First accurate article with AI in the name I've seen on this site a long time.
I don't care how well your "AI" works
331–340 of 808 posts
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#332every important technology produces its own amish
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#333> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…
Likely progressive, but definitely not luddite [0]. Anti-capitalist for sure.
I struggle with this discourse deeply. With many posters like OP, I align almost completely - unions are good, large megacorps are bad, death to facists etc. It's when we get to the AI issue that I do a bit of a double take.
Right now, AI is almost completely in the hands of a few large corp entities, yes. But once upon a time, so was the internet, so were processing chips, so was software. This is the power of the byte - it shrinks progressively and multiplies infinitely - thus making it inherently diffuse and populist (at the end of the day). It's not the relationship to our cultural standards that causes this - it's baked right into the structure of the underlying system. Computing systems are like sand - you can melt them into a tower of glass, but those are fragile and will inevitably become sand once again. Sand is famously difficult to hold in a tight grasp.
I won't say that we should stop fighting against the entrenchment of powers like OpenAI - fine, that's potentially a worthy fight and if that's what you want to focus on go ahead. However, if you really want to hack the planet, democratize power and distribute control, what you have to be doing is working towards smaller local models, distributed training, and finding an alternative to backprop that can compete without the same functional costs.
We are this close to having a guide in our pocket that can help us understand the machine better. Forget having AI "do the work" for you, it can help you to grok the deeper parts of the system such that you can hack them better - and if we're to come out of this tectonic shift in tech with our heads above water, we absolutely need to create models that cannot be owned by the guy with the $5B datacenter.
Deepseek shows us the glimmer of a way forward. We have to take it. The megacorp AI is already here to stay, and the only panacea is an AI that they cannot control. It all comes down to whether or not you genuinely believe that the way of the hacker can overcome the monolith. I, for one, am a believer.
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#334> 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),…
I consider the devaluation of the craft to be completely independent from the professional occupation of software.
Programming has been devalued because more people can do it at a basic level with LLM tooling. People that I do not consider smart enough or to have put enough work in to output the things that they have nor do they really understand it themselves.
It is of course the new reality and now we all have to go find new markers/things to judge peoples output by. Thats the devaluation of the craft itself.
For what its worth, this devaluation has happened many times in this field. ASM, Compilers, managed gc languages, the cloud, abstractions have continually opened up the field to people the old timers consider unworthy.
LLMs are a unique twist on that standard pattern.
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#335> 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…
It just makes you more powerful, not less. When we got rid of rooms full of typewriters it’s because we became more productive, not less.
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#336Earlier 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…
> We're already committed to ~3 years of the current trajectory
How do you mean committed?
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like, I mean, at a certain point it runs out of chances. If someone can show me compelling quantitive evidence that these things are broadly useful I may reconsider, but until then I see no particular reason to do my own sampling. If and when they are useful, there will be _evidence_ of that. My relative came to me to make a small business website for her. She knew I was a "coder". She gave me a logo and what her sma…
Okay, I mean if that’s the sort of thing you regularly have to do, cool, it’s useful for that, maybe, I suppose? To be clear I’m not saying LLMs are totally useless.
I don't have to do this regularly. You asked for a qualitative example. I just gave you one.
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? I was surprised how hard many here fell for the NFT thing, too.
Please, not the old "AI is the new crypto" trope. Various people have been wrong on various predictions in the past, and it seems to me that any implied strong overlap is anecdotal at best and wishful (why?) thinking at worst. The only really embarrassing behavior is never updating your priors when your predictions are wrong. Also, if you're always right about all your prognoses, you should probably also not be in th…
[dead]
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#339I honestly don't get vibe coding. I've tried it multiple times, but even after spending 4 hours on a fresh project I don't feel like I know what the hell is going on anymore. At that point I'm just guessing what the next prompt is to make it work. I have no critical knowledge about the codebase that makes me feel like I could fix an edge case without reading the source code line by line (which at that point would pro…
I recently made a few changes to a small personal web app using an LLM. Everything was 100% within my capabilities to pull off. Easily a few levels below the limits of my knowledge. And I’d already written the start of the code by hand. So when I went to AI I could give it small tasks. Create a React context component, store this in there, and use it in this file. Most of that code is boilerplate. Poll this API endpo…
If you’re reviewing the code, it’s not vibe coding. You’re relying on your assessment of the code, not on the “vibes” of the running program.
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#340[deleted]