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Please Use AI

shawnsmucker.substack.com

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Re: Please Use AI

#251

Post by jimbokun »

draftsman wrote: post #140
hootz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, when working on personal projects with AI I feel like I've replaced some of the joy of tinkering with code with the joy of tinkering with models. They require different work, writing prompts, setting up guardrails, harnesses etc, and that is also pretty fun for me!

I find very little joy in trying to wrangle the blackboxes that are LLMs. The undeterministic nature of them frustrates me, and feels nothing like the software engineering I know and love. However, I know I’m in the minority here, as almost everyone else in the industry I’ve talked to seems to love using them.

Well just look around Hacker News. Many many here expressing the same frustrations as you.

The deterministic nature of programming drew many of use to it, and that going away can create a crisis of identity.

Re: Please Use AI

#252

Post by bko »

SuperV1234 wrote: post #243
bko wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats. I'm pretty sure I've helped more than a few friends and family members debug a router. Most of them didn't even know what a router was. Much harder to Google for specific issues like that, hence the 1 billion people that use AI globally. Pretending that AI is not incredibly useful is... disingeuous

How'd you infer that I don't find AI useful from my statement? Of course I do. I am merely saying that the argumentation in the "poem" is not specific to AI.

It was based on:

> Pretending it's an AI novelty is... disingenuous.

yes, being able to debug your router through a simple conversation without bothering people is a novelty

Re: Please Use AI

#254

Post by zug_zug »

eunoia wrote: post #26

Beautiful piece. I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.

I definitely got this sense with Zuckerberg/meta (and probably Musk too) -- it should be ironic disturbing to have people who aren't really social people building our social networks....

Some of the least-mentally-healthy people I know see human dynamics as fundamentally 0-sum competitions, and I feel like some of these platforms are modeled on that, but not all of them (youtube is a mixed bag, reddit used to be pretty harmless).

Re: Please Use AI

#255

Post by giancarlostoro »

beering wrote: post #231
causal wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're hinting at an interesting distinction in how AI interaction can play out. Sometimes it makes you feel like you have been cut out and are now an outsider on your own project, other times it introduces you to something and helps you get started in a world you could not access on your own.

AI makes the good students better and the bad students worse.

This is really the best way to put it.

On the other hand: In terms of building software using agents I wouldn't call developers students, specifically when it comes to letting AI write the code, but its a similar concept: Good developers know how to architect and guide the coding agent, bad ones keep asking it to do the work they don't understand, or even if they do understand it, they don't take the time to stop and architect the problem. I've had amazing output from Claude Code, but apparently a lot of devs feel it is inadequate, some people it seems want the AI to code it perfectly in one shot, I go back and tell it what to fix, to add tests, to not change existing tests, etc.

Re: Please Use AI

#256

Post by dragonwriter »

lanfeust6 wrote: post #165
jimbokun wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can’t they continue to do so? Because we are talking to the AIs instead of talking to them. > After all, nothing the author’s written isn’t also true about Google, but nobody realized how bad of a mistake that was. There was plenty written about how Google was making us dumber because we didn't need to remember anything any more.

> instead of Citation needed. People did not stop talking to family, friends and colleagues just because they're able to leverage LLMs.

> People did not stop talking to family, friends and colleagues just because they're able to leverage LLMs.

Which people? There are clearly people who did—some with catastrophic, newsworthy results, but presumably more without.

Re: Please Use AI

#257

Post by jimbokun »

elliotbnvl wrote: post #113

Though I deeply agree with this sentiment, the author fails to address that there can be multiple goals to an action. And writing can be for art or communication or both but not always both, and removing the art from communication doesn’t destroy its ability to communicate.

No, I think it does.

The only purpose of communicating is to transmit your thoughts to one or more other people.

If the thoughts are the thoughts of the AI, you are not communicating anything.

Re: Please Use AI

#258

Post by runtime_terror »

beering wrote: post #224
ryukoposting wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a photo has strong composition and symbolism, does it matter if the photographer took the photo as opposed to prompting it into existence?

An interesting question because photos are mostly machine-generated to begin with. The photographer just hits a button.

"Just hits a button" is an incredibly reductive way to look at photography

Re: Please Use AI

#259

Post by SuperV1234 »

bko wrote: post #252
SuperV1234 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How'd you infer that I don't find AI useful from my statement? Of course I do. I am merely saying that the argumentation in the "poem" is not specific to AI.

It was based on: > Pretending it's an AI novelty is... disingenuous. yes, being able to debug your router through a simple conversation without bothering people is a novelty

It's not that simple.

The grandma that would have phoned her nephew to fix the phone will still do the same thing now. She will not have magically switched to querying LLMs after a lifetime of technological illiteracy.

The tech-savvy person that uses AI today would have been more than capable than figuring out how to fix their router by using Google even without prior networking skills/experience 5-10 years ago.

Using AI to solve these problems is a novelty for a specific subset of the population. And the topic does matter.

Even the somewhat tech-illiterate mom would have been able to Google a recipe 10 years ago, or watch an Instagram reel 5 years ago. They were surely not going to call their friends to ask instructions on how to make an apple pie.

Pretending this is an AI novelty is indeed disingeneous.

Re: Please Use AI

#260

Post by jimbokun »

postalcoder wrote: post #49

I agree with this sentiment. I've seen other parents create AI videos of their toddlers being visited at night by Santa. I've seen parents happily throw their children into AI video generators to entertain them. People are using AI recklessly. I can't imagine stealing the gift of a child's imagination away from them and instead, replacing it with these hollow representations of reality. It disgusts me. I use AI all t…

Yep, we all thought giving young kids was "helping them learn to use computers to be ready for the future" too.

Some people learned that lesson and are now pushing back on letting their kids access AI. But not everyone.

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