This is a response to a short essay by Wendell Berry which you can read here: http://tipiglen.co.uk/berrynot.html
Why I am not going to buy a computer
81–90 of 103 posts
Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before Here's the problem I have. No doubt an LLM made it faster to write those docs, but did you fully spot check it for accuracy? A lot of people aren't which I think is why the average joe hates it. These docs can still have AI generated mistakes which are easily glossed over by a regular human.
> Here's the problem I have. No doubt an LLM made it faster to write those docs, but did you fully spot check it for accuracy? Hi. I write lots of documentation already. I enjoy the taste of clean, fresh, accurate documentation. Spot-check it for accuracy? I review it. The same way I would review other documentation in the past. The difference? Fewer errors and issues, and when I do find them, it's far easier to get…
> Now it's an AI mistake, and people HATE AI mistakes. Even if the number of AI mistakes is fewer than the human mistakes.
I dont know. We have this hype cycle where ai or cars are talked about flawless or so much better then people ... years before they actually are. And then in each time we find that nah, they were not but now this time they certainly are.
And each time I read on HN about how people expect so much better from tech then from people. And usually, when you look at it, the opposite is true. Where human get criticised, tech gets tripple benefit of doubt.
Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Now it's an AI mistake, and people HATE AI mistakes. Even if the number of AI mistakes is fewer than the human mistakes. That's because AIs make mistakes no human would. If you're documenting a function, you might misspell something (or orthographically spell something that should be misspelled), or confuse two functions with similar names; you won't reference a function or feature that doesn't and has never existed…
> you won't reference a function or feature that doesn't and has never existed. That does sometimes exist in human docs. I've stumbled on "aspirational" features in docs that never really existed but were more just intended to exist. To me the mistakes are bad, but it's also that the docs tend to be pretty low quality IMO. LLMs tend to like to write novels where a sentence would have been better.
Yeah, that's true. I don't understand why they do that. People don't write like that, we're pretty economical. It's not even that they're repetitive to emphasize a point, they just engage in horrific circumlocution. Is it, like, that the facts of the input only percolate through the network when they emit a token, so they only "think" when they're outputting something? I don't know if that's it, but that's what I would think if I caught someone writing like this, that they're writing faster than they can think, so they fill the void with vacuous noise.
Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer
#84I grew up learning how to write by hand, and when I was in college we were required to code by hand. It was cool. When I need to do something hard I still reach for pen and paper. Sometimes though, writing long stuff with pen and paper is just hard. It hurts and my handwriting isn't excellent. I was curious about typewriters and so I learned about them and bought a few. They're amazing devices. Much closer to writing…
> I think we have forgotten how great real life was at getting stuff done. The computer was supposed to assist them and for a time it did. That is until we forgot what it was for and made it replace life altogether.
I read the book how the internet happened (great book btw) and I would politely like to refuse this claim :)
Or perhaps there could be a separation between the computer and the internet (or more accurately the browsers)
When only computers existed, there were assists of working tools (maybe older versions of docs,excel etc.) but when the internet browsers happened (Netscape), from the very start of it, there were ideas of advertisement and monetization of it.
The only reason that internet turned out to be so open in the start was that Netscape wanted to have it open to get as much turf as possible before Microsoft realizes and they did everything and even then Microsoft had too much monopoly and they released Internet Explorer.
Before internet or pre-dawn of it, there were people with computer magazines and people tinkering and it might be one of you judging from writing code by hand :)
There was an real passion in it and people like you followed it, until the internet experiment really worked and then sooner or later things from internet started reverting to some form of enshittification and immense advertisements and stock markets wanting more advertisements leading to wanting more retention and wanting to create/replace life altogether (most literally Meta and its failed metaverse)
While writing this comment, I have come to insight: Internet had come to replace to the Television (Information Highway) but lately it has ended up becoming one. The last line of "That is until we forgot what it was for and made it replace life altogether." might apply to television as well and the only bottleneck during that time was the technology which seems to have been the internet as now we have youtube,insta,tiktok with infinite scroll feeds, so perhaps things have always been like this way but you were never exposed so much to that side but now its coming for the coding side of things which you are passionate about.
In that sense nothing is as good or as bad as it seems but we are certainly going on a downward trend perhaps depending on the metric and I would prefer living in the golden past so I envy you :)
Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer
#85The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documen…
yup, ALMOST correct documentation, but using 10-20x the amount of words needed to actually document. Is it better than nothing? probably? Much of it is really hard for a human to read though. So if the purposed us to document what the AI did for a future instance of an AI, sure, but I don't see the current tech replacing technical writers in the short term.
Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We do this and then no one reads it. My experience with AI-written documentation is that, as a category, it contains just enough technical errors that more often than not I end up spending time running down confidently stated errors the old fashioned way: cross-referencing API documentation, reading code, etc. At that point you inevitably end up trying to get in touch with a human from the other team. In other word…
The step that a lot of people leave out is the revising : it is worth the human hours to go over the outputs of AI for this kind of thing with a fine-tooth comb to make sure it is usable, readable, accurate, etc.
I would then have to wonder if all the time saved in the first place at all. I have heard anecdotes of verifying AI output to be more time-consuming and generally even more painful/stressful than doing the whole work yourself perhaps.
As an employee, I would prefer to not be stressed and as an employer, I would prefer to not additionally stress my employee on all times so that I can have them use the stress for the works which truly matter the most (which is a limited resource as an employee shouldn't be burnt out or shouldn't be given unlimited stress)
Also its probably the ethical thing to do but even rational logic dictates so in my honest opinion (not sure how much of it works exactly on documentation stuff though*)
Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you won't reference a function or feature that doesn't and has never existed. That does sometimes exist in human docs. I've stumbled on "aspirational" features in docs that never really existed but were more just intended to exist. To me the mistakes are bad, but it's also that the docs tend to be pretty low quality IMO. LLMs tend to like to write novels where a sentence would have been better.
Yeah, that's true. I don't understand why they do that. People don't write like that, we're pretty economical. It's not even that they're repetitive to emphasize a point, they just engage in horrific circumlocution. Is it, like, that the facts of the input only percolate through the network when they emit a token, so they only "think" when they're outputting something? I don't know if that's it, but that's what I wou…
My non-serious assumption is that they prioritized the classic writings of 1800s authors like Johann David Wyss in their training. These authors were paid by the word, which resulted in long pointless chapters in their books just to milk money out of the printers.
Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer
#88Neither the original 1987 story nor the blog post make any sense to me. I feel the authors are focused on a niche aspect: exchanging deep human thoughts with other humans. For that use case, sure, don’t use a computer, don’t use AI. But there’s nothing wrong with a car made by a robot factory. The car is useful, regardless of how it was made. AI lets some people create new products, those may be useful.
Probably not the author's point but to me, the takeaway is that these people are driven by emotion and can't be won over with rational arguments. They have an emotional attachment to their old ways, a fear of being obsoleted, a wish that there is something truly special and mysterious about humans, etc.
Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer
#89As a user and consumer of objects, sometimes I want a meaningful experience with a thing made lovingly by human hands. I will take a dinner cooked by my friends over take-out any day of the week even if the restaurant makes objectively better food. But sometimes I am happy to use a mass produced utilitarian object because it solves the problem. I don't have an emotional relationship with my stapler. These two perspec…
I don't have answers to such as you put it the existential question of our generation(s) but I do wanted to extend some human connection in forms of appreciation that I (yes a human) really appreciated reading your comment and there were some wonders in the past which created the whole ecosystem where you can type on a keyboard and I can read on a screen and type back almost instantaneously and communicate. What an amazing time, I imagine people maybe even kings of vast lands from past feeling the time taking for mail to reach and would be just shocked by this technology and others we have created in what, a lifetime of progress and collaboration.
A famous quote that I remembered right now which feels apt: "We are more connected yet disconnected than ever before"
Have a good day, dear stranger from the other side of the world that I can send message instantaneously by just clicking reply, hopefully we meet again :)
Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer
#90The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documen…
Average Joe here - The problem is when your boss/PM is also an average Joe that bangs a 200 page doc and he doesn't even care to review properly leaving lots of gaps, redundant details and doesn't even know the rationale behind the decisions in the document.
Bottom line: there is no true ownership in the upper level so why should I take ownership in a product based on garbage produced documentation specs?