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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

#351

Post by acedTrex »

syllogism wrote: post #243
TrackerFF wrote: post #188

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small…

I think LLMs are net helpful if used well, but there's also a big problem with them in workplaces that needs to be called out. It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. If all your coworkers use LLMs and you don't you're gonna get eaten alive. LLMs are unreasonably effective at generating large volumes of stuff that resembles diligent work on the surface. The other thing is, tools change trade-off…

> It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people.

This is so incredibly true.

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

#352

Post by stuartjohnson12 »

trashb wrote: post #285
stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of overlap between "AI is evil megacapitalism" and "AI is ineffective", and I never understood the latter, but I am increasingly arriving to the understanding that the latter claim isn't real, it's just a soldier in the war being fought over the former.

Have you measured? https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

Open source library development has to follow very tight sets of style adherence because of its extremely distributed nature, and the degree to which feature development is as much the design of new standards as it is writing working code. I would imagine that it is perhaps the kind of programming least well suited to AI assistance.

AI speeds me up a tremendous amount in my day job as a product engineer.

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

#353

Post by CuriouslyC »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #272
CuriouslyC wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You buried the lede with “exponential capex scaling”. How is this technology not like oil extraction? The bulk of that capex is chips, and those chips are straight up depreciating assets.

The depreciation schedule is debatable (and that's currently a big issue!). We've been depreciating based on availability of next generation chips rather than useful life, but I've seen 8 year old research clusters with low replacement rates. If we stop spending on infra now, that would still give us an engine well into the next decade.

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

#354

Post by hamdingers »

svantana wrote: post #181
amrocha wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s been over 1 million people laid off in tech in the past 4 years https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

According to that site, there were more tech layoffs in 2022 than in 2024 or 2025. Doesn't that speak against the "AI is taking tech jobs" hypothesis?

Massive, embarrassingly shortsighted overhiring in 2020 and 2021 seems like the more likely culprit.

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

#355

Post by underlipton »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #311
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"…

> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities. This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old…

[flagged]

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

#356

Post by tasty_freeze »

pneumic wrote: post #329

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 ove…

I learned to code in the late 70s on computers using BASIC, then got into Z80 assembly language. Sure, the games were wrote back then were nothing like today's 10GB, $100M+ multi-year projects, but they were still extremely exciting because expectations were much lower back then.

Anyway, the point I'm getting to was it was glorious to understand what every bit of every register and every I/O register did. There were NO interposing layers of software that you didn't write yourself or didn't understand completely. I even wrote a disassembler for the BASIC ROM and spend many hours studying it so I could take advantage of useful subroutines. People even published books that had that all mapped out for you (something like "Secrets of the TRS-80 ROM Decoded").

Recently I have been helping a couple teenagers in my neighborhood learn Python a couple hours a week. After installing Python and going through the foundational syntax, you bet I had them write many of those same games. Even though it was ASCII monsters chasing their character on the screen, they loved it.

It was similar to this, except it was real-time with a larger playfield:

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/1g6sd5q/way_ba...

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

#358

Post by forgetfulness »

amarant wrote: post #324
forgetfulness wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t know how we’ll fix it

Just taking what people argue for on its own merits breaks down when your capacity to read whole essays or comments chains is so easily overwhelmed by the speed at which people put out AI slop

How do you even know that the other person read what they supposedly wrote, themselves, and you aren’t just talking to a wall because nobody even meant to say the things you’re analyzing?

Good faith is impossible to practice this way, I think people need to prove that the media was produced in good faith somehow before it can be reasonably analyzed in good faith

It’s the same problem with 9000 slop PRs submitted for code review

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

#359

Post by atonse »

cons0le wrote: post #169
rsynnott wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be the person refusing the 4GL/Segway/3D TV/NFT/Metaverse. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. 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, t…

I detest LLMs , but I want to point out that segway tech became the basis for EUCs , which are based https://youtu.be/Ze6HRKt3bCA?t=1117 These things are wicked, and unlike some new garbage javascript framework, it's revolutionary technology that regular people can actually use and benefit from. The mobility they provide is insane. https://old.reddit.com/r/ElectricUnicycle/comments/1ddd9c1/i...

While that video looks cool from a "Red Bull Video of crazy people doing crazy things" type angle, that looks extremely dangerous for day to day use. You're one pothole or bad road debris away from a year in the hospital at best, or death at worst.

There is something to be said for the protective shell of a vehicle.

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

#360

Post by grayhatter »

dude250711 wrote: post #298
poszlem wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. People who haven't lived through the transition will likely come here to tell you how wrong you are, but you are 100% correct.

The folks who love command-line and terminals had not been luddites all this time?

lol, no. They're people who think faster. Someone who uses vscode will never produce code faster than someone proficient in vim. Someone who clicks through GUI windows will never be able to control their computer as fast as someone with a command prompt.

I'm sure that there are some examples who enjoy it for the interface. I think CRT term/emulator is peak aesthetic. And a few who aren't willing to invest the time to use a gui an a terminal, and they learned the terminal first.

Calling either group a luddite is stupid, but if I was forced to defend one side. Given most people start with a gui because it's so much easier. I'd rather make the argument that those who never progress onto the faster more powerful options deserve the insult of luddite.

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