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No AI Fridays

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Re: No AI Fridays

#131

Post by claytongulick »

brookst wrote: post #62
echelon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really do not get all of y'all claiming this causes you to "not be able to think". I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions in daily transaction volume. I've built laser projection systems to play interactive games on skyscrapers. That ability is not atrophying. I'm able to do 10-20x what I was able to do before AI, and I'm able to work at a breadth, depth, and level of polish that w…

Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators. I’m with you — I’m producing more and better art, with a deeper understanding of the art which comes from scale. My music is more innovative, my simulations are richer and more fun, I can wake up in the morning with a new idea and have a prototype in hours. It is magical.

> Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators.

Why do you think so many people prefer to listen to live music over an album playing on a jukebox?

Live music doesn't have the polish and perfection of a studio recording, it's much less efficient to have to manually play instruments than to just hit "play" on a song. So why bother?

I think it's because we're looking at things wrong all over the place.

Similar to live music, I definitely prefer to read code written by a real human. I can get in their head, understand how they were reasoning to solve a problem, even if there were problems with their reasoning.

When I hear all the breathless takes about AI "productivity" improvements, my brain just circles aback to the old saw about activity over achievement.

What are your outputs? What is activity and what is achievement?

A business person brags that AI is able to generate a report for them that used to require lots of manual work linking spreadsheets. OK.

What was the value of the report? What was the goal? I like to follow this all the way down-

- Widget sales report

Why?

- To inform inventory and production decisions, as well as marketing

Why?

- So that the company can make money? So that the founders can be proud of their product? So that the product can improve lives in some way?

Why?

- So that the people working can have improved lives, and/or more status in society

Why?

- So that collectively by competing with each other in structured ways, humans as a whole thrive and benefit

Etc...

OK. Where does AI fit into this? What has it taken away from the human experience, and how had it affected all of these goals?

The goal isn't code. It isn't even the product that the code makes - it's the reward signaling that you get from cooperating and competing with other people.

When you short circuit your efforts at creation by using AI, it feels the same to me as saying you're putting on a live music show, but instead just hitting "play" on an album.

Re: No AI Fridays

#132

Post by midtake »

kstenerud wrote: post #92

Reminds me of when we were admonished to use a "real" compiled language rather than an interpreted, GC'd one, lest we lose our ability to reason about the system, cache, and memory. Which reminds me of when we were admonished to continue using assembly, lest our "real" skills atrophy from too much cushy C development. Which reminds me of when we were admonished to keep our scope and probe skills sharp, and read and u…

This is a paradigm shift. If you know basic arithmetic, a calculator doesn't stop you from knowing how to add or multiply. But AI definitely stops you from learning how to reason. So it's not the same at all.

Re: No AI Fridays

#133

Post by dalmo3 »

hello_moto wrote: post #120
brookst wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny, I’m the exact opposite. I’ve tackled projects at scales I could never have done before, and learned more than I would have. My actual coding ability is probably lower, but I’ve learned so much about music theory and production, CAD, and statistics. All because my hobby projects can go so much further than before.

Will that knowledge stick? Given that you blasted through many things relatively quick?

As someone in a similar journey, I say: No, the knowledge won't stick.

OTOH, the output might stick?

Then the question becomes do you value knowledge for its own sake or for what it enables you to do? I don't have an answer.

Re: No AI Fridays

#134

Post by LogicFailsMe »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #19

At the very least, I do encourage people who are working on personal projects for explicitly learning and studying purposes to purposefully not use AI. Of course, if the purpose of the project is to learn AI, then that rule is allowed to be broken. Anecdotal example but I know plenty of students (Including my own brother) who graduated recently who did it almost entirely with AI (unfortunately at the request of their…

After many decades of coding, probably 1M+ LOC*, for real, I am purposely doing most of my work through coding agents to understand their capabilities. No stupid demand that I take a day off from AI is remotely helpful here.

But broadly my preliminary findings after a year or so:

1. AI gets you to that MVP 80% dopamine rush and then takes all that dopamine away if you lean into doing the last 20% with it. But if you try to do the last 20% yourself, you will experience the joy of agentic coding style and you will lose the ability to even produce dopamine. I use these things to build PoCs, not products.

2. The haters mostly have no idea how amazing getting to that 80% really is as a technological achievement and they are mostly stuck at Stochastic Parrot. And 3 days of the ungimped Fable demonstrated to me most of that remaining 20% is achievable, but not with gimping and/or production optimizations by the frontier labs.

3. If you want to see the promise and the limits of coding agents, you have to try to build something with them. But if you hate AI, you've already made up your mind and no amount of evidence will sway you, so don't bother.

4. These things are hideously power inefficient. And Moore's Law is out of steam. While we could stand up renewable and nuclear to power this, there are factions that hate one or the other more than they hate AI so good luck with that.

5. The San Francisco AGI cult is 100% unhelpful and the C-suite linkedin lunatics who take them seriously are even worse.

I'm reading a book written in the 90s but set in the 1980s where one of the assertions was that America is incompatible with technocracy. Prophetic methinks.

*No this does not mean I have some sort of 10x engineer privilege compared to GenZ and how will they ever learn to code? No, this just means I got the crap kicked out of me in grade school and consistently dismissed as weird growing up with the parents of those GenZ kids who have landed in a disturbing culture of learned helplessness and social media addiction built by an unholy cabal of GenX and GenY. They built it, they can fix it. Won't someone finally think of the chiiiilldren? Especially the weird ones that could replace me and outdo me?

Re: No AI Fridays

#135

Post by dgellow »

VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #107
dgellow wrote: post #10

I would actually really recommend people who are using coding agents full time to make AI brakes for your weekend projects. Think of it like a small break to take the time to reconnect to the code and keep your brain muscles intact, a bit like a professional cyclist going for a casual ride in the forest to experience what they don’t experience anymore in their professional life.

This reads like a satire comment.

Mind expanding?

Re: No AI Fridays

#136

Post by yard2010 »

echelon wrote: post #117
eudamoniac wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this 5M business?

https://getartcraft.com https://youtu.be/kzvQMdg66Go (Now with full animation control, not just blocking and posing.) This isn't UGC. I know a lot of studios from my filmmaking and 30% of my customers are spending thousands of dollars a month. It's got really good word of mouth and 89% M3 retention. There are two films coming out in theaters this year that use ArtCraft. It's also completely open source (the desktop a…

Dam everything about it sounds like a fairy tale. Way to go. That's so inspiring

Re: No AI Fridays

#137

Post by brookst »

hello_moto wrote: post #120
brookst wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny, I’m the exact opposite. I’ve tackled projects at scales I could never have done before, and learned more than I would have. My actual coding ability is probably lower, but I’ve learned so much about music theory and production, CAD, and statistics. All because my hobby projects can go so much further than before.

Will that knowledge stick? Given that you blasted through many things relatively quick?

I’ve never been a cram for the test kind of person. I do best when using knowledge in an ongoing basis. Regardless of AI, things I studied intensely a decade ago but never use are by and large gone, whereas things I use frequently stay and deepen.

I don’t expect it to be any different with AI, but YMMV.

Re: No AI Fridays

#138

Post by LogicFailsMe »

wkjagt wrote: post #66
echelon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really do not get all of y'all claiming this causes you to "not be able to think". I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions in daily transaction volume. I've built laser projection systems to play interactive games on skyscrapers. That ability is not atrophying. I'm able to do 10-20x what I was able to do before AI, and I'm able to work at a breadth, depth, and level of polish that w…

I believe you. I'm just telling my own personal experience. What works for you doesn't seem to work for me. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? But also: I'm purely doing things for my own pleasure now, so whatever I enjoy more is what I'm free to do. Again though, that's just me.

I would absolutely believe people on the spectrum with hyperfocus-oriented ADHD (such as myself) might knock things out of the park with coding agents while everyone else is befuddled by their bizarre behavior. But then, I don't get the slow pace and fake drama of reality TV and professional wrestling, yet so many others do. Similarly, starting with British serial dramas like Survivors and Blake's Seven in the 80s, I really enjoy serialized dramas with an intricately constructed world. We are not all alike inside IMO, but that's 100% a good thing too.

Re: No AI Fridays

#139

Post by Lerc »

kstenerud wrote: post #112
coldtea wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reminds me of when we were admonished to use a "real" compiled language rather than an interpreted, GC'd one, lest we lose our ability to reason about the system, cache, and memory. And they were right. People used in interpreted and GC ones lost most if not all the ability to reason about the system, cache, and memory. Today's bloated "1GB RAM for a small form app" apps are the results of this. > You don't need to…

> People used in interpreted and GC ones lost most if not all the ability to reason about the system, cache, and memory. It's not that they lost it, but rather that they never learned it. I didn't lose my ability to reason about those things during the 4 years where I worked in Python and Java. And once again, for average software devs that's fine. Most non-critical software that doesn't perform very complex tasks ca…

I get the impression that analogies like this are trying to disguise a moral judgement as a practical one.

It's clearly absurd to abandon GC languages or to require everyone who uses one to learn assembly. Yes, it could be beneficial to learn the lowest levels of the machine, but with an opportunity cost. Advocates of many such principles are often those who have already paid that opportunity cost and consequently see no downside.

There has always been a known trade off with how much you need to know about a system against the practical ability to make something that someone uses.

If we talk directly to the practicality issue, what happens when AI can rewrite a program written in a highly expressive, but inefficient, language? A future AI might be able to turn a bloated prototype into a sleek, high performance, program where every byte is justified.

Then it would be absolutely true that a programmer who did not know the low level intricacies would not know how to do that for themselves, but would they need to? If they can make the things that they want to make and those things do not have obvious limitations, they could be learning a skill more relevant to the world that they live in.

By all means, learn assembly if you think it is interesting. I have learned Asm (and indeed written assemblers) for a variety of systems. I won't hold it against someone if they spend the time figuring out cross entropy instead.

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