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Why I am not going to buy a computer

karlvmuller.com

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Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#61

Post by asimpletune »

I grew up learning how to write by hand, and when I was in college we were required to code by hand. It was cool. When I need to do something hard I still reach for pen and paper. Sometimes though, writing long stuff with pen and paper is just hard. It hurts and my handwriting isn't excellent.

I was curious about typewriters and so I learned about them and bought a few. They're amazing devices. Much closer to writing by hand with a pen then a printer. Composition and editing happen in separate stages. You can write very fast though with perfect handwriting.

I think from doing this, and other things, I realized that software was so well designed in the past because it was built by people who grew up with better metaphors for the work humans do. Computers were made because their benefits were so enormous that it was worth trying to get them even 1/10 as close as doing real work was. That experiment has largely succeeded. The only failure is then people grew up without seeing the computer as a metaphor for the work, but as the work itself. That's why software is so poorly designed.

Just take a cork board for example. You put your stuff on it. When you want to see something you just turn your head. If you leave for the day and come back everything is still there. There's no on or off. Everything is persistent by default. Input and output are universal. You just write on stuff. You want to share a file with someone, just give it to them. Or make a copy.

I think we have forgotten how great real life was at getting stuff done. The computer was supposed to assist them and for a time it did. That is until we forgot what it was for and made it replace life altogether.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#62

Post by giancarlostoro »

datakan wrote: post #3

The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documen…

AI fatigue is one thing, what I'm seeing mistaken for fatigue is AI prejudice, whereby they don't care if it's high quality output, you could have had literal human experts certify it, because it is AI, they just call it slop and walk away. There is no standard or reasoning with these people about AI at all, they've written it off in the most ignorant of ways. I care about the quality of the output, and if its been human vetted.

Edit, adding more:

If its an AI video, I don't care depending on what its supposed to be, I've seen people upset a literal meme AI video was AI, that was the point, it was supposed to be a ridiculous meme, it was on purpose, some of them aren't even as bad as the person dismissing them make them out to be.

Intellectual laziness, worse than the laziness of some people who lean way too much on AI (some people cannot have a conversation with you, without prompting a model every few minutes, its getting ridiculous).

AI has become the next stage after social media, whether you like it or not. It has taken over human interaction in ways we are still learning more about every day. All the "normies" I know use ChatGPT like they would have used Facebook.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#63

Post by alistairSH »

munificent wrote: post #51
datakan wrote: post #3

The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documen…

Why bother having Copilot write documentation ahead of time? For the people who need it, they can just ask Copilot the one targeted question they have in that moment and it will serve them a textual answer to exactly that. Having an AI write docs which are then saved and served strikes me as in the same uncanny valley as fax machines. It's a halfway step that doesn't understand the full import of a new technology. In…

Might depend on the target reader of the doc... if it's another engineer consuming APIs or libraries, yeah, they can just use Copilot or other to answer in real-time, no published doc needed.

But if it's a customer? They might not have access to Copilot at all, or whatever AI tool they use might not have access to the source code or other material used to gen the doc.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#64

Post by fedeb95 »

alain94040 wrote: post #18

Neither the original 1987 story nor the blog post make any sense to me. I feel the authors are focused on a niche aspect: exchanging deep human thoughts with other humans. For that use case, sure, don’t use a computer, don’t use AI. But there’s nothing wrong with a car made by a robot factory. The car is useful, regardless of how it was made. AI lets some people create new products, those may be useful.

the point I see is that even if you automate all that is possible to automate, there are some core activities that can't be delegated to machines in order for a product to feel very good. May it be the design, or whatever: I don't have an opinion on which aspect must be curated by a human, but some aspect has to. Maybe this aspect is simply AI review and prompting, or AI infrastructure creation and maintenance... I don't know. But the point is that this part of production exists, and it's what makes a useful product something you want to buy more than another useful product.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#65

Post by datakan »

munificent wrote: post #51
datakan wrote: post #3

The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documen…

Why bother having Copilot write documentation ahead of time? For the people who need it, they can just ask Copilot the one targeted question they have in that moment and it will serve them a textual answer to exactly that. Having an AI write docs which are then saved and served strikes me as in the same uncanny valley as fax machines. It's a halfway step that doesn't understand the full import of a new technology. In…

A lot of times its for audit purposes. You have to show a mature documented program etc.

Other times it's simply for reference purposes. So if you're talking about current enterprise architecture, the AI itself needs something to reference in order to answer.

There are many reasons ultimately.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#66

Post by fedeb95 »

freediddy wrote: post #22

> AI is probabilistic and any probabilistic system can inherently never be perfect as it also still makes numerous mistakes. Work still needs to be reviewed by humans. I don't know why people keep saying this. I don't believe code needs to be reviewed by humans. Are humans infallible? I think 80%+ of code is basically human slop. Do we review the assembly language that is generated by compilers? I think given where A…

humans are way better at managing big contexts than a machine. The human mind is way more complex than any AI model + infrastructure.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#67

Post by nlawalker »

jollyllama wrote: post #49
datakan wrote: post #3

The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documen…

Probably because you and your boss have valuable context and historical knowledge about why things are the way they are, and this is of course lacking when you pawn the task off to Copilot.

Yes, this right here. Generated content that's based on sources that readers already have access to has no value beyond what they can ask an LLM to generate themselves.

Now, if you write it with tender loving care and bake all that stuff into it, then will humans read it directly? Maybe not, but the information that their agents read and then pass on to them at least has a better chance of being correct and useful. If the success criteria for your documentation was "measurable count of human eyeballs" and not "better outcomes", your docs aren't going to be good anyway.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#68

Post by lilerjee »

> The body characterizes everything it touches. What it makes it traces over with the marks of its pulses and breathings, its excitements, hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. On its good work, it leaves the marks of skill, care, and love persisting through hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. And to those of us who love and honor the life of the body in this world, these marks are precious things, necessities of life.

Full of intelligence in the statement.

It makes me feel the warm.

AI is not intelligence or a person, even not the real AI, current AI is useful for some things, but not so useful for real value or real world, and it will waste too much your energy, resources, and money in the end.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#69

Post by 100percentjake »

freediddy wrote: post #22

> AI is probabilistic and any probabilistic system can inherently never be perfect as it also still makes numerous mistakes. Work still needs to be reviewed by humans. I don't know why people keep saying this. I don't believe code needs to be reviewed by humans. Are humans infallible? I think 80%+ of code is basically human slop. Do we review the assembly language that is generated by compilers? I think given where A…

Compilers are deterministic, though. If you don't put garbage in, you won't get garbage out. With a probabilistic system you can have varying outputs for the same input, thus the need to spend (waste?) effort verifying that your output is quality.

No comment on the rest of your comment. The assembly piece just bothered me in particular.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#70

Post by fedeb95 »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #52
freediddy wrote: post #22

> AI is probabilistic and any probabilistic system can inherently never be perfect as it also still makes numerous mistakes. Work still needs to be reviewed by humans. I don't know why people keep saying this. I don't believe code needs to be reviewed by humans. Are humans infallible? I think 80%+ of code is basically human slop. Do we review the assembly language that is generated by compilers? I think given where A…

> In January, someone told me that an expert told him that software engineering would be dead in 3 months, and I scoffed at the time, but now I think it's pretty accurate I mean, maybe your 3 month prediction is correct. But by definition that expert's 3 month prediction wasn't accurate because software engineering is still around and it's after April. We are 3.5 years in '6months until programming is solved'.

wait just three more months and software engineers will be out of job on time.
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