Comment by heddycrow
19 hours ago
Imagine calling a circle a sphere. But a circle is 2D projection of a sphere.
I suppose we are comfortable calling a 3D projection of a hypercube by its 4D name because there really is no 4D context which we can readily slip into. That and no shorter name than "3D projection of a hypercube".
I'm not a mathematician and I'm certainly guilty of uncareful thinking. And I'm not certain that careful thinking and speech is always necessary.
Maybe I just missed the whole point of this article. I have a math fetish and IRL hobbies with my wife, now listen to what I have to say about what code and AI are up to?
Code is clay. Code is foam. Code is water. Code is paper. Code is wood.
Why can't it just be code? Is it that hard to conceptualize? Is the point of the article to rage-bait nerds by making a loose comparison that might not hold up under scrutiny?
Just grumbling in the hopes that someone else will grumble and I won't feel like the only one. My apologies to those who really needed to read this article and feel insulted by my take.
>Why can't it just be code? Is it that hard to conceptualize?
Because the transference of human intelligence is quite often done by analogy.
That's a fair response. I think I was trying to make a point which may be a bit more subtle than my questions suggest when taken at face value.
I'll attempt to explain.
From reading the article, I presume that at some point, all the people who think of code as clay will migrate out of this profession and set up shop in some mall somewhere helping married people renew their ties by making code artifacts by hand. As the article suggests, code (for them) will go the way that clay has went.
Also per the article, AI will be making some other portion of the low-hanging fruit code which business people can't justify hiring humans for.
And then perhaps there will be me and other people like me getting paid to work on things which require an understanding that code is quite unlike any medium humanity has seen before.
For the later group, code is not for everyone, it's beyond what AI can produce by itself, it's not a fetish, it's not cool, it's not fun, and it's one of the only ways to do the things we can do with it.
I sometimes think I'm addressing that later group of people when I type into this box, but maybe that's a bit naive of me.
It could have been safer for me to state that I find it unwise to make these analogies without being careful about the dangers in doing so.
The article did not do it for you. Do not apologize and thanks for sharing why he did not do it for you. It did not do it for me neither, for other reasons (I don't care that much about code, as a non-coder)
it's okay !
Thanks for taking the time to respond. Where I come from, apologies are a dime a dozen.
It's a bit more than it not doing it for me. I'm a bit tired of "AI and coding" takes over the past few years.
You are right. I don't have to agree and I don't have to be quiet about it. But it's going to be okay.