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I don't care how well your "AI" works

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Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#321

Post by tekne »

Blackthorn wrote: post #305
codeflo wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were proven right three minutes after you posted this. Something happened, I'm not sure what and how. Hacking became reduced to "hacktivism", and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces.

> and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces. That happened because technology stopped being fun. When we were kids, seeing Penny communicating with Brain through her watch was neat and cool! Then when it happened in real life, it turned out that it was just a platform to inject you with more advertisements. The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of…

It's not ads, honestly. It's quality. The tool being designed to empower the user. Have you ever seen something encrusted in ads be designed to empower the user? At least, it necessitates reducing the user's power to remove the ads.

But it's fundamentally a correlation, and this observation is important because something can be completely ad-free and yet disempowering and hence unpleasant to use; it's just that vice-versa is rare.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#322

Post by Blackthorn »

phil21 wrote: post #309
Blackthorn wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces. That happened because technology stopped being fun. When we were kids, seeing Penny communicating with Brain through her watch was neat and cool! Then when it happened in real life, it turned out that it was just a platform to inject you with more advertisements. The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of…

>The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of technology. Disagree. Ads hurt, but not as much as technology being invaded by the regular masses who have no inherit interest in tech for the sake of tech. Ads came after this since they needed an audience first. Once that line was crossed, it all became far less fun for those who were in it for the sheer joy, exploration, and esca…

I don't think that just because something becomes accessible to a lot more people that it devalues the experience.

To use the two examples I gave in this thread. Digital music is more accessible than ever before and it's going from strength to strength. While at-home subtractive CNC is still in the realm of deep hobbyists, 3d printing* and CNC cutting/plotting* (Cricut, others) have been accessible and interested by the masses for a decade now and those spaces are thriving!

* Despite the best efforts of some of the sellers of these to lock down and enshittify the platforms. If this continues, this might change and fall into the general tech malaise, and it will be a great loss if that happens.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#323

Post by vrighter »

thunky wrote: post #110
embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession You're probably fine as a more senior dev...for now. But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it. Plus as an industry we've been exploiting our employer's lack of information to extract large salaries to produce largely poor qua…

provided the senior dev takes time off to review that slop.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#324

Post by amarant »

forgetfulness wrote: post #289
bgwalter wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being anti "AI" has nothing to do with being progressive. Historically, hackers have always rejected bloated tools, especially those that are not under their control and that spy on them and build dossiers like ChatGPT. Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. It is relatively new that some corporate owned "open" source developers use t…

Hackers never had a very cohesive and consistent ideology or moral framework, we heard non stop of the exploits of people funded as part of Cold War military pork projects that got the plug pulled eventually, but some antipathy and mistrust of the powerful and belief in the power of knowledge were recurrent themes nonetheless So why is it a surprise that hackers mistrust these tools pushed by megacorps, that also sel…

The problem here isn't resisting those forces, that's all well and good.

The problem is the vast masses falling under Turing's Law:

"Any person who posts a sufficiently long text online will be mistaken for an AI."

Not usually in good faith however.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#325

Post by fileeditview »

carlosjobim wrote: post #302
fileeditview wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over. The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse. edit…

Why didn't programmers think of stepping down from their ivory towers and start making small apps which solve small problems? That people and businesses are very happy to pay for? But no! Programmers seem to only like working on giant scale projects, which only are of interest to huge enterprises, governments, or the open source quagmire of virtualization within virtualization within virtualization. There's exactly o…

I don't think programmers are the issue here. What you describe sounds to me more like the typical product management in a company. Stuff features into the thing until it bursts of bugs and is barely maintainable.

I would love to do something like what you describe. Build a simple but solid and very specialized solution. However I am not sure there is demand or if I have the right ideas for what to do.

You mention invoicing and I think: there must be hundreds of apps for what you describe but maybe I am wrong. What is the one good app you mention? I am curious now :)

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#326

Post by layer8 »

yathaid wrote: post #300

>> No matter how well “AI” works, it has some deeply fundamental problems, that won’t go away with technical progress. Without an explanation of what they author is calling out as flaws, it is hard to take this article seriously. I know engineers I respect a ton who have gotten a bunch of productivity upgrades using "AI". My own learning curve has been to see Claude say "okay, these integration tests aren't working.…

The entire rest of the article consists of describing the problems. The problems aren’t about the technical abilities of AI.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#327

Post by vrighter »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #177
danaris wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't worry about where AI is today, worry about where it will be in 5-10 years. And where will it be in 5-10 years? Because right now, the trajectory looks like "right about where it is today, with maybe some better integrations". Yes, LLMs experienced a period of explosive growth over the past 5-8 years or so. But then they hit diminishing returns , and they hit them hard. Right now, it looks like a veritable pla…

Right about where it is today with better integrations? One year is the difference between Sonnet 3.5 and Opus 4.5. We're not hitting diminishing returns yet (mostly because of exponential capex scaling, but still). We're already committed to ~3 years of the current trajectory, which means we can expect similar performance boosts year over year. The key to keep in mind is that LLMs are a giant bag of capabilities, an…

better integrations won't do anything to fix the fact that these tools are, by their mathematical nature, unreliable and always will be

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#328

Post by Atlas667 »

Luddism is a reaction to the current situation as it pertains to labor. Marx had this to say about it:

"It took both time and experience before the workers learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used."

- Karl Marx. Das Kapital Vol 1 Ch 15: Machinery and Modern Industry, 1867

Tech can always be good, how its used is what makes it bad, or not.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#329

Post by pneumic »

For me LLMs have been an incredible relief when it comes to software planning—quickly navigating the paralyzing quantity of choices when it comes to infrastructure, deployment, architecture and so on. Of course, this only highlights how crushingly complex it all is now, and I get a sinking feeling that instead of people solving technical complexity where it needs solving, these tools will be an abstraction layer over ever-rolling balls of mud that no one bothers to clean up anymore.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#330

Post by kelseyfrog »

j4coh wrote: post #250
swatcoder wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "devaluation" they mention is just the correction against the absurd ZIRP bump, that lured would-be doctors and lawyers into tech jobs at FAANG and FAANG-alike firms with the promise of upper middle class lifestyles for trivially weaving together API calls and jockeying JIRA tickets. You didn't have to spend years more in grad school, you didn't have to be a diligent engineer. You just had to had to have a knack…

I don't believe companies can reliably tell expert and non-expert developers apart, to sort them so efficiently to play out like you say.

The companies that can will remain and the companies that can't will perish. Not necessarily quickly nor gracefully, but the market stops all bucks.
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