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Please Use AI

shawnsmucker.substack.com

161–170 of 414 posts

Re: Please Use AI

#161
post #43

Be sure to use a mobile phone when making your next, I don’t know, meal plan, for example. Definitely do not come in person to your friend who loves to cook and ask her for her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals

You’ve either willfully ignored the point, or completely missed it as it flew over your head. AI wants to replace “your friend” completely.

Re: Please Use AI

#162
As someone who uses AI constantly - mandated at work. I fucking hate it. I hate what it makes me become: a mall cop of creativity. Endlessly directing little agents with feigned authority.

Re: Please Use AI

#163
post #68
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook, sure, but Uber and AirBNB? I don't see how Uber has displaced some community function. AirBNB is arguably destructive to communities, but again how was community fulfilling the need it attempts to address?

Before Uber it was totally normal to ask someone, even an acquaintance, for a ride to the airport.

You can still ask friends or acquaintances for rides to the airport. The taxi service where I live is absolutely miserable and there's not really any viable public transport options. Pre-Uber and early smartphones, they'd require you to have the exact address of where you were and they'd be there "between 30 minutes and two hours" which is unreasonable and had folks judging if they were actually "good enough" to drive.

If they actually showed and picked you up, somehow the credit card machine wouldn't be working and then they'd aggressively insist they'd drive you to an ATM to get cash. It would magically start working if you told them that cash was not an option

The taxi service got what was coming to them, at least here they did. They had decades to make their service at least non-hostile to the consumer and instead it just got worse. I'll gladly pay for a rideshare where I can just put in my destination address vs have to deal with that nonsense

Re: Please Use AI

#164
For the sake of it: Just do everything manually.

Stop using the computer to talk to strangers, take your feed and go to your neighbour and talk to them.

Stop buying online. Spend your free time in the crowded city and ask someone in the electronic store who doesn't know shit.

Just go to the place everyone else is going at the same time because its a lot more fun than trying to pre analyse it upfront.

How about stop buying pasta for once? Do you know how easy it is to make pasta at home? You only need to grow your wheat, store it, mill it, ...

Its a tool, its an interesting tool. Keep your brain engaged and keep an eye on it were it leads. Stop having knee jerk reactions like the old people...

And yes not everyone can take a sabatical to write their dream book. Surprise \o/ but perhaps i can get it out of my system and i might enjoy seeing a good enough version.

Re: Please Use AI

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can’t they continue to do so? If anything an underlying truth about humanity is being exposed: we take the easy way out far more often than we’d like to admit. Perhaps, this truth being made explicit is a wakeup call that will teach us the value of that hard work anew. After all, nothing the author’s written isn’t also true about Google, but nobody realized how bad of a mistake that was.

> Why can’t they continue to do so? Because we are talking to the AIs instead of talking to them. > After all, nothing the author’s written isn’t also true about Google, but nobody realized how bad of a mistake that was. There was plenty written about how Google was making us dumber because we didn't need to remember anything any more.

> instead of

Citation needed. People did not stop talking to family, friends and colleagues just because they're able to leverage LLMs.

Re: Please Use AI

#166
I'm going to design an AI agent to preview Hacker News posts so that I don't have to sift through smug, self-righteous posts like this to get to actual, thoughtful dialog on technology.

I'm so sick and tired of the endless slaps on the wrist because I choose to live my life in a way that the author would not prefer.

Re: Please Use AI

#167
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix. > So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself ha…

> This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something. No, and if you think that, your friends, family, and coworkers probably don't like you that much. You can push yourself harder for someone else, but it is and has always been something you do. Making it everyone else's problem to improve you makes you a codependent asshole. You can and should find pu…

There's no abdication of personal responsibility. To be the kind of person who wants to constantly improve, it is incredibly important to surround yourself with similar people.

You will always grow faster spending time with someone who says "couldn't you also try X" than someone who always says "that's good enough, why don't you relax and watch some TV".

Re: Please Use AI

#168
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix. > So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself ha…

> This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something. No, and if you think that, your friends, family, and coworkers probably don't like you that much. You can push yourself harder for someone else, but it is and has always been something you do. Making it everyone else's problem to improve you makes you a codependent asshole. You can and should find pu…

It's not about making them be responsible for me or offloading my problems or them making me better.

It's about community. And real people often like to help. If your circle doesn't, find someone who does. Find a community.

I enjoy helping people be better, to reach new heights in their personal lives. It's about relationships.

My thoughts aren't about "abdication of personal responsibility" or "Shifting blame".

It's about humanity and people and community.

Re: Please Use AI

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If your project contained original thought does it matter if the IFs and the ELSEs were generated? I sometimes wonder if people get into this to create an actual working something or they just enjoy sorting colored blocks for the heck of it. I am on the other extreme end: I don’t give a rat’s ass about the code itself. The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts are what I find interesting. All the “file ha…

I have landed here myself. I have always enjoyed writing code, but I find lately that I am getting so much more satisfaction from the process of exploring and designing systems more, and code is simply the substrate.

I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code.

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