AI is a mirror. If you are boring, you will use AI in a boring way.
AI makes you boring
231–240 of 397 posts
Re: AI makes you boring
#232Additionally, the boredom atrophies any future collaboration. Why make a helpful library and share it when you can brute force the thing that it helps? Why make a library when the bots will just slurp it up as delicious corpus and barf it back out at us? Why refactor? Why share your thoughts, wasting time typing? Why collaborate at all when the machine does everything with less mental energy? There was a article recently about offloading/outsourcing your thoughts, i.e. your humanity, which is part of why it's all so unbelievably boring.
Online ecosystem decay is on the horizon.
Re: AI makes you boring
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
I compare it to a project I worked on when I was very junior a very long time ago - I built by hand this complicated harness of scripts to deploy VM's on bare metal and do stuff like create customizable, on-the-fly test environments for the devs on my team. It worked fine, but it was a massive time sink, lots of code, and was extremely difficult to maintain and could have weird behavior or bad assumptions quite often…
Yeah, the feeling that hits when you finally realize you spent THIS MUCH EFFORT in a problem and you realize you can do more with less. > I made it because at that point in my career I simply didn't know that ansible existed Channels Mark Twain. "Sorry for such a long letter, i didn't have the time to make it shorter."
This is why I make it a goal to have a very good knowledge about the tools I use. So many problems, can be solved by piping a few unix tools together or have a whole chapter in the docs (emacs, vim, postgres,…) about how to solve it.
I write software when the scripts are no longer suitable.
Re: AI makes you boring
#234Just this week I made a todo list app and a fitness tracking app and put them both on the App Store. What did you make?
Re: AI makes you boring
#235This issue exists in art and I want to push back a little. There has always been automation in art even at the most micro level. Take for example (an extreme example) the paintbrush. Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not. The bristles land randomly on the canvas, but it’s controlled chaos. The cumulative effect of many bristles landing on a canvas is a general feel or texture. This is an extreme exam…
AI bros: "You're gatekeeping because you think the result isn't art!"
Rest of the world: "No, we're gatekeeping because we think the result isn't good."
If someone can cajole their LLM to emit something worthwhile, e.g. Terence Tao's LLM generated proofs, people will be happy to acknowledge it. Most people are incapable of that and no number of protestations of gatekeeping can cover up the unoriginality and poor quality of their LLM results.
Re: AI makes you boring
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these th…
> But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these things increasingly do). It works, sure, but is it worth your time to use? I think a common blind spot for software engineers is understanding how hard it is to get people to use software they aren’t effectively forced to use (through work or in order to gain access to something or ‘network effects’ or whatever). Most people’s time…
Yeah, sure, you could create a social media or photo-sharing site, but most people that want to share cat photos with their friends could just as easily print out their photos and stick them in the mail already.
Re: AI makes you boring
#237Brilliant. You put into words something that I've thought every time I've seen people flinging around slop, or ideating about ways to fling around slop to "accelerate productivity"...
Re: AI makes you boring
#238This issue exists in art and I want to push back a little. There has always been automation in art even at the most micro level. Take for example (an extreme example) the paintbrush. Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not. The bristles land randomly on the canvas, but it’s controlled chaos. The cumulative effect of many bristles landing on a canvas is a general feel or texture. This is an extreme exam…
> Do you care where each bristle lands?
Sometimes you do, which is why there’s not only a single type of brush in a studio. You want something very controllable if you’re doing lineart with ink.
Even with digital painting, there’s a lot of fussing with the brush engine. There’s even a market for selling presets.
Re: AI makes you boring
#239Setting aside the marvelous murk in that use of "you," which parenthetically I would be happy to chat about ad nauseum, I would say this is a fine time to haul out: Ximm's Law: every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon. Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false. Lemma: co…
"every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon."
They're token predictors. This is inherently a limited technology, which is optimized for making people feel good about interacting with it.
There may be future AI technologies which are not just token predictors, and will have different capabilities. Or maybe there won't be. But when we talk about AI these days, we're talking about a technology with a skill ceiling.
Re: AI makes you boring
#240Meh. Being 'anti AI' is just hot right now and lots of people are jumping on the bandwagon. I'm sure some of them will actually hold out. Just like those people still buying Vinyl because Spotify is 'not art' or whatever. Have fun all, meanwhile I built 2 apps this weekend purely for myself. Would've taken me weeks a few years ago.
People who agree with you are right-minded and sensible, and people who disagree with you are "jumping on the bandwagon".