If I am to believe that I am a visualizer. No, not really. With the negative "after image" it's almost like an artifact in your physical vision. More like seeing a floater IMO. But with the "mind's eye" it's completely non-physical. I can imagine an apple like I would see it with my eyes just strictly in my brain, but I can't "see" it. There is no visual output. It's very bizarre to put into words. I think of it like AR/VR. I can overlay objects onto my physical world.. AR. But I can also just think and manipulate things in some imaginary brain space... VR
What type of applications are y'all seeing from LLMs? Anecdotally the only thing that has changed for me is the ability to output more code. That's not software. My coworker is a 10x vibe-coder and his flagship application is held together with brittle shell scripts, a sloppy codebase, bad abstractions, piles of markdown files and an ouroboros of generated tests. This is not software. This is just held together with duct tape and a prayer. Although this guy doesn't have any traditional background but still, if LLM generated coding agents were so good even a simpleton like himself should be able to create a miraculous piece of software, right?
the 0x engineer became a 10x vibe-coder responsible for our CICD and vibe-coded testing that was previously manual
He's introduced several 100,000s LoC changes and additions in 10-15 codebases. There are some repos that only he works in ( so no PRs, just merge to master and be done ). He also has self-approved and merged changes without review (he's an admin)
Anyway, now he put in his notice and no one on his team knows how any of this works. We can't get code changes without CICD passing. CICD breaks all the time. The original contractor who made the CICD before him wants nothing to do with it now. We can't generate signed OTA packages.
He went from doing 'too much to finish anything' to 'made so many changes that he had to bypass PRs'.
Now he's leaving.
Engineers have been pointing out this bottleneck for the past year or so. The engineering managers aren't pushing it and the business owners either don't understand or don't care
Hah, ultimate vibe coder nightmare scenario. I wonder if, in six months time, there will be enough stories like this for sanity to prevail a little more.
Yes I know. There's no nuance on HN. I was using it as a metaphor to show that this person has no idea what they're doing. Which is a huge difference from someone deeply knowing the codebase and tech it'll sit on to make an educated tradeoff. I've seen the duct-tape in real codebases and I knew the engineers who put it there and why. That doesn't exist when your senior engineer is a nebulous "idea of an engineer" that resets its memory every few hours.
Please explain this "adapting". The LLM sellers' holygrail is * you just need to crank our model bro *. With this mindset, there is no adaptation needed, save a couple of weeks of getting up to speed with nuances of using the models, the / commands and integration of their APIs into your workflow.
It's not just corpo talk. The ultimate goal in LLM and AI progress is "replacement" of professional knowledge workers. In the march of the 9s of the accuracy of the generated LLM output, the engineers role would matter less and less.
It's asking engineers to "adapt" to being efficient in filling out the last 10% then 1% then 0.1% then 0.01%.
Yeah i also want to know what the adaption is. Because so far all I'm seeing is removal of the natural incentive to build deeper understanding of the systems. So in the future only the people who are really curious and want to know for knowledge sake are going to know enough to deal with the blind spots of the automatons.
Knowing how the things the LLM's are touching appears to be the only skill of value. Because using these things are trivial for anyone who is familiar with computers, what adaptation and catching up is there beyond waiting and observing what works and then just applying that?
"But the LLM's will know everything" well then we aren't needed at all, just put it on a loop and leave it running. At this endpoint there's nothing to adapt to, only direct means of allocating necessary resources to yourself for subsistence.
> brittle shell scripts, a sloppy codebase, bad abstractions, piles of markdown files and an ouroboros of generated tests. This is not software
I think that's software. It's not good software, but it's software.
This perspective feels a bit like a chef insisting McDonalds or frozen dinners aren't food. It's mass produced, unoriginal, and typically soulless, but it's still food. As Scott would say, maybe a map vs territory discussion.
I built an orchestrator connected to email, browser and payments, and it handles a ton of boring stuff like “pay electricity”, or “apt renters want something, deal with that”, or scheduling appointments, dealing with infoline chatbots and everything around that.
Plus navigating personal communication (what’s the address
of friend X, who did I promise to go to a dance workshop with) and so on…
In essense, anything Siri promised to be, but really working.
> his flagship application is held together with brittle shell scripts, a sloppy codebase, bad abstractions, piles of markdown files and an ouroboros of generated tests
you just described lots of codebases at highly values companies. Plenty of places, maybe even the majority, do not care about code quality if the code results in a functional application.
Why would it? You still need to be able to understand and describe a problem (if the space is complex, that usually means: many connected problems) and that requires good thinking.
The effects of the tech giants encroachment of society and the stakes and gravity of the situation is so serious that some people think its important not to allow attempts to frame the struggle as Sisyphean to succeed.
Bob: "I hate <company> and what they're doing to this cute fluffy animal I would like to do things to stop that"
Tom: "Well actually they're not nearly as bad as <other company> to said fluffy creature and if you actually cared about fluffy creature you'd only focus on them"
Great argument. Hate to be the one to tell you this but, two things can be true at once.
Why is your hypothetical Tom wrong to claim that Bob primarily cares about hating <company> and is using fluffy creatures as an excuse because it sounds superficially better than the actual reasons Bob has a problem with <company>?
And I'm guessing that I'm supposed to believe here that the reason Bob hates explicitly this one company and is dismissing 99% of the damage done to the cute fluffy animal by corporations that seemingly get paid to exterminate them in brutal ways, the reason many people seem to spouse this extremely bizarre, specific belief is "just because" right? Not an obscene amount of hypocrisy and dishonesty?
Because I don't have anywhere near enough brain damage to do that and I'm not sure I can get there in a medically safe manner.
Ah, slopper is hilarious. Too long has the title of builder just been an excuse to make dog shit UI and excusing yourself. If you're going to build user-facing tools, good UI/UX is a requirement not an option. Couldn't imagine this excuse flying in any other industry. Yeah I just made a chair where all 4 legs are different lengths and the back rest is in the middle of the seat, "I'm just more of a builder"
Not that it matters at this point but the hegelian dialectic is not thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Usually attributed to Hegel but as I understand it he actually pushed back on this mechanical view of it all and his views on these transitory states was much more nuanced.
If I had been wearing my fiendish CEO hat at the time, I might have even said something like: "somebody pointing this out will be a great way to jumpstart discussion in the comments."
One of the evilest tricks in marketing to developers is to ensure your post contains one small inaccuracy so somebody gets nerdsniped... not that I have ever done that.
A sort of broadening of Cunningham's Law (the fastest way to get an answer online is not by posting the question, but by posting the wrong answer—very true in my experience). If there's no issue of fact at hand, then you end up getting some engagement about the intentional malapropism/misattribution/mistake/whatever and then the forum rules tend to herd participants back to discussing the matter at hand: your company.
Trump did this a lot with the legacy media in his first term. He would make inaccurate statements to the media on the topic he wanted to be in the spotlight, and the media would jump to "fact check" him. Guess what, now everyone is talking about illegal immigration, tariffs, or whatever subject Trump thought was to their advantage.
People always need to be reminded, though. It seems to be in human nature to fear bad publicity, and the people who fear it less end up with disproportionate power as a result.
If that's not motivation enough for you to rename it, well, TypeScript already has a static type checker called Hegel. https://hegel.js.org/ (It's a stronger type system than TypeScript.)
I think it's more that Hegel was fine with "dialectics" but that the antithesis/synthesis stuff is not actually what's going on in his dialectic. It's a bit of a popular misconception about the role of negation and "movement" in Hegel.
From what I understand, it's a proof technique (other techniques include Kant's Transcendental Deduction or Descartes's pure doubt) that requires generating new conceptual thoughts via internal contradiction and showing necessarily that you lead from one category to the next.
The necessity thing is the big thing - why unfold in this way and not some other way. Because the premises in which you set up your argument can lead to extreme distortions, even if you think you're being "charitable" or whatever. Descartes introduced mind-body dualisms with the method of pure doubt, which at a first glance seemingly is a legitimate angle of attack.
Unfortunately that's about as nuanced as I know. Importantly this excludes out a wide amount of "any conflict that ends in a resolution validates Hegel" kind of sophistry.
>other techniques include Kant's Transcendental Deduction or Descartes's pure doubt
This is not quite accurate. Kant says very explicitly in the (rarely studied) Transcendental Doctrine of Method (Ch 1 Section 4, A789/B817) that this kind of proof method (he calls it "apagogic") is unsuitable to transcendental proofs.
You might be thinking of the much more well studied Antinomies of Pure Reason, in which he uses this kind of proof negatively (which is to say, the circumscribe the limits of reason) as part of his proof against the way the metaphysical arguments from philosophers of his time (which he called "dogmatic" use of reason) about the nature of the cosmos were posed.
The method he used in his Deduction is a transcendental argument, which is typically expressed using two things, X and Y. X is problematic (can be true but not necessarily so), and Y is dependent on X. So then if Y is true, then X must necessarily be true as well.
Sorry I meant "proof method" as more like "this was this guy's angle of attack", not that they would've thought each others angles were valid at all or that they're commensurable with say, 20th century formal proof logic (or Aristotelian logic for example). Descartes and Leibniz were squarely the rationalists that Kant wanted to abolish, and Hegel rejected Kants distinction between noumena and phenomena entirely, so they're already starting from very different places.
I guess it would be more accurate to state Kants actual premises here as making the distinction between appearance and thing-in-itself rather than the deduction, but the deduction technique itself was fascinating when I first learned it so that's what I associate most with Kant lol.
I guess I have not thought critically why we couldn't use a Transcendental argument to support Descartes. I just treated it as a vague category error (to be fair I don't actually know Descartes philosophy that well, even less than I know Kants lol). Could be a fun exercise when I have time.
>I guess I have not thought critically why we couldn't use a Transcendental argument to support Descartes.
The previous section within the Transcendental Dialectic that focuses on the nature of the soul goes into a refutation of Descartes' statement. Kant basically finds "I think therefore I am" to be a tautology that only works by equivocating the "I" in each clause. "I think" pretends that the "I" there is an object in the world which it then compares to the "I am" which is an object in the world. Kant argues that "I think" does not actually demonstrate an "I" that is an object but rather a redundant qualification of thinking.
I am being a bit imprecise, so here is SEP's summary:
>For in each case, Kant thinks that a feature of self-consciousness (the essentially subjectival, unitary and identical nature of the “I” of apperception) gets transmuted into a metaphysics of a self (as an object) that is ostensibly “known” through reason alone to be substantial, simple, identical, etc. This slide from the “I” of apperception to the constitution of an object (the soul) has received considerable attention in the secondary literature, and has fueled a great deal of attention to the Kantian theory of mind and mental activity.
>The claim that the ‘I’ of apperception yields no object of knowledge (for it is not itself an object, but only the “vehicle” for any representation of objectivity as such) is fundamental to Kant’s critique of rational psychology.
Eh… it’s always worth keeping in mind the time period and what was going on with the tooling for mathematics and science at the time.
Statistics wasn’t really quite mature enough to be applied to let’s say political economy a.k.a. economics which is what Hegel was working in.
JB Say (1) was the leading mind in statistics at the time but wasn’t as popular in political circles (Notably Proudhon used Says work as epistemology versus Hegel and Marx)
I’ve been in serious philosophy courses where they take the dialectic literally and it is the epistemological source of reasoning so it’s not gone
This is especially true in how marx expanded into dialectical materialism - he got stuck on the process as the right epistemological approach, and marxists still love the dialectic and Hegelian roots (zizek is the biggest one here).
The dialectic eventually fell due to robust numerical methods and is a degenerate version version of the sampling Markov Process which is really the best in class for epistemological grounding.
I thought the dialectic was just a proof methodology, and especially the modern political angles you might year from say a Youtube video essay on Hegel, was because of a very careful narrative from some french dude (and I guess Marx with his dialectical materialism). I mean, I agree with many perspectives from 20th century continental philosophy, but it has to be agreed that they refactored Hegel for their own purposes, no?
Oh the amount of branching and forking and remixing of Hegel is more or less infinite
I think it’s worth again pointing out that Hegel was at the height of contemporary philosophy at the time but he wasn’t a mathematician and this is the key distinction.
Hagel lives in the pre-mathematical economics world. The continental philosophy world of words with Kant etc… and never crossed into the mathematical world. So I liking it too he was doing limited capabilities and tools that he had
Again compare this to the scientific process described by Francis Bacon. There are no remixes to that there’s just improvements.
Ultimately using the dialectic is trying to use an outdated technology for understanding human behavior
> The continental philosophy world of words with Kant
Interestingly, a lot of arguments and formulations Kant had were lifted from Leibniz and reframed with a less mathematical flavor. I remember in particular his argument against infinite regress was pretty much pound for pound just reciting some conjecture from Leibniz (without attribution)
I mean I don't know about Hegel, but Kant certainly dipped into mathematics. One of the reasons why he even wrote CPR was to unify in his mind, the rationalists (had Leibniz) versus the empiricists (had Newton). 20th century analytic philosophy was heavily informed by Kantian distinctions (Logical Positivism uses very similar terminology, and Carnap himself was a Neo-Kantian originally, though funnily enough Heidegger also was). In the 21st century, It seems like overall philosophy has gotten more specialized and grounded and people have moved away from one unified system of truth, and have gotten more domain-driven, both in continental and analytic philosophy.
It's no doubt that basically nobody could've predicted a priori 20th century mathematics and physics. Not too familiar with the physics side, but any modern philosopher who doesn't take computability seriously isn't worth their salt, for example. Not too familiar with statistics but I believe you that statistics and modern economic theories could disprove say, Marxism as he envisioned it.
That definitely doesn't mean that all those tools from back then are useless or even just misinformed IMO. I witness plenty of modern people (not you) being philosophically bankrupt when making claims.
My claim is that genuinely all of those previous analytical forms are absolutely useless if you have the capacity to utilize a more mathematical framework
The problem is, those more mathematically challenging frameworks are inaccessible to the majority of the people
so they don’t actually take off because there’s no mechanism to translate more rigor in social studies and social sciences in large part because humans reject the concept of being measured and experimeted with, which is understandable if not optimal
So as a function, applications of mathematics trended towards things that were not human focused and they were machine focused and financial focused
So the big transition happened after TV and Internet (really just low cost high reach advertising) became pervasive and social scientists began utilizing statistical methods across consumer and attention action as social science experimentation platforms
Social science moved from the squishy into the precise precisely to give companies a market advantage in capturing market share through manipulating human behavior
ultimately that was the wet dream of political philosophers since pahotep
Oh interesting. I've basically quotiented out all social science all my life and stuck strictly to STEM, so my stack is, a lot of analytic + philosophy of science. A lot of pure math and CS (all across the stack), and recently physics because of job. I try not to comment on social issues (though Continental vibes generally seem righter to me the more I study it)
But I've never thought critically (in a long time) about applying it back to social science / political philosophy. Mind discussing more about what you're reading and targeting? I've personally avoided a lot of studies in this area because I didn't think they were actually rigorous but I probably just don't know where to look.
Microeconometrics tends to be quite rigorous and easy to validate.
They won't hold up to physics levels of rigor, of course - probably a bit more at the medical studies level of rigor.
David Card, Gary Becker, McFadden, etc.
Rigor is also... there's something about letting perfect be the enemy of the good.
If noone will apply math unless you can 100% reliably reproduce controlled experiments in a lab, the only thing left is people just talking about dialectics.
The challenge is how to get as much rigor as possible.
For instance, David Card saw New Jersey increase minimum wage. You generally can't truly conduct large-scale controlled social experiments, but he saw this as interesting.
He looked at the NJ/PA area around Philadelphia as a somewhat unified labor market, but half of it just had its minimum wage increased - which he looked at to study as a "natural" experiment, with PA as the control group and NJ as the experimental group, to investigate what happened to the labor market when the minimum wage increased. Having a major metro area split down the middle allowed for a lot of other concerns to be factored out, since the only difference was what side of the river you happened to be on.
He had lots of other studies looking at things like that, trying to find ways to get controlled-experiment like behavior where one can't necessarily do a true controlled experiment, but trying to get as close as possible, to be as rigorous as is possible.
Is that as ideal as a laboratory experiment? Hell no. But it's way closer than just arguing dialectics.
Well if you’re interested in the history of it the best start is really just Jeremy Bentham’s consequentialism.
To be clear I don’t believe in consequentialism
He built what was called Fellicific calculus (iirc) that would allow you to more or less take measurement of decisions. It was a mess and it obviously doesn’t work but this is kind of the first serious attempt to bring mathematical rigour to political philosophy.
You could argue that the tao te ching teaching does this in the way that it’s utilized in the sense that you have a set of things that you measure to give you predictive capabilities, but that’s closer to mysticism and tarot card reading its worth acknowledging the input as it’s the basis for like half the human population.
I have my own perspective of this which I wrote out in a fairly lengthy document (General Theory of Cohesion) on my website if you wanna go read it. Warning it’s not particularly scruitable if you’re not already pretty deep into cybernetics and systems theory.
That’s bs. Even just the preface to Phenomenology of Spirit is chock full of ideas that folks would be better off if they contemplated. Hegel can be considered a visual thinker (or visionary) whose ideas don’t need “measurement”. If folks understand his thoughts on the master-slave dialectic, for example, they would have an idea as to why we have such incompetent leaders like trump. His thought suffers from the same problem of any thinker who tried to be systematic, but it is still worth being inspired by.
The point is not “could someone get benefit from this” it’s that there are better heuristics to use and using old ones means you’re operating on old software
By that standard literally anything is valuable even as just an example of what not to do so it’s a meaningless measurement
You originally made the statement that "Hegel is irrelevant in the age of measurement", to which I objected. Unless you're going to back pedal further, you did find studying Hegel questionable.
I'm not going to go on the attack, but your pronouncements and self-certainty do not sound well considered.
I fear a motorcycle blasting down my street at 10pm. What's the difference.
Once my cats realized the robo vac won't hurt them they don't even move for it anymore... Seems intelligent to initially be terrified of something and update your perception of it.
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