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Feeling Sad about AI

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Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#221

Post by Joel_Mckay »

bitpush wrote: post #200
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coul…

> 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. I think about this a lot when I look at the roads, freeways and railroads of the world. In pursuit for building it, billions of trees have been cut down, land fundamentally shifted, rivers cut through, and wildlife uprooted…

I ran the numbers on Sam Altman flippant statement about wasted energy, and found roughly 40000 human 20 year old lives worth of energy are exchanged with every frontier model training-cycle release at OpenAI.

Some history... Westinghouse Electric sold turbines to power stations in the 1950s, and promoted electronic home appliances to drive energy consumption to close the sales loop. While the scheme was not a direct business success, for society it improved just about every Americans living standards.

The problem is LLM cost resources, broke that loop, and only bids down the quality of life people can afford. You pay more, have less, and reduce taxable labor incomes into demand deficient classes.

This will not end well for people even if LLM are recognized as mostly hype. =3

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#222

Post by chasd00 »

palmotea wrote: post #178
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…

> 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. Two important things you didn't address: 1. Quality-of-life 2. Economic security I'm not unhappy that vibe-coding is possible. I'm unhappy that it's likely to change the equation so I will lose a good chunk of my economic secur…

> AI technology has not been developed to make any regular person's life better or help humanity in any way

What are some examples of technology that did make regular people's life better or help humanity? I think of AI as like the invention of the loom. It made textiles a lot faster but idk about making lives better by itself. It made more clothes but you still had to buy them. I can't really think of a technology that made lives better only because of its existence.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#223

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #165
gh0stcat wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I somewhat agree with this... but what is the long-term viability of vibe-coding? Of paying someone/something else for intelligence? Do you feel that you have stopped learning or could not create software now without the tool? Is it all just going to be local models? I'm not as confident that long term, we will be happy that the knowledge of software building itself might be broadly lost. Happy to hear thoughts of th…

> Do you feel that you have stopped learning or could not create software now without the tool? The rate at which I'm learning has gone up . I'm becoming a much more proficient software engineer, I'm learning how to operate in new ecosystems, I'm getting better at all sorts of higher level aspects of my work. I am however getting worse at sitting down and crunching out code by hand, mainly because I find it frustrati…

[deleted]

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#224

Post by chasd00 »

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.

how did his AI solve the bug? I've had cc recognize a bug was in an outdated lib and then update it to resolve the issue. Granted it made that determination by finding the source code to the lib, identifying the bug, and then verifying it was fixed by looking at the source of the updated lib.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#225

Post by camdenreslink »

datakan wrote: post #82
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…

That's kinda what I feel like telling him. He has a lot of passion and he's a very smart kid. I don't want to crush that, I want to nurture it. I think being real about things is important though and he has a lot of years still to ultimately decide.

One lesson that could be applicable, is that your passion doesn't necessarily have to be your "job". You can perform music on the weekends, or be an active participant in your local indie dev gamer community while having a totally boring corporate job. I've seen a lot of people burned by trying to make their passion their actual career.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#226

Post by ungovernableCat »

throwaway1921 wrote: post #13

I was just having this conversation with someone. It's less sadness for me and more dread though. All of the sudden, everyone's technical expertise and the things that they spent their life getting good at, are accessible by everyone. I don't know if this makes sense as a society. Say whatever about what it means ethically, legally, etc., but I'm not sure this kind of thing is sustainable in the long run for a functi…

It's a bit more grim than that. It's accessible yes, but ultimately it's concentrated in a few AI labs and handed out at their grace.

What happens when the race is won and then there's no need to compete anymore? What happens when top expertise is monopolised?

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#227

Post by JeremyHerrman »

AI can be a tool for the software craftsman too!

Just keep a high bar for quality at whatever abstraction level you're working at - whether that's machine code, assembly, low or high level languages, or even wrangling agents.

I've been coding for 25 years and I've never been more excited and less sad to build projects I've been dreaming of but haven't had enough time to do.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#228

Post by chasd00 »

ericmcer wrote: post #215
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…

Well yeah it conditions you to turn towards it anytime you hit a roadblock. It is in a precarious state right now where it is too good not to leverage but will bite you if you get sloppy. I still write things by hand sometimes because it is fun, but it does make you feel stupid when you spend 2 hours fixing something a 2 min prompt could have fixed.

> feel stupid when you spend 2 hours fixing something a 2 min prompt could have fixed.

or when it handles like 5 edge cases by default that I didn't even think of. That's scary because then I start thinking about all my other code.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#229

Post by qarl »

camdenreslink wrote: post #225
datakan wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kinda what I feel like telling him. He has a lot of passion and he's a very smart kid. I don't want to crush that, I want to nurture it. I think being real about things is important though and he has a lot of years still to ultimately decide.

One lesson that could be applicable, is that your passion doesn't necessarily have to be your "job". You can perform music on the weekends, or be an active participant in your local indie dev gamer community while having a totally boring corporate job. I've seen a lot of people burned by trying to make their passion their actual career.

This is, in fact, what my kid is planning. They are artistically inclined - make beautiful art - but when looking at colleges focused on law.

Why? Because lawyers make bank, and they can fund their passion that way. Not the way I did it, but... who knows?

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#230

Post by palmotea »

chasd00 wrote: post #222
palmotea wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Two important things you didn't address: 1. Quality-of-life 2. Economic security I'm not unhappy that vibe-coding is possible. I'm unhappy that it's likely to change the equation so I will lose a good chunk of my economic secur…

> AI technology has not been developed to make any regular person's life better or help humanity in any way What are some examples of technology that did make regular people's life better or help humanity? I think of AI as like the invention of the loom. It made textiles a lot faster but idk about making lives better by itself. It made more clothes but you still had to buy them. I can't really think of a technology t…

What I meant is that it's not being built to solve any problem most people actually have. It's not like a building that's being built become some person needs shelter. It's more like some guy building a howitzer and just firing it randomly (hitting homes and people), just because he can and thinks it's cool and maybe can make some money selling tickets. After all, it was inevitable someone was going to built a howitzer and start firing it, so it might as well be him doing it.

AI is more like social media, something no one actually needs and no one was really clamoring for, which was made without with any care about how it would affect people. It got built, caused all kinds of malign consequences disproportionate to whatever meager benefits it provided, and Mark Zuckerberg got rich from all that.

Ultimately, many of problems of AI stem from the kind of capitalism we have now, AI just magnifies them to extreme and potentially accelerating degree.

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