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The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

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121–130 of 252 posts

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#121

Post by Lerc »

It puts me in mind of making a jig when woodworking. Make the thing when you need it. You don't need to maintain it, you don't need to sell it. It does it's job and you move on. If it does the job really well maybe you keep it around for next time, maybe you refine it if you use it often.

Never be ashamed of making useless things, the really useful things are hiding amongst them.

If having fun is interfering with your productivity, that isn't necessarily a problem, it is only a problem if it interferes with your livelihood.

If Robots are to take all our jobs, we need to retain our livelihoods. Then we all could perhaps have fun making the things we want to make for the pleasure of making them.

I too have ADHD, perhaps it is different for me because I began medication about the same time the models got good, but I have worked on some individual projects for longer than I could have earlier.

I don't spend all day typing prompts though. It's more of a step in, do a thing, then think about it while doing something else.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#122

Post by CrzyLngPwd »

iainctduncan wrote: post #63

I wonder how many of the responses here bifurcate by age. The post resonates with me, but I am now in my early fifties. When I was in my 20's and 30's, I would have happily chased rabbits down all those holes, but now that time seems so brutally finite, I feel that anything encouring me to spend time on stuff other than what really matters is a strong negative. (Where "what matters" includes work, family, friends, an…

I'm also in my fifties, and sold my first software (6502 assemblewr) when I was 17!

My younger self was always excited when the latest tech came out, when the latest MSDN arrived, etc. But the last 15 or so years, I totally lost interest. I still love writing code but the desire for the latest and greatest had fade.

These LLMs were dogshit for a while, but I would keep returning to them.

Now I am excited again.

I work on a large web project with lots of legacy that is slowly being rewritten and copilot and codex are helping a lot by first writing tests for the old code, and then converting to the new.

I thought we'd never finish, but now I can see how we can do it.

It's brought a bit of the fun back into the game.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#124

Post by tolerance »

viccis wrote: post #6

>exploring AI as a lens in Marshall McLuhan-like thinking I would be wary of using McLuhan-like media analysis of AI. His central argument is that media are tools that extend man's ability. A calculator or a spell checker extend our thinking and writing. AI does not extend those abilities so much as it completely replaces it. The way in which it does resemble media is insofar as it captures the same urge that McLuhan…

> AI does not extend those abilities so much as it completely replaces it.

These two elements (extend/replace) are not mutually opposed according to McLuhan's tetrad.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#125

Post by logicchains »

FuckButtons wrote: post #116
Aurornis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the bifurcation is between people who want to write code and people who want to have the end product of the code. People who want to write code hate AI because it's doing the part they wanted to do. People who want the end product of the code love AI because they want anything that helps them get to the end product faster. The person who wrote this post feels oddly in neither camp. They like playing with the…

Well, you are learning something, just the thing you’re learning has an even shorter usable lifespan than programming languages, namely you’re learning what works to get useful responses from ai agents. Whether or not that has value to you is a different matter, but it’s worth bearing in mind something is being learned, even if it’s not engineering or programming.

You're learning to manage idiot savants, which is a very useful skill.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#128

Post by hparadiz »

ygjb wrote: post #102
hparadiz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO was just an example. If you try to tell me you've never copied/pasted code before I know you are lying.

I agree with the notion it's an age thing, but not because I am old, but because the tools are different. When I was learning to program as a kid I blindly 'copied and pasted' from computer magazine. I typed everything in, not understanding what I was doing, and made mistakes. Then came the tedious problem of figuring why the code didn't work. What was the syntax error? Why was it wrong? Why did the computer crash wh…

Most code we write is boiler plate nonsense. Writing out React components manually doesn't make me better at writing C. Like it literally is a waste of my time. I could be focusing on "real problems" like the way light diffuses in my simulated atmosphere in my 3D engine. But no I gotta sit there and manually wire up the onclick event for some button or whatever because it doesn't pass the HN sniff test from some pedantic random. Yea trying to fix one of my old job's webpack build for 3 weeks sure did build character. My boss hated how long it took. I hated how long it took. And thank fuck I NEVER have to do it again.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#129

Post by augment_me »

prmoustache wrote: post #74
augment_me wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the whole blog and the point can be reversed. If your bottlenecks are meetings and emails, and you make an agent take notes and summarize things for you, you gained focus to work on what you find meaningful. > He explains that this happens because knowledge work often relies on “pseudo productivity,” where visible busyness is treated as a proxy for real value. Digital tools reinforce this by making people…

> your bottlenecks are meetings [...], and you make an agent take notes and summarize things for you. An agent taking notes and summarizing things is of no use. You are supposed to participate to a meeting, otherwise it is just a memo and the meeting doesn't have to take place. The correct solution is just to not attend it if you know you aren't requested to participate and are just here to grow the numbers and make…

> The correct solution is just to not attend it if you know you aren't requested to participate and are just here to grow the numbers and make your company waste money.

If this argument actually worked in practice, the world would be a better place

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#130

Post by yoyohello13 »

hparadiz wrote: post #89
VorpalWay wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see this as analogous. Yes, you do choose an abstraction level to operate at, I rarely think in terms of transistors, or even gates (which by your logic an assembly programmer should do). But I often do think across adjacent abstraction levels, because abstractions are (varying levels of) leaky. Modern compilers are after many decades good enough and modern computers fast enough that it is rare that I…

My lived experience over the past few months is proving you wrong. I started with your position and have since been able to see how good the tools are when properly used. I've also noticed a huge gap in ability among engineers and I think the gap is widening. My theory is that some folks have the premium tools and some don't and the ones that don't are sort of in this weird limbo where they are sort of stubbornly ann…

Ah yes the “you’re not paying the ai labs enough” argument.
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