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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

#791
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing more insufferable than the "AI do everything and replace everyone" crowd is the "AI is completely useless" crowd. It's useful for some things and useless for others, just like any other tool you'll encounter.

The proposition that AI is completely is trivially nullified. For example, it is provably useful for large-scale cheating on course assignments - a non-trivial task that had previously used human-operated "essay mills" and other services.

s/completely/completely useless/

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

#792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "unauthorized use" rather than "stealing", since the original work is not moved anywhere. It's more like using your creative work to train a software system that generates similar-looking, competing works, for pennies, at industrial scale and speed.

The pedantry matters for the same reason it mattered when the music industry did this to Napster: because the truth is important.

Accurate terminology can help to clarify discussions, including discussions of appropriate activity related to creative works.

My suspicion is also that what many artists are objecting to is less the training itself (though AI web crawlers are aggressive and annoying) and more the use of the trained model for large-scale generation of similar (and possibly competing) works ("derivative" in an artistic if not legal sense), in the artist's style, especially by large companies for commercial gain.

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

#793

> 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),…

The only way to create senior programmers is for someone to hire juniors and let them grow.

I'm not worried for my job, I can work _with_ AI very well. I'm not precious about my processes or ways of working.

What I AM worried about is that if companies stop hiring juniors because they (try to) replace them with AI, we'll no longer have new seniors and the craft itself will deteriorate.

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

#794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has more to do with monetary policy than AI, though.

I couldn’t agree more, I think AI is more about taking power away from tech workers who have historically had a lot of power compared to other non unionized workers.

Oh I disagree

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

#795
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ot…

Marx was a racist.

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

#796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> assign work to an LLM This is just not happening anywhere around me. I don't know why it keeps getting repeated in every one of these discussions. Every software engineer I know is using LLM tools, but every team around me is still hiring new developers. Zero firing is happening in any circle near me due to LLMs. LLMs can not do unsupervised work, period. They do not replace developers. They replace Stack Overflow…

It's me. I'm the LM having work assigned to me that junior dev used to get. I'm actually just a highly proficient BA who has always almost read code, followed and understood news about software development here and on /. before, but generally avoided writing code out of sheer laziness. It's always been more convenient to find something easier and more lucrative in those moments if decision where I actually considered…

> It's me. I'm the LM

Okay.

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

#797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn’t agree more, I think AI is more about taking power away from tech workers who have historically had a lot of power compared to other non unionized workers.

Oh I disagree

Good thing I wasn’t replying to you then!

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

#798
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you measured? https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

Open source library development has to follow very tight sets of style adherence because of its extremely distributed nature, and the degree to which feature development is as much the design of new standards as it is writing working code. I would imagine that it is perhaps the kind of programming least well suited to AI assistance. AI speeds me up a tremendous amount in my day job as a product engineer.

> AI speeds me up a tremendous amount in my day job as a product engineer.

Sure, there are specialized and non-specialized models.

I was asking if you've measured your "tremendous speed-up" using AI or you just feel like it is a "tremendous speed-up". As the research indicates you may feel like you are sped up 20% while you are actually 20% slower. I'm not saying that you don't actually have a speed-up from AI.

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

#799

> 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"…

> 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…

Get some black dudes involved. Black dudes know how to keep it real.

(It will be interesting to see many people are able to accurately draw the conceptual line between what part of my sentiment is a joke and what part is serious.)

EDIT: Just interested in seeing if it could tease out the portion of the HN crowd who go apoplectic any time they're forced to remember that black people exist, the portion that only know us in the abstract ("He's right! Black people DO 'keep it real!'"), and the tiny minority that will actually understand the point I'm trying to make. I suppose that's bad communication, but you could also say that the medium is (part of) the message.

Suffice it to say, maybe now that DEI is gone, actual good-faith efforts to recognize the hacker ethos in disparate groups, and to bring those individuals into the culture, could take place. The corporate-ization of hacking couldn't have taken place (and could be undone) with an injection of some counterculture. And you had an entire group of people, whose existing ethos was based on appropriating and remixing and building something from the metal up, right there.

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

#800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there are a lot of us very clear that our identities are being threatened and scared shitless we will lose the ability to pay our rent or buy food because of it.

We exist inside of capitalism - particularly late-stage deeply unregulated capitalism. You are always very close to losing the ability to pay your rent or buy food not because your identity is being threatened but because a bunch of people who don’t care about you and only care about making money will happily lay you off without a second thought if they think it will make the even richer people above them happy. And…

I have been paid to write software for almost 30 years now. And never seriously worried I wouldn’t be able to find another job writing software until now.
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