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And do what, given that AI-as-marketed optimizes out having relationships with people and enjoying art/cinema/music? Touch grass all by myself?
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Just because you failed to use an LLM effectively the first time, or it doesn't live up to your version of the hype doesn't mean you have a magic window into how sh1t they are. Many people who use them regularly know just how bad they are and what it's like to move beyond the original context window length. But having auto complete on steroids is still the best thing with regards to making computing "fun" again in a generation. No more boiler plate, no more beating your head against a desk looking for that minor coding bug that could have been fixed by a awesome regex if only you had the time to learn it. No more having to break your stride and go through about 20 websites with popups to find that someone else solved the problem got you, just getting on with stuff and having fun whilst doing it.
Edit: no retort, just flagging and down-voting... lovely
> "live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal." I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our bankin…
Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there. But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline. > There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge th…
But personally, I don't feel as upset over all this as he does. It seems that all my tech curmudgeonliness over the years is paying off these days, in spades.
Humbly, I suggest that he and many others simply need to disconnect more from The Current Thing or The Popular Thing.
Let's look at what he complains about:
* Bitcoin. Massive hype, never went anywhere. He's totally right. That's why I never used it and barely even read about it. I have no complaints because I don't care. I told myself I'd care if someone ever built something useful with Bitcoin. 10 years later they haven't. I'm going back to bed.
* Windows. Man I'm glad I dodged that bullet and became a Linux user almost 15 years ago. Just do it. Stuff will irk you either way but Linux irks don't make you feel like your dignity as a human being is being violated. Again, he's right that Windows sucks; I just don't have to care, because I walked away.
* Bluesky, Twitter, various dumb things being said on social media. Those bother him too. Fortunately, these products are optional. I haven't logged into my Twitter account for three years. I'll certainly never create a Bluesky one. On some of my devices I straight up block many of these crapo social sites like Reddit etc. in /etc/hosts. I follow some RSS feeds of a few blogs, one of the local timeline for a Mastodon instance. Takes ten minutes and then I go READ BOOKS in my spare time. That's it. He is yet again right, social media sucks, it's the place where you hear about all this dumb stuff like Bitcoin; I just am not reading it.
I'm not trying to toot my own horn here it's just that when you disconnect from all the trash, you never look back, and the frustrations of people who haven't seem a little silly. You can just turn all of this stuff off. Why don't you? Is it an addiction? Treat it like one if so. I used to spend 6 hours a day on my phone and now it's 1 hour, mainly at lunch, because the rest of the time it's on silent, in a bag, or turned off, just like a meth addict trying to quit shouldn't leave meth lying around.
Listen to Stallman. Listen to Doctorow. These guys are right. They were always right. The free alternatives that respect you exist. Just make the leap and use them.
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> Do you have no code that could use translation (move code that looks like this to code that looks like that)? Only bad code, and what takes the time is understanding it, not rewriting it, and the LLM doesn't make that part any quicker. > they save dozens of hours on single sentence prompt tasks, even if you have to review them Really? How are you reviewing quicker than you could write? Unless the code is just a pil…
> Really? How are you reviewing quicker than you could write? Unless the code is just a pile of verbose whatever, reviewing it is slower than writing it, and a lot less fun too. Well, humans typically read way faster than they write, and if you own the code, have a strict style guide, etc, it is often pretty simple to understand new or modified code, unless you are dealing with a novel concept, which I wouldn't trust…
When it's just reading, perhaps, but to review you have to read carefully and understand. It's like the classic quote that if you're writing code at the limits of your ability you won't be able to debug it.
> if you own the code, have a strict style guide, etc, it is often pretty simple to understand new or modified code, unless you are dealing with a novel concept, which I wouldn't trust a LLM with anyway
The way I see it if the code is that simple and repetitive then probably that repetition should be factored out and the code made a lot shorter. The code should only need to express the novel/distinctive parts of the problem - which, as you say, are the parts we wouldn't trust an LLM with.
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I appreciate the idealism but your argument has some flaws. Firstly the "theft component" isn't exactly new. There have always been rich and poor. Secondly everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants. The Beatles were influenced by the works of others. Paul and John learned to write by mimicking other writers. That code you right is the pinicle of endless work dine by others. By Ada Lovelace, and Charles Babbage,…
I think your last point is very reductionist. Nearly every country ends up in a voting situation where only 2 parties can realistically win. A diverse parlament results in paralysis and the fall of government (happened in my home country multiple times). The two parties that end up viable tend to be financed quite heavily by said wealthy, including being proped by the media said wealthy control. The more right wing s…
I would contest some of your points though.
Firstly, not every country votes, not all that vote have 2 viable parties, so that's a flaw in your argument.
Equally most elections produce a winner. That winner can, and does, get stuff done. The US is paralyzed because it takes 60% to win the senate, which hasn't happened for a while. So US elections are set up so "no one wins". Which of course leads to overreach etc that we're seeing currently.
There's a danger when living inside a system that you assume everywhere else is the same. There's a danger when you live in a system that heavily propagandizes its own superiority, that you start to feel like everywhere else is worse.
If we are the best, and this system is the best, and it's terrible, then clearly all hope is lost.
But what I maybe, just maybe, all those things you absolutely, positively, know to be true, are not true? Is that even worth thinking about?
> But the dream has died. It almost came true, and then it was immediately co-opted by a bunch of get-rich-quick grifters and a bunch of turbo-libertarians whose entire identities are defined by the Things that they Own and who want to cryptographically impose that on everyone else too because they’re mad that World of Warcraft nerfed warlock or something. Oh come on. As someone who works with plenty of entrepeneurs,…
They're unhappy that something better doesn't exist, and that the dream of cryptocurrencies, that they would actually become a useful technology for everyday movement of money, has essentially been killed and buried by the sheer quantity of grift in the ecosystem (to be fair, there's a lot of fundamental technology issues that make that a difficult dream to achieve in practice, but it's sad that it basically doesn't seem to get much at all of the substantial resources poured into the ecosystem, and the general stench of it now makes legitimate use so much harder. So many people associate crypto == scam that adoption for real payments has actively gone backwards since the first few years).
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there are many people with many use cases for distributed ledgers. we are already aware of the flowchart of your argument path “list them” “oh I can do that in this other convoluted way that doesnt solve any of these users goals or problems” “I’m not the target audience for that so it doesnt count” “ah so financial speculation, that doesnt count despite being the largest application and sector on the planet” “marketc…
A lot of your examples are fallacious arguments that are weak or just generally wrong but your first one is >”list them” If you are arguing that something exists, then being asked to prove its existence is table stakes, not poor arguments You starting with a strong argument in your list of bad arguments and then ending with shit that mocks anyone calling you out makes me believe that you are not discussing this topic…
yes, that means we are at an impasse. use the search, ask an LLM, if even that is too much initiative for a quite outdated skeptic to take even now then I can’t help you
there are hundreds of billions, maybe trillions in volume going through financial services on blockchains and it doesn’t matter if financial services isn’t a sector you care about or are the target audience for, there are people there who will pay to solve problems they have
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Speaking as a grump who recently chilled out, put reservations on hold and gave Claude a crack... it turns out that the anti-AI crowd (which still includes me in many regards) gets a lot wrong about the experience of using it, as demonstrated in TFA. You don't get reams of wishy-washy code unless you ask for it. If you're an experienced developer who Knows What They Want then you can wield it like a scalpel. None of…
> If you're an experienced developer who Knows What They Want then you can wield it like a scalpel. But that's not what the marketing says. The marketing says it will do your entire job for you. In reality, it will save you some typing if you already know what to do . On HN at least, where most people are startup/hustle culture and experts in something, they don't think long term enough to see the consequences for no…
This goes too far in the other direction. LLMs can do far more than merely saving you typing. I have successfully used coding agents to implement code which at the outset I had no business writing as it was far outside my domain expertise. By the end I'd gained enough understanding to be able to review the output and guide the LLM towards a correct solution, far faster than the weeks or months it would have taken to acquire enough background info to make an attempt at coding it myself.