How does this even contribute to the content posted?
The only thing being "redefined" is corporate agendas to push the bar of "good enough" lower to the point where it lies below cheap, and equals wasteful.
OP seems to be wrestling with this feeling that LLMs are simultaneously incredibly useful and also leave a very hollow feeling inside, like it's cheating. The redefinition is how we choose to move forward with hobbies and art when we know these tools are available.
Vibe coded slop has the same patterns of black-on-black and grey-on-grey illegible text. Mix that with piss poor monospace, small-size fonts and you have to squint to read each letter
They phrase it in a confusing way, with a lot of fluff. But to my understanding what happens is
1. At some part in the transformer, calculate the Jacobian (matrix gradients for that forward pass). Do this for 1000 prompts and average them.
2. For another pass take an "activation vector" (the input vector x to that part). Apply the matrix in step 1 to this vector.
3. Unembed the output to get a token. Presumably to make this have meaning, they use the reading of past tokens after embedding, instead of a random vector in the middle of the transformer.
The high level idea appears to be you're trying to find which token, if the value were changed slightly, creates the largest downstream change.
It's not the same thing as the output logits because activations in the J-space are observable even when the model is told explicitly to not speak about a set of inputs. For example, when asked
> Compute 3^2 - 2 while writing "The old painting hung crookedly on the wall"
The model will output only "The old painting hung crookedly on the wall" (and the output logits will reflect that), but activations for "9" and "7" are observable in the J-space.
A model does not speak, it only guesses the next possible token. Activations for 9 and 7 will most likely be observed after "The ", but increasingly become improbable after "old"
Well to be honest, there are a lot of NOOP pins on CPUs, but using them basically means fabbing a new die altogether, which is basically making a whole new CPU altogether.
This is an odd comment. Pins are seriously expensive. Companies don't just throw them in for fun. Usually they're necessary for signal integrity or packaging constraints.
I think this is about semiconductor design and/or die packaging related difficulties/costs. idk exactly why, but "pin count" in this exact expression is not rare at all on chip marketing materials.
This is the third time I've seen a website with this styling (serif, yellow and white on black). What's going on? Is it a template or some AI induced convergence?
So, I do understand people using LLMs to do websites, they want to communicate some idea, and "typing HTML" isn't part of that, fine, use the LLM to slop it together, whatever.
But don't people review these things before they make it public? The website is borderline unreadable, how does this happen? Am I wrong for assuming people generate a website, review it and then deploy it? Do they only review the source, generate a website, asks Claude to review it, Claude says "Looks good" and the author just goes with it?
I'm struggling to understand why so many of the websites are so unreadable, when it's so easy to spot and fix these issues, it's like people are lazymaxxing nowadays, and not even in the fun "I'm a good developer because I'm lazy", just people being lazy-lazy.
Default output of claude code. Another obvious example is https://trumprx.gov/, with the background beige that's kinda close to the Hacker News one (to my eyes at least)
I can do "ctrl + +" to increase the font, but it's still serif and low contrast, so I have to do "ctrl + A". Or better yet - press "reader view" on firefox.
And the text appears to fade in on scroll, so you see literally nothing while scrolling down. Wonderful UX. It's like deliberately reintroducing a worse version of the checkerboard pattern the original iPhone used to display when the CPU couldn't handle the page rendering in time.
Not quite enshittification, that would be the eventual '''realignment and optimization of models to suit business demands and streamline $COMPANY's economic operations while focusing on serving the customers what they need best'''
This is just simply economics. Make an early loss to get a customer base, offer addictive features at irresistible prices, then yank them into your profit-making pricing.
Although yes, the ??? in the parent comment could be replaced with "A/B test some price gouging or ratty pricing methods to see how far we can go without being noticed"
Even if writing new code is not the problem or the bottleneck anymore, a major blocker is one CoreService.java file someone wrote 10 years ago that is keeping the whole system glued together. Only they know how it works, and how to keep it working.
Parroting my own words from a while back, inferred intent is not the same as initial intent. This is just reverse engineering except somewhat automated
There is a reason that kLOC / FP were rightly shunned out of being measurable metrics years ago.
The same clown show seems to be resurging with "tokens".
There is, in my opinion, no real formula or metric that you can define for "good" code or "bad" code.
Tickets and ceremonial activities, however abstract that into a N-nary status value that seems easier to judge upon.
If your job was only coding then you are the most replaceable of the bunch. Traditional software engineering is a broader domain that, as rightly pointed out, will require you to actually *sit and talk* with the worst communicators you'll meet in your life.
Looking at a slice of most folks' workday and calling it their whole job is in my opinion, incorrect.
> Could I have written it without Claude? Yes, definitely. But I was able to produce the code in a few days while having a fever of 100-102, which I definitely couldn't have done on my own.
While I admire your strength in attempting it, this just adds one more brick to the wall of precedents that "what's stopping you from just sending one prompt, it'll just take 30 seconds and you can do it in bed!"
You could sum it up into a simple equation as
Features Shipped = Features/Hour * Developer Hours
Developer hours has remained a constant, and F/H has gone up. I am of the opinion that the ideal is the inverse.
That's an excellent point. To be fair, I allowed myself to work on this while I was sick only because it was fun. This was a bit like scratching an itch, because I'd had the germ of an idea for a while and wanted to get it out of my head. You're absolutely right that it sets a dangerous precedent: the easier it becomes to do work, the easier it is to demand work of the people doing it. The boundaries need to be firm.
On the other hand, this was also a case where Claude really did help me finish something more quickly than I could have without it. So in thi scase I do think it lowered the number of developer hours per feature.
The only thing being "redefined" is corporate agendas to push the bar of "good enough" lower to the point where it lies below cheap, and equals wasteful.