7 ms·

> is it about doing, or is it about getting things done? No, this is a false dichotomy and slippery slope dangerous thinking. It’s about building a world wher

by gyomu 11mo ago

> is it about doing, or is it about getting things done? No, this is a false dichotomy and slippery slope dangerous thinking. It’s about building a world where we can all live in and find meaning, joy, dignity, and fulfillment, which requires a balance between pursuing the ends and preserving the means as worthwhile human pursuits. If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time, or it was prepared entirely by robots controlled by nefarious people using the profits to harm society, I don’t want it. Human society and civilization is for the benefit of humans, not for filling checkboxes above all else.

rustystump 11mo ago
I guess you are a vegan too right? I get this take but it is naivety. Not everything must pass the morality purity test. Did mass processed food production stop people from cooking or enjoying human made food? No it did not. The same is true in almost all domains where a form of industrialization happens.
- nullgeo 11mo ago
  > Did mass processed food production stop people from cooking or enjoying human made food? Yeah but what if I'm getting pitted against my coworkers who are vibe coding and getting things done faster than I am. Some people write code with pride because it's their brainchild. AI completely ruins the fun for those people when they have to compete against their coworkers for productivity. I'm not in disagreement with you or the GP comment, but this it is super hard to make nuanced comments about GenAI.
  - generativenoise 11mo ago
    They are wrong however. To take the food example, the existence of processed food production creates artifacts like food deserts. If you are privileged these things don't effect you as much as you get more agency. Just the existence of quick to eat and prepare foods are going to put limits on how long you are going to be given for lunch and dinner. Even if you wanted to prepare fresh food, the system is going to make it difficult since it becomes an unsupported activity in terms of time allowances and market access.
    - rustystump 11mo ago
      A subjective take that processed quick food is bad or less than the opposite. It is all about new things that optimize the old. To be clear when i say processed i dont mean tv dinners but that have prepared food that human didnt cook.
      - generativenoise 11mo ago
        I made no judgement about the quality of processed food or where the different options rank in terms access to calories and nutrition, or what is actually feasible. It was simply about how changes can become mildly to severely obligate to certain populations in our economic system.
  - rustystump 11mo ago
    That is an issue that exists regardless of ai but i do get it. Most furniture is not hand made. But that doesnt preclude people from enjoying buying or making handmade furniture. The fact that i think people need to get over is that you are blessed beyond measure to have a fun job that gives you creative joy and satisfaction. Losing that because of ai/new tool is not some unprecedented event signaling the end of creativity. A job is a job. What amuses me is i have just as much fun clacking away with some ai help as i did before. But then again i like the problem solving process more than writing the same code in one specific programming language.
- jimbokun 11mo ago
  No, but it certainly made the nutritional content of the food we eat worse. It saved countless people from starvation while introducing the disease of obesity on a massive scale. I suppose that's a reasonable tradeoff.
prmph 11mo ago
I was a bit disappointed by your response because, from the way you started it, I was expecting a stronger argument. I do agree with your point, but I think a key aspect of the false dichotomy is that there is evidence that AI is not actually "getting things done"
- linsomniac 11mo ago
  >there is evidence that AI is not actually "getting things done" But there is also evidence that AI is actually getting things done, right? Most of the evidence that AI can't get things done that I've seen tends to be along the lines of asking it to do a large job and it struggling. It seems like a lot of people stop there, and either don't investigate problems where it might be a better fit.
  - aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
    > It seems like a lot of people stop there, and either don't investigate problems where it might be a better fit. The AI sceptics do think deeply about where AI might be a better fit. They indeed thought deeply about this, but for every hypthetical use case they could come up with, they had to conclude that - AI has to become much much more reliable to be suitable for this use case - the current AI architectures (as "the thing that bigtech markets") will likely by principle never be able to achieve this kind of reliability This is exactly why these AI-sceptical people got so sceptical about AI, and also the reason why these AI sceptics got so vocal about their opinions.
  - queenkjuul 11mo ago
    I've put far more time than i should have trying to get AI to successfully complete tasks of varying sizes in our codebase at work. It simply cannot do things reliably and adequately when working in a large codebase. It lacks sufficient context, it ignores established conventions, worst of all, it often ignores instructions (endless unnecessary comments being my personal biggest peeve). So i think i have, in fact, tried my best to use it. It's great for little tiny things. Give me a one-off script to transform some command's output, translate some code from Python to Typescript, write individual unit tests for individual functions. But none of that is transforming how i do my job, it's saving me minutes, not hours. Nobody at my company is getting serious quantities of programming done with AI, either, and not for lack of trying. I've never been one to claim it's useless, just that it's usefulness (i.e. "how much is getting done") is drastically overblown.
7492728292283 11mo ago
[flagged]
HDThoreaun 11mo ago
This is dumb. Every fast food meal you eat was prepared by someone having a miserable time. Guess what, theyd be more miserable without the job. Getting stuff done is what benefits humans, not feel good jobs.
- zeofig 11mo ago
  One of the reasons I try to avoid fast food and indeed everything.
  - HDThoreaun 11mo ago
    I really don’t see how this helps the fast food workers. When less people eat their food they lose jobs and become even more miserable. Sure if you hire them as a private chef you’re helping them out but if just cook yourself you haven’t done a thing to improve their life.
    - zeofig 11mo ago
      You're right. I'll send them some thoughts and prayers too.
- feisty0630 11mo ago
  It's not "dumb", you're just presenting a steelman that directly contradicts what the person you're replying to wrote. You might indeed be shocked to find that not everyone consumes fast food.
  - JustExAWS 11mo ago
    Did the people who worked on the farm to grow and harvest your food enjoy it?
    - feisty0630 11mo ago
      Are you seriously and earnestly arguing that harm-minimisation is useless and we should all just open the human-suffering throttle, or did you just not think that far ahead? I am hoping the latter. Being foolish is far more temporary a condition than being cruel.
protocolture 11mo ago
>If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time, or it was prepared entirely by robots controlled by nefarious people using the profits to harm society, I don’t want it. So much infrastructure is built by people having a less than good time. An Engineer might get the jollies designing a bridge, but the workers who work on it dont. The goal is to give lots of people happiness from not having to drive 100km out of their way. If we solve a lot of problems for a lot of people and all it costs is the happiness of a few software engineers, well I am not convinced they were happy to begin with. Fund it.
- com2kid 11mo ago
  > An Engineer might get the jollies designing a bridge, but the workers who work on it dont. My father was a laborer and he was incredibly proud of every project he worked on to build the city he loved. He was exceptionally proud the day I drove to my first day of work at Microsoft, along a road he helped pave. We should all aim to build things we can take pride in.
  - theturtlemoves 11mo ago
    Same here. My father was a bricklayer. Backbreaking work. On weekends he drove us to the houses he had worked on. We didn't appreciate it as young children, but he was definitely very proud of what he built.
- vikramkr 11mo ago
  And why should the workers who work on the bridge be denied happiness and satisfaction from their work? Building and creating physical stuff is incredibly rewarding in concept for so many people - especially in a culture that values/glorifies physical and manual labor like parts of the US. I mean bob the builder is a popular kids show and "all boys are fascinated by big trucks and construction projects" is both an incredibly common stereotype and to a significant extent just a true statement.
  - protocolture 11mo ago
macinjosh 11mo ago
Yet you use your toilet. Do you think the sewer workers love their job?
- feisty0630 11mo ago
  Are you from the middle ages, or are you so out of touch with blue-collar work that you're under the impression the average sewer worker has to manually handle waste?
hiAndrewQuinn 11mo ago
How do I know this very comment wasn't written by someone who was having a bad time, though? The tone is frustrated and critical. I'd put the odds at maybe 1 in 5. Where do we draw the line where we have to delete our own grouchiness from the Internet for fear of letting others consume something we created in anger?
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 11mo ago
  On reddit, I delete it daily. Partly for that reason and partly because the Internet is scary. The line though, is probably when you put my harm out into the world than good. That's probably a good place to draw it.
yawnxyz 11mo ago
good analogy; personally i hate microwaving food but can’t shame people for doing it
RamblingCTO 11mo ago
The amount of pushback for "civilization, life is for the benefit of humans and not for filling checkboxes" is bewildering. Drones not questioning what cancerours thinking they have. Life is for living, not for the economy or whatever technocratic utility function you think you're optimizing for. They are all tools, not the destiny.
- igleria 11mo ago
  username checks out. I'm sadly unsurprised, but me ranting about silicon valley mentality on HN feels like yelling at a cloud. Best we can do is keep trying to make people's lives better even if it is not in the best interest of the shareholders :)
  - RamblingCTO 11mo ago
    Trying my best ;) Funnily enough, the OG silicon valley vibe includes "let's make this world a better place to live", the hippie stuff imho. Nowadays it's more like "let's maximize shareholder value and extract what we can" and that's lazy. Bring back the old school SV and take more acid!
pembrook 11mo ago
> slippery slope dangerous thinking > If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time, or it was prepared entirely by robots controlled by nefarious people using the profits to harm society, I don’t want it. So every restaurant you go to, you head to the back to run a purity test on the political beliefs and “happiness” of the people making your food to make sure they line up exactly with what you believe? This just screams luxury beliefs to me, and historically, Utopianism like this has been the actual dangerous slippery slope. Like…tens of millions of people starving dangerous. I just don’t think this fully automated luxury communism thing you are fantasizing about will make you happy. Seeking pleasure 24/7 is pathological and means you stop feeling it, and doing things for the benefit of others instead of yourself is miserable…but ultimately more fulfilling.
- bonobo 11mo ago
  > So every restaurant you go to, you head to the back to run a purity test on the political beliefs and “happiness” of the people making your food to make sure they line up exactly with what you believe? Does their argument gets invalidated if they don't verify *every* restaurant ever? Nobody has the time nor the resources to follow their moral standards with 100% precision, but if we're doing our best I'd argue we can still take that moral stance. Recently a slave labour scheme was dismantled in my country in which some wineries were keeping slaves to produce grape juice. The companies were on the news, and although I do love some grape juice I will never ever buy from them again. Do I check *every* single source of the products I consume? Of course no. Can they eventually do some marketing tricks and fool me into buying from them again? Maybe. But I do my best and I feel like this is sufficient to claim this is a good moral stance nonetheless.
KronisLV 11mo ago
> If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time, or it was prepared entirely by robots controlled by nefarious people using the profits to harm society, I don’t want it. Unfortunately I feel compelled to express the doomer take here, but I don't think most people care how their fast fashion or iPhones are made. And very few find it practically doable to boycott a company like Nestle. People trying to go full Stallman (sans the problematic stuff, rather along the lines of FSF) also find it just difficult. Most people are just happy that the boot is on the other foot or someone else's back and that they have enough convenience and isolation from the rest of the world not to care. Or honestly it's hard to get by for them as well and all of those trinkets and unethically made products help them get through the day. > Human society and civilization is for the benefit of humans, not for filling checkboxes above all else. I really wish that was the case, instead of for the extraction of what little wealth we have by corpos and the oligarchs (call them whatever you want), to push us more towards a rat race of sorts where we get by just barely enough to keep consuming but not enough to effect meaningful change most of the time. Then again, could be better, could be worse - it's cool to see passionate people choosing to make something just for the sake of the experience and creating something unique, not always with a profit in mind. In regards to software development in particular, I'm reminded of a few specific paragraphs in https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world. This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty. Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they’re told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers’ snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over. You don't really get that Good Code with AI that much, or at least I haven't felt that way looking at it. Then again, I could say that about most code written by other people, not sure what that means. Maybe I just have an odd taste in code that so little of it seems pleasant.
potato3732842 11mo ago
>If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time, or it was prepared entirely by robots controlled by nefarious people using the profits to harm society, I don’t want it. What if the people, miserable or not, getting paid to make the meal have a fundamentally opposed world view to you and will use some amount of their wealth to try and enforce it on you in roundabout ways. Because I assure you, some guy in a warehouse in Des Moines filling out some bullshit web form just so he can swipe his employee key card and start his forklift, doesn't want to enrich you, or me, or just about anyone else on HN. And his boss who felt compelled to buy the crap just to save a buck on insurance probably feels about the same.
xnx 11mo ago
> If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time ... I don’t want it. Vegetarian I presume?

by gyomu 11mo ago

rustystump 11mo ago

I guess you are a vegan too right? I get this take but it is naivety. Not everything must pass the morality purity test. Did mass processed food production stop people from cooking or enjoying human made food? No it did not. The same is true in almost all domains where a form of industrialization happens.

nullgeo 11mo ago
> Did mass processed food production stop people from cooking or enjoying human made food? Yeah but what if I'm getting pitted against my coworkers who are vibe coding and getting things done faster than I am. Some people write code with pride because it's their brainchild. AI completely ruins the fun for those people when they have to compete against their coworkers for productivity. I'm not in disagreement with you or the GP comment, but this it is super hard to make nuanced comments about GenAI.
- generativenoise 11mo ago
  They are wrong however. To take the food example, the existence of processed food production creates artifacts like food deserts. If you are privileged these things don't effect you as much as you get more agency. Just the existence of quick to eat and prepare foods are going to put limits on how long you are going to be given for lunch and dinner. Even if you wanted to prepare fresh food, the system is going to make it difficult since it becomes an unsupported activity in terms of time allowances and market access.
  - rustystump 11mo ago
    A subjective take that processed quick food is bad or less than the opposite. It is all about new things that optimize the old. To be clear when i say processed i dont mean tv dinners but that have prepared food that human didnt cook.
    - generativenoise 11mo ago
      I made no judgement about the quality of processed food or where the different options rank in terms access to calories and nutrition, or what is actually feasible. It was simply about how changes can become mildly to severely obligate to certain populations in our economic system.
- rustystump 11mo ago
  That is an issue that exists regardless of ai but i do get it. Most furniture is not hand made. But that doesnt preclude people from enjoying buying or making handmade furniture. The fact that i think people need to get over is that you are blessed beyond measure to have a fun job that gives you creative joy and satisfaction. Losing that because of ai/new tool is not some unprecedented event signaling the end of creativity. A job is a job. What amuses me is i have just as much fun clacking away with some ai help as i did before. But then again i like the problem solving process more than writing the same code in one specific programming language.
jimbokun 11mo ago
No, but it certainly made the nutritional content of the food we eat worse. It saved countless people from starvation while introducing the disease of obesity on a massive scale. I suppose that's a reasonable tradeoff.

prmph 11mo ago

I was a bit disappointed by your response because, from the way you started it, I was expecting a stronger argument. I do agree with your point, but I think a key aspect of the false dichotomy is that there is evidence that AI is not actually "getting things done"

linsomniac 11mo ago
>there is evidence that AI is not actually "getting things done" But there is also evidence that AI is actually getting things done, right? Most of the evidence that AI can't get things done that I've seen tends to be along the lines of asking it to do a large job and it struggling. It seems like a lot of people stop there, and either don't investigate problems where it might be a better fit.
- aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
  > It seems like a lot of people stop there, and either don't investigate problems where it might be a better fit. The AI sceptics do think deeply about where AI might be a better fit. They indeed thought deeply about this, but for every hypthetical use case they could come up with, they had to conclude that - AI has to become much much more reliable to be suitable for this use case - the current AI architectures (as "the thing that bigtech markets") will likely by principle never be able to achieve this kind of reliability This is exactly why these AI-sceptical people got so sceptical about AI, and also the reason why these AI sceptics got so vocal about their opinions.
- queenkjuul 11mo ago
  I've put far more time than i should have trying to get AI to successfully complete tasks of varying sizes in our codebase at work. It simply cannot do things reliably and adequately when working in a large codebase. It lacks sufficient context, it ignores established conventions, worst of all, it often ignores instructions (endless unnecessary comments being my personal biggest peeve). So i think i have, in fact, tried my best to use it. It's great for little tiny things. Give me a one-off script to transform some command's output, translate some code from Python to Typescript, write individual unit tests for individual functions. But none of that is transforming how i do my job, it's saving me minutes, not hours. Nobody at my company is getting serious quantities of programming done with AI, either, and not for lack of trying. I've never been one to claim it's useless, just that it's usefulness (i.e. "how much is getting done") is drastically overblown.

7492728292283 11mo ago

[flagged]

HDThoreaun 11mo ago

This is dumb. Every fast food meal you eat was prepared by someone having a miserable time. Guess what, theyd be more miserable without the job. Getting stuff done is what benefits humans, not feel good jobs.

zeofig 11mo ago
One of the reasons I try to avoid fast food and indeed everything.
- HDThoreaun 11mo ago
  I really don’t see how this helps the fast food workers. When less people eat their food they lose jobs and become even more miserable. Sure if you hire them as a private chef you’re helping them out but if just cook yourself you haven’t done a thing to improve their life.
  - zeofig 11mo ago
    You're right. I'll send them some thoughts and prayers too.
feisty0630 11mo ago
It's not "dumb", you're just presenting a steelman that directly contradicts what the person you're replying to wrote. You might indeed be shocked to find that not everyone consumes fast food.
- JustExAWS 11mo ago
  Did the people who worked on the farm to grow and harvest your food enjoy it?
  - feisty0630 11mo ago
    Are you seriously and earnestly arguing that harm-minimisation is useless and we should all just open the human-suffering throttle, or did you just not think that far ahead? I am hoping the latter. Being foolish is far more temporary a condition than being cruel.

protocolture 11mo ago

>If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time, or it was prepared entirely by robots controlled by nefarious people using the profits to harm society, I don’t want it. So much infrastructure is built by people having a less than good time. An Engineer might get the jollies designing a bridge, but the workers who work on it dont. The goal is to give lots of people happiness from not having to drive 100km out of their way. If we solve a lot of problems for a lot of people and all it costs is the happiness of a few software engineers, well I am not convinced they were happy to begin with. Fund it.

com2kid 11mo ago
> An Engineer might get the jollies designing a bridge, but the workers who work on it dont. My father was a laborer and he was incredibly proud of every project he worked on to build the city he loved. He was exceptionally proud the day I drove to my first day of work at Microsoft, along a road he helped pave. We should all aim to build things we can take pride in.
- theturtlemoves 11mo ago
  Same here. My father was a bricklayer. Backbreaking work. On weekends he drove us to the houses he had worked on. We didn't appreciate it as young children, but he was definitely very proud of what he built.
vikramkr 11mo ago
And why should the workers who work on the bridge be denied happiness and satisfaction from their work? Building and creating physical stuff is incredibly rewarding in concept for so many people - especially in a culture that values/glorifies physical and manual labor like parts of the US. I mean bob the builder is a popular kids show and "all boys are fascinated by big trucks and construction projects" is both an incredibly common stereotype and to a significant extent just a true statement.
- protocolture 11mo ago

macinjosh 11mo ago

Yet you use your toilet. Do you think the sewer workers love their job?

feisty0630 11mo ago
Are you from the middle ages, or are you so out of touch with blue-collar work that you're under the impression the average sewer worker has to manually handle waste?

hiAndrewQuinn 11mo ago

How do I know this very comment wasn't written by someone who was having a bad time, though? The tone is frustrated and critical. I'd put the odds at maybe 1 in 5. Where do we draw the line where we have to delete our own grouchiness from the Internet for fear of letting others consume something we created in anger?

8n4vidtmkvmk 11mo ago
On reddit, I delete it daily. Partly for that reason and partly because the Internet is scary. The line though, is probably when you put my harm out into the world than good. That's probably a good place to draw it.

yawnxyz 11mo ago

good analogy; personally i hate microwaving food but can’t shame people for doing it

RamblingCTO 11mo ago

The amount of pushback for "civilization, life is for the benefit of humans and not for filling checkboxes" is bewildering. Drones not questioning what cancerours thinking they have. Life is for living, not for the economy or whatever technocratic utility function you think you're optimizing for. They are all tools, not the destiny.

igleria 11mo ago
username checks out. I'm sadly unsurprised, but me ranting about silicon valley mentality on HN feels like yelling at a cloud. Best we can do is keep trying to make people's lives better even if it is not in the best interest of the shareholders :)
- RamblingCTO 11mo ago
  Trying my best ;) Funnily enough, the OG silicon valley vibe includes "let's make this world a better place to live", the hippie stuff imho. Nowadays it's more like "let's maximize shareholder value and extract what we can" and that's lazy. Bring back the old school SV and take more acid!

pembrook 11mo ago

> slippery slope dangerous thinking > If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time, or it was prepared entirely by robots controlled by nefarious people using the profits to harm society, I don’t want it. So every restaurant you go to, you head to the back to run a purity test on the political beliefs and “happiness” of the people making your food to make sure they line up exactly with what you believe? This just screams luxury beliefs to me, and historically, Utopianism like this has been the actual dangerous slippery slope. Like…tens of millions of people starving dangerous. I just don’t think this fully automated luxury communism thing you are fantasizing about will make you happy. Seeking pleasure 24/7 is pathological and means you stop feeling it, and doing things for the benefit of others instead of yourself is miserable…but ultimately more fulfilling.

bonobo 11mo ago
> So every restaurant you go to, you head to the back to run a purity test on the political beliefs and “happiness” of the people making your food to make sure they line up exactly with what you believe? Does their argument gets invalidated if they don't verify *every* restaurant ever? Nobody has the time nor the resources to follow their moral standards with 100% precision, but if we're doing our best I'd argue we can still take that moral stance. Recently a slave labour scheme was dismantled in my country in which some wineries were keeping slaves to produce grape juice. The companies were on the news, and although I do love some grape juice I will never ever buy from them again. Do I check *every* single source of the products I consume? Of course no. Can they eventually do some marketing tricks and fool me into buying from them again? Maybe. But I do my best and I feel like this is sufficient to claim this is a good moral stance nonetheless.

KronisLV 11mo ago

> If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time, or it was prepared entirely by robots controlled by nefarious people using the profits to harm society, I don’t want it. Unfortunately I feel compelled to express the doomer take here, but I don't think most people care how their fast fashion or iPhones are made. And very few find it practically doable to boycott a company like Nestle. People trying to go full Stallman (sans the problematic stuff, rather along the lines of FSF) also find it just difficult. Most people are just happy that the boot is on the other foot or someone else's back and that they have enough convenience and isolation from the rest of the world not to care. Or honestly it's hard to get by for them as well and all of those trinkets and unethically made products help them get through the day. > Human society and civilization is for the benefit of humans, not for filling checkboxes above all else. I really wish that was the case, instead of for the extraction of what little wealth we have by corpos and the oligarchs (call them whatever you want), to push us more towards a rat race of sorts where we get by just barely enough to keep consuming but not enough to effect meaningful change most of the time. Then again, could be better, could be worse - it's cool to see passionate people choosing to make something just for the sake of the experience and creating something unique, not always with a profit in mind. In regards to software development in particular, I'm reminded of a few specific paragraphs in https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world. This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty. Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they’re told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers’ snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over. You don't really get that Good Code with AI that much, or at least I haven't felt that way looking at it. Then again, I could say that about most code written by other people, not sure what that means. Maybe I just have an odd taste in code that so little of it seems pleasant.

potato3732842 11mo ago

>If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time, or it was prepared entirely by robots controlled by nefarious people using the profits to harm society, I don’t want it. What if the people, miserable or not, getting paid to make the meal have a fundamentally opposed world view to you and will use some amount of their wealth to try and enforce it on you in roundabout ways. Because I assure you, some guy in a warehouse in Des Moines filling out some bullshit web form just so he can swipe his employee key card and start his forklift, doesn't want to enrich you, or me, or just about anyone else on HN. And his boss who felt compelled to buy the crap just to save a buck on insurance probably feels about the same.

xnx 11mo ago

> If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time ... I don’t want it. Vegetarian I presume?