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The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

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Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#31

Post by cardanome »

elliotbnvl wrote: post #2

It seems like the author is overindexing on useful and underindexing on wonderful. He clearly had fun building these products — and in hindsight is disavowing them because they didn’t generate income? An oddly capitalist view of play. Some really good points on how these bots are incentivized to reward mindless engagement though and the bit about voice transcription not producing useful writing landed. When the barri…

> He clearly had fun building these products

The author did not build those products. AI did.

And I don't read anything indicated they had fun.

There is pleasure in making something yourself. There is learning. There is pride.

With generative AI you are just stealing other people's work. You are learning nothing. Anything could have generated the same projects. There was no skill involved, just enough disposable income to pay for tokens.

And yes some people develop some weird psychosis and think that they did the thing and not the AI. Everyone else is vibe coding but they got the special sauce, the perfect prompts. They are delusional.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#33

Post by xendo »

naasking wrote: post #23
xendo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the old days, producing all those things would be tremendous learning opportunity. Today it's a pure waste, not producing income is not a problem, not producing anything is.

Learning how to use AI effectively was the learning opportunity here, what was created is completely incidental. You're effectively obsessing over programming languages obscuring the machine code that actually runs. "Imagine all the missed learning opportunity of digging into all that machine code!" Sure, but also, who cares? The machine code is completely incidental for most purposes.

I work with AI everyday, despite what many people suggest there is so little to learn. After a couple of hours you are good to go. You don't even need gstack.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#34

Post by joshuamoyers »

article points out a real problem - simplicity is one of the hardest things to achieve. the act of reduction is important.

buts its a refreshing that there is an initial list of half baked projects, i suppose meant to evoke horror at the untidiness and wasted time. but honestly each of those projects sound cool as hell. not necessarily durable - but who cares. i’d argue there is a skill, one that is different than traditional programming, that the author was building up over that period.

discipline is important. focus is hard. but allowing yourself to play is not a bad thing at all and i dont think building little interesting side projects should be a shameful act.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#35

Post by deadbabe »

Jordan-117 wrote: post #24

> In recent times, at least once per month someone sends a screenshot for an awesome tool they are working on. I'm like whoa, that's really something and the sender is obviously proud and enthusiastic. I try not to ask, but am always thinking "and where will you market it?" What a strange perspective. His dismissal of the long list of projects at the top is also odd. What's wrong with making something cool and functi…

The problem is, that working on lots of little random code projects makes you fall into some kind of local minimum of overall joy and satisfaction. You are robbing yourself of the motivation of focusing on something truly substantial, that is still just a hobby, but the end result will leave you far more proud and fulfilled.

At the end of your life, if all you've done are little half baked throwaway projects, you might look back and realize one day you never made anything of any particular significance, just thrashed around building stuff people had already done so many times before that some unthinking, unfeeling LLM can spit it out almost verbatim just so you can say "me too".

This applies to more than just AI, it can be about any type of "side project" really, or any context where you have a wealth of so many possible options that focusing on one intensely forces you to deliberately ignore most of them.

An example for me lately is hackernews. I used to jump around wildy, looking at comments not really even reading articles. I felt like I was learning a lot. But lately I've taken another approach. Instead of clicking a bunch of things, I'm actually determining what is the most interesting article of the day, reading it thoroughly and truly thinking about it, and then after pausing for reflection, forming my own thoughts about it. I have found this to be a far more enriching experience than my previous habit. I think a lot of things in life turn out this way.

The only reason to use AI to build is when you don't really care too much about things, you just want something, anything. An image here, some code there, a ridiculous video. Cheap thrills with no soul required.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#36

Post by linsomniac »

I've been having the opposite experience; I've been GAINING focus through AI use.

In my day, when there's something that is distracting me from moving my objectives forward, I'm asking "Can AI help me automate this?" The answer is surprisingly often "yes". I call these "rough edges" and have been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to "file the rough edges down".

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#38

Post by ianm218 »

dangus wrote: post #22

I think this blames the technology way too much. > Except for the SaaS, almost none of this is useful and I don't want to maintain any of it. So don’t. Nobody’s twisting your arm. Nobody told the author to sit down and write a bunch of random useless stuff. This is like blaming your bicycle for enabling you to stop at too many shops that you didn’t mean to go to when you originally meant to ride straight to the groce…

I don’t think he’s blaming the technology he’s saying that AI is like crack for people with certain types of ADHD who are always thinking up new projects or going down rabbit holes.

I can relate to this greatly I have started dozens of projects since last summer but have been having a hard time turning these into real value. Not even money but just something that people find useful beyond my own learnings.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#39

Post by DJBunnies »

jmward01 wrote: post #25

Wow. To me the point of code has always been the crazy ideas and playing around. I love to create just for me and every once in a while for others is ok too. If you only think of code as 'a tool to build useful things' and everything else as wasted then sure, this is the philosophy for you. However, creating a bunch of random not going to follow up on it but I explored and played moments seems like a plus and not a n…

Playing with legos is fine if you can afford them.
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