Agreed! I hate the start of a project with an LLM. The code it writes is always expletive, and wrangling it with rules, hooks, plans, and what have you is just a series of half measures. I'm basically in a fistfight with a cheerful drunk keyboard.
Once there's enough code, tests, and docs to appease the prefill gods and give it an understanding of what I expect in terms of code quality, style, and TDD etiquette, I can expect more consistent performance.
That said, I've never been comfortable enough with it to let it write more than a few of functions at a time without a diff/checking-in.
I've seen folks with 500K LOC branches written by an LLM and my heart just sinks...
Yeah, but there was a time when running Linux on a laptop was one of the most complex ways of running Linux. Now I just expect everything to work, especially if I buy from Lenovo, Dell, or HP.
There was a time when Wi-Fi, or Wayland, or XComposite, or Linux gaming, or just accelerated graphics at all or, or, or... People get excited, they work on it, other people get excited and mess about, and eventually it just works.
I would love to one day pick up a decommissioned M1 Ultra and use my OS of choice on it, and I'm grateful for the people who are doing the hard thing now.
There are fairly mainstream devices with decent Vulkan support but poor hardware decode coverage for the codecs people actually get on the web. Polaris era Radeons have H.264 and HEVC decode, but VP9 support is absent (or not exposed in many common Linux paths) so YouTube is sloppy. The Raspberry Pi 5 is another example: it has hardware HEVC decode, but YouTube 4K is generally VP9 or AV1 rather than HEVC, and Pi 5 does not advertise VP9 hardware decode.
I think Vulkan Video is just another api to access those hardware decoders. It's not going to bring support for codecs to hardware without the support.
>but VP9 support is absent (or not exposed in many common Linux paths) so YouTube is sloppy [...] but YouTube 4K is generally VP9 or AV1 rather than HEVC
I installed linux yesterday. Youtube doesn't let you backtrack to VP9 in the user profile setting. It serves AV1 by default now for all resolutions. Bummer if you're on older and/or low end hardware.
On pi5 they even removed the hw accelerated h264 encoder. The soc used in raspberry pi is basically what scraps Broadcom allow them to have. For example it took to pi5 to add accelerated aes.
Since we out here doing ad hominems: if you don't think the code you wrote a few months ago is shit, you're already cooked, and judging by that comment, I'm betting you're crispy.
Even the best code I've ever written rots, not because it changes but because I get better. Now... I know thinking out of the box is hard... but one can get better a lot of different ways, and call me an optimist, but I'm betting folks can get better at producing tool-assisted code, too. Assuming how we do it now is how it will be forever is silly.
We're in the middle of figuring out the next level of mediated engineering. You-know-what or get off the pot, but stop pretending being a dinosaur is still in vogue. It's gauche, and trust me, we've seen it all before...
... back in my day we didn't have that fancy IDE autocomplete; we memorized every function in a library. IDEs?! ... Back in my day we didn't even have debuggers; we just knew how the code worked. Pish posh, back in my day the compiler didn't even produce error messages that made sense. Compilers? The faux luxury of it all! Back in my day, if you actually cared about your code, you wrote the assembly by hand.
The code I write is pretty good, and it stays good throughout the years because it was already good. If you're frequently finding month old code to be shit, your code is just shit to begin with.
Or .. you are working in an unstable environment. If the system you take as a base changes frequently(like the web), your code becomes bad, outdated code, no matter how shiny it was before.
But if it was good, migration and maintaining it is easier.
Are you implying I should have switched to react 13 years ago, when it was just another framework who come and go?
And then my experience would have been stable?
(I kind of doubt it, when my unstable web experience was caused by changes into how canvas works, webrtc, indexeddb, webgl, webgpu. I don't make simple UI's)
Or well, just that "let" was introduced makes all my beautiful old code with only "var" bad code by modern standards.
My point is that the web is not really an unstable platform anymore, it's just something people say that used to be true. Also using var and other superceded constructions doesn't make the code bad; that's not what bad code is. I think you know this.
The GamersNexus arc is such a YouTube success story: from a dude uploading videos, to superbly rigorous methodology in top tier hardware reviews, to occasional news summaries, to journalistic longforms, to straight up advocacy, and somehow back to a humble written tech site.
It’s like a tech Benjamin Button story. Thanks, Steve!
...oh heck, I can't handle it anymore, take my money already.
I understand their points. But to me they do too much rage baits these days that I can't bring myself to watch their stuff. Why would I let my self get angry lol.
Yeah, I agree but given the state of YouTube and the fact GN has an actual office, lab and employees, I also understand why they have no choice but to the play the game at least a bit. YouTube has repeatedly cut the rev rates to the point that even fairly large channels are still under pressure if they have meaningful recurring expenses.
Basically, I just skip the rage bait and watch the good stuff. I also love that GN still publishes print articles, which has essentially zero upside for them.
Reality has both negatives and positives. Gamers Nexus clearly lie on the other side of the spectrum where they overwhelmingly choose the negative stuffs, hence rage baits.
I cannot name any positives from the past twelve months in the field of PC hardware, that Gamers Nexus operates in and around with their work. Perhaps I’ve overlooked something?
Yes; while that doesn’t have bearing on business or technical matters of the PC hardware market, it’s certainly positive-feelgood content that the comment I originally replied to might appreciate as good TV!
GN aren't the rage baiters. It's the companies that are handing this content to them on a silver platter that are. Steve and team have done excellent work over the years. Have things turned more directed at the enshittification? Of course, that's what they're reporting on. He's been iced out of pre-reviews for ending up on these corporate naughty lists plenty of times. But Steve is at least saying it out loud and as it is. Just look at the DRAM cartel v2 and AMD going against their own corporate & political donations policies. Sorry, but Steve isn't the rage baiter in this story.
Once there's enough code, tests, and docs to appease the prefill gods and give it an understanding of what I expect in terms of code quality, style, and TDD etiquette, I can expect more consistent performance.
That said, I've never been comfortable enough with it to let it write more than a few of functions at a time without a diff/checking-in.
I've seen folks with 500K LOC branches written by an LLM and my heart just sinks...
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