Like the artisans/craftsmen in many places (especially Japan), hand craft will always carry enduring meaning — machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands. But historically at least, they can replace over 99.9% of it.
Leave Me Behind
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Re: Leave Me Behind
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? I'm more motivated than ever to make stuff at the moment. I have a long list of projects I've always wanted to make, but I never had time. The barrier is so low now. For example, I want to make: - A mini OS on top of SeL4 - A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust. - My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends - A local…
Leisure projects for me at least are about the personal challenge and achievement. If the LLM does it, you achieved nothing.
Are you assuming that "using a LLM" automatically means "vibe coding"?
Is it not engineering anymore even if you micromanage and relegate the machine to a better typist, following patterns and doing research around?
Re: Leave Me Behind
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The automation at least built unimaginable amounts of wealth for the rich people while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.
>while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago. How can people say false things like this with a straight face? Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom, let alone poor people back then: abundant cheap food that poor people can now be fat instead of starve to…
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Re: Leave Me Behind
#84Like the artisans/craftsmen in many places (especially Japan), hand craft will always carry enduring meaning — machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands. But historically at least, they can replace over 99.9% of it.
> machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands.
What about 'machines' with hands and human-level cognition?
Re: Leave Me Behind
#85Mario Savio said a few lines when the industrial revolution peaked: There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious Makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels Upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to t…
A slop fork machine is way different though, I dont know why authors never thought about this but imagine a machine that can detect the features and replicate whatever it sees, show it how to make bread once and it can do it infinitely, make it listen to a song and its able to find why it sounds the way it does and just spam variations, even if it doesnt make anything original it demotivates any attempt to push the b…
I argue the opposite, that originality will actually become more valuable.
Think about it: everyone has characterized AI slop, as slop. Which means that we negatively value it in terms of originality. Combine that with the fact that there will be a lot of it, this means that original work will 1. stand out or be very distinct from slop, and 2. have its value amplified as a result of this polarization.
basically, we value originality more AND are able to identify it more readily.
related is also the fact that originality will literally be valuable as training data for future models
Re: Leave Me Behind
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
>LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking. No it isn't. I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want. If you also outsource thinking to it, that's your choice though. Or the company's choice. But ultimately the free market will deiced with products made using LLMs outcompete those mad…
It shouldn't be used for that either. The problem is our programming languages and tools are shit so we made another expensive tool to drive them. I've said this elsewhere before but I single-handedly produced more actual tangible business value with Microsoft Access than anything else since. What was an hour's work is now a procurement process and thousands of lines of tedious configuration and boilerplate that invo…
Recently, I had some data for which I wanted some graphs. I uploaded the .jsonl file, and prompted "make a html page and graph this data using plotly". I wanted a report, and got a report, quicker than I could have made it myself.
Re: Leave Me Behind
#87Most humans derive their purpose and meaning from their work. Has always been that way. What do you think happens when you remove meaning from people’s lives at scale? It won’t be pretty.
Re: Leave Me Behind
#88Mario Savio said a few lines when the industrial revolution peaked: There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious Makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels Upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to t…
> take human intelligence to another pinnacle I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber, and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders will accelerate that trend.
> I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber
Also, I think we (non-scientists) might be overestimating the average historical intelligence - see Flynn Effect [1] - perhaps because of a bias in our perception of the past levels based on who published books and thoughts - basically more intelligent members of our species.
> and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
[2] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.20 — 5th c. BCE Greece. “So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand.”
[3] Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.2 — 4th c. BCE Greece. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/stasis/2017/honeycutt/aris.... Aristotle treats public persuasion as necessary partly because ordinary audiences cannot easily follow complex chains of reasoning. He says rhetoric addresses deliberative matters before people “who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument, or follow a long chain of reasoning.”
[4] Plato, Republic, Book V — 4th c. BCE Greece. https://topostext.org/work/768. Plato distinguishes philosophers from the many “lovers of sights and sounds,” who enjoy appearances but do not apprehend deeper truth. The text says their thought is “incapable” of grasping the underlying form or nature of beauty, and that few attain that deeper vision.
[5] Confucius, Analects, Book 2 — 5th c. BCE China. https://www.chinastory.cn/ywdbk/english/v1/detail/20190722/1.... "Learning without thought is pointless, Thought without learning is dangerous".
[6] Buddhist tradition, Dhammapada, Appamāda-vagga. https://suttacentral.net/dhp21-32/en/sujato. Dhammapada contrasts heedfulness with heedlessness, treating heedlessness as a central human failing. In one translation: “Heedfulness is the state free of death; heedlessness is the state of death. The heedful do not die, while the heedless are like the dead.”
[7] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, “Idols of the Mind” — 1620. https://history.hanover.edu/texts/bacon/novorg.html. Bacon argues that the “Idols of the Tribe” are rooted in human nature itself, and that human understanding distorts reality like a false mirror.
Re: Leave Me Behind
#89Mario Savio said a few lines when the industrial revolution peaked: There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious Makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels Upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to t…
> take human intelligence to another pinnacle I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber, and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders will accelerate that trend.
“Pinnacle” just means “highest point” here. They are saying that AI might take human intelligence to a higher point than was previously reached. That’s debatable, of course, but isn’t what you seem to be arguing against.
Re: Leave Me Behind
#90Like the artisans/craftsmen in many places (especially Japan), hand craft will always carry enduring meaning — machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands. But historically at least, they can replace over 99.9% of it.
> machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands. What about 'machines' with hands and human-level cognition?
I don't have a quantitative way to argue this, but my intuition says that for humans to build something that matches human capability across every dimension would require a breakthrough at the physical level — and such a breakthrough may itself be bounded by the limits of humans as observers.
That said, this goal might itself be a non-goal. AI is going to be — or already is — more powerful than any individual human in many ways. But what my intuition points to is that humans will still have plenty of interesting work to do, like the author's example of handwriting code: it shifts from being scalable value creation into a form of craftsmanship.