I have to share this one.

Now don’t think of me as smug, I’m only trying to give you a frame of reference here, but: I’m pretty good at Vim. I’ve been using it seriously for 15 years and can type 130 words per minute even on a bad day. I’ve pulled off some impressive stunts with Vim macros. But here I sat, watching an LLM predict where my cursor should go and what I should do there next, and couldn’t help but admit to myself that this is faster than I could ever be.

Yeah, flex your Vim skills because being fast at editing text is totally the bottleneck of programming and not the quality and speed of our own thoughts.

The world is changing, this is big, I told myself, keep up. I watched the Karpathy videos, typed myself through Python notebooks, attempted to read a few papers, downloaded resources that promised to teach me linear algebra, watched 3blue1brown videos at the gym.

Wow man, you watched 3blue1brown videos at the gym...

In Munich I spoke at a meetup that was held in the rooms of the university’s AI group. While talking to some of the young programmers there I came to realize: they couldn’t give less of a shit about the things I had been concerned about. Was this code written with Pure Vim, was it written with Pure Emacs, does it not contain Artificial Intelligence Sweetener? They don’t care. They’ve grown up as programmers with AI already available to them. Of course they use it, why wouldn’t they? Next question. Concerns about “is this still the same programming that I fell in love with?” seemed so silly that I didn’t even dare to say them out loud.

SIDE NOTE: I plea the resident compiler engineer to quickly assess the quality of this man's books since I am complete moron when it comes to programming language theory.

He wrote also negatively about the hackers who do homemade meds thing.

i've heard about them before and got reminded of their existence against my will recently. (do you know that somebody made a recommendation engine for peertube? can you guess which CCC talk from last winter was on top of pile in their example?)

you know, i think they have a bit of that techbro urge to turn every human activity into series of marketable ESP32 IOT-enabled widgets, except that they don't do that to woo VCs, they say they do that for betterment of humanity, but i think they're doing it for clout. because lemmy has only communist programmers and no one else, not much later i stumbled upon an essay on how trying to make programming languages easier in some ways is doomed to fail, because the task of programming itself is complex and much more than just writing code, and if you try, you get monstrosities like COBOL. i'm not in IT but it seems to me that this take is more common among fans of C and has little overlap with type of techbros from above.

so in some way, they are trying to cobolify backyard chemistry. the thing that is stupid about it is that it has been done before, and it's a very useful tool, and also it does something completely opposite than what they wanted to do. it's called solid phase peptide synthesis, and it replaces synthetic process that previously has been used in liquid phase (that is, like you do usually in normal solutions in normal flasks). (there's also a way to make synthetic DNA/RNA in similar way. both have a limitation that only a certain number of aminoacids/bases is actually practical). the thing about SPPS is that it can be automated, and you can just type in sequence of a peptide you want to get, and machine handles part of the rest.

what you gotta give it to them is that automated synthesis allows for a rapid output of many compounds. but it's also hideously expensive, uses equally expensive reagents, and requires constant attention and maintenance from two, ideally more, highly trained professionals in order to keep it running, and even then syntheses still can fail. in order to figure out what got wrong you need to use analytical equipment that costs about as much as that first machine, and then you have to unfuck up that failed synthesis in the first place, which is something that non-chemist won't be able to do. and even when everything goes right, product is still dirty and has to be purified using some other equipment. and even when it works, scaleup requires completely different approach (the older one) because it just doesn't scale well above early phase research amounts.

what i meant to say is that while automation of this kind is good because it allows humans to skip mind-numbingly repetitive steps (and allows to focus on "the everything else" aspect of research, like experiment planning, or parts of synthesis that machine can't do - which tend to be harder and so more rewarding problems) this all absolutely does not lead to deskilling of synthesis like this bozo in camo vest wanted to, i'd say it's exactly the opposite. there's also the entire aspect of how they don't do analysis or purification of anything, and this alone i guess will kill people at some point

on how trying to make programming languages easier in some ways is doomed to fail

This is prob right, but the 'in some ways' part does a lot of work here. Think the issue is that some complexity can be removed without problem, and some absolutely cannot. And the problem of figuring out which is which is hard. (Which if you squint, seems to be similar to the chemistry stuff you describe here). With software it (as far as I can tell) is also quickly that bigger projects need bigger teams, and that adds a lot of communication problems, and as a non-stacking process you can't just add more programmers to make stuff go faster (compared to for example building a building, which can be sped up a lot more with just more workers) as these communication problems remain. From what I heard is that this, and the problem of maintaining software on a large scale is what Java was trying to fix. Which is why all programmers love Java. It is a language for enterprise scale projects. (On that note, which is also why a lot of reason people hate Java for the wrong reasons, a lot of the hated stuff makes sense if you recall it is made for enterprise scale projects/teams etc. It is an attempt to make those projects easier (lets leave it in the middle if that attempt worked or not (Do think it is amusing that Minecraft of all things was coded in Java by a single person (initially))).

Interesting our community seems to attract a few outspoken chemistry people. Not something I know much about, know somebody who does something with crystal chemistry machines, and when he technically talks about it I'm happy I understand about 30% :).