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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

#71

Post by jasongi »

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…

Nobody willingly reads docs. Docs don't exist for the reader, they exist for the writer(s) - because it saves them having to explain the same thing over and over again. Having docs is nice for continuity and for the people who take initiative to seek them out instead of just asking others, but their real value is turning daily (or hourly) 30 minute explanation into a link and a "let me know if you have any questions". The doc pays for itself the second time someone asks you about it.

If they can tell it is written with AI, then the docs are slop. If you're writing something lots of people will use, don't skimp on model or reasoning level, and front load with style guides and examples.

The new key for documentation is that it doesn't need to be was by humans. Good docs are just as valuable whether people read them, or just ask an LLM and the LLM RAGs the information from your docs. The main difference you have to focus on nowadays is ensuring your documentation, even internal documentation, has good "SEO" that it gets looked up.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#72

Post by munificent »

As a user and consumer of objects, sometimes I want a meaningful experience with a thing made lovingly by human hands. I will take a dinner cooked by my friends over take-out any day of the week even if the restaurant makes objectively better food. But sometimes I am happy to use a mass produced utilitarian object because it solves the problem. I don't have an emotional relationship with my stapler.

These two perspectives are not completely separate. In practice, every object has some mixture of human care and machine optimized productivity.

Likewise, as a producer of objects to be used by others, I want them to have a meaningful connection to me as the maker. But I also want to be able to produce more objects more efficiently so I can affect the lives of more people.

Again, those are not entirely separate stances. With my books, I hand-lettered every single word in the illustrations. But I scanned those and cleaned them up in Photoshop instead of painting over mistakes with correction fluid, and I use the magic of the web and print on demand to put those books in front of thousands of people.

I think most people have had a very uneasy truce with the amount of soulless manufactured junk in our lives versus the crafted things that we cherish. Most of us have a nagging feeling as we sit in our IKEA-filled homes watching parasocial videos on our phones that despite all the material boons industrialization has given us, we are suffering from a poverty of meaningful connection. But, also... we keep buying that stuff because stuff is nice and solves real problems.

AI has set off a bomb right in the center of that uneasy truce and now all of us are struggling to work through the psychological fallout. It is a true fact that AI will make it much easier and cheaper to produce more digital goods with real utilitarian value. It is also a true fact that it will flood our social spaces with slop and make it even harder to find a real connection with a real human in that hazy smoke of AI bullshit.

Reconciling those is the existential question of our generation. I don't believe it will be solved by taking a side. It will be solved, if at all, through some sort of more meaningful synthesis of the two halves.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#73

Post by olalonde »

The quote accurately mirrors a lot of the anti-AI sentiment in my experience. The pushback comes from a visceral, emotional aversion, and the technical or economic arguments proposed against it are largely post-hoc rationalizations.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#74

Post by tcoff91 »

munchbunny wrote: post #16
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…

> We do this and then no one reads it. My experience with AI-written documentation is that, as a category, it contains just enough technical errors that more often than not I end up spending time running down confidently stated errors the old fashioned way: cross-referencing API documentation, reading code, etc. At that point you inevitably end up trying to get in touch with a human from the other team. In other word…

1-shotting documentation with AI is a bad idea. You then have to have multiple verification passes to have any chance of it being worth anything.

Like if you have an AI generate a runbook, then you better have the AI actually validate the runbook and make sure it is correct.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#75

Post by krisoft »

embedding-shape wrote: post #4
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…

> no one reads it. [... ] they seem disillusioned Regardless of reasons they tell you, if no one reads your documentation, then it isn't good enough. Good documentation gets read, as long as it is good. It sounds to me like you're disillusioned, if you're not responding to the feedback, even if you sometimes have to look through the reasons people tell you on the surface.

Maybe. But also if the thing was not documented for years, then maybe the users learned how to use it without documentation? Or at least how to get what they need done.

People won't read documentation of something they already know (or think they know).

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#76

Post by roadside_picnic »

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…

> We do this and then no one reads it.

This to me is an anti-pattern that I see everywhere because we're still in the early stages of understanding how to adopt these things and create real agentic workflows.

Why should humans read all that documentation if they're ultimately not going to be the ones implementing it?

I see similar patterns like this everywhere, people asking questions about a PR that an engineer then copy pastes to an agents and the copy pastes back to the PR. It's obvious that humans are still in the loop in awkward places.

I've pointed this out before, but web development went through similar growing pains where we did all sorts of weird stuff because we hadn't quite figured out the patterns that work.

Right now nobody really knows what works and the tools we're using are still changing very rapidly. 6 months ago almost nobody was using agent harnesses and thinking about agents writing all of your code was preposterous. Today even the hardcore, AI-skeptic people on my team still have agents writing the vast majority of their code.

It's very clear to me that we're still stuffing agentic behavior into workflows designed for humans. It shouldn't be at all surprising that these patterns feel weird and sometimes broken. It has nothing to do with "winning over the average Joe" but rather these patterns evolving so they actually make sense.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#77

Post by ink_13 »

munchbunny wrote: post #16
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…

> We do this and then no one reads it. My experience with AI-written documentation is that, as a category, it contains just enough technical errors that more often than not I end up spending time running down confidently stated errors the old fashioned way: cross-referencing API documentation, reading code, etc. At that point you inevitably end up trying to get in touch with a human from the other team. In other word…

The step that a lot of people leave out is the revising: it is worth the human hours to go over the outputs of AI for this kind of thing with a fine-tooth comb to make sure it is usable, readable, accurate, etc.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#78

Post by bLorax »

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…

I really wanted to write a well structured answer to your comment but then I saw the username and was like "nah I'm fine"

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#79

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

bLorax wrote: post #48
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.

I'm pretty undecided on where I stand on LLMs, but I have to point out that I use them before making my point. The thing with AI is that the output we get from it is not deterministic. With assembly lines you can get a good enough deterministic output (having component failures in mind) that everything is gonna be fine. I've never been to a car factory, but I'm sure there are guard rails in place to ensure minimum da…

I do love some comments where people have nuanced thoughts on LLMs, so thank you for sharing them!

I'm more so undecided on them because of the social effects on them. I am all for innovation but social media hasn't been the ideal example either (Facebook famously has young girls who are insecure who might delete their pics and not upload them and would show them predatory ads on top of it with countless other examples)

I am one of the younger folks on this website and I honestly feel like it might've been much better for us in the past pre social-media perhaps.

Have we as a society ever truly reflected on innovation. Nuclear innovation comes to my mind in terms of arms race (ironically which I believe that Nuclear could've been really great for power production and I hope that it gets more looked into)

I am also unsure if regulation might make sense, regulation has been tried and nothing seems to work. I had a decent chat with simon once and sort of the conclusion from that and others seems to be that the cat is out of the box.

Thus we might have to think some more about the sentimental values instead as well and do proper evaluations on if it should be used and when.

The whole culture towards AI perhaps can be seen like a fake projection of confidence. Similar to how as you point out from the deterministic/undeterministic part of it from technical point of view as well. (Many) People are projecting AI to be completely deterministic when in reality it sort of isn't.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#80

Post by olalonde »

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…

The top AI labs still employ thousands of software engineers. If it was dead, they'd be among the first to stop employing them. If by "software engineering is dead" you mean that using AI coding tools is now part of the job description, I think that's largely correct.
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