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I don't care how well your "AI" works

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Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#581

Post by tbrownaw »

m000 wrote: post #433
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

I think you're missing that a lot of what we call "learning" would be categorized as "busy work" after the fact. If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid. Which may be a goal on itself for our AI overlords. As mr Miyagi said: "Wax on. Wax off." This may turn out very profitable for the pre-AI generations, as the junior to senior pipeline won't churn seniors at the same rate. Bu…

> Which may be a goal on itself for our AI overlords.

That doesn't seem exactly likely.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#582

Post by jimbokun »

chemotaxis wrote: post #366
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

> It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. It happens, but I think it's pretty uncommon. What's a lot more common is people getting called out for offloading tasks to LLMs in a way that j…

The reason to be angry about the chatbot generated argument is that without sources it’s likely to have hallucinated a few things.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#583

Post by elektronika »

ewzimm wrote: post #216
embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

What is devalued is traditional labor-based ideology. The blog references Marx's theory of alienation. The Marxist labor theory of value, that the value of anything is determined by the labor that creates it, gives the working class moral authority over the owner class. When labor is reduced, the basis of socialist revolution is devalued, as the working class no longer can claim superior contributions to value creati…

Marx addressed exactly this sort of improvement in productivity from automation. He was writing with full hindsight on the industrial revolution after all. I hope coding LLMs give professional computer touchers a wakeup call to develop some sorely lacking class consciousness.

>the capitalist who applies the improved method of production, appropriates to surplus-labour a greater portion of the working day, than the other capitalists in the same trade […] The law of the determination of value by labour-time, a law which brings under its sway the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production, by compelling him to sell his goods under their social value, this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method.

From Capital, Vol 1 Chapter 12 if you're curious.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#584

Post by jsh1 »

Most of this debate misses the real shift. AI isn't replacing programmers, it's replacing the parts of programming that were never craft in the first place. In the future, most people will prompt code they barely understand while a small minority who keep real depth will end up owning the hard problems. If anything collapses the culture, it won't be AI but our willingness to trade mastery for convenience.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#585

Post by swaits »

spot5010 wrote: post #392

"I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain. Many of my friends share that sentiment." Any software engineer who shares this sentiment is doing their career a disservice. LLMs have their pitfalls, and I have been skeptical of their capabilities, but nevertheless I have tried them out earnestly. The progress of AI coding assistants over the past year has been remarkable, and now they ar…

It’s some mixture of luddites, denial, ignorance, and I don’t know what else.

I’m not sure what these people are NOT seeing. Maybe I’m somehow fortunate with visibility into what AI can do today, and what it will do tomorrow. But I’m not doing anything special. Just paying attention and keeping an open mind.

I’ve been at this for 40 years, working professionally for more than 30. I’ve seen lots.

One pattern I’ve seen repeating is folks who seem to stop leaning at some point. I don’t understand this, because for me learning everyday is what fuels me. And those folks eventually die on the vine, or they become the last few greybeards working on COBOL.

We are alive at a very interesting time in tech. I am excited about that. I am here for it.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#586

Post by jimbokun »

m000 wrote: post #433
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

I think you're missing that a lot of what we call "learning" would be categorized as "busy work" after the fact. If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid. Which may be a goal on itself for our AI overlords. As mr Miyagi said: "Wax on. Wax off." This may turn out very profitable for the pre-AI generations, as the junior to senior pipeline won't churn seniors at the same rate. Bu…

Pathway to Idiocracy.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#587

Post by jimbokun »

thewebguyd wrote: post #494
m000 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing that a lot of what we call "learning" would be categorized as "busy work" after the fact. If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid. Which may be a goal on itself for our AI overlords. As mr Miyagi said: "Wax on. Wax off." This may turn out very profitable for the pre-AI generations, as the junior to senior pipeline won't churn seniors at the same rate. Bu…

> If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid. I've seen this same thing said about Google. "If you outsource your memory to Google searching instead, you won't be able to do anything without and you'll become dumber." Maybe that did happen, but it didn't seem to result in any meaningful change on the whole. Instead, I got to waste less time memorizing things, or spending time lea…

If you extend Google to include social networks the damage to human mental health and well being is difficult to calculate.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#588

Post by ineedasername »

jimbokun wrote: post #540
ineedasername wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs" This is the exact sentiment when said about some other profession or craft, countless people elsewhere and on HN have noted that it's neither productive not wise to be so precious about a task that evolved as a n…

What’s your solid contribution to the discussion?

Responding to and enumerating, in this case, the viewpoint of someone. It's the general process by which discussions take place and progress.

If the thread were about 1) the current problems and approaches AI alignment, 2) the poorly understood mechanisms of hallucination, 3a) the mindset the doesn't see the conflict whey they say "don't anthropomorphize" but runs off to create a pavlovian playground in post-training, 3b) the mindsets that do much the reverse and how both these are dangerous and harmful, 4) the poorly understood trade off of sparse inference optimizations. But it's not, so I hold those in reserve.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#589

Post by stocksinsmocks »

Aurornis wrote: post #255
TrackerFF wrote: post #188

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small…

> Non-coders are churning out small apps in record pace, juniors are looking like savants with the amount of code and tasks they finish, where probably 90% of the code is done by Claude or whatever. Honestly I think you’re swallowing some of the hype here. I think the biggest advantages of LLMs go to the experienced coders who know how to leverage them in their workflows. That may not even include having the LLM writ…

I’m a garage coder and the kind of engineer that has a license. I had the capacity with my kids to make a usable application for my work about once every 6 months. Now it’s once a weekend or so. You don’t have to believe it.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#590

Post by doug_durham »

thewebguyd wrote: post #462
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

> All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this. The attitude and push back from this loud minority has always been weird to me. Ever since I got my hands on my first computer as a kid, I've been outsourcing parts of my brain to computing so that I can focus on more interesting…

Thank you for expressing well what I was thinking. I derive intense joy from coding. Like you my over my 40 year career I've been exploiting more and more ways to outsource work to computers. The space of software is so vast that I've never worried for a second that I'd not have work to do. Coding is a means to solving interesting problems. It is not an end in itself.
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