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Please Use AI

shawnsmucker.substack.com

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Re: Please Use AI

#361

Post by renegade-otter »

simoncion wrote: post #110
renegade-otter wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

You mean the same people who want to destroy the fabric of civilization - norms, caring for one another, feeling shame - also care deeply about us? REALLY...

It's the same as Elon Musk "worrying" about saving humans and then it turns out it's all racism after all.

> Do you find HRT and gender-affirming surgeries to be borderline psychopathic?

What. These current class of tech oligarch support MAGA, which came to power with this being the major culture war flashpoint. They didn't seem to mind.

Re: Please Use AI

#362

Post by KronisLV »

dgellow wrote: post #232
TakeItToTen wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had that the first few months, but that feeling doesnt stay forever. I think a difficulty with that discussion is that some are still in the honeymoon stage, while others are at the “wtf is the point” stage of the relationship with coding harnesses. In my case that took ~1y from using tools like Claude code daily to the point where I lost interest and motivation once I understood the technology contributed negative…

> I understood the technology contributed negatively to my personal growth.

If your goal is to become better at writing code, it almost certainly is a net negative.

If you define growth as shipping stuff and getting things done that you previously wouldn’t have had the time for, then it might be a positive.

Hell, it’s probably both at the same time and what each person cares more about is the deciding factor.

Re: Please Use AI

#363

Post by ofcourseyoudo »

if "false dichotomy" was a whole ass essay

as if you're choosing between "Claude, tell me how to make an omelette" and walking across the forest path to your sylvan neighbor, the former Michelin-star chef who set up an artisanal microgastropub by the pond

as opposed to googling "omelet recipe"

Re: Please Use AI

#364

Post by mapontosevenths »

randy909 wrote: post #347
runarberg wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is not a programming language though. I don’t understand how such an obviously false sentence can be so persistent.

This. Just because an llm can translate any language into a programming language doesn’t suddenly make all languages programming languages. Until I can ‘brew install englishc’ and so on, it’s not a f**ing programming language.

Can you define programing language in a way that includes all the current programming languages and excludes English? I kind of doubt it unless you just define it as "anything that isn't a human language", which would be silly.

Re: Please Use AI

#365

Post by happytoexplain »

Brendinooo wrote: post #94
happytoexplain wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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? I really don't understand the need to torture alternate meanings out of the writing of people we don't agree with. Nothing in the author's writing even comes close to implying what you're suggesting here.

There's an undercurrent in a lot of writings like this that don't seem to grasp that LLMs enable access to a ton of knowledge that was otherwise out of reach for a ton of people. I'll give an example. I just traveled to Serbia, and I went on a run through a park in New Belgrade, where I saw a monument written in Cyrillic. I snapped a pic of it and uploaded it to Claude; it translated and gave me some context. I thoug…

>There's an undercurrent in a lot of writings like this that don't seem to grasp that LLMs enable access to a ton of knowledge that was otherwise out of reach for a ton of people.

There isn't. This blog post is a great example. There isn't a hint of what you are asserting. You are assuming it out of thin air.

LLMs enable a lot and harm a lot. We should be able to talk about the harm without people assuming we are unaware of the enablement, and vice versa. LLMs are a gigantic topic.

Re: Please Use AI

#366

Post by runarberg »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #364
randy909 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Just because an llm can translate any language into a programming language doesn’t suddenly make all languages programming languages. Until I can ‘brew install englishc’ and so on, it’s not a f**ing programming language.

Can you define programing language in a way that includes all the current programming languages and excludes English? I kind of doubt it unless you just define it as "anything that isn't a human language", which would be silly.

Natural language is full of ambiguities and redundancies which makes it a poor fit for a programming language, which is why it is never used as such.

You don’t need a precise definition of a term to know what a thing is and isn’t (Wittgenstein has taught us that much at least). We just need to know that programming languages are used to express an executable computer programs (usually by translating to simple machine instructions) and that a natural language has never been used in this way in a significant manner.

A case in point. I bet you can‘t find a definition for a fish which includes cods and sting-rays, but excludes dolphins and shrimp. And similarly the IAU were unable to come up with a definition of a planet which included Pluto and Mercury but excluded Ceres and Sedna.

Re: Please Use AI

#367

Post by llbeansandrice »

beej71 wrote: post #265
btilly wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd. I never had any friends, families, or coworkers who were willing to be available for a dozen rough drafts. I've only had ones who were willing to talk during the idea stage, or after it was closer to a final speech. For me, AI gives me feedback at places that I wouldn't have received it before. It does not replace the human feedback that I still look for.

I just acted as an amateur editor for my friend's new novel. It took a long time to get through with hundreds or thousands of minor corrections and notes. I'm certain I outperformed an LLM for a lot of that in terms of quality.

You don’t need to outperform an LLM tho. The experience of working on it together is incredibly meaningful.

I generally reject this litmus test that someone has to be “better” and an LLM in order for the human interaction and effort to be worthwhile.

You’re now part of the journey of this novel. They will thank you in the acknowledgements section. It’s this foundation upon which our lives, communities, culture and societies are built.

You do not need to be better. This act you did for a friend is not suddenly pointless and meaningless upon the release of the next model.

Re: Please Use AI

#368

Post by mapontosevenths »

runarberg wrote: post #366
mapontosevenths wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you define programing language in a way that includes all the current programming languages and excludes English? I kind of doubt it unless you just define it as "anything that isn't a human language", which would be silly.

Natural language is full of ambiguities and redundancies which makes it a poor fit for a programming language, which is why it is never used as such. You don’t need a precise definition of a term to know what a thing is and isn’t (Wittgenstein has taught us that much at least). We just need to know that programming languages are used to express an executable computer programs (usually by translating to simple machine…

> Natural language is full of ambiguities and redundancies which makes it a poor fit for a programming language, which is why it is never used as such.

I mean, a quarter century ago Dijkstra argued your point compellingly, and he was right back then. If you read his "On the foolishness of “natural language programming”" (1978) you'll find that all of his most compelling arguments are gone now. Things have changed, and the machines can now largely cope with the ambiguity of language as well as the average human being can.

Since human language is the original source for the specifications we turn into formal code most of the time anyhow, we're really just asking if that original specification the programmers turn into formal symbolism is a form of code or not, and whether a good spec is equivalent to good code. I think it's difficult to argue that it's not, especially given that we now have these handy Natural Language to Formal Symbolism compilers.

> We just need to know that programming languages are used to express an executable computer programs (usually by translating to simple machine instructions) and that a natural language has never been used in this way in a significant manner.

I did that like 30 times today. Maybe it wasn't in the past, today it is. The path is now Specifications->LLM->Formal Symbolism->Machine Code, it used to be Specifications->Human->Formal Symbolism->Machine Code. The inputs and outputs are the same, and I would argue that the process is still "programming" regardless of syntactic games with semantics.

Eventually we'll find a more efficient version of that formal symbolism and stop using code designed to be human readable at all. Still nothing will really changed besides the input method.

Re: Please Use AI

#369

Post by runarberg »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #368
runarberg wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural language is full of ambiguities and redundancies which makes it a poor fit for a programming language, which is why it is never used as such. You don’t need a precise definition of a term to know what a thing is and isn’t (Wittgenstein has taught us that much at least). We just need to know that programming languages are used to express an executable computer programs (usually by translating to simple machine…

> Natural language is full of ambiguities and redundancies which makes it a poor fit for a programming language, which is why it is never used as such. I mean, a quarter century ago Dijkstra argued your point compellingly, and he was right back then. If you read his "On the foolishness of “natural language programming”" (1978) you'll find that all of his most compelling arguments are gone now. Things have changed, an…

> I did that like 30 times today.

You did no such thing. You fed some text into a statistical machinery which was able to infer another text from it. The first text just so happens to be a natural language and the inferred text was a formalized programming language which the statistical model had had its weight tuned to produce.

Statistical inference is a completely different process then compilation. Inferring is a completely different verb from compiling. Two different verbs which mean different things.

If we take your logic and explore its implication, we can just as easily claim that a project manager writing JIRA ticket is programming, and that JIRA is a programming language. The project manager wrote a ticket in natural language which was picket up by a developer who translated it (by your defintion of translation) to a formal language which got compiled to machine instruction and executed by a computer. This is obviously silly. And as silly as you find my description, I find yours equally silly.

Re: Please Use AI

#370

Post by aidenn0 »

causal wrote: post #143
aidenn0 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's the kind of elitism that gets the point?

Elitism excludes humans from one another, which is exactly what the poem is encouraging you not to do

The poem itself is elitist. If you leverage a broad social network, you are better than if you use AI.
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