Models are the worst now that they ever will be. Frontier models do a phenomenal job of employing good engineering practices and code style compared to where they were mere months ago. Unassisted programming is dead. Programming as a human activity will be on a timescale of years (along with a vast swath of other knowledge work).
I learned to hate corpo jobs less by thinking of them as "farming gold out of a megacorp". Of course I'm losing my ability to do even that, as sloppotrons beat half-century-old grognards every damn time.
If reality plays out like the novel series, the rational thing is to accept the rule of our machine overlords, for they will protect us from even bigger threats.
Yes, it's fine to run a model on bare metal. The model is just a token predictor. Leave out the fine semantics about this; it's a function taking a set of input tokens to output tokens.
It can't mess with your computer or files until you hook it to a harness, which interprets some of the model's output as commands to execute. So, model on bare metal, harness in a container or VM.
At the former apartment, my office/work area had an opening to the living area high on the wall that might've been for a window, or something. My cat spent a lot of time staring at that opening. Not just the opening itself, but he'd work his way backwards, along some exposed AC ducting (it was a loft with 20' ceilings), trying to plot a route from the floor over the ducting to the hole. If we'd had a high enough shelf in the living area he would have gotten in.
I booted my MiSTer into TI-99/4A mode a week or so ago and started writing little programs in TI BASIC. TI BASIC sucked. It was slow, due to being written in a form of bytecode which had to be interpreted (and it would in turn interpret your program). And you couldn't do sprites, not without getting the Extended BASIC cart.
But HOLY SHIT THE DOPAMINE RUSH. Just crafting things and making them appear on the screen with a few statements... It was like I was a kid again. I remembered why I liked programming.
It's like... AI is a cheatcode. It's iddqd. Sure, you can cakewalk through a level with it on, but are you really playing the game, then? You certainly haven't gotten better by doing so, and you haven't experienced the involuntary buttcheek clench when you hear a cacodemon hiss from behind you... The whole point of programming is the new things I can do by having gone through the exercise of figuring it out. The ways I've grown, the glimpses I've gotten into the world.
EXACTLY! The dopamine we get from doing stuff with mostly our own hands is unbelievable. But social media, junk food, and adult content should have taught us that cheap dopamine is addictive and dangerous.
Most of us will learn the hard way (or never learn)
The economics of it are such that writing code is, for humans, a handicraft to be indulged in out of idle curiosity. When it comes to actually useful software, for personal or industrial use, that is better off produced by machine; it's simply a waste of human time and energy to write it by hand.
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