I'm not sure that's a valid analogy. Light, composition and creativity are all experienced directly by viewer, and essentially describe what it is that we notice and appreciate in photography (even if subconciously). The best analogy I can think of to programming is the UX/UI of the application. Given equaly competent developers, nobody is going to notice or care if your application was written in Rust or Cold Fusion.
But the original analogy is flawed too. I wouldn't consider caring about the craft of programming to be similar to obsessing over your photography equipment. GAS is about consumerism and playing with gadgets, at the end of the day.
Caring about the craft of programming is more about being an artist who takes pride in crafting something beautiful, even if they're the only ones experiencing it. I am most definitley not one of those programmers, but have always had nothing but immense respect for those that are.
>It's entirely possible they don't have the ability in house to resolve it.
I've started breathing a little easier about the possibilty of AI taking all our software engineering jobs after using Anthropic's dev tools.
If the people making the models and tools that are supposed to take all our jobs can't even fix their own issues in a dependable and expedient manner, then we're probably going to be ok for a bit.
This isn't a slight against Anthropic, I love their products and use them extensively. It's more a recognition of the fact that the more difficult aspects of engineering are still quite difficult, and in a way LLMs just don't seem well suited for.
I believe the point he was trying to make is that he doesn't want to be recommended things he wants to watch. He wants his YouTube use to be be focused and intentional, and not let himself get sucked into an endless stream of engaging content.
And my point is that your words is about any other recommendation engine. Youtube is very different, there is no better information source to shape oneself what is really good to be interested in. Except of maybe book search websites.
The author wants to find content when he is looking for something specific. He does not want his attention grabbed by something he wasn't looking for, no matter how educational it may be.
Multiple people have clearly explained this to you in several comment threads and you're still insisting it makes no sense. At this point the only question is why you don't want to understand.
Well, what is enough good to grab one's attention? If not Youtube, something/somebody else has to provide this function for the person. The impact Youtube does on me is like having fucking Aristotle as a teacher. Tell me please what is better.
Yes, thank you. It feels like whenever this topic is brought up everyone argues between some false dichotomy of letting the kid binge on algorithmic slop or personally engaging with them in some wholesome activity.
Meanwhile a couple generations of us grew up with two working parents who were happy to just throw us in front of the TV or our lego sets when they needed a break. And that seemed to work fine?
Our daughter is only 2, but she's still absolutely thrilled whenever we let her zone out to some Disney movie on the TV, and has yet to even hold a tablet (that we know of, at least). I know things will probably change for us as she gets older, so I try to withold too much judgement from the parents I see happily plopping a tablet with YouTube in front of their kid. But for now, it's just hard for me to even imagine doing that.
I'm sure many would ask "whats the difference between a movie on TV amd YouTube on a tablet?" Well, tons, just from my personal experience. But her pediatrician, early child development professional we work with, and research I've read, all seem to indicate there's a pretty big difference.
A movie requires following a plot line for a sustained amount of time (like 1.25 hours). YouTube shorts are like 30 second dopamine hits that make a movie seem like a chore. Think about that. What we used to do for fun is considered by some to be exhausting now.
I was really shocked last week when I met two women in their early 20s in a bar. Someone mentioned The Lord of the Rings. I said I'd read it.
They were shocked! They were asking about the film.
And I was probably more shocked when they said they don't read books because they don't have the patience. One said she once read a whole book and it was really good, but hasn't don't so since.
This was incredibly irritating at first, though over time I've learned to appreciate this "extra credit" work. It can be fun to see what Claude thinks I can do better, or should add in addition to whatever feature I just asked for. Especially when it comes to UI work, Claude actually has some pretty cool ideas.
If I'm using Claude through Copilot where it's "free" I'll let it do its thing and just roll back to the last commit if it gets too ambitious. If I really want it to stay on track I'll explicitly tell it in the prompt to focus only on what I've asked, and that seems to work.
And just today, I found myself leaving a comment like this:
//Note to Claude: Do not refactor the below. It's ugly, but it's supposed to be that way.
Never thought I'd see the day I was leaving comments for my AI agent coworker.
Claude is almost comically good outside of copilot. When using through copilot it’s like working with a lobotomized idiot (that complains it generated public code about half the time).
It used to be good, or at least quite decent in GH Copilot, but it all turned into poop (the completions, the models, everything) ever since they announced the pricing changes.
Considering that M$ obviously trains over GitHub data, I'm a bit pissed, honestly, even if I get GH Copilot Pro for free.
I'm currenlty juggling a few side projects, one of which is a game I've been tinkering with for 3 years. It's a pretty simple simulation of riding your bike through a city at night. It's never been anywhere near close to anything I could actually release, but I finally at least pulled together a gameplay video I could show off to my familiy and friends. They were all pretty impressed, and all wanted to know when I'd actually release it.
But I doubt I ever will. To me, making the game is my game, and I've tried to frame my side project work to my gamer friends that way. Sometimes it's giving myself new techncial puzzles to figure out, other times it's just letting myself zone out and get creative with world building, snapping together building facades like legos to build whatever crazy city I can imagine. It's so much fun.
Another is a web project that's much less fun and creative, but the more I tinker with it the more it turns into something that may actually be useful to others. And it may actually turn into something I can release and promote, and maybe even earn a little beer money with. I'm currently working up the motivation and courage to do a Show HN on that one here soon.
It almost pains me to say it (for reasons I can't even articulate well) but I've found LLMs to be tremendously useful in pushing through on side project work. I've lost track of how many projects I've spun up over the years and abandoned as soon as I got to the tedious parts you need to tackle if you actually want a marketable product (admin interfaces, user accounts, endless boilerplate html, etc, etc). With a competent LLM I can just delegate all the tedious crap and stay focused on what's actually fun for me. It's great.
The auto-commits of Aider scared the crap out of me at first too, but after realizing I can just create a throwaway branch and let it run wild it ended up being a nice way to work.
I've been trying to use Sonnet 3.7 tonight through the Copilot agent and it gets frustrating to see the API 500 halfway through the task list leaving the project in a half baked state, and then and not feeling like I have a good "auto save" to pick up again from.
That's been my experience as well with projects, though I have yet to do any sort of A/B testing to see if it's all in my head or not.
I've attributed it to all your project content (custom instruction, plus documents) getting thrown into context before your prompt. And honestly, I have yet to work with any model where the quality of the answer wasn't inversely proportional to the length of context (beyond of course supplying good instruction and documentation where needed).
Likewise it reminded me of my first summer job growing up in rural northern Illinois in the 80s: detasseling corn [1]. It was just something we pretty much all did, starting in Jr. High. So, if my math is correct, starting at around 12 or 13. The whole thing was managed via our school counselors, and they even used school buses to haul us out to the fields.
In the years I was doing it we all just lined up on one end of the field and walked the length of it pulling the tassles from the top of every stalk of corn. We started before dawn, soaked in the dew of the fields and freezing cold. And we ended early afternoon, soaked in sweat.
Pretty messed up in hindsight, though I can't say I've spent too much time thinking about it over the years. The only real lasting impact it's had on me is a crippling fear of grasshoppers, after being swarmed by them a few times in the fields.
Agree with your sentiment, but I'd take it one step further: why doesn't anyone calling the shots at Meta realize just how uncool it is to do such a thing? Which is the same reaction I had to their recent AI influencers.
It speaks to their seeming inability to read the zeitgeist on the general public's attitude towards generative AI at the moment. I'm generally "pro AI", in that I think generative AI is incredibly interesting tech that can potentially be used to create some very cool (and maybe even helpful) things. But "AI" has become a dirty word among the people I know who aren't living in our tech bubble - uncool at best, and evil at worst.
And every time I see something like this, I understand perfectly why they feel that way. Every new hamfisted or creepy attempt at inserting AI into everything by companies like Meta just digs the hole even deeper for people's perception of generative AI.
But the original analogy is flawed too. I wouldn't consider caring about the craft of programming to be similar to obsessing over your photography equipment. GAS is about consumerism and playing with gadgets, at the end of the day.
Caring about the craft of programming is more about being an artist who takes pride in crafting something beautiful, even if they're the only ones experiencing it. I am most definitley not one of those programmers, but have always had nothing but immense respect for those that are.