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Feeling Sad about AI

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Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#141

Post by bitexploder »

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…

Someone was probably sad when they saw a compiler work for the first time after years of writing assembly. AI is intellectually different, progressing, and has no visible horizon, but in my life technology never did in computing. The point is that technology changes often. I think having a couple of decades in tech makes the shock easier to absorb in many ways. And also harder regarding something so familiar becoming so rapidly irrelevant.

But I think your message is correct. The agents don't do the hard work of making things useful and reliable for humans. There is more to do now, not less, somehow. The universe has changed, but most of the problems we are solving have not.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#142

Post by qarl »

onei wrote: post #121
qarl wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked in both the game industry and the film industry - tell your son this: When you are passionate about your work - it comes at a serious price. We live in capitalism and so everything has its cost. Passion in the workplace is taken-advantage of by the corporation. Sure, maybe there are a few places. Maybe more at the beginning of the industry. But by and large you and your skills will be treate…

What was it like to work in the film industry, presumably as a software developer? I've heard lots of anecdotes about the games industry, but nothing whatsoever about working on a film.

Honestly - and maybe it's because it's had longer to mature - the film industry is better than the game industry. Before computers, films already needed artists to create brilliant stuff - and programming for passion is very much like art, I think.

Still, not a great place to be. Long brutal hours with insane deadlines, and a corporate structure that will try to bleed you dry. But they do have more recognition of the passion aspect.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#143

Post by Joel_Mckay »

bitpush wrote: post #41

Two things can be true at the same time. 1. It is clear that many people, including the person in the video, has strong identities tied to a certain skill that they have spent years honing and perfecting. The sudden loss of agency and democratization can be confusing, disorienting and frankly demotivating. We need to acknowledge that. 2. Unfortunately, this has played out several hundreds of times over the years in t…

1. Corporations misappropriating $9Tn of opensource human works to sell isomorphic plagiarism tokens is not progress, but rather an unsustainable ectoparasite people will not tolerate very long.

2. Indeed, the invention of the Cotton gin was credited for prolonging the economics of US Slavery for another century. Those folks were probably upset for a good reason.

It is a self correcting problem, as anything that could be scraped has already been stolen. Only the chat user data remains, and LLM are causing a 17% decline in core skills.

Note too, there is a trivial counter-proof to recursive self-improvement theories that any child with calculus II can solve. No I won't warn them this time, as we are waiting to strip the data-centers for discount infrastructure.

The market correction correlation with Shrek movie releases is undeniable, and June 2027 is closer than you think. =3

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#144

Post by Sivart13 »

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…

> 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

It's not that binary for me. Sometimes I'm on board, sometimes I'm chewed up by existential dread.

It doesn't help that there's no time to really acclimate. The entire world economy is pointed directly toward making this thing as powerful (dangerous) as possible, as fast as possible.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#145

Post by slater »

saulpw wrote: post #133
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Looks like you can walk it, so horse is likely to work, too?

https://maps.app.goo.gl/BX26xVTL2HsBxqPH6

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#146

Post by jeppester »

forinti wrote: post #75
abnry wrote: post #14

I did well in school and the praise I received for excelling in my math degree did shape my life and impact my motivations. I do like praise. But outside of social reasons, it's understanding I crave. Thoroughly understanding a topic is awesome. I remember the feeling of acing my qualifier exam in grad school. Those LLMs change nothing fundamentally about this motivation and need and capability. I can't type a prompt…

This week I helped a colleague with a bug. He used an LLM to sort it out before telling me about it. I'm old fashioned, so I looked at the code, saw that it used an old lib and then I searched online for a newer version. Lo and behold, the bug had been ironed out. AI makes it really easy to not think properly about your task.

Exactly. I feel that agentic programming is largely turning what would have in the past been actual understanding into some kind of fluffy superficial pseudo "understanding" that's only barely good enough when assisted by AI.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#147

Post by Tubelord »

hbn wrote: post #86
pram wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK man it’s a golden era for one-man indie games right now (I just finished Endacopia) and that can only increase with AI assistance. I wouldn’t be too cynical about it

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/

I've been a long-time indie gamer and the appeal of older games has increased significantly for me since AI. Nearly an endless supply of top-notch human-crafted classic video games exist, virtually all for free or very cheap. I understand not everyone has the same taste as me but if they did I'd be surprised of there still was a modern gaming industry at all.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#148

Post by thatmf »

Same.

My spouse and I were recently at a pizza place that had one of those arcade tables with Mrs Pacman, Donkey Kong etc. As we were sitting there eating I started getting pretty animated talking about what amazing technical achievements these games were, and how clever and resourceful it required the developers/artists to be due to the constraints they were working with. That cleverness is what first drew me, as a young smart-ass, to being creative and building things with computers and hardware. Transcending limitations.

But now you don't need to be clever. And that's what fucking sucks. Yes, I can 100x or whatever my output. Who cares?

Well, the people with the money care. The delusional accelerationist types with god complexes. The types that will sell out their fellow worker to VC because they believe themselves to be somehow above it or if I don't do it someone else will etc. Fuck all of those people. I mean, they've always been here, or even necessary. But there used to be at least some sort of balance between labor/creativity and... them. That balance is now gone.

The thing is- yes you still can be clever with these tools. But the motivations aren't the same. You can get something perfectly acceptable without it. The imperative is no longer there. And maybe this is me realizing how lazy I am (aren't all good programmers?) But another word for "imperative" in this context is "purpose". And well, I guess I'm just glad to be old enough now that I'm closer to the end of my career than the beginning, and I can sort of see the exit sign from here, and I'm learning to be clever in other domains that haven't been drained by LLMs yet.

So yeah. Feels bad man.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#149

Post by ajdegol »

If you’ve been in the software game long enough then you can recount days or weeks tracking down a particularly tricky bug that was resolved by a single line of code.

That’s because software engineering is not about the amount of code you write: it’s about problem solving.

So then logically, either: - there are problems still to solve and you can work to solve them (maybe with AI) - there are no problems. So let’s head to the beach, as there are no problems.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#150

Post by mindwok »

Kudos to the author for sharing a candid and vulnerable post. I think we're all grieving right now for the things we loved: programming itself, open source software and the community around it, high salaries and high status jobs with crazy bargaining power. I think many are still in the denial phase, but it's getting harder to deny being in tech is basically unrecognisable to what it was even 4 years ago.

For those of you feeling the grief, have hope that just like programming and the world it created gave you purpose, community, money, etc - something else will come in time.

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