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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

#341

Post by notTooFarGone »

mono442 wrote: post #140

The author may not care but I doubt people care that a software has been developed by AI instead of a human. Just like nobody cares whenever a hole has been dug by hand using a shovel or by an excavator.

people care if there is noone able to fix the software or adjust it.

Think of old SAP systems with a million obscure customization - any medium to large codebase that is mostly vibe coded is instantly legacy code.

In your hole analogy: People don't care if a mine is dug by a bot or planned by humans until there is structural integrity issues or tunnels that are collapsing and nobody is able to read the map properly.

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

#342

Post by paganel »

easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> 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"…

That's because AI-generated memes are lame, not saying that memes are smart, generally speaking, but the AI-generated ones are even lamer. And nothing wrong with being a luddite, to the contrary, in this day and age still thinking that technology is the way forward no matter what is nothing short of criminal.

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

#343

Post by nrclark »

easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> 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"…

Ironically, the actual luddites weren't anti-technology at all. Mechanized looms at the time produced low-quality, low-durability cloth at low prices. The luddite pushback was more about the shift from durable to disposable.

It's a message that's actually pretty relevant in an age of AI slop.

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

#344

Post by tylershuster »

rbongers wrote: post #287

I view current LLMs as new kinds of search engines. Ones where you have to re-verify their responses, but on the other hand can answer long and vague queries. I really don't see the harm in using them this way that can't also be said about traditional search engines. Search engines already use algorithms, it's just swapping out the algorithm and interface. Search engines can bias our understanding of anything as much…

Exactly. Using them to actually “generate content” is a sure fire way to turn your brain into garbage, along with whatever you “produce” - but they do seem to have fulfilled Google’s dream of making the Star Trek computer reality.

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

#346

Post by zwnow »

lxgr wrote: post #299
zwnow wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you have to actually learn how to use them. This probably is the issue for me, I am simply not willing to do so. To me the whole AI thing is extremely dystopian so even on a professional level I feel repulsed by it. We had an AWS and a Cloudflare outage recently, which has shown that maybe it isn't a great idea to rely on a few companies for a single _thing_. Integrating LLMs and using all these tools is just a…

> We had an AWS and a Cloudflare outage recently, which has shown that maybe it isn't a great idea to rely on a few companies for a single _thing_. I share that concern about massive, unforced centralization. If there were any evidence for the hypothesis that LLM inference would always remain viable in datacenters only, I'd be extremely concerned about their use too. But from all I've seen, it seems overwhelmingly li…

I'd be all for it if its truly disconnected from big tech entities.

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

#347

Post by AlexandrB »

lxgr wrote: post #284
ceejayoz wrote: post #257

Earlier 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…

I'm sorry, but the idiocy that was crypto-hype can't be dismissed this easily. It's hard to make a prediction on AI because things are moving so fast and the technology is actually useful, so I wouldn't fault anyone for being wrong in retrospect. But when it comes to NFTs: if you bought into that stuff you are either a sucker or a scammer and in both cases your future opinions can be safely discarded.

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

#348

Post by DennisP »

Aurornis wrote: post #316
phil21 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me, hacker is about results Same to me as well. A hacker would "hack out" some tool in a few crazy caffeine fueled nights that would be ridiculed by professional devs who had been working on the problem as a 6 man team for a year. Only the hacker's tool actually worked and saved 8000 man-hours of dev time. Code might be ugly, might use foundational tech everyone sneers at - but the job would be done. Maintaining…

> but that was the "scene" to me back in the day. Same. Back then, and even now, the people who were busy criticizing other people for using the wrong programming language, text editor, or operating system were a different set of people than the ones actually delivering results. In a way it was like hacker fashion: These people knew what was hot and what was not. They ran the right window manager on the right hardwar…

To wit: my brother has never worked as a developer and has just a limited knowledge of python. In the past few days, he's designed, vibe-coded, and deployed a four-player online chess game, in about four hours of actual work, using Google's Antigravity. I looked at the code when it was partly done, and it was pretty good.

The gatekeepers wouldn't consider him a hacker, but that's kinda what he is now.

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

#349

Post by brendoelfrendo »

easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> 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"…

> That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality.

I think, by definition, Luddites or neo-Luddites or whatever you want to call them are reactionaries but I think that's kind of orthogonal to being "progressive." Not sure where progressive comes in.

> All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this.

I think that's maybe part of the problem? We shouldn't try to automate the busy work, we should acknowledge that it doesn't matter and stop doing it. In this regard, AI addresses a symptom but does not cure the underlying illness caused by dysfunctional systems. It just shifts work over so we get to a point where AI generated output is being analyzed by an AI and the only "winner" is Anthropic or Google or whoever you paid for those tokens.

> These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against.

I don't believe for a second that a gaggle of tumblrinas are more harmful to society than a single Sam Altman, lol.

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

#350

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

tekne wrote: post #321
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…

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-…

> 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.

Yes, a number of ad-supported sites are designed to empower the user. Video streaming platforms, for example, give me nearly unlimited freedom to watch what I want when I want. When I was growing up, TV executives picked a small set of videos to make available at 10 am, and if I didn’t want to watch one of those videos I didn’t get to watch anything. It’s not even a tradeoff, TV shows had more frequent and more annoying ads.

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