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

FPGA systems researchers: with this clever trick we can make the chip have 36% lower surface area and use 14% less energy!

Worst people you know: haha gpus go brrrrrrrrrrr

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 8 months ago

also the worst people I know: LLMs will replace human labor! now tell me why my copilot-generated HDL isn’t working

load more comments (8 replies)