541–550 of 808 posts
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That's because there's nothing "craftsman" about using AI to do stuff for you. Someone who uses AI to write their programs isn't the equivalent of a carpenter using a table saw, they are the equivalent of a carpenter who subcontracts the piece out to someone else. And we wouldn't show respect to the latter person either.
What about an architect who outsources the bricklaying? A designer who outsources manufacturing?
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>Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. At some point people started universally accepting the idea that any sort of gatekeeping was a bad thing.I think by now people are starting to realize that this was a flawed idea. (at best, gatekeeping is not a pure negative; it's situational) But, despite coming to realize this I think…
Your point is that the hacker ethos involved ... Fewer people being excited about programming? I don't think we experienced this on the same planet. Web 1.0 was full of weirdos doing cool weird stuff for the pure joy of discovery. That's the ethos we need back, and it's not incompatible with AI. The wrong turn we took was letting business overtake joy. That's a decision we can undo today by opting out of that whole e…
Not to mention 20 years ago I personally (and probably others my age) had much more time to care about random weird stuff.
So, I am skeptical without some actual analysis or numbers that things really are so bad.
The real conclusion is:
> No matter how well “AI” works, it has some deeply fundamental problems, that won’t go away with technical progress.
which you can tell from the title. There are zero arguments made to support this. It's just faux-radical rambling. I'm amazed how people are impressed by this privileged middle-class babble. This is an absolutely empty-headed article that AI could spit out dozens of versions of.
I care how well your AI works. I also care how it works, like I care about how transistors work. I do not want to build my own transistors*, although I like to speculate about how different ones could be built, just like I like to think about different machine learning architectures. The skills that I learned when I learned computers put me in an ideal position to understand, implement, and use machine learning.
The reason I care about how well your AI works is because I am going to use it to accomplish my own goals. I am not going to fetishize being a technician in an art most people don't know, I am not a middle-class profession worshiper. I get it, your knowledge of a rare art guarantees that you eat. If your art becomes obviated by technology (like the art of doing math by hand, which you could once live very well on from birth to death), you have to learn something else.
But I care how well your AI works because I am trying to accomplish things in the world, not build an identity. I think AI is bad, and I'm a bit happy that it's bad, because it means that I can use it to bridge myself to the next place before it gets good enough not to need me. The fact that I know how computers work means that I can make the AI do what I want in a way that somebody who didn't have my background couldn't. The first people that were dealing with computers were people who were good at math.
Life is not going to be good for the type of this year's MBP js programmer who learned it because the web was paying, refused to learn anything else so only gradually became a programmer after node came around, and only used the trendy frameworks that it seemed they were hiring for, who still has no idea how a computer works. AI is actually going to give everything back to the nerds, because AI assistance might eventually mean you're only limited by your imagination (within the context of computers.) Nerds are imaginative. The kind of imagination that has been actively discouraged in tech for a long time, since it became a profession for marketers and middlemen.
I almost guarantee this call for craftsmen against AI is coming from someone who builds CRUD apps for a living. To not be excited about what AI can do for the things that you already wanted to create, the things you dream of and couldn't find enough people with enough skills to dream with you to get it done; to me that's a sign that you're just not into computers.
My fears of AI is that it will be nerfed, made so sycophantic that it sucks down credits and gets distracted so often that it makes it impossible to work, be used to extract my ideas and give them to someone with more capital and manpower who can jump in front of me (the Amazon problem), that governments will be bribed into making it impossible to run them locally, that governments will be bribed into letting corporations install them on all our computers so they can join in on the surveillance and control. I'm worried about the speakwrite. I'm worried about how it will make dreams possible for evil men. I am not worried about losing my identity. I'm not insecure like that.
* although I have of course, in school, by stringing a bunch of NANDs together. I was a pioneer of the WAS-gate, which is when you turn on the power and a puff of smoke comes out of one of your transistors.
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Across ~10 jobs or so, mostly as a employee of 5-100 person companies, sometimes as a consultant, sometimes as a freelancer, but always with a comfy paycheck compared to any other career, and never as taxing (mental and physical) as the physical labor I did before I was a programmer, and that some of my peers are still doing. Of course, there is always exceptions, like programmers who need to hike to volcanos to setu…
> never as taxing (mental and physical) as the physical labor I did before I was a programmer I find it... very strange that you think software development is less mentally taxing than physical labor.
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I was once in your camp, thinking there was some sort of middle-ground to be had with the emergence of Generative AI and it's potential as a useful tool to help me do more work in less time, but I suppose the folks who opposed automated industrial machinery back in the day did the same. The problem is that, historically speaking, you have two choices; 1. Resist as long as you can, risking being labeled a Luddite or w…
Maybe the dilemma isn’t whether to “resist” or “acquiesce”, but rather whether to frame technological change as an inherently adversarial and zero sum struggle, versus looking for opportunities to leverage those technologies for greater productivity, comfort, prosperity, etc. Stop pushing against the idea of change. It’s going to happen, and keep happening, forever. Work with it. And by any metric, the average citize…
It's just exhausting to read the 1000th post of people saying "If we replace jobs with AI, we will all be having happy times instead of doing boring work." It's like reading a Kindergartner's idea of how the world works.
People need to pay for food. If they are replaced, companies are not going to make up jobs just so they can hire people. They are under no responsibility or incentive to do that.
It's useless explaining that here because half of the shills likely have ulterior reasons to be obtuse about that. On top of that, many software developers are so outside the working class that they don't really have a concept of financial obligation, some refusing to have friends that aren't "high IQ", which is their shorthand for not poor or "losers".
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> 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…
> we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. Mostly I agree with you. But there's a large group of people who are way too contemptuous of craftsmen using AI. We need to push back against this arrogant attitude. Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw.
It reduces craftsmanship to unskilled labor.
The design work and thinking happen somewhere else. The operator comes in, punches a clock, and chokes on MDF dust for 8 hours.
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…
I've never really worked on such a low level, the closest I've gotten before is bytecode - which while satisfying - just isn't as satisfying as having to imagine the binary moving around the CPU and registers (and busses too).
I'm even finding myself looking at computers in a totally different way, it's a similar feeling to learning a declarative, or functional language (coming from a procedural language) - except with this amazing hardware component too.
Hats off to you though, I'm not sure I'd have had the patience to code under those conditions!
> 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"…
I'm middle-aged. 30 years ago, hacker culture as I experienced it was about making cool stuff. It was also about the identity -- hackers were geeks. Intelligent, and a little (or a lot) different from the rest of society.
Generally speaking, hackers could not avoid writing code. Whether it was shell scripts or HTML or Javascript or full-blown 3D graphics engines. To a large extent, coding became the distinguishing feature of "hackers" in terms of identity.
Nearly anybody could install Linux or build a PC, but writing nontrivial code took a much larger level of commitment.
There are legitimate functional and ethical concerns about AI. But I think a lot of "hackers" are in HUGE amounts of denial about how much of their opposition to AI springs from having their identities threatened.
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We need to change the underlying system. We do not need to do things no one needs. We do not need a million differen webshops, and the next CRUD application. We need a system which allows the earth resources being used as efficient and fair as possible. Then we can again start apprechiating real craftmanship but not for critical things and not because we need to feed ourselves but because we want to do it.
> We do not need a million differen webshops, and the next CRUD application. The thing about capitalism is that unecessary webshop isn't getting any customers if it's truly unecessary, and will soon be out of business. We can appreciate Ghostty, because why? Because the guy writing it is independently wealthy and can fly jets around for fun, and has deigned to grace us with his coding gifts once again? Don't get me w…
Also competition is a core driver for cost reduction and progress in capitalism.
And on a big picture pov: There is only one Amazon, Alibaba etc.