Beautiful poem. Well said and hard cutting
Please Use AI
101–110 of 414 posts
Re: Please Use AI
#102This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers. Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into…
> If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
So much to unpack here!
First, one of terrible contemporary social fallacies that AI's convenience reinforces is that your fly fishing questions are urgent. Web search first cultured this impulse, and smartphones first amplified it, going so far as to convince people to interrupt real social interactions to go look up some insignicant trivia on their phone, but AI threatens to cement it.
The occasions on which you need a quick answer, let alone an unreliable one from the internet or an AI chatbot, are vanishingly rare.
Truly. If you find that inconceible, you're living in some kind of frantic alarm state and may want to check in on yourself before the stress and anxiety takes its inevitable toll on your health.
Second, the answers to your fly gishing questions are still within reach without AI. AI -- in tgat role -- is just a shitty aggregator and paraphraser. What answers it has are better and more humanely available by calling/emailing an outfitter (they'd love to help!), reaching through your friend network to deeper nodes (people love to share their comnection!), or by finding one of the dozens of online communities for the topic and engaging with a human there (that's why they gather there! To discuss these things!)
And all of the above applies to pretty much every topic besides the most urgent medical emergency (for which you should call an emergency dispatcher or teledoc service!), not just fly fishing.
Re: Please Use AI
#103This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers. Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into…
> If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
Consider the ways this actually would happen but a mere 3-5 years ago.
You would Google search for information about fly-fishing and find:
* Enthusiast websites & blogs * Enthusiast forums * Enthusiast YouTube & other social media
The source might not literally be your dad or your friend, but you would still connect with real people.
Re: Please Use AI
#104I had this moment when we designed shirts for the marathon we ran as a group. Instead of Brainstorming something funny, we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results. I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel emp…
Endless hours of putting soul into your shirt? I mean, good for you, but it sounds like your team wasn’t so stoked about that as you are. So I’m not sure you can blame AI for that one. Give it time. This is a skill (and tooling) issue. AI enables so goddamn much creativity. You literally don’t know what to do with it, but once society adapts and we all calm TF down we are free to create in whatever capacity we like.…
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Re: Please Use AI
#105I had this moment when we designed shirts for the marathon we ran as a group. Instead of Brainstorming something funny, we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results. I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel emp…
Ever since I started experimenting with AI coding, I've totally lost that feeling of accomplishment. For projects I actually developed by typing in the code, it feels like I actually did something--like here's something I built and am responsible for bringing into the world. When I finish an AI-built project, I feel...nothing. Just that empty: "Code now exists where it didn't exist before, but I didn't really do anyt…
AI is like cheap void calories. Writing by hand is calories from a good home cooked meal with all the nutrients and love, AI code (unless maybe you worked on putting together an AI system and the harness is your build), feels like calories from a Sprite.
Also I’ve been thinking that ai code is like cheap amazon furniture and hand crafted is well… hand crafted.
Re: Please Use AI
#106This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers. Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into…
Eh, the poem doesn't suggest technology isn't ever useful. It's highlighting that the inefficiency of human relationship is a feature, not a bug. You might not have a friend who is into fly-fishing, but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about. Maybe that's less efficient, maybe it's less direct. But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other, an…
>but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about
But this is the thing. Many people don't, or have some other real or imagined barrier preventing them from it. Many people are really extraordinarily isolated.
While I relate to the heart of the poem, there is an aspect of it that's essentially criticizing people for their suffering. There's a "just stop drinking" vibe.
Re: Please Use AI
#107This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers. Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into…
Eh, the poem doesn't suggest technology isn't ever useful. It's highlighting that the inefficiency of human relationship is a feature, not a bug. You might not have a friend who is into fly-fishing, but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about. Maybe that's less efficient, maybe it's less direct. But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other, an…
> But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other
"It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love."
-- Stephen Hawking
I think we may be approaching some sort of watershed moment, if not conflict between those who hold such sentiments and those whose response is "oh yeah? hold my beer".
Re: Please Use AI
#108I had this moment when we designed shirts for the marathon we ran as a group. Instead of Brainstorming something funny, we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results. I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel emp…
We need to invent new reasons to be together.
I love people, I love spending time with them. Even though I am married, a parent, and living near to several relatives I still get lonely because of a lack of some forms of interaction.
At the same time, the form of interaction I'm missing is not "debating which font to use on a t shirt." I'm glad a robot can do that for me.
We need some genuine human creativity (or hell, use an AI if it gives you a good answer) for ways to get people to interact in joyful ways rather than over shared drudgery.
Let's go running together and let the computer make a t shirt to commemorate it.
Re: Please Use AI
#109This was great. I think about this a lot and have for years now. When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?” Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question. I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them…
I don't know if I would put recipes in the same 'real' stuff category as writing. I am sure celebrity cookbooks have been regurgitating the same recipes with slight modifications for decades now. What is the difference between buying and following Reese Witherspoon's cookbook and just asking an LLM?
It is not like either is putting your apron on and mixing the ingredients.
Re: Please Use AI
#110Beautiful piece. I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.
The whole idea of trans-humanism, so beloved by VCs and the AI cult, seems borderline psychopathic to me.
> The whole idea of trans-humanism, so beloved by VCs and the AI cult, seems borderline psychopathic to me.
Do you find HRT and gender-affirming surgeries to be borderline psychopathic? How about safe and effective cures for genetic, viral, and bacterial maladies that cripple or kill?
The big things about transhumanism are to figure out how fix the things that damage and destroy us, and figure out how to let each person shape themselves to be the best version of them possible. If your best you is a baseline human, then, great! More power to you! I know that mine sure as fuck isn't.
Will there be lots of trouble on the way towards teching up so that everyone can be the best version of themselves possible? Absolutely. Hell, we appear to be generally incapable of figuring out something so simple as how to provide good lives for everyone even if there's no useful work for them to do.