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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#241

Post by khafra »

Gud wrote: post #226
wolvesechoes wrote: post #210

The real split is between people that believe technological progress is good by itself and by the law of nature it always makes life better and easier, and people that know the history and know that stuff like 8 hours workday wasn't spat out of steam machine - it had to be fought for through political struggle, because actual "natural" consequence of increased productivity was increase in workload.

The real split is between the capital owners, who live on our labour, typically through inheritance of a piece of paper that says they own a percentage of what I make.

Whether the labor theory of value is right or wrong, the "real split" you describe will soon no longer exist. Capital owners will live on the labor of their capital. Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all.

Unless we muster the political will to stop AI development, internationally, until we can be certain of our ability to durably imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep humans around, doing human things.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#242

Post by XorNot »

cableshaft wrote: post #208
suzzer99 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enjoying something and getting satisfaction out of it are two different things. I don't enjoy the act of coding. But I enjoy the feeling when I figure something out. I also think that having to solve novel puzzles as part of my job helps preserve my brain plasticity as I age. I'm not sure I'll get either of those from claude.

> I also think that having to solve novel puzzles as part of my job helps preserve my brain plasticity as I age. Yeah, this is a concern. I remember when I took a break from coding to work as a video game producer for a couple of years and I felt like my ability to code was atrophying and that drove me nuts. Now I'm not so sure. There's just so much dumb garbage that's accumulated around coding nowadays, especially w…

Everytime I've had to do any any webdev, I've usually just been frustrated by the fact that there's a vision of how powerful any particular architecture should be, and then all the confusion and boilerplate to try and get it there.

And then it changes every 6 months or goes in circles - and I suppose now we just gave up and are letting LLMs YOLO code out the door with whatever works.

Like I remember learning all about Redux Sagas, and then suddenly the whole concept is gone, but also I'm not actually particularly clear on what replaced it (might be time to go back to that well since I need to write a web interface soon again).

Re: Grief and the AI split

#243

Post by Gud »

khafra wrote: post #241
Gud wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real split is between the capital owners, who live on our labour, typically through inheritance of a piece of paper that says they own a percentage of what I make.

Whether the labor theory of value is right or wrong, the "real split" you describe will soon no longer exist. Capital owners will live on the labor of their capital. Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all. Unless we muster the political will to stop AI development, internationally, until we can be certain of our ability to durably imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep hu…

I agree.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#244

Post by wiseowise »

simianwords wrote: post #222
wiseowise wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people think like you we won’t have jobs because everyone would fucking die when cars, MRI machines, nuclear power plans and ICBMs, airplanes, infra, payments start misbehaving. Now what?

this is a category error that i specifically called out in my comment.

Where?

> That does not mean you are correct. This mindset is useful only in serious reusable libraries and open source tools. Most enterprise code involves lots of exploring and fast iteration. Code quality doesn’t matter that much. No one else is going to see it.

Here? Most of those that I’ve listed IS boring enterprise code. Unless we’re taking medical/military grade.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#245

Post by Freak_NL »

sdevonoes wrote: post #99

It’s sad not because of AI itself but because of the companies behind AI: we are now paying for every single line of code we produce. That sucks

Weird you got downvoted for that. This is exactly the thing which has been bothering me about all of this.

Pre-LLM there are paid products and licenced stuff, but for the most part you could code in any language using free or community edition IDE's and mostly open toolchains. The total requirement for me as an individual to start using some language or stack is owning a computer and having internet access. Both provided by a stable market with consumer choice.

Post-LLM there is now this blackbox of a service which you depend on and for which someone is picking up a not-insignificant tab where the costs currently seem massively subsidised, and which is getting to be a requirement for your skill set. Open local models? Fine, but who is training them? How will those stay up-to-date?

Oh, and then there is the not-quite-insignificant ecological aspect and that bit where the powers-that-be seem to have collectively decided that copyright doesn't really apply here.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#246

Post by vb7132 »

amelius wrote: post #239

There's two kinds of developers. The first one would never become a manager because they like coding too much. The other one would become a manager at the first opportunity. It is obviously the second group that is benefiting from AI the most (because not everybody can be a manager).

True, there are people who are good with people. And they should totally become managers.

But there are also the third kind: who like to design the systems and let them be built by someone else..

Re: Grief and the AI split

#247

Post by forgetfreeman »

khafra wrote: post #241
Gud wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real split is between the capital owners, who live on our labour, typically through inheritance of a piece of paper that says they own a percentage of what I make.

Whether the labor theory of value is right or wrong, the "real split" you describe will soon no longer exist. Capital owners will live on the labor of their capital. Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all. Unless we muster the political will to stop AI development, internationally, until we can be certain of our ability to durably imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep hu…

"Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all."

That's been tried several times now and has a tendency to end very badly for capital. You'd think folks with even a grade school level of historical literacy would know better than to stick a fork in that outlet.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#248

Post by swader999 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #189
rudedogg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real divide is over quality and standards. We all have different thresholds for what is acceptable, and our roles as engineers typically reflect that preference. I can grind on a single piece of code for hours, iterating over and over until I like the way it works, the parameter names, etc. Other people do not see the value in that whatsoever, and something that works is good enough. We both are valuable…

> Also, theres the pace of advancement of the models. Many people formed their opinions last year, and the landscape has changed a lot. People have been saying this every year for the last 3 years. It hasn't been true before, and it isn't true now. The models haven't actually gotten smarter, they still don't actually understand a thing, and they still routinely make basic syntax and logic errors. Yes, even (insert yo…

And yet I just eliminated three months (easily) of tech debt on our billing system in the past two weeks.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#249

Post by vb7132 »

Having managed developers for over five years, I have seen two categories of devs (to simplify the argument, let's focus just on the smart ones):

- one group loves to work independently and gets you the results, they are fast and they figure things out

- second group needs direction, they can be creative in their space but check-ins and course corrections are needed.

AI feels like group1 but it's actually group2. In essence, it doesn't fully fit in either group. I am still figuring out this third group.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#250

Post by claud_ia »

sarchertech wrote: post #69

I’ve heard this thesis a lot, but it’s almost always from the result chasers. It doesn’t resonate with me because I am a result chaser. I like woodworking because I like building something that never existed before. I don’t mind using a CNC router or a 3 printer to help me out. I don’t care about the process, I care about the result. But I care deeply about the quality of the result. I don’t care about the beauty of…

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