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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

#571

Post by ihaveajob »

LPisGood wrote: post #518
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"…

> hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality Richard Stallman has his email printed out on paper for him to read, and he only connects to the internet by using wget to fetch web pages and then has them printed off.

You're probably thinking about Donald Knuth, not Stallman.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

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

#572

Post by bigstrat2003 »

owenthejumper wrote: post #11
aforwardslash wrote: post #4

Everytime I read one of these "I don't use AI" posts, the content is either "my code is handcrafted in a mountain spring and blessed by the universe itself, so no AI can match it", or "everything different from what I do is technofascism or ". Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; and sometimes code is just code, and AI is just a tool. What am I missing?

You are not missing much. Yes there will be situations where AI won’t be helpful, but that’s not a majority Used right, Claude Code is actually very impressive. You just have to already be a programmer to use it right - divide the problem into small chunks yourself, instruct it to work on the small chunks. Second example - there is a certain expectation of language in American professional communication. As a non nat…

AI is not only unhelpful, but is counterproductive in the majority of situations. It is not in any way a good tool.

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

#573

Post by jimbokun »

musicale wrote: post #432
ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself progressive and my main issue with the technology is that it was created by stealing from people who have not been compensated in any way. I wouldn’t blame any artist that is fundamentally against this tech in every way. Good for them.

It's "unauthorized use" rather than "stealing", since the original work is not moved anywhere. It's more like using your creative work to train a software system that generates similar-looking, competing works, for pennies, at industrial scale and speed.

Ok Mr. (Or Ms.) Pedant you know what the intended meaning was.

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

#574

Post by notJim »

ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 wrote: post #397
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"…

I consider myself progressive and my main issue with the technology is that it was created by stealing from people who have not been compensated in any way. I wouldn’t blame any artist that is fundamentally against this tech in every way. Good for them.

Every artist and creator of anything learned by engaging with other people's work. I see training AI as basically the same thing. Instead of training an organic mind, it's just training a neural network. If it reproduces works that are too similar to the original, that's obviously an issue, but that's the same as human artists.

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

#575

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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.

No, but people do care if the software works. And the software developed by LLMs doesn't work.

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

#576

Post by JohnBooty »

jimbokun wrote: post #560
JohnBooty wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was very insightful. It made me think about how "hacker culture" has changed. 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 ful…

Well there are a lot of us very clear that our identities are being threatened and scared shitless we will lose the ability to pay our rent or buy food because of it.

As somebody currently navigating the brutal job market, I'm scared shitless about that too. I have to tell you though, that the historical success rate of railing against "technologies that make labor more efficient" is currently at 0.0000000%.

We've survived and thrived through inflection points like this before, though. So I'm doing my best to have an adapt-or-die mindset.

"computers are taking away human jobs"

"visual basic will eliminate the need for 'real coders'"

"nobody will think any more. they'll 'just google it' instead of actually understanding things"

"SQL is human readable. it's going to reduce the need for engineers" (before my time, admittedly)

"offshoring will larely eliminate US-based software development"

etc.

Ultimately (with the partial exception of offshoring) these became productivity-enhancers that increased the expectations placed on the shoulders of engineers and expanded the profession, not things that replaced the profession. Admittedly, AI feels like our biggest challenge yet. Maybe.

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

#577

Post by thewebguyd »

JohnBooty wrote: post #549
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 was very insightful. It made me think about how "hacker culture" has changed. 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 ful…

> opposition to AI springs from having their identities threatened.

I think there's definitely some truth to this. I saw similar pushback from the "learn to code" and coding bootcamp era, and you still frequently see it in Linux communities where anytime the prospect of more "normies" using Linux comes up, a not insignificant part of the community is actively hostile to that happening.

The attitude goes all the way back to eternal september.

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

#578

Post by acedTrex »

evnp wrote: post #435
acedTrex wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. This is so incredibly true.

I'm interested in this. Code review, most egregiously where the "author" neglected to review the LLM output themselves, seems like a clear instance. What are some other examples? Something that should go in a "survival guide" for devs that still prefer to code themselves.

I'm currently really feeling the pain the side bar stuff. The non "application" code/config.

Scripts, cicd, documentation etc. The stuff that gets a PR but doesn't REALLY get the same level of review because its not really production code. But when you need to go tweak the thing it does a few months or years later... its so dense and undecipherable you spend more time figuring out how the llm wrote the damn thing than doing it all over yourself.

Should you probably review it a little harsher in the moment? sure, but thats not always feasible with things that are at the time "not important" and only later become the root of other things.

I have lost several hours this week to several such occurences.

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

#579

Post by taco_emoji »

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'm curious: why don't YOU create this app? 95% of a software business isn't the programming, it's the requirements gathering and marketing and all that other stuff.

Is it beneath YOUR dignity to create this? What an untapped market! You could be king!

Also it's absurd to an incredible degree to believe that any significant portion of programmers, left to their own devices, are eager to make "big, complicated, enterprise-scale" software.

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

#580

Post by CamperBob2 »

jimbokun wrote: post #551
CamperBob2 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs. I'm tempted to say "You're not helping," as my eyes roll back in their sockets far enough to hurt. But I can also understand how threatening LLMs must appear to programmers, writers, and artists who aren't very good at their jobs. What I don't get is why I should care.

The question about why you should care about others and not just yourself has literature stretching back thousands of years. Maybe start with one of the major world religions?

Which one do you suggest? Many of them come with a nasty non-compete clause.
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