From the article: "I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few years, and I think the best response is to stop. ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would call metis." "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do wi…
The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I'm the AI luddite on my team of red team security engineers, but I'm still using it in very limited use cases. As much as I disagree with how the guardrails around AI are being handled, I still need to use it to stay relevant in my field and not get canned.
I'm already adding "Agentic Workflows" as a skill in my LinkedIn profile. Cringed hard at that, but oh well...
Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
#13Having the "call your representatives" link be to your website as well isn't particularly helpful... I already can't get to it
Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I'm the AI luddite on my team of red team security engineers, but I'm still using it in very limited use cases. As much as I disagree with how the guardrails around AI are being handled, I still need to use it to stay relevant in my field and not get canned.
I'm using claude but then refuse to do much cleaning up of what it spews. Im leaving that for the PR reviewers who love AI and going through slop. If they want slop, I'll give them the slop they want.
As someone that loves cleaning up code, I'm actually asking the vibe coders in the team (designer, PM and SEO guy) to just give me small PRs and then I clean up instead of reviewing. I know they will just put the text back in code anyway, so it's less work for me to refactor it.
With a caveat: if they give me >1000 lines or too many features in the same PR, I ask them to reduce the scope, sometimes to start from scratch.
And I also started doing this with another engineer: no review cycle, we just clean up each other's code and merge.
I'm honestly surprised at how much I prefer this to the traditional structure of code reviews.
Additionally, I don't have to follow Jira tickets with lengthy SEO specs or "please change this according to Figma". They just the changes themselves and we go on with our lives.
Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I'm the AI luddite on my team of red team security engineers, but I'm still using it in very limited use cases. As much as I disagree with how the guardrails around AI are being handled, I still need to use it to stay relevant in my field and not get canned.
I'm using claude but then refuse to do much cleaning up of what it spews. Im leaving that for the PR reviewers who love AI and going through slop. If they want slop, I'll give them the slop they want.
Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
#16and while I know they can do the nitty gritty ui work fine, I feel like I can work just as fast, or faster, on UI without them than I can with them. with them it's a lot of "no, not that, you changed too much/too little/the wrong thing", but without them I just execute because it's a domain I'm familiar with.
So my general idea of them is that they are "90% machines". Great at doing all of the "heavy lifting" bullshit of initial setup or large structural refactoring (that doesn't actually change functionality, just prepares for it) that I never want to do anyway, but not necessary and often unhelpful for filling in that last 10% of the project just the way I want it.
of course, since any good PM knows that 90% of the code written only means 50% of the project finished (at best), it still feels like a hollow win. So I often consider the situation in the same way as that last paragraph. Am I letting the ease of the initial setup degrade my ability to setup projects without these tools? does it matter, since project setup and refactoring are one-and-done, project-specific, configuration-specific quagmires where the less thought about fiddly perfect text-matching, the better? can I use these things and still be able to use them well (direct them on architechture/structure) if I keep using them and lose grounded concepts of what the underlying work is? good questions, as far as I'm concerned.
Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
#17The comparison to the adoption of automobiles is apt, and something I've thought about before as well. Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society.
That said, I'm more open to using LLMs in constrained scenarios, in cases where they're an appropriate tool for the job and the downsides can be reasonably mitigated. The equivalent position in 1920 would not be telling individuals "don't ever drive a car," but rather extrapolating critically about the negative social and environmental effects (many of which were predictable) and preventing the worst outcomes via policy.
But this requires understanding the actual limits and possibilities of the technology. In my opinion, it's important for technologists who actually see the downsides to stay aware and involved, and even be experts and leaders in the field. I want to be in a position to say "no" to the worst excesses of AI, from a position of credible authority.
Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
#18I think that would democratize some of the power. Then again, I haven't been super impressed with humanity lately and wonder if that sort of democratization of power would actually be a good thing. Over the last few years, I've come to realize that a lot of people want to watch the world burn, way more than I had imagined. It is much easier to destroy than to build. If we make it easier for people to build agents, is that a net positive overall?
Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
#19The idea that Claude might be able to help you change the color of your led lighting as a legitimate counter to things like a less usable world wide web, worse government services, the loss of human ability, etc. is excellent parody.