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Feeling Sad about AI

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Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#131

Post by stale2002 »

datakan wrote: post #16

My son told me yesterday he wants to program video games for a living. He's 13. He's looking at how it used to be done and seeing the pride people had in doing it. He hasn't seen how it is now. Not sure I have the heart to tell him how terrible the industry has become. Feels like telling a kid 30 years ago that being an astronaut is pointless because they no longer go to the moon.

You are looking at this all wrong. Give him the tools now and watch him be a better game dev today than a professional engineer from 4 years ago. He can work on his dreams as of this exact moment.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#132

Post by lf88 »

It's very sad, indeed. And I am afraid that, on the current trajectory, this tragedy will extend to all cognitive activities, including the most fulfilling. This is not the future I was dreaming for. This is not the world I want to inhabit. But I have some hope, because I see a mounting awareness that the future we are heading to is not the best one for humanity.

For the record, I still do all my coding without using any LLM.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#133

Post by saulpw »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #26
UltraSane wrote: post #3

I feel the same way. I used to love to get into a flow state while programming and feel very proud of clever code and elegant architecture. But now LLMs are so much faster it feels somewhat pointless.

The code is still there, you can still flow with it. And your ability to do so ( along with the LLM) will only produce superior results in the long run. It's just, yes, like all of us .. the temptation is there to not do that.

You can't ride a horse from New York to Washington DC today, and it hasn't been possible for almost 100 years.

So enjoy the manual coding while you can. I don't hold out hope that it will be possible in the long run.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#134

Post by sinsterizme »

bsoqk wrote: post #36
flyingshelf wrote: post #24

This is basically me in 2026. Life has no meaning and I'm waiting for my money to run out before I end it. Hopefully I can find a job that doesn't bore me but I'm not positive.

It’s interesting to me that people find so much meaning in their jobs. To me work is just the means to obtain the money I need to actually live my life.

I think most people happy with their lives find meaning in their work. There’s studies on men’s happiness in particular being predominantly based on work satisfaction

https://s3.amazonaws.com/harrys-cdnx-prod/manual/Harry%27s+M...

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#135

Post by xp84 »

brokencode wrote: post #52
alexambarch wrote: post #28

It’s been hard for me to overcome the feeling that anything I can do, the machine can do better and faster. I know people have been saying “If you’re worried about it replacing you, you weren’t a good engineer to start with,” but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. I had a lot of fun solving problems and thinking deeply, but now my time is much better spent reviewing the plans and code of a machine that’s done that par…

I think that’s going to be one of the biggest impacts of AI in society. We will need to find new ways to occupy our time and find meaning in life once machines can do everything better, faster, and cheaper. What will it look like? Will everybody spend their time playing sports and games? Or on art? Perhaps exploring the solar system or beyond if our technology advances enough? Quite a time to be alive to even have to…

Super optimistic take, unfortunately. Even I as an economic conservative, have serious reservations about our economic system going into this revolution.

It's not that capitalism, money, etc. is a broken system or something. But I think we're foolish if we assume that our current framework can simply adapt to absolutely any eventuality and any massive change in assumptions. I do believe that it's like the best possible train, where the rails are scarcity and human nature. But massive changes to scarcity will have weird-ass effects on the train, and we've unfortunately gotten here in a time where the West has so much dispute going on that I just can't see an organized and smart reorganization of our lives, or even smart adjustments being made. Two political factions are instead going to be screwing around trying to seize maximum power and sabotaging everything to make the other party look bad.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#136

Post by camdenreslink »

jamesjyu wrote: post #105
hbn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That also makes it a more difficult to make it a career than ever. There's simply too many games releasing. Steam is absolutely FLOODED with new games releasing, and it's very hard to stand out. https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/

There's nothing new under the sun. The quality of your ideas and execution will still matter in this flood, as it always has been.

I think your ability to market will matter the most (which is also pretty much the same as ever).

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#137

Post by fidotron »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #110
fidotron wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't believe the AI boosters were right. Not even sure they can believe it. The AI field has known, but repeatedly ignored, that the knowledge work group would end up first on the chopping block, especially for those where everything they touch is digitally encoded already. I used to joke that we're all really in trouble when robots can sort out your socks, but as of about a year ago I started seeing disturbing…

> the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be Getting to the end asap is absolutely going to be "the vast majority of people are disenfranchised", how could it possibly be anything different? The only lever most people have is their labour, and that is bei…

Disenfranchising everyone at once beats disenfranchising enough to be a problem but not enough to motivate a solution, which is what the drip feeding achieves.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#138

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #66

I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well , is to be very disheartened by it. Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact spe…

[deleted]

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#139

Post by hax0ron3 »

erqtw1 wrote: post #120
simonw wrote: post #66

I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well , is to be very disheartened by it. Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact spe…

The web developer who wrote some early parts of Django and has reserved the top comment spot tells us to surrender to the inevitability. There are other areas of software, and given the multitude of horrible websites that use 100% CPU and look ugly AI does not work even for web development! This is defeatist propaganda.

The existence of the websites that use 100% CPU probably has more to do with the fact that humans spent years building software ecosystems and business practices that make websites that use 100% CPU than it does with any inherent limitations in AI. AI is just following the practices that it sees in existing codebases and that have wide adoption.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#140

Post by erqtw1 »

I know a lot of people could be watching this and thinking, "where were you when they disrespected me?"

- I was flagged in 2018 when I said DEI is industry propaganda to divide and conquer. This is now accepted.

- I was flagged when they told coal miners to "learn how to code" because that was industry propaganda.

- I was flagged when I said bitcoin is for money laundering.

So the people with flagging power never cared, yes. The users are also at fault: There are many mainstream articles about tracking and personal data abuse, and they don't care. Even mathematicians needed to be hit on the nose to find out that research theft via prompts is real.

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