8 ms·

My AI-driven identity crisis

60 points by wonger_ 1y ago

k310 1y ago
> THIS is the identity crisis: I’ve had a talent for explaining things from a young age, and I’ve honed the talent into a skill over several decades. I derived satisfaction from knowing that I do it better than average. Now that skill has already been commodified. The writer seems to assume that people can learn entirely from computer displays. (Including glasses) That would be a world where our entire lives or a great deal of them, are devoted to computer generated facts, experiences, well, everything. There are still both creative and mundane experiences like the door molding that needs a fix. I've been through a few revolutions that "changed everything" From the phone without a dial (true) to cell phones that solve the formerly horrifying "I couldn't find you at the airport" situation. And so on. I guess that the existential question is: "What is the purpose, meaning, and joy in life?" It's not defined by the gadgets and technologies outside us, but truly by the relationships we have with people. So, if AI "replaces" my highly personal photographic experiences captured on film or memory, it's shared with close friends who know the story behind it and its value as an experience shared. I rarely post my photos anywhere, thanks to the image bureau and AI dragnets. They commoditize and destroy that personsl value. Art is self-expression. Read Joseph Conrad's preface [0] Likewise, as long as life is full of experiences away from computer screens (and glasses), those are real life, and the technology is just ornament. I had a plan for after-school education in which kids would go out and measure things and use computers to analyze the data. Like Kepler, but a lot faster. And the learning is in the doing. Very long ago, 50 years to be factual, I wanted to get a third class Electrician's Mate rating, and in those days, you could strike for a rating. Pass some exams and show expertise with real gear. One of the Warrant Officers was tickled that I did it "the old way" instead of "A" school, because it's all "A" school now. Probably computerized. Now, I'm retired, and relationships with people mean even more. I have more experiences and wisdom to share, and in a way that's unique to each person, not a multidimensional "profile" which might even be more complete than my understanding, but in a personal way that comes from the shared experience of being human and cares deeply about feelings, because we've had similar ones. Not defined by the technology of the time: Mom and Dad's old "Operator" phone or 53 Ford. But by what we shared as persons, equal in humanity though as different as a kid and parent can be, and through evolving lives and times. [0] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/joseph-conrad/the-nigger-of-the-narcissus/text/preface-2 https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/joseph-conrad/the-nigger-o...
- pillefitz 1y ago
  Beautiful comment, thanks
martin-t 1y ago
The issue is calling it "AI" in the first place. It's not, it's a statistical model of existing text. There's no "genAI", there is "genMS" - generative machine statistics. When you look at it that way, it's obvious the models are build on enormous amounts of work done by people publishing the the internet. This amount of work is many orders of magnitude more hours than it took to produce the training algorithms. As a result, most of the money people pay to access these models should go to the original authors. And that even ignores the fact that a model trained on AGPL code should be licensed under AGPL as well as its output - even if no single training input can be identified in the output, it's quite straightforwardly _derived_ from enormous amounts of trainings data input and a tiny (barely relevant) bit of prompt input. It's _derivative_ work.
- drdeca 1y ago
  I don’t think copyright works that way. Also, not sure what you mean by “statistics”. If you mean that a parameter for a parameterized probability distribution is chosen in order to make the distribution align with a dataset, ok, that’s true. That’s not generally what I think of when I hear “statistics” though?
  - martin-t 1y ago
    > I don’t think copyright works that way. Maybe but it should - see sibling comment. Statistics as in taking a large input and processing it into much fewer values which describe the input in some relevant ways (and allow reproducing it). Admittedly it's pretty informal.
- slidehero 1y ago
  > It's _derivative_ work. fwiw, I mostly agree with you (ai training stinks of some kind of infringement), but legal precedent is not favouring copyright holders at least for now. In Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta "judges have now held that copying works to train LLMs is “transformative” under the fair use doctrine" [1] i.e. no infrigement - bearing in mind this applies only in the US. The EU and the rest of the world are setting their own precedents. Copyright can only be contested in the jurisdiction that the alleged infringement occurred, and so far it seems that fair use is holding up. I'm curious to watch how it all plays out. It might end up similarly to Uber vs The World. They used their deep pockets to destabilise taxis globally and now that the law is catching up it doesn't matter any more - Uber already won. [1] https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/07/a-tale-of-three-cases-how-fair-use-is-playing-out-in-ai-copyright-lawsuits https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/07/a-tale-...
thorum 1y ago
I think we’re going to have to set bigger goals for ourselves. We’re all still figuring out what that means.
- shhhhhplease 1y ago
  Phone numbers and addresses became useless knowledge. Not useless, but you know what I mean. We’ll shuffle more out so what’s useful can be learned and stored. And so on and so on, but the pace and scale of this one is huge.
ip26 1y ago
Exactly this sort of thing makes it feel like there could be a "cliff" or "eternal winter of human publishing", where books like his are never again written by humans. Often when tech comes out that does something better than people, it makes sense for people to stop doing it. But in the case of "books explaining things", AI only learned how to explain things by examining the existing corpus - and there won't be any more human-generated content to continue to learn and evolve from, so the explanatory skills of AI could wind up frozen in 2025. An alternative would of course be that humans team up with AI to write better books of this sort, and are able to develop new and better ways of explaining things at a more rapid pace as a result. A relatively recent example that sticks in my mind is how data visualization has improved. Documents from the second half of the 1900's are shockingly bad at data presentation, and the shock is due to how the standard of practice has improved in the last few decades. AI probably wouldn't have figured this out on its own, but is now able to train on many, many examples of good visualization.
- scotty79 1y ago
  Books like his used to be a huge thing. There was a wall of computer books in every book store. When internet came they mostly disappeared. Why would I pay a lot to buy a book if I can find more up to date knowledge about any given software thing on the internet for free? Recently I noticed they make a comeback in the form of a small shelf that you can find in you try hard. But it reminds me of a comeback of record players. Books like his were already vintage before AI. A thing you buy not for the utility, but just because you have nostalgia and too much money.
  - hellisothers 1y ago
    Fair, I do like reading long form content with a narrative arc for some non-fiction topics though. Books on architecture and meta skills are still valuable.
FeepingCreature 1y ago
You shouldn't feel a need to justify your existence. You don't owe anybody anything for the right to exist.
- Animats 1y ago
  The world does not owe you the right to exist, either. Not under US-type capitalism.
  - diordiderot 1y ago
    > The world does not owe you the right to exist I mean thats just nature. Darwin etc. Maybe you should try the DPRK?
    - hackable_sand 1y ago
      Hold up Nature does give everyone the right to exist without justification. I'm not sure what Darwin has to say on the matter. He doesn't strike me as prescriptive.
    - danlitt 1y ago
      > Yet you participate in society. Curious!
    - piva00 1y ago
      There is a vast spectrum between US-style neoliberal-late-capitalism and the DPRK, maybe both extremes just need to die to stop this kind of stupid thought-terminating cliché for once.
  - srhtftw 1y ago
    I prefer to believe otherwise. In the words of the Desiderata¹ You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. ¹- https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html
  - weatherlite 1y ago
mccoyb 1y ago
I’ve tried to use flagship models to produce long-ish technical writing content and the result has not been satisfactory. The resulting content lacks consistency and coherency. The generated prose is rather breathless: in carefully articulated content, every sentence should have a place. Flagship models (Opus 4~) don’t seem to understand the value of a sentence. I’ve tried to prompt engineer this behavior (one should carefully attend to each sentence: how is it contributing to the technical narrative in this section, and overall?), but didn’t have much success. I suspect this might be solved by research on grounding generation against world models: much of verifying “is this sentence correct here?” has to do with my sharing of a world model of some domain with my audience. I use that world model to debug my own writing.
- melvinroest 1y ago
  Maybe do a new prompt at paragraph level?
- fredrikholm 1y ago
  I was born in 1990, quite late into the end tail of ordinary people not writing letters by hand, reading (a single book/article) for hours on end etc. and it's already evident that people outside of occupations that demand it just don't consume or produce as much (quality) writing as they used to. My fear isn't that LLMs will fail to meet our standards, my fear is that LLMs will drag us down to a new low of homogenized, dull and lifeless form of writing. Perhaps I'm biased, but it feels as if the few times I am impressed by someones writing, the material is 20 years old or older, even if said author is still producing work.
  - mccoyb 1y ago
    I think you're accurately describing a "regression to the mean" phenomenon, which LLMs have transmitted to areas involving programmatic control through text. I recently used an LLM to help scaffold a piece of technical writing. I showed it to several of my peers (sharp and accomplished PhD students), and they immediately identified the paragraphs (even sentences in captions!) written by an LLM. I had spent a good amount of time prompt engineering Opus 4 to try and produce a coherent piece of content aligned with a narrative which I had already developed, but it was still _immediately obvious_ what was not consistent ... it stood out like a sore thumb to experts. By the the time we finished the content, there was not a sentence of LLM-generated writing in the final product. Possibly an incorrect extrapolation, but I think my experience here is the current status quo. Code is a bit easier for these systems, because the LLM can align against test suites, type systems, etc. But for writing ... you just can't trust the current capabilities to pass the sniff test by experts. After all, how does one commmunicate "coherence" as a test which the LLM might align its generations against? That's why you need a shared world model (with your audience) -- and if we could produce a computational representation of such a thing, we might have a chance at better coherent / consistent technical writing generations.
NBJack 1y ago
Strangely enough, I suspect that if AI truly becomes prevalent, in about 5-10 years there will be a counter culture of those seeking things they strongly believe are human made, tangible, and genuine. I believe folks will yearn for in person shows and performances, seek respected authors and artists, getting out of the AI slop bubble at least for a time. I don't think it will ever counter the change, but I suspect there will be some interesting developments in culture worldwide caused by this.
- canistel 1y ago
  This can be compared with fine art (as against photography or digital art), theatre (as against films), handmade (as against factory produced) etc. In all these cases, the originals occupy an expensive niche, usually beyond the reach of the common-folk.
  - NBJack 1y ago
    You are probably right. That would track well with prior behavior. I suppose it will also depend on how affordable/accessible these models will be.
- georgeburdell 1y ago
  Had this thought too. Even came up with a tongue-in-cheek term for such a group: luddaites :). I believe it will be sooner than 5-10 years.
- weatherlite 1y ago
  Could be, but not for learning honestly, and not for most things if we're being honest. If I want to learn Python then I want to learn Python, I don't need the sweat of another human involved in the experience. Plus A.I will probably do a much better job curtailing to my needs than some book. Sure, for some niche artwork and prostitution there will always be demand for human labor.
scotty79 1y ago
The name of the game for highly creative people is pivot. Have you ever wished you had a clone, even imperfect one, that you could just tell what to do, so you can do other stuff? Do you have any ideas that would require you to hire some people to even attempt them but never could afford the cost nor the risk? Did you ever wanted to try something else but doing what you are best at took the bulk of your time? Explore those ideas now with the use of AI. Broaden your horizons. Throw a lot of daring things at the AI wall and see what sticks for you. With AI powered tools there never been a better time to be highly creative person.
- hackable_sand 1y ago
  Read that comment in Dan Steven's American accent and it makes a lot more sense!
boristsr 1y ago
I understand your thoughts. I've had similar motivation problems about blogging since the release of ChatGPT. Feels like you are writing for a machine rather than readers. Definitely seen a decline in readers since December 2023 on older articles that previously had steady traffic for years. Also, I just purchased LazyVim For Ambitious Developers. I've used the online edition a number of times in recent months. Thanks for your work!
kookamamie 1y ago
> It’s not clear whether AI will take our programming jobs I think it's safe to say it is pretty clear. As an example, you can power 10 developers with the highest tier of Claude Code Max for a year under the price of a new developer. At this point, having plenty of personal experience with the tool, I'd pick the former option. There, one less job for a developer.
- weatherlite 1y ago
  I agree. It's getting tougher and I don't know why you're being downvoted. However, so many people can now build new companies we might have a good few years left, perhaps more than you'd think. It could be another decade of good work which is enough for me personally.
  - kookamamie 1y ago
    I don't mind the downvotes. I get it - it is a hard pill to swallow, especially when so many identify with being a programmer.
    - weatherlite 1y ago
      It's both the identifying thing and of course the steady (and mostly - high) income. Could be quite a hit for many people to become economically dislocated just like that.
      - BizarreByte 1y ago
        > It's both the identifying thing and of course the steady (and mostly - high) income. It's the income for me. This career was my only ticket out of poverty, it actually saved me from an otherwise horrible life. Now supposed to cheer that I might very well be replaced in the foreseeable future? It's the only line of work I'm skilled at or qualified to do and I honestly don't know what awaits me if I lose it.
theletterf 1y ago
As a tech writer, I feel like I'm becoming a context curator: I'll still write, with AI being one of the readers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837875
briga 1y ago
I've been reading a lot of (human-written) books lately, and one thing this has made abundantly clear to me is that AI writing just doesn't stack up. For one AI writing is often completely wrong about the details. But it also just tends to be bland and superficial. If you want a 5-minute summary of something, sure, it can do a passable job. But if I want something substantial and carefully thought out, I'll choose a book written by a human expert every time. Maybe this will change at some point in the future, but for now there's no way I would substitute a well-written book on a subject for AI slop. These models are trained on human-written material anyway, why not just go straight to the source?
revskill 1y ago
Ai needd to be perdonalized to understand human assumption and knowledge better.
nikolayasdf123 1y ago
yes, in the age of AI making any money is getting increasingly hard
roadside_picnic 1y ago
As an author who is currently under contract to finish a book, I'm a bit annoyed that AI really can't write for me. I'm busy, I really like writing, but writing a good book does involve serious time researching and exploring. I've tried to have AI help me through, but I've more often than not had to dive into source code and run experiments to make sure I understand what's going on. It's even a book on AI, so there would be no shame at all in using AI to write it. > So what am I good for anymore? And here I was thinking this question is why writers write at all. Who else would do something requiring so much work for so little reward but those who fundamentally think they aren't worth much, it's what unites us. But I don't think I worry about being replaced, not because I'm irreplaceable, but because if I could be completely replaced I think that might be quite a delightful experience. Imagine all those people who need something from you satisfied. That's what being replaced would entail: not a single person demanding a single thing from you. But unfortunately no, I'm still needed here, annoyingly.
- BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
  > And here I was thinking this question is why writers write at all. As a job? Income. Like every other job we do in this insufferable world.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  >Who else would do something requiring so much work for so little reward but those who fundamentally think they aren't worth much, it's what unites us. This seems like the most dystopian statement given that writers are taking pride in the unity / fact that they are under rewarded / basically exploited by the system and you are taking this exploitation as a sense of unity? I understand that you didn't mean any harm with the statement but I feel like this statement is true and it just shows what a bloody dystopian nightmare we live in man. Exploitation has become the norm.
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    > Exploitation has become the norm. This has been the case since the dawn of ages.
irjustin 1y ago
> Stack Overflow usage is in absolute free-fall. I'm actually sad by this because it was such a place that was so foundational my development as an engineer. I visited it once in last month or so, when I had an AWS Lambda - Playwright issue that need specific settings to solve the problem but Claude, Gemini gave me a mash of the answers. I'm not complaining, but I "grew up" with Stack. Our space no longer looks like a pyramid, I liken it to diamond-ish. New grads will simply not be able to find jobs[0] and I'm worried for anyone entering the E in STEAM (can't speak for others). It's happening now and we're only at the tip of the iceberg. I have 2 young children and am uncertain about how to help them navigate the future. The sword of efficiency doesn't care about my children. I mean that's my whole job right? to help people become efficient? It's just the speed and scale is insane. More questions than answers... [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs-students.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs...
- slaterbug 1y ago
  My partner and I have basically decided not to have children at this point for the exact reason you stated. The rate of change at the moment is dizzying and I’m not sure that the future we’re heading toward is one that I’d want my kids to be part of.
  - hellisothers 1y ago
    It is dire and your conclusion is valid, having children in the face of uncertainty allows you to influence the future though. Even if it means sacrificing your children at the altar, gives them the opportunity to influence the future too.
low_tech_love 1y ago
“I have hopes for a utopian future where AI does everything better than humans, which allows us to spend our time poorly doing the things we are most excited about.” This thought is quite common and widespread, I’ve heard it multiple times, and it always baffles me. The very idea that human beings would stop exploiting each other and just live a peaceful, content life with their AI helpers is so hopelessly distant from the way I understand the world. I wish I was wrong, but human beings don’t exploit each other because we need to, as if it was an unfortunate thing; we exploit each other because we want and because we can. Even if AI robots solved most of our problems, we will never simply accept that and let others live in peace. Some human beings will always look for opportunities to rise above others, as long as they somehow can. I’d go even further as to say that, in case a future like that became actually feasible and predictable, lots of people currently in positions of power would fight very hard to keep that from happening.
- fulafel 1y ago
  For a remedy to this flavour of pessimism I'd suggest you read Bregman's Humankind[1]. tldr; the current level of exploiting each other doesn't come naturally for people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humankind:_A_Hopeful_History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humankind:_A_Hopeful_History
  - jjani 1y ago
    > the current level of exploiting each other doesn't come naturally for people. Agreed, it doesn't. Nothing about that fact seems reason for optimism, however. It's a gigantic leap to go from "the current level of exploiting each other doesn't come naturally for people" to "that level is going to decrease, or stop rising, any time soon".
    - low_tech_love 1y ago
      It doesn’t as long as we keep each other at check. I do believe it’s natural for humans to take advantage of opportunities that arise in your environment; if a human being sees that they can do better, at the expense of others, then it seems to me that is a very natural response for an individual that has a single, disconnected brain (as opposed to some kind of hive mind). But don’t mistake “natural” with “good”. Actually that is much more natural (in a wild sense) than having a complex society full of moral and philosophical constraints. I myself believe very strongly in ethics and try to be ethical as much as I can, but that doesn’t mean ethical behaviour comes “naturally”. If you can’t accept that not everyone will be ethical, and some will act “savagely”, then you’re being naive and opening yourself to, well, opportunities of exploitation.
globalnode 1y ago
didnt read the article but i doubt ai was the driver
luxpir 1y ago
Sell a course.
alecco 1y ago
CoRecursive's recent episode "Coding in the Red-Queen Era" about identity as a programmer and AI tools is very good. He talks about how to avoid falling into the trap of making yourself dumber. https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/ https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/
Yizahi 1y ago
Wow, what an enormous left side "header" ("sider"?). It takes 750 pixels out of 1920 on my screen, almost 40% of the site.
Havoc 1y ago
> So what am I good for anymore? That question will haunt many over the next two decades. Especially once tech gets good enough to replace most manual labour. Suddenly a billion plus thinking exactly that

60 points by wonger_ 1y ago

k310 1y ago

> THIS is the identity crisis: I’ve had a talent for explaining things from a young age, and I’ve honed the talent into a skill over several decades. I derived satisfaction from knowing that I do it better than average. Now that skill has already been commodified. The writer seems to assume that people can learn entirely from computer displays. (Including glasses) That would be a world where our entire lives or a great deal of them, are devoted to computer generated facts, experiences, well, everything. There are still both creative and mundane experiences like the door molding that needs a fix. I've been through a few revolutions that "changed everything" From the phone without a dial (true) to cell phones that solve the formerly horrifying "I couldn't find you at the airport" situation. And so on. I guess that the existential question is: "What is the purpose, meaning, and joy in life?" It's not defined by the gadgets and technologies outside us, but truly by the relationships we have with people. So, if AI "replaces" my highly personal photographic experiences captured on film or memory, it's shared with close friends who know the story behind it and its value as an experience shared. I rarely post my photos anywhere, thanks to the image bureau and AI dragnets. They commoditize and destroy that personsl value. Art is self-expression. Read Joseph Conrad's preface [0] Likewise, as long as life is full of experiences away from computer screens (and glasses), those are real life, and the technology is just ornament. I had a plan for after-school education in which kids would go out and measure things and use computers to analyze the data. Like Kepler, but a lot faster. And the learning is in the doing. Very long ago, 50 years to be factual, I wanted to get a third class Electrician's Mate rating, and in those days, you could strike for a rating. Pass some exams and show expertise with real gear. One of the Warrant Officers was tickled that I did it "the old way" instead of "A" school, because it's all "A" school now. Probably computerized. Now, I'm retired, and relationships with people mean even more. I have more experiences and wisdom to share, and in a way that's unique to each person, not a multidimensional "profile" which might even be more complete than my understanding, but in a personal way that comes from the shared experience of being human and cares deeply about feelings, because we've had similar ones. Not defined by the technology of the time: Mom and Dad's old "Operator" phone or 53 Ford. But by what we shared as persons, equal in humanity though as different as a kid and parent can be, and through evolving lives and times. [0] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/joseph-conrad/the-nigger-of-the-narcissus/text/preface-2 https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/joseph-conrad/the-nigger-o...

pillefitz 1y ago
Beautiful comment, thanks

martin-t 1y ago

The issue is calling it "AI" in the first place. It's not, it's a statistical model of existing text. There's no "genAI", there is "genMS" - generative machine statistics. When you look at it that way, it's obvious the models are build on enormous amounts of work done by people publishing the the internet. This amount of work is many orders of magnitude more hours than it took to produce the training algorithms. As a result, most of the money people pay to access these models should go to the original authors. And that even ignores the fact that a model trained on AGPL code should be licensed under AGPL as well as its output - even if no single training input can be identified in the output, it's quite straightforwardly _derived_ from enormous amounts of trainings data input and a tiny (barely relevant) bit of prompt input. It's _derivative_ work.

drdeca 1y ago
I don’t think copyright works that way. Also, not sure what you mean by “statistics”. If you mean that a parameter for a parameterized probability distribution is chosen in order to make the distribution align with a dataset, ok, that’s true. That’s not generally what I think of when I hear “statistics” though?
- martin-t 1y ago
  > I don’t think copyright works that way. Maybe but it should - see sibling comment. Statistics as in taking a large input and processing it into much fewer values which describe the input in some relevant ways (and allow reproducing it). Admittedly it's pretty informal.
slidehero 1y ago
> It's _derivative_ work. fwiw, I mostly agree with you (ai training stinks of some kind of infringement), but legal precedent is not favouring copyright holders at least for now. In Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta "judges have now held that copying works to train LLMs is “transformative” under the fair use doctrine" [1] i.e. no infrigement - bearing in mind this applies only in the US. The EU and the rest of the world are setting their own precedents. Copyright can only be contested in the jurisdiction that the alleged infringement occurred, and so far it seems that fair use is holding up. I'm curious to watch how it all plays out. It might end up similarly to Uber vs The World. They used their deep pockets to destabilise taxis globally and now that the law is catching up it doesn't matter any more - Uber already won. [1] https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/07/a-tale-of-three-cases-how-fair-use-is-playing-out-in-ai-copyright-lawsuits https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/07/a-tale-...

thorum 1y ago

I think we’re going to have to set bigger goals for ourselves. We’re all still figuring out what that means.

shhhhhplease 1y ago
Phone numbers and addresses became useless knowledge. Not useless, but you know what I mean. We’ll shuffle more out so what’s useful can be learned and stored. And so on and so on, but the pace and scale of this one is huge.

ip26 1y ago

Exactly this sort of thing makes it feel like there could be a "cliff" or "eternal winter of human publishing", where books like his are never again written by humans. Often when tech comes out that does something better than people, it makes sense for people to stop doing it. But in the case of "books explaining things", AI only learned how to explain things by examining the existing corpus - and there won't be any more human-generated content to continue to learn and evolve from, so the explanatory skills of AI could wind up frozen in 2025. An alternative would of course be that humans team up with AI to write better books of this sort, and are able to develop new and better ways of explaining things at a more rapid pace as a result. A relatively recent example that sticks in my mind is how data visualization has improved. Documents from the second half of the 1900's are shockingly bad at data presentation, and the shock is due to how the standard of practice has improved in the last few decades. AI probably wouldn't have figured this out on its own, but is now able to train on many, many examples of good visualization.

scotty79 1y ago
Books like his used to be a huge thing. There was a wall of computer books in every book store. When internet came they mostly disappeared. Why would I pay a lot to buy a book if I can find more up to date knowledge about any given software thing on the internet for free? Recently I noticed they make a comeback in the form of a small shelf that you can find in you try hard. But it reminds me of a comeback of record players. Books like his were already vintage before AI. A thing you buy not for the utility, but just because you have nostalgia and too much money.
- hellisothers 1y ago
  Fair, I do like reading long form content with a narrative arc for some non-fiction topics though. Books on architecture and meta skills are still valuable.

FeepingCreature 1y ago

You shouldn't feel a need to justify your existence. You don't owe anybody anything for the right to exist.

Animats 1y ago
The world does not owe you the right to exist, either. Not under US-type capitalism.
- diordiderot 1y ago
  > The world does not owe you the right to exist I mean thats just nature. Darwin etc. Maybe you should try the DPRK?
  - hackable_sand 1y ago
    Hold up Nature does give everyone the right to exist without justification. I'm not sure what Darwin has to say on the matter. He doesn't strike me as prescriptive.
  - danlitt 1y ago
    > Yet you participate in society. Curious!
  - piva00 1y ago
    There is a vast spectrum between US-style neoliberal-late-capitalism and the DPRK, maybe both extremes just need to die to stop this kind of stupid thought-terminating cliché for once.
- srhtftw 1y ago
  I prefer to believe otherwise. In the words of the Desiderata¹ You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. ¹- https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html
- weatherlite 1y ago

mccoyb 1y ago

I’ve tried to use flagship models to produce long-ish technical writing content and the result has not been satisfactory. The resulting content lacks consistency and coherency. The generated prose is rather breathless: in carefully articulated content, every sentence should have a place. Flagship models (Opus 4~) don’t seem to understand the value of a sentence. I’ve tried to prompt engineer this behavior (one should carefully attend to each sentence: how is it contributing to the technical narrative in this section, and overall?), but didn’t have much success. I suspect this might be solved by research on grounding generation against world models: much of verifying “is this sentence correct here?” has to do with my sharing of a world model of some domain with my audience. I use that world model to debug my own writing.

melvinroest 1y ago
Maybe do a new prompt at paragraph level?
fredrikholm 1y ago
I was born in 1990, quite late into the end tail of ordinary people not writing letters by hand, reading (a single book/article) for hours on end etc. and it's already evident that people outside of occupations that demand it just don't consume or produce as much (quality) writing as they used to. My fear isn't that LLMs will fail to meet our standards, my fear is that LLMs will drag us down to a new low of homogenized, dull and lifeless form of writing. Perhaps I'm biased, but it feels as if the few times I am impressed by someones writing, the material is 20 years old or older, even if said author is still producing work.
- mccoyb 1y ago
  I think you're accurately describing a "regression to the mean" phenomenon, which LLMs have transmitted to areas involving programmatic control through text. I recently used an LLM to help scaffold a piece of technical writing. I showed it to several of my peers (sharp and accomplished PhD students), and they immediately identified the paragraphs (even sentences in captions!) written by an LLM. I had spent a good amount of time prompt engineering Opus 4 to try and produce a coherent piece of content aligned with a narrative which I had already developed, but it was still _immediately obvious_ what was not consistent ... it stood out like a sore thumb to experts. By the the time we finished the content, there was not a sentence of LLM-generated writing in the final product. Possibly an incorrect extrapolation, but I think my experience here is the current status quo. Code is a bit easier for these systems, because the LLM can align against test suites, type systems, etc. But for writing ... you just can't trust the current capabilities to pass the sniff test by experts. After all, how does one commmunicate "coherence" as a test which the LLM might align its generations against? That's why you need a shared world model (with your audience) -- and if we could produce a computational representation of such a thing, we might have a chance at better coherent / consistent technical writing generations.

NBJack 1y ago

Strangely enough, I suspect that if AI truly becomes prevalent, in about 5-10 years there will be a counter culture of those seeking things they strongly believe are human made, tangible, and genuine. I believe folks will yearn for in person shows and performances, seek respected authors and artists, getting out of the AI slop bubble at least for a time. I don't think it will ever counter the change, but I suspect there will be some interesting developments in culture worldwide caused by this.

canistel 1y ago
This can be compared with fine art (as against photography or digital art), theatre (as against films), handmade (as against factory produced) etc. In all these cases, the originals occupy an expensive niche, usually beyond the reach of the common-folk.
- NBJack 1y ago
  You are probably right. That would track well with prior behavior. I suppose it will also depend on how affordable/accessible these models will be.
georgeburdell 1y ago
Had this thought too. Even came up with a tongue-in-cheek term for such a group: luddaites :). I believe it will be sooner than 5-10 years.
weatherlite 1y ago
Could be, but not for learning honestly, and not for most things if we're being honest. If I want to learn Python then I want to learn Python, I don't need the sweat of another human involved in the experience. Plus A.I will probably do a much better job curtailing to my needs than some book. Sure, for some niche artwork and prostitution there will always be demand for human labor.

scotty79 1y ago

The name of the game for highly creative people is pivot. Have you ever wished you had a clone, even imperfect one, that you could just tell what to do, so you can do other stuff? Do you have any ideas that would require you to hire some people to even attempt them but never could afford the cost nor the risk? Did you ever wanted to try something else but doing what you are best at took the bulk of your time? Explore those ideas now with the use of AI. Broaden your horizons. Throw a lot of daring things at the AI wall and see what sticks for you. With AI powered tools there never been a better time to be highly creative person.

hackable_sand 1y ago
Read that comment in Dan Steven's American accent and it makes a lot more sense!

boristsr 1y ago

I understand your thoughts. I've had similar motivation problems about blogging since the release of ChatGPT. Feels like you are writing for a machine rather than readers. Definitely seen a decline in readers since December 2023 on older articles that previously had steady traffic for years. Also, I just purchased LazyVim For Ambitious Developers. I've used the online edition a number of times in recent months. Thanks for your work!

kookamamie 1y ago

> It’s not clear whether AI will take our programming jobs I think it's safe to say it is pretty clear. As an example, you can power 10 developers with the highest tier of Claude Code Max for a year under the price of a new developer. At this point, having plenty of personal experience with the tool, I'd pick the former option. There, one less job for a developer.

weatherlite 1y ago
I agree. It's getting tougher and I don't know why you're being downvoted. However, so many people can now build new companies we might have a good few years left, perhaps more than you'd think. It could be another decade of good work which is enough for me personally.
- kookamamie 1y ago
  I don't mind the downvotes. I get it - it is a hard pill to swallow, especially when so many identify with being a programmer.
  - weatherlite 1y ago
    It's both the identifying thing and of course the steady (and mostly - high) income. Could be quite a hit for many people to become economically dislocated just like that.
    - BizarreByte 1y ago
      > It's both the identifying thing and of course the steady (and mostly - high) income. It's the income for me. This career was my only ticket out of poverty, it actually saved me from an otherwise horrible life. Now supposed to cheer that I might very well be replaced in the foreseeable future? It's the only line of work I'm skilled at or qualified to do and I honestly don't know what awaits me if I lose it.

theletterf 1y ago

As a tech writer, I feel like I'm becoming a context curator: I'll still write, with AI being one of the readers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837875

briga 1y ago

I've been reading a lot of (human-written) books lately, and one thing this has made abundantly clear to me is that AI writing just doesn't stack up. For one AI writing is often completely wrong about the details. But it also just tends to be bland and superficial. If you want a 5-minute summary of something, sure, it can do a passable job. But if I want something substantial and carefully thought out, I'll choose a book written by a human expert every time. Maybe this will change at some point in the future, but for now there's no way I would substitute a well-written book on a subject for AI slop. These models are trained on human-written material anyway, why not just go straight to the source?

revskill 1y ago

Ai needd to be perdonalized to understand human assumption and knowledge better.

nikolayasdf123 1y ago

yes, in the age of AI making any money is getting increasingly hard

roadside_picnic 1y ago

As an author who is currently under contract to finish a book, I'm a bit annoyed that AI really can't write for me. I'm busy, I really like writing, but writing a good book does involve serious time researching and exploring. I've tried to have AI help me through, but I've more often than not had to dive into source code and run experiments to make sure I understand what's going on. It's even a book on AI, so there would be no shame at all in using AI to write it. > So what am I good for anymore? And here I was thinking this question is why writers write at all. Who else would do something requiring so much work for so little reward but those who fundamentally think they aren't worth much, it's what unites us. But I don't think I worry about being replaced, not because I'm irreplaceable, but because if I could be completely replaced I think that might be quite a delightful experience. Imagine all those people who need something from you satisfied. That's what being replaced would entail: not a single person demanding a single thing from you. But unfortunately no, I'm still needed here, annoyingly.

BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
> And here I was thinking this question is why writers write at all. As a job? Income. Like every other job we do in this insufferable world.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
>Who else would do something requiring so much work for so little reward but those who fundamentally think they aren't worth much, it's what unites us. This seems like the most dystopian statement given that writers are taking pride in the unity / fact that they are under rewarded / basically exploited by the system and you are taking this exploitation as a sense of unity? I understand that you didn't mean any harm with the statement but I feel like this statement is true and it just shows what a bloody dystopian nightmare we live in man. Exploitation has become the norm.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  > Exploitation has become the norm. This has been the case since the dawn of ages.

irjustin 1y ago

> Stack Overflow usage is in absolute free-fall. I'm actually sad by this because it was such a place that was so foundational my development as an engineer. I visited it once in last month or so, when I had an AWS Lambda - Playwright issue that need specific settings to solve the problem but Claude, Gemini gave me a mash of the answers. I'm not complaining, but I "grew up" with Stack. Our space no longer looks like a pyramid, I liken it to diamond-ish. New grads will simply not be able to find jobs[0] and I'm worried for anyone entering the E in STEAM (can't speak for others). It's happening now and we're only at the tip of the iceberg. I have 2 young children and am uncertain about how to help them navigate the future. The sword of efficiency doesn't care about my children. I mean that's my whole job right? to help people become efficient? It's just the speed and scale is insane. More questions than answers... [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs-students.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs...

slaterbug 1y ago
My partner and I have basically decided not to have children at this point for the exact reason you stated. The rate of change at the moment is dizzying and I’m not sure that the future we’re heading toward is one that I’d want my kids to be part of.
- hellisothers 1y ago
  It is dire and your conclusion is valid, having children in the face of uncertainty allows you to influence the future though. Even if it means sacrificing your children at the altar, gives them the opportunity to influence the future too.

low_tech_love 1y ago

“I have hopes for a utopian future where AI does everything better than humans, which allows us to spend our time poorly doing the things we are most excited about.” This thought is quite common and widespread, I’ve heard it multiple times, and it always baffles me. The very idea that human beings would stop exploiting each other and just live a peaceful, content life with their AI helpers is so hopelessly distant from the way I understand the world. I wish I was wrong, but human beings don’t exploit each other because we need to, as if it was an unfortunate thing; we exploit each other because we want and because we can. Even if AI robots solved most of our problems, we will never simply accept that and let others live in peace. Some human beings will always look for opportunities to rise above others, as long as they somehow can. I’d go even further as to say that, in case a future like that became actually feasible and predictable, lots of people currently in positions of power would fight very hard to keep that from happening.

fulafel 1y ago
For a remedy to this flavour of pessimism I'd suggest you read Bregman's Humankind[1]. tldr; the current level of exploiting each other doesn't come naturally for people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humankind:_A_Hopeful_History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humankind:_A_Hopeful_History
- jjani 1y ago
  > the current level of exploiting each other doesn't come naturally for people. Agreed, it doesn't. Nothing about that fact seems reason for optimism, however. It's a gigantic leap to go from "the current level of exploiting each other doesn't come naturally for people" to "that level is going to decrease, or stop rising, any time soon".
  - low_tech_love 1y ago
    It doesn’t as long as we keep each other at check. I do believe it’s natural for humans to take advantage of opportunities that arise in your environment; if a human being sees that they can do better, at the expense of others, then it seems to me that is a very natural response for an individual that has a single, disconnected brain (as opposed to some kind of hive mind). But don’t mistake “natural” with “good”. Actually that is much more natural (in a wild sense) than having a complex society full of moral and philosophical constraints. I myself believe very strongly in ethics and try to be ethical as much as I can, but that doesn’t mean ethical behaviour comes “naturally”. If you can’t accept that not everyone will be ethical, and some will act “savagely”, then you’re being naive and opening yourself to, well, opportunities of exploitation.

globalnode 1y ago

didnt read the article but i doubt ai was the driver

luxpir 1y ago

Sell a course.

alecco 1y ago

CoRecursive's recent episode "Coding in the Red-Queen Era" about identity as a programmer and AI tools is very good. He talks about how to avoid falling into the trap of making yourself dumber. https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/ https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/

Yizahi 1y ago

Wow, what an enormous left side "header" ("sider"?). It takes 750 pixels out of 1920 on my screen, almost 40% of the site.

Havoc 1y ago

> So what am I good for anymore? That question will haunt many over the next two decades. Especially once tech gets good enough to replace most manual labour. Suddenly a billion plus thinking exactly that