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After AI takes everything

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Re: After AI takes everything

#101

Post by no_multitudes »

cdfalcon wrote: post #80
no_multitudes wrote: post #5

Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.

You think this was written by AI? I'm curious, why? Anytime I'm about to read a long post I generally paste it into a few detectors for sanity, but none of them flagged anything for this one. I read the entirety and thought it was pretty compelling - long maybe, but thoughtful. I appreciated the historical quotes interjected, and didn't find the prose suspect.

"On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question:"

"This gives us the first corollary of end-state thinking cold but honest:"

"What does the end-state look like? My take is simple — a single line: PRD is Code."

"This shift brings a quiet, lethal corollary: "

"But think clearly about what letting go means."

"It sounds like a lament; it is actually a refining process. "

"When the tide of the times is pushing you along, slow can be a discipline."

These outtakes are all fairly obvious unedited claudeslop that add nothing to the argument. The excessive use of bolding and em-dashes throughout the article are also signals.

Re: After AI takes everything

#102

Post by FromTheFirstIn »

hurtigioll wrote: post #94
drudolph914 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so much to unpack here and almost poetic that you say this first is that the model will write out that it “thought” and “double checked” it’s output Second, this was in a fresh context window of the latest model (that isn’t fable b/c we can’t use for reasons beyond this thread), and it was on it’s second highest thinking mode. I shouldn’t have to double check something that it claimed to have burned more tokens on to…

I guess the code you write always works correctly whem you submit the PR, and code reviews don't find real problems in it. it makes sense then to have the exact same bar when using LLMs

It’s very funny to watch an AI bull deal with pushback. If people are gushing about this being able to take over all knowledge work in a span of a year and a half, isn’t it reasonable to hold it to a standard you’d hold an average developer to? If I said I wanted a cache that busted based on memory and instead it busted based on entries, I’d definitely tell the engineer they weren’t paying attention. I certainly wouldn’t be parading around the company telling everyone they’ll be a Principal Engineer in 18 months

Re: After AI takes everything

#103

Post by no_multitudes »

627467 wrote: post #85
no_multitudes wrote: post #5

Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.

Isn't the original post in Chinese? English is probably llm translated - like the whole blog

LLM translations of non-LLM text don't generally look as bad as this does. Many of the LLM-y traits -- inappropriate overuse of bolding and em-dashes, aggressively punchy sentences, and an essay that seems artifically stretched out to hit a word count -- are not affected by translation.

Re: After AI takes everything

#104

Post by [deleted] »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #53
embedding-shape wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the vibe is generally same with AI too. If people believe AI will genuinely be used for good (like many in China seem to think, I get the feeling) then the public at large seems fine with industry focusing on it. But when people have the feeling or even expectation that it'll be used for things like increasing the wealth/wage/inequality gap, control of the masses, automated widespread surveillance and more, y…

People in China think AI will be used for good because China has a track record of protecting workers from the fallout of automation (see courts ruling people can't be wholesale replaced with AI), and they view the ridiculous surveillance less negatively because the party delivers low crime and rapidly improving economic circumstances.

[deleted]

Re: After AI takes everything

#105

Post by mikgp »

rybosworld wrote: post #14
pydry wrote: post #4

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop. AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place. I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential…

I think it's likely that what you call slop is more often than not "good enough". One thing a lot of developers aim for in their code, beyond "it does what it is meant to", is something along the lines of elegance (that's my word for it, there may be a better one). With AI generated code there is no time for elegance. It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that reall…

> It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that really doesn't matter anymore.

Does it not though? Once maybe, but at scale? All code is tech debt. The more duplication, the bigger context, the more grokking, the higher the odds of making a mistake.

I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that LLM's mean the end of caring about code quality. Maybe not in the same way as before.

Re: After AI takes everything

#106

Post by rayiner »

lelanthran wrote: post #87
rayiner wrote: post #52

AI can’t take away babies, picnics with your spouse, or dipping your toes into the ocean. If it replaces work, then great, that’s the stuff we didn’t need to do anyway.

> If it replaces work, then great, that’s the stuff we didn’t need to do anyway. If that were true, you would have done it (given up working) by now. You haven't, hence it's not true.

I do it because I believe humans have a moral obligation to power the various cogs of society. If humans are no longer needed to power said cogs, then I no longer need to do it.

Re: After AI takes everything

#107

Post by bayarearefugee »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #97
torginus wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would those jobs be minimum wage? Skilled trades often pay as well or better than most desk jobs - which might be a downgrade for a lot of folks here, but the maximalist AI disruption premise is still far from an apocalyptic scenario

Not all of them are minimum wage now, but even for the ones that currently aren't how do you think their wages will be impacted by the sea of currently-white-color workers retraining into their markets to escape the white-collar employment apocalypse? Even the "AI proof" jobs are going to get hit hard in multiple directions -- first, there will be more supply of the labor they perform as people scramble to transition…

*currently-white-collar

Re: After AI takes everything

#108

Post by arty_throwaway »

First thing is that "intent", according to this author, is single-author and monolithic. I'm not sure that's the way it works with any modern codebase of any size. I suppose they were perhaps just thinking about sitting down at a prompt and having a go, but I suspect it's a fiction because what is an LLM if not encoded intent of millions of us, itself running on a codebase of hundreds of authors, itself running on an OS of thousands of authors, etc.

The main move here is hand execution to the machine and keep "choosing what to intend" for the human. Isn't choosing what to intend just...intent? And forming intent is what programmers always do/did. That sounds less like a new refuge, and more like a relabelled part of the job.

More importantly, "intent is implementation" needs intent to be two different things at once. For the slogan to work, the intent at handoff has to be complete enough to determine the system on its own. But Section 4's own recipe is not that. It's hand off a rough idea and let the AI "expand and refine" it. Complete enough to ship, or rough enough to need the machine to finish it? "Intent" can't be both. There's no finished intent at the handoff for the slogan to be true of.

Same problem with the verification argument. Section 1 says nobody needs to read the assembly (personally, I like reading assembly, but I digress). Then Section 2 says the one thing that can't be sped up is verification. The author says it's an economic reality, I would argue it's structural. Verification is expensive because there's no general procedure to confirm an implementation does what you intended! Halting problem, natch. Saying you verified the result doesn't work because that's specific: this time in that environment. Verification keeps dragging back to the code. You can't claim that code loses meaning AND claim that verification is the surviving human job, because verification is the place that code meaning won't go away.

Anyway, there are frameworks that can describe how intent relates to computational process. This blog post isn't one of them.

Re: After AI takes everything

#109

Post by NichoPaolucci »

torginus wrote: post #91
bayarearefugee wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Btw, its insane to think imo that a few years from now theres going to be no jobs - AI isnt going to cook food or stack bricks or any number of manual processes We're all really excited to do those mostly minimum wage jobs. Especially given how much competition there will be for them when the currently non-minimum-wage jobs disappear.

Why would those jobs be minimum wage? Skilled trades often pay as well or better than most desk jobs - which might be a downgrade for a lot of folks here, but the maximalist AI disruption premise is still far from an apocalyptic scenario

Where do you think that white collar workers will go in this maximalist AI disruption premise? My guess is directly to the skilled trades + healthcare. Probably opting for the highest paid positions first and working their way downwards as they become saturated.

Maximalist AI disruption === economic collapse (IMO)

Re: After AI takes everything

#110

Post by HDBaseT »

rayiner wrote: post #83
yacin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how will you afford that baby, or picnic, or trip to the ocean?

Easily. People in my dad’s village in Bangladesh have those things.

They also don't have clean drinking water or food that wasn't prepared on the ground. They don't have modern medicines or 'modern' entertainment like cinemas.

It is not comparable.

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