Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fokus.cool

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 808 posts

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

#601

Post by thewebguyd »

jimbokun wrote: post #569
thewebguyd wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The marketing for AI is that it will soon replace THE INTERESTING PARTS too. Because it will be better than humans at everything. For you, what are “the interesting parts”, and why do you believe in principle a machine won’t do those parts better than you?

What are the "interesting parts" is hard to quantify because my interests vary, so even if a machine can do those parts better than me, doesn't necessarily mean I'll use the machine.

The arts is a good example. I still enjoy analog photography & darkroom techniques. Digital can (arguably) do it better, faster, and cheaper. Doesn't change the hobby for me.

But, at least the option is there. Should I need to shoot a wedding, or some family photos for pay, I don't bust out my 35mm range finder and shoot film. I bring my R6, and send the photos through ImagenAI to edit.

In that way, the interesting parts are whatever I feel like doing myself, for my own personal enjoyment.

Just the other day I used AI to help me make a macOS utility to have a live wallpaper from an mp4. Didn't feel like paying for any of the existing "live wallpaper" apps. Probably a side project I would never have done otherwise. Almost one shot it outside of a use-after-free bug I had to fix myself, which ended up being quite enjoyable. In that instance, the interesting part was in the finding a problem and fixing it, while I got to outsource 90% of the rest of the work.

I'm rambling now, but the TL;DR is I'm more so excited about having the option to outsource portions of something rather than always outsourcing. Sometimes all you need is a cheap piece of mass produced crap, and other times you want to spend more money (or more time) making it yourself, or buying handmade from an expert craftsman.

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

#603

Post by esafak »

grayhatter wrote: post #360
dude250711 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The folks who love command-line and terminals had not been luddites all this time?

lol, no. They're people who think faster. Someone who uses vscode will never produce code faster than someone proficient in vim. Someone who clicks through GUI windows will never be able to control their computer as fast as someone with a command prompt. I'm sure that there are some examples who enjoy it for the interface. I think CRT term/emulator is peak aesthetic. And a few who aren't willing to invest the time to…

IDEs have keyboard shortcuts too, you know.

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

#604

Post by j2kun »

ineedasername wrote: post #520
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities. This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old…

"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…

> prevents progress

"progress" is doing a lot of work here. Progress in what sense, and for whom? The jury is still out on whether LLMs even increase productivity (which is not the same as progress), and I say this as a user of LLMs.

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

#605

Post by iepathos »

These hyper paranoid statements like "I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain", are fairly worrisome for a technical person who claims to have any understanding of AI and undermines the credibility of the critique. There is some truth in here but it's beneath a lot of paranoia that's hard to sift through.

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

#606

Post by embedding-shape »

acedTrex wrote: post #334
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),…

I consider the devaluation of the craft to be completely independent from the professional occupation of software. Programming has been devalued because more people can do it at a basic level with LLM tooling. People that I do not consider smart enough or to have put enough work in to output the things that they have nor do they really understand it themselves. It is of course the new reality and now we all have to g…

> Programming has been devalued because more people can do it at a basic level with LLM tooling

But just because more people can do something doesn't mean it's devalued, or am I misunderstanding the word? The value of programs remains the same, regardless of who composes them. The availability of computers, the internet and the web seems to have had the opposite effect so far, making entire industries much more valued than they were in the decades before.

Neither do I see ASM, compilers, and all your other examples of devalualing, it seems like it's "nichifying" the industry if anything, which requires more experts, not fewer. The more abstractions we have in reality, the more experts are needed for being able to handle those things.

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

#607

Post by jimbokun »

Glemkloksdjf wrote: post #533
octorian wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just seeing that sentence fragment about "structures of power and violence" told me so much about the author. Its the sort of language that brings with it a whole host of stereotypes, some of which were immediately confirmed with a little more digging (and others would require way too much effort to confirm, but likely could be). And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Bec…

Capitalism is bad. I'm not ignorant to this fact that it helped us for quite a long time but it also created climate change. Overpopulation. We are still stuck on planet earth, have not figured out the reason for live or the origin of the universe. I would prefer a world were we think about using all the resources earth provides sustainable and how to use them the most efficient way for the max amount of human beings…

You would need to demonstrate that some other system would have given us all the things you want while avoiding every problem you cite, while not introducing other comparable or worse problems.

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

#608

Post by maddmann »

Glemkloksdjf wrote: post #533
octorian wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just seeing that sentence fragment about "structures of power and violence" told me so much about the author. Its the sort of language that brings with it a whole host of stereotypes, some of which were immediately confirmed with a little more digging (and others would require way too much effort to confirm, but likely could be). And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Bec…

Capitalism is bad. I'm not ignorant to this fact that it helped us for quite a long time but it also created climate change. Overpopulation. We are still stuck on planet earth, have not figured out the reason for live or the origin of the universe. I would prefer a world were we think about using all the resources earth provides sustainable and how to use them the most efficient way for the max amount of human beings…

How did capitalism create overpopulation? Isn’t that more related to agriculture and better medical tech?

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

#610

Post by dspillett »

ineedasername wrote: post #520
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities. This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old…

"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…

I'm firmly in the “don't want to use it; if you want to, feel free, but stop nagging me to” camp.

Oh, and the “I'm not accepting 'the AI did it' as an excuse for failures” camp. Just like outsourcing to other humans: you chose the tool(s), you are responsible for verifying the output.

I got into programming and kicking infrastructure because I'm the sort of sad git who likes the details, and I'm not about to let some automaton steal my fun and turn me into its glorified QA service!

I'd rather go serve tables or stack shelves, heck I've been saying I need a good long sabbatical from tech for a few years now… And before people chime in with “but that would mean dropping back to minimum wage”: if LLMs mean almost everybody can program, then programming will pretty soon be a minimum wage job anyway, and I'll just be choosing how I earn that minimum (and perhaps reclaiming tinkering with tech as the hobby it was when I was far younger).

Post reply on HN