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The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

thoughts.hmmz.org

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Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow? Many of the people who are complaining about AI vibecoding today also didn't blindly copy/paste from StackOverflow in the past.

I'm sure they were blindly accepting the Assembly coming out of the compiler.

If you think that's a good analogy you're in the wronf industry ....

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#82

I wonder how many of the responses here bifurcate by age. The post resonates with me, but I am now in my early fifties. When I was in my 20's and 30's, I would have happily chased rabbits down all those holes, but now that time seems so brutally finite, I feel that anything encouring me to spend time on stuff other than what really matters is a strong negative. (Where "what matters" includes work, family, friends, an…

Of course it is. Young people are always more eager to adapt new tech while older people yell at clouds. AI usage is MUCH higher among young people.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#83
I think they got most of it right. Whenever there is a tool that helps one super active, it is a one off cliff. Smart ones will figure that out and get back to using it for meaningful purpose. A small percentage weaker ones will get addicted.

Nothing different from all innovations.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#84
Your car can drive 100+mph, but it’s probably not a good idea to drive around corners, in town or in your neighborhood at top speed. LLMs are the same. They can go 1,000+MPH, but what you need and what’s safe is 20-80mph. Practice restraint and focus and LLMs will make you more productive and give you some good results.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#85
"The output was unbridled garbage. Because the effort was removed, so was the commitment, and with the commitment the focus, and with the focus any meaningful product at all. " -- i've noticed that fact first when I started to use linux. It didn't click untill I've built Gentoo from handbook. The commitment: i've asked on Gentoo IRC and it turns out a lot of people had a similar story.

Then, I've built a keyboard for myself and I'm still using it. I liked the process and started to build them basically for giveaway. My hope was that it will help people who eager to switch to ergonomic keyboards but the bar is too high for them to build, to figure out things etc.. But it turned out that people who get it without this effort they just try, fail, and leave it dusting on the shelf. They lack commitment, nothing fuels their enthusiasm.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#87

Only mentioning this because the OP did - but for me (also ADHD) it's kind of the opposite. I'm finishing side projects for the first time ever because I can actually get them working before I get bored of them. My projects are more infra-leaning, and not all of them get much use, but some do. Others let me explore certain ideas and then sometimes serve as a reference point later when I run into something that remind…

Diagnosed with ADHD, ultimately does not change anything for me even through i had the same idea as you. Reason is that i can now start even more stuff in parallel. And some part of them get finished more before i can just prompt more when in focus, but instead of finishing i add more features.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#88

I wonder how many of the responses here bifurcate by age. The post resonates with me, but I am now in my early fifties. When I was in my 20's and 30's, I would have happily chased rabbits down all those holes, but now that time seems so brutally finite, I feel that anything encouring me to spend time on stuff other than what really matters is a strong negative. (Where "what matters" includes work, family, friends, an…

I think the bifurcation is between people who want to write code and people who want to have the end product of the code.

People who want to write code hate AI because it's doing the part they wanted to do.

People who want the end product of the code love AI because they want anything that helps them get to the end product faster.

The person who wrote this post feels oddly in neither camp. They like playing with the AI and seeing what comes out the other end. Some of the projects they boast about having built aren't even usable projects, like when they had it mock up a UI of a product and then got bored and moved on to the next before writing a backend.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they were blindly accepting the Assembly coming out of the compiler.

I don't really see this as analogous. Yes, you do choose an abstraction level to operate at, I rarely think in terms of transistors, or even gates (which by your logic an assembly programmer should do). But I often do think across adjacent abstraction levels, because abstractions are (varying levels of) leaky. Modern compilers are after many decades good enough and modern computers fast enough that it is rare that I…

My lived experience over the past few months is proving you wrong. I started with your position and have since been able to see how good the tools are when properly used. I've also noticed a huge gap in ability among engineers and I think the gap is widening. My theory is that some folks have the premium tools and some don't and the ones that don't are sort of in this weird limbo where they are sort of stubbornly annoyed at the idea of having to pay for these things so they lash out. Understandable but ultimately self defeating. You can in-fact force the LLM to use any pattern you want. I encountered this recently with a hand made framework I wanted to upgrade. It did stuff I didn't like. But well guess what? I provided it new constraints and it started to do what I want. Be as opinionated as you want. That's the whole point. It's basically your intern.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#90
what if…

we just used ai to improve products and services

instead of all this wanking off showing how you go through 1 billion tokens a month (not really that impressive)

what would be way more cool is

i made something that reliably saves others 8 hours a month of busywork

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