681–690 of 896 posts
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I did, so it probably depends of where you live.
What Soviet products did you see?
My memory from the period is far from perfect, though, as I was a kid when the USSR collapsed.
This Is exactly how civilizations die out. When AI was incoming I wrote similar predictions. This WILL happen, sooner or later. People will stop understanding what programming is. What is hard drive. Why storing files in cloud is not the same as having them on your HDD. And similar things
I still code daily without any coding assistance mostly because I believe this is the way to not forget how things are done, even trivial things. My main point against using AI is that I do not want to depend basically on anything when I'm in front of the screen (obviously not including, documentation, books, SO and alike). I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most tri…
This is the important statement, although I'd swap the word "knowledge" for "experience" here. You can gain "knowledge" from books, but only trial & error will give you experience to know "which" knowledge to use in which situations.
And what's important about this in the context of working with AI is the "error" part.
You have to experience errors to become truly experienced. And part of the experience is to recognize when you're about to make an error - to avoid it.
AI-driven processes mess up our natural trial & error learning curve in multiple ways:
- the AI push forces us to ship features faster (cause if we don't, our competitors will), reviews are sloppier, we discover errors later on, the feedback loop gets longer...
- using AI to debug and fix errors means we spend less time understanding what the error was about, which means we learn less about how to avoid the error in the first place...
- AI itself sounds overly confident, so reading its outputs without previous experience you may be less likely to recognize when it's making an error, which makes it harder for you to recognize when you're making an error trusting it...
On the other hand, this last point I tried to make is also why I don't think avoiding AI completely is a good strategy. Whether we like it or not, AI is becoming a part of developer's workflow. And as such, we also need to learn the trial & error process of using AI - what makes AI make errors and how to prompt it to avoid that.
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Do you really think the economy is zero sum? For example, who was Elon Musk's wealth transferred from? What do you think about all that money being invested into AI? Is that "extreme short term profit maximization"?
What is the point on Musk you are making? The monetary success does not neccesserily correlate to the common good they have created. In case of Musk there is a lot of governement subsidies, lots of market manipulation and false claim s. So not all activieties that bring profit to the richest are good to the rest. And stats on inequality just highlights that trend
The government gave Musk a trillion dollars?
> So not all activieties that bring profit to the richest are good to the rest
I didn't say they were all good. I said he created his wealth, it was not transferred to him.
> And stats on inequality just highlights that trend
All those stats highlight is some people create more wealth than others.
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Where was all this wealth 200 years ago? Inflation is caused by printing money not backed by goods and services. Inflation is another form of taxation.
The vast majority of it was stored underground as petrochemicals. A fact made immediately apparent by looking at like any chart. Is this a serious conversation?
What if I use what would otherwise be a waste product to create something people are willing to pay for? For example sawdust. Is that not value creation?
The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…
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I don’t know who his wealth was transferred from, exactly. But I do know what he’s using it for now: as a gravitational force to unilaterally screw with public institutions and systems the rest of us depend on. Even if you agree with some of DOGE projects’s goals, the way it operated was wildly thoughtless about consequences beyond Musk’s personal wishes, and almost completely unaccountable. I’m honestly sick that my…
Musk's money came from creating a business that was worth a lot of money. I.e. he created his wealth. It was not transferred to him. The same goes for Bezos, Jobs, Gates, etc.
At some point, accumulated wealth becomes power, and that power can be used to pull energy, attention, labor, and public resources out of the system for one person’s agenda.
And in Tesla’s case, the stock value creation story is insanely unorthodox, to be charitable. A lot of that valuation was supercharged by years of market-moving hype done personally by Elon: 10+ years of FSD timelines that never happened, the more recent “buy a Tesla, it’s an appreciating asset!” super-lie, the mission gradually being abandoned, GOP craps on EVs and it’s crickets from Elon, etc.
Now we have the ultimate example of wealth gravity distortion: Musk helped put Trump back in power, and the relationship looks openly transactional. But Elon is not just benefiting from Trump’s transactional nature. He is also benefiting from an administration where white collar crime and regulatory accountability seem to have basically stopped being real things.
So with all that, the kind of shady behavior Elon pulled that might normally trigger government scrutiny or enforcement is now being smothered by political influence.
Even today, Tesla appears to be the highest P/E outlier in the S&P 500 among profitable companies. So the market is not just valuing the current business. It is valuing the story, the hype, and increasingly Musk’s ability to buy influence to stay outta trouble.
And to be clear, I’m not trying to pretend nothing real was built. SpaceX is impressive. Tesla really did help kickstart the EV market. But that does not make up for the harm, distortion, and unaccountable power being exercised now.
So yes, maybe the wealth was “created” in an accounting sense. But the concern is what happens when that created value becomes an unaccountable force acting on everything else.
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What does my relationship with the c-suite/my work have to do with a colleague dumping their unedited chatgpt crap on to me? I legitimately do not understand what point you’re trying to make. There seems to be a lot of assumptions here and I’m not sure what they are. Sending your unedited LLM outputs to me is not sticking it to the execs. If you really want to play that game, you go ahead and ship that or hand it to…
> If you ask me for a summary of something and I simply hand you what ChatGPT gave me, would you say “thanks” and be satisfied? Yes. Again my job is to stay unexploited. Saying yes is the easiest option. I'll leave the worrying to the people making an order of magnitude more money than me.
If you want to phone it in or act your wage or whatever go ahead but don’t make it my problem. You’re not sticking it to your employer. You’re actively making your workplace worse for everyone else. Your decisions impact others.
This is like working in the service industry and simply not doing your job. Management doesn’t suffer and they’ll just fire you. The people you work with have to do your job for you. What have you actually accomplished?
The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…
I feel like it’s something more fundamental and broad than that. We slowly remove excuses to talk to other people. The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker. It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing? The thing that gets me is,…