I agree that the article is a poor take on AI in programming. However, I wouldn't blame NYT for corrupt journalism. This is an op-ed, not something written by NYT staff.
> it could also be that these software jobs won’t pay as well as in the past, because, of course, the jobs aren’t as hard as they used to be. Acquiring the skills isn’t as challenging.
This sounds opposite to what the article said earlier: newbies aren’t able to get as much use out of these coding agents as the more experienced programmers do.
NYT has it out for digital advertisers, who directly compete with them. I do sense some schadenfreude here that the tech nerds who work at these places might be in trouble.
"Silicon Valley panjandrums spent the 2010s lecturing American workers in dying industries that they needed to “learn to code."
To copywriters at the NYT, LLMs are far better at stringing together natural language prose than large amounts of valid software. Get ready to supervise LLMs all day if you're not already.
The code is also recognizable as slop to those who know how. Not the tropey "Not X, but Y" kind that's super easy to spot. But tons of repetition, deeply nested code, etc.
A counterpoint is that (maybe) nobody cares if the code is understandable, clean and maintainable. But NYT is explicitly in the business of selling ads surrounded by cheap copy just good enough to attract eyeballs. I suspect getting LLMs to write that is going to be far easier than getting LLMs to maintain large code bases autonomously.
If you explicitly make it go over the code file by file to clean up, fix duplication and refactor, it'll look much better, while no amount of "fix this slop" prompting can fix AI prose.
> no amount of "fix this slop" prompting can fix AI prose
What's the proof for that? What fundamental limitation of these large language models makes them unable to produce natural language? A lot of people see the high likelihood of ever increasing amounts of generated, no-effort content on the web as a real threat. You're saying that's impossible.
>What fundamental limitation of these large language models makes them unable to produce natural language?
LLMs can get indefinitely good at coding problems by training in a reinforcement learning loop on randomly generated coding problems with compiler/unit tests to verify correctness. On the other hand, there's no way to automatically generate a "human thinks this looks like slop" signal; it fundamentally requires human time, severely limiting throughput compared to fully automatable training signals.
Not the person you're responding to, but I think they mean sexps as in S-expressions [1]. These are used in all kinds of programming, and they have been used inside protocols for markup, as in the email protocol IMAP.
Yes. Not quite a decade before JSON and YAML, what's at hand for a human-readable interchange format for nested data? SGML (no XML yet), something FORTH-ish, make up your own thing, and...? Contemporary WAIS (search as a distinct non-HTTP protocol) shrugged off human-readable, and tried nightmarish binary ASN.1.
Congress could end this lawlessness in one day, but the Republicans refuse to hold anyone in this administration accountable. I'm afraid we're stuck until we replace enough Congress members.
ONE person was held accountable. One of the kids for cash judges convicted kids for money ... and didn't pay taxes on the kickbacks. He got convicted for "both" factors, excpept PLENTY of people involved in the convicting kids for cash, including lawmakers, didn't get convicted at all.
One can barely imagine what the punishment would be for a private individual kidnapping >2000 kids for on average 3 months each, with several of those kids committing suicide as a result? Kidnapping, because that's exactly what the state did here. What do you think if you or I did that, the punishment would be? I'm thinking somewhere between consecutive life sentences and death, and 100k+ USD per kid.
The state decided NO punishment, except a short house arrest stint for one of the judges that also didn't pay taxes was enough.
Or take the Flint lead poisoning crisis, and compare civil liability to what the government did when it was the culprit, rather than the benificiary. Compare and contrast:
Private company causes lead poisoning? On average $300,000 USD per victim, paid within 2 years of the poisoning. In some cases people served jail sentences of weeks to months, which isn't much but it's at least not zero.
Government causes lead poisoning? Flint water crisis: On average $2000 USD per victim (though some kids got $100,000, though that didn't cover their medical bills), paid >8 years after the case started. And this is purely based on the flint poisoning crisis, and ignores the many smaller cases the government simply got away with it. Not a single person, even the ones who were directly personally responsible and refused to turn up to court saw a single second of jail time.
(and that is ignoring that most of those private companies were convicted of doing what was considered safe, and often not promptly stopping when they knew it damaged people. The government started hurting people and ignored people telling them this would cause lead poisoning)
For people like me who might be unfamiliar with the craft of digital cutting of vinyl, felt, and similar materials, here's a good article from the New York Times from a decade ago [1].
It summarizes three brands of machines: Pazzles, in Boisie, Idaho, Cricut from Provo Craft in Spanish Fork, Utah, and Silhouette, from Silhouette America in Lindon, Utah, at that time. I believe Pazzles ceased operation in 2020.
[1] For Crafters, the Gift of Automation, By Peter Wayner, Dec. 2, 2009
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