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Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

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Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#191
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI amplifies existing process. For people without sufficient clarity I imagine it amplifies that lack of clarity, which is where it is factually unproductive while it still ‘seems’ to be productive (producing slop). At the end of the day, LLMs are still tools.

Yeah, that gives me the scary feeling that especially here people are overvalueing themselves by a lot. They find AI counterproductive because they simply never were good at what they do before AI. This is always always my read of people who value talking, meetings and office time as important: I have never met people who have that and who are not sales or just plain suck at their job; AI amplifies that. Also with sa…

You don’t value “talk”? I understand. I have a lot of those around me and they are super productive, all day, alone, in their little cubicles. Oblivious to everything around them.

I don’t know what to say to those types anymore. Live and let live I guess.. or in this case, not live I suppose.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle? Does your ability to cook good food ... Pushing that analogy, AI is the equivalent of automating everything from tilling, growing, all the way to cooking. It is as if the human is involved at the beginning in specifying what they want, and at the end, in plating up the food and consuming the product. The next generation will have no clue about th…

> That kind of power breeds fascism. uhmmm and what have y'all been doing to prevent fascism and wealth inequality up until the point -before- AI became a thing? What did you do about the mandatory government IDs required to access the internet? What did you do to reduce police brutality and unaccountability in the USA? AI is the ONE thing that COULD give the common peasantry a chance. ..maybe that's why so many fire…

You do realize that the same powers that have bred fascism and mandatory id requirement are hand in glove with the AI oligarchs, no? They gain with rampant use of AI disproportionately more than the peasant.

The peasantry stands no chance. Unless there is a French Revolution style uprising

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#195
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on this with real-world examples you've experienced?

Not GP, but I can. I'm currently working on porting a mid-sized project to a new architecture, new programming language and of course adding new features. Getting a new feature implemented is quite easy. You spend a few hours brainstorming specs with the agent, then ask it to implement it. This gives you extremely frequent code drops that add a new brick, add a new feature, etc. All of this with 100% code coverage (w…

Thankyou for putting the last three months of my life into words > and the explanations of the agent are convincing enough that surely, it knows better than you.

I feel this in my bones. I also get to watch the misalignment feedback loop close itself when the next agent sees that security rules aren't followed because of a hallucinated 20 line justification in a code comment, and then it decides that the project _is_ a demo and then confidently writes even more security holes into the codebase.

Then when you catch the issue, the agent pushes back against the fix because it would need a schema change and production DB migration.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite Wow that resonated by a scary amount.

Again I don't get what people on HN are doing? Our client wants something: I mumble in my phone what they want, with some spec docs we had / made by mumbling in our phones: a working system comes out, we test it with our client, we fix. We sign a SLA, get paid 100k, a few weeks have passed. I mean, we should not measure everything in money, but for lack of a better measure for productivity, I cannot see how anyone fi…

If it works for you, great! Just keep going. I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves? Certainly they understand their problems better than you and they can adapt to rising issues faster if their in-house team does it themselves. And certainly what kind of AI you can access, they can too and perhaps even more. So what will remain your value propositions?

I’m a critical user, not a categorical denier. But there are certain categories where I see the current AI face a wall: fitting new ideas, or existing code into an existing architecture particularly. Or work on the backend when constraints are not strictly enforced (for various historical reasons). Schematic understanding is still an issue.

Sometimes additional chunkings and detailed planning/instructions suffice. But other time, humans are still the best vehicles to code.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#197
> But don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master, heir to lifetimes of tradition, that gets mauled by an amateur MMA fighter.

Seems like a fundamentally poor analogy. Software development is collaborative, not competitive.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That kind of power breeds fascism. uhmmm and what have y'all been doing to prevent fascism and wealth inequality up until the point -before- AI became a thing? What did you do about the mandatory government IDs required to access the internet? What did you do to reduce police brutality and unaccountability in the USA? AI is the ONE thing that COULD give the common peasantry a chance. ..maybe that's why so many fire…

You do realize that the same powers that have bred fascism and mandatory id requirement are hand in glove with the AI oligarchs, no? They gain with rampant use of AI disproportionately more than the peasant. The peasantry stands no chance. Unless there is a French Revolution style uprising

> Unless there is a French Revolution style uprising

Yeah civilians are not going to win with weapons anymore. The imbalance there has been ridiculously disproportionate for decades.

But the common peon can use AI to look up laws and rights and other information and shit to see what we CAN still do.

USE it before they take that away too.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#199
I assume he’s referring to videos like this? https://youtu.be/gEDaCIDvj6I

If so… Very poor choice of metaphor. Nothing resembles AI coding quite so much as the mystical master waving his hands in karate-style movements, seeing dozens of his opponents helplessly bowl themselves over, and eventually coming to believe he truly has the power to defeat any enemy.

If I still edited videos I would have “make no mistakes” fly out of his hands, and the students would have little “you’re absolutely right” and “that’s on me” captions on them as they flip themselves over.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#200
post #115

John Carmack is a personal hero of mine, so it pains me to say this: Carmack hasn't produced anything noteworthy since AI was invented, therefore, how productive can it really be? It could be he is doing incredible work in private... but it could also be that he's lost in the weeds, because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite? I remain a skeptic.

I mean his post boils down to "Get on the bandwagon because you might otherwise miss out. All the cool kids do AI now." There are valid concerns there (and you should probably be playing around with LLMs), but he voiced none of them. He just led with a metaphor about obsolescence and then continued spreading FOMO with an authoritative voice.

He also runs an AI company now called Keen something. So he’s yet another biased hypester at this point.
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