What is Hackers' Pub?

Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.

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The reason I get so annoyed about people pitching LLMs as a way to 'democratise programming' or as end-user programming tools is that they solve the wrong problem.

The hard part of programming is not writing code. It's unambiguously expressing your problem and desired solution. Imagine if LLMs were perfect programmers. All you have to do is write a requirements document and they turn it into a working program. Amazing, right? Well, not if you've ever seen what most people write in a requirements document or seen the output when a team of good programmers works from a requirements document.

The most popular end-user programming language in the world (and, by extension, the most popular programming language), with over a billion users, is the Calc language that is embedded in Excel. It is not popular because it's a good language. Calc is a terrible programming language by pretty much any metric. It's popular because Excel (which is also a terrible spreadsheet, but that's a different rant) is basically a visual debugger and a reactive programming environment. Every temporary value in an Excel program is inspectable and it's trivial to write additional debug expressions that are automatically updated when the values that they're observing change.

Much as I detest it as a spreadsheet, Excel is probably the best debugger that I have ever used, including Lisp and Smalltalk.

The thing that makes end-user programming easy in Excel is not that it's easy to write code, it's that it's easy to see what the code is doing and understand why it's doing the wrong thing. If you replace this with an LLM that generates Python, and the Python program is wrong, how does a normal non-Python-programming human debug it? They try asking the LLM, but it doesn't actually understand the Python so it will often send them down odd rabbit holes. In contrast, every intermediate step in an Excel / Calc program is visible. Every single intermediate value is introspectable. Adding extra sanity checks (such as 'does money leaving the account equal the money paid to suppliers?') is trivial.

If you want to democratise programming, build better debuggers, don't build tools that rapidly generate code that's hard to debug.

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普段、日本語を読む時、漢字の意味だけを見て韓国の漢字音で読む事が多く、意味は分かっていても正確な読み方が分からない事が多いのだが、明日の発表を控え、私の拙い日本語力が借りを背負って帰ってきた。発表の原稿で、読み方がよく分からない単語に一々振り仮名を付ける中。😮‍💨

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마스토돈 여러분.
저는 언제나 여러분이 보지 못해도
이상한 커모지를 찍어서 반응이나 대답합니다.
고로 저는 마음인가 별을 많이 찍는 사람이 아니라
감정표현을 많이 하는 사람인겁니다.

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생각을 실시간으로 주고 받을 수 있는 slido를 만들어서 QR코드로 주고받으며 대화를 하면 어떨까요?

우리는 그걸 1대1 채팅방이라고 부르기로 했어요... ​:blobcatgooglynotlike:

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scaling *down* a business is so much work. I think things mostly grow, or crash and burn. here I'm doing "let's be smart with money, switch to cheaper options, lower my pay for now" — it's going to be fine, there's tons of exciting stuff on the horizon, just have to do more with less for now.

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普段、日本語を読む時、漢字の意味だけを見て韓国の漢字音で読む事が多く、意味は分かっていても正確な読み方が分からない事が多いのだが、明日の発表を控え、私の拙い日本語力が借りを背負って帰ってきた。発表の原稿で、読み方がよく分からない単語に一々振り仮名を付ける中。😮‍💨

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普段、日本語を読む時、漢字の意味だけを見て韓国の漢字音で読む事が多く、意味は分かっていても正確な読み方が分からない事が多いのだが、明日の発表を控え、私の拙い日本語力が借りを背負って帰ってきた。発表の原稿で、読み方がよく分からない単語に一々振り仮名を付ける中。😮‍💨

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