15 ms·
The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
- airza 6mo agoI agree with the general sentiment that the structure of society is going to change, but I don't know what the satisfying solution is. It's hard to imagine not participating will work, or even be financially viable for me, for long.
- wedemmoez 6mo agoI agree. I'm the AI luddite on my team of red team security engineers, but I'm still using it in very limited use cases. As much as I disagree with how the guardrails around AI are being handled, I still need to use it to stay relevant in my field and not get canned.
- hootz 6mo agoI'm already adding "Agentic Workflows" as a skill in my LinkedIn profile. Cringed hard at that, but oh well...
- pydry 6mo agoWhat if the hiring managers at the jobs you'd actually prefer to work at also cringe when they see it on your profile?
- hootz 6mo agoThat's actually a really good point.
- hn_throwaway_99 6mo agoIt's becoming so ubiquitous, I highly doubt it. At worst I think a manager would just see it as fluff, but not a negative.
- bluefirebrand 6mo agoI hope the hiring managers I would actually want to work for would see it as a red flag on resumes
- MarcelOlsz 6mo agoWhy? It's just the name of the game, everyone gets it. Especially if you're a generalist/frontend type.
- bluefirebrand 6mo agoIt's simply not a game I'm interested in playing. I'll find something else to do instead, leave the AI jockeying to others.
- pesus 6mo agoAt this point, I'd assume those hiring managers are also being forced to use AI in their jobs (or pretend, at least) and probably wouldn't read too much into it if it's not a substantial portion of their resume. I do feel the same way, though.
- pydry 6mo agoI asked coz know several managers who would look upon it as a red flag and I suspect OP would probably prefer to work for them rather than AI sheep.
- miltonlost 6mo agoI'm using claude but then refuse to do much cleaning up of what it spews. Im leaving that for the PR reviewers who love AI and going through slop. If they want slop, I'll give them the slop they want.
- whstl 6mo agoNot advocating that people should follow this but: As someone that loves cleaning up code, I'm actually asking the vibe coders in the team (designer, PM and SEO guy) to just give me small PRs and then I clean up instead of reviewing. I know they will just put the text back in code anyway, so it's less work for me to refactor it. With a caveat: if they give me >1000 lines or too many features in the same PR, I ask them to reduce the scope, sometimes to start from scratch. And I also started doing this with another engineer: no review cycle, we just clean up each other's code and merge. I'm honestly surprised at how much I prefer this to the traditional structure of code reviews. Additionally, I don't have to follow Jira tickets with lengthy SEO specs or "please change this according to Figma". They just the changes themselves and we go on with our lives.
- grvdrm 6mo agoFavorited. I was talking to someone (non-dev) yesterday who prototypes with Claude and then goes back/forth with the lead engineer to clean it up and make it production worthy (or at least more robust). I like that model.
- kelzier 6mo agoI thought the de facto policy was that the individual remains responsible in a team context.
- chungusamongus 6mo agoThat's exactly it. This person does not understand the coercive competition of the market. If you don't use new tech, you are going to be undercut by people who do. And every HR dept is going to expect to to have experience with AI even if the department that’s hiring doesn't really use it. If the author's supposed solution to the problem has negative personal consequences, why would you do it? To be nice?
- miltonlost 6mo agoBecause I don't like the feeling my conscience gives me by doing something I think is evil and bad. Some people have moral lines that they won't cross when finding jobs. If my competitors are filling their flour with sawdust, guess I got to just do the same?
- fnimick 6mo agoNo, we won't do the same, but enough people will that it doesn't matter. Such is the way it goes.
- nradov 6mo agoYour moral compass is skewed. Customers don't care what tools we use, they just want products that work. Is a wheat farmer who ploughs a field with horses more moral than one who uses a tractor? The resulting flour tastes the same either way.
- Glemllksdf 6mo agoIts not the same. Its clearly shit to replace flour with sawdust. Having different opinions on AI/LLMs doesn't make the use of it the same as replacing flour with sawdust. The AI 'image' slop for example, i don't think its bad. But i also don't think it takes anything from a real artist. It takes jobs from people with drawing skills but it doesn't change anything for an artist.
- throwanem 6mo agoNo. I'm doing it because I care more whether I can live with myself than whether I impress people with the name of who I work for. Hence much of my recent comment history here, for example. I don't want any of these people getting the idea they should want me to work with them, either. I do want my name on every industry blacklist I can possibly get it on. Those will eventually be revealed - remember Franklin's dictum, fellas! That shit always comes out in the end - and I look forward to that day with pleased and eager anticipation. At the moment I'm more looking at menial work for one of the local universities. Money is money, and my needs are small; the work is honest, I still should have a decade or so of physical labor left in me, and it carries the perk of free tuition for the degree I never had time for. I would have the time and energy to write, perhaps, even! And, however badly the people in charge are running things lately, the world will always need someone good at cleaning a toilet. (And I am already pretty good at cleaning a toilet!)
- dfxm12 6mo agoThe idea that Claude might be able to help you change the color of your led lighting as a legitimate counter to things like a less usable world wide web, worse government services, the loss of human ability, etc. is excellent parody.
- catapart 6mo agocompletely fair, and I agree. but let's talk 6 months/a year down the line - when a local LLM will be able to offer what claude code does only slower and a smaller context window. then do you whip out the local llm to handle the project, or is it still objectionable?
- lionkor 6mo agoIt's already YEARS down the line from when this was promised, we can't keep saying "but in a couple more quarters it'll all be different!".
- Philpax 6mo agoThe front page is currently home to the announcement of Qwen 3.6 35B, which has comparable performance to the flagship coding models of a few months ago, and can be run at home by those with a gaming computer or MBP from the last five years. It is happening, but there will always be some lag.
- lionkor 6mo agoYes, but every time the capabilities, security, accuracy, or any other quality of LLMs is challenged, the default answer is that we'll essentially have AGI in a quarter or two. It's very tiring to try to argue with people about current quality, when the argument is always to wait and/or pay for a super expensive model.
- Philpax 6mo agoThat's not what the grandparent poster was saying, but sure. They have been steadily improving across those metrics, as Opus 4.6 / 4.7 / Mythos demonstrate. They're certainly not perfect, and I understand your fatigue (it is certainly fatiguing to follow, even if interested!), but each new release pushes it that bit further, and the improvements percolate downwards to the cheaper models.
- poszlem 6mo agoFrom the article: "I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few years, and I think the best response is to stop. ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would call metis." "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there's the real danger" - Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
- TeMPOraL 6mo ago> "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there's the real danger" - Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune I always preferred this take: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” ― Alfred North Whitehead It's both opposite and complementary to your Frank Herbert quote.
- notpachet 6mo agoI guess it hinges on your definition of "civilization".
- hackable_sand 6mo agoOr "advance"
- delecti 6mo agoI think it's important that we recognize and understand how those operations are being done, and ignorance of the complexity of all the parts of our lives leads to the death of expertise. People who would learn a lot just from reading the course description of a 100 level class in a field are assuming their lack of knowledge means there's no complexity there. > “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Isaac Asimov The easier society makes it to be unaware of the complexity of everything around us, the easier it becomes to assume everything is actually as simple as their surface-level understanding.
- willrshansen 6mo agoIf there's too many lies, "source or gtfo" becomes more important
- ipython 6mo agoyou would have to trust that the person listening to the lies would know the difference, and that's the rub...
- jbxntuehineoh 6mo agothat's the neat part, the source is also going to be bullshit slop!
- engeljohnb 6mo agoTherefore, you can dismiss whatwever claim is being made. That's the reason to ask for the source: so you can judge whether it's reliable.
- warkdarrior 6mo ago> That's the reason to ask for the source: so you can judge whether it's reliable. So the solution to checking whether an article is reliable is to check whether its sources are reliable? How far back do you go? Or do you disregard immediately any article that does not cite only sources you already trust?
- engeljohnb 5mo agoYou find a primary source. If I want to know "Did Christopher Columbus believe the earth is flat?" I could read modern day articles about it, but I'm going to ignore any that don't include direct quotes from either him or people that knew him. And then I'll double check those quotes to make sure they're authentic. If I want to know "does more resistance or more volume lead to better muscle growth?" I can find a million fitness blogs about it, but I'll only trust the ones that name specific studies, and even then I'll probably ditch the article and read the study itself.
- voidUpdate 6mo ago> "Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act. Now might be a good time to call your representatives." Having the "call your representatives" link be to your website as well isn't particularly helpful... I already can't get to it
- s1mn 6mo agoI love it when Americans take the moral high ground
- snackerblues 6mo agoSurprised you can even read this thread without a 'acking loicence
- drstewart 6mo agoFunny that's how I feel when Europeans lecture about wars and imperialism
- Leynos 6mo agoOP should link to https://www.writetothem.com/ https://www.writetothem.com/
- masfuerte 6mo agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20260416134911/https://aphyr.com/posts/420-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-where-do-we-go-from-here https://web.archive.org/web/20260416134911/https://aphyr.com...
- catapart 6mo agothe epilogue is what speaks to me most. all of the work I've done with llms takes that same kind of approach. I never link them to a git repo and I only ever ask them to make specific, well-formatted changes so that I can pick up where they left off. my general feelings are that LLMs make the bullshit I hate doing a lot easier - project setup, integrate themeing, prepare/package resources for installability/portability, basic dependency preparation (vite for js/ts, ui libs for c#, stuff like that), ui layout scaffolding (main panel, menu panel, theme variables), auto-update fetch and execute loops, etc... and while I know they can do the nitty gritty ui work fine, I feel like I can work just as fast, or faster, on UI without them than I can with them. with them it's a lot of "no, not that, you changed too much/too little/the wrong thing", but without them I just execute because it's a domain I'm familiar with. So my general idea of them is that they are "90% machines". Great at doing all of the "heavy lifting" bullshit of initial setup or large structural refactoring (that doesn't actually change functionality, just prepares for it) that I never want to do anyway, but not necessary and often unhelpful for filling in that last 10% of the project just the way I want it. of course, since any good PM knows that 90% of the code written only means 50% of the project finished (at best), it still feels like a hollow win. So I often consider the situation in the same way as that last paragraph. Am I letting the ease of the initial setup degrade my ability to setup projects without these tools? does it matter, since project setup and refactoring are one-and-done, project-specific, configuration-specific quagmires where the less thought about fiddly perfect text-matching, the better? can I use these things and still be able to use them well (direct them on architechture/structure) if I keep using them and lose grounded concepts of what the underlying work is? good questions, as far as I'm concerned.
- lukev 6mo agoThis is a must-read series of articles, and I think Kyle is very much correct. The comparison to the adoption of automobiles is apt, and something I've thought about before as well. Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. That said, I'm more open to using LLMs in constrained scenarios, in cases where they're an appropriate tool for the job and the downsides can be reasonably mitigated. The equivalent position in 1920 would not be telling individuals "don't ever drive a car," but rather extrapolating critically about the negative social and environmental effects (many of which were predictable) and preventing the worst outcomes via policy. But this requires understanding the actual limits and possibilities of the technology. In my opinion, it's important for technologists who actually see the downsides to stay aware and involved, and even be experts and leaders in the field. I want to be in a position to say "no" to the worst excesses of AI, from a position of credible authority.
- baal80spam 6mo ago> Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.
- lukev 6mo ago[dead]
- throwway120385 6mo agoThey have a net positive effect for every owner, except that they seem to facilitate and encourage ways of living that require automobile ownership as a condition of adulthood in most places. So I'm not entirely sure they're a vast net positive in every value system. In yours, yes, but not in mine.
- mwigdahl 6mo agoIronically, AI facilitates self-driving cars, which promise to _reduce_ the need for private automobile ownership.
- egonschiele 6mo agoI've been thinking about this a lot recently, and I don't know if it is possible to stop. I've been thinking the most impactful thing would be to create open-source tools to make it easier to build agents on top of open-source models. We have a few open-source models now, maybe not as good as Gemini, but if the agent were sufficiently good, could that compensate? I think that would democratize some of the power. Then again, I haven't been super impressed with humanity lately and wonder if that sort of democratization of power would actually be a good thing. Over the last few years, I've come to realize that a lot of people want to watch the world burn, way more than I had imagined. It is much easier to destroy than to build. If we make it easier for people to build agents, is that a net positive overall?
- miltonlost 6mo ago> If we make it easier for people to build agents, is that a net positive overall? If we make it easier for people to drive and have cars, isn't that a net positive? If we make it easier for X, isn't that better? No, not necessarily, that's the entire point of this series of essays. Friction is good in some cases! You can't learn without friction. You can't have sex without friction.
- thushar10 6mo agoPareto almost never goes away. Democratization usually improves the baseline (rights, resources, time) but it rarely flattens power distribution. Even with open-source models, power will likely tilt toward those with the most compute or the best feedback loops. So considering the imbalance as inevitable , the discussion should be about ensuring the new 'baseline' for humanity is actually net positive.
- chungusamongus 6mo agoComplaining about AI slop is starting to become its own kind of slop. There isn't anything novel in this little essay. It might as well have been written by AI because I've seen this type of dude complain about this exact type of thing countless times at this point, and none of them have a solution other than empty moralizing or call your representative or whatever. None of that’s going to work. Fortune, Gizmodo, The Verge,Ars Technica, etc. all circulate the same negative headlines and none of them have a solution, and their writers are probably going to be totally replaced by AI so what difference does it make? They're just capitalizing on the negative sentiment and they have no intention to come up with a solution. At that point it's just complaining and I'm sick of it.
- zabzonk 6mo agoSpotting a problem is relatively easy. Coming up with a solution, not so much. But it is still worth pointing out that there is a problem.
- chungusamongus 6mo agoI mean, it has been exhaustively discussed at this stage. Everyone who cares knows all of this stuff already. The solution is obviously some form of socialism but a lot of tech people are blinkered libertarians who refuse to put two and two together.
- alehlopeh 6mo agoIf you’re not an AI yourself it’s weird how you’re so offended by this stuff.
- chungusamongus 6mo agoAn AI wouldn't get offended. It would sycophantically agree.
- TheEaterOfSouls 6mo agoAgreed, and I think if you asked most people in the developed world, they'd say the invention of automobiles has been a net positive (to say the least) despite all the very real negatives. Stopped reading the article after that. It seems like the people expressing these sentiments are a loud minority, and I know from having spent way too much time online that if LLMs didn't exist in their current form, they'd be angry about something else. Then again, Maybe I'm just out of touch. It's a distinct possibility.
- rib3ye 6mo agoThe conclusion was the takeaway. Everyone is getting bumped up a skill notch, not just bozo liars.
- SilverBirch 6mo agoFrankly I think it’s kind of childish to just put up a massive Uk wide block on your website. “Call your representatives”, ok dude, can I give you a list of things I want to change about your country’s policies?
- dminik 6mo agoI don't think you can. The comments section of the page is also behind the block for you, no?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- drstewart 6mo ago>ok dude, can I give you a list of things I want to change about your country’s policies? reply of course, non Americans never comment on American policies
- cm2012 6mo agoThis article is a good example of how ideology can can lead people down irrational paths.
- throw4847285 6mo agoA statement that can be reversed onto the speaker without effort is meaningless. It has no content. It just means, "I am rational and you are not." Ok, then.
- yanis_t 6mo agoI read couple of articles in the series and I still couldn't get what was the point author is trying to make. Reads like, "let me give you 100 arguments why I think this is bad". Do LLMs lie? Of course not, they are just programs. Do the make mistakes or get the facts wrong? Of course they do, not more often then a human does. So what is the point of that article? Why my future is particularly bad now because of LLMs?
- lionkor 6mo agoHow can you argue they don't lie, as if they have any idea of correct vs wrong? There is no brain there. When statistics overwhelmingly say "yes" is the correct answer to something, it will say "yes" -- completely independent of whether that's the correct answer.
- bauerd 6mo agoThe argument isn't that LLMs are bad because they can hallucinate. Author (clearly) argues that LLM use has negative cognitive effects on their users and on society as a whole. Plus, the technology would wipe out a large, large number of jobs.
- analog8374 6mo agoWe've recreated pre-enlightenment intellectual culture. Authority and logical consistency matter. Reality doesn't.
- nfornowledge 6mo agoRudolph built his engine, Henry built his car, Popular Mechanics published it. 2000 biofueling stations across the nation. All made illegal by special interests months before the article was published. Information didn't move fast enough to let the editors know that innovation was illegal.
- gmuslera 6mo agoThe epilogue looked weak to me. The previous sections explored why it was essentially wrong to use current LLM technology, the answers can be wrong, or not even wrong, and why it has to be that way. The epilogue focus more in (our) obsolescence in a paradigm shift towards widespread LLM use scenario and not in them doing their work right or wrong. And that should be the core. There is a new, emergent technology, should we throw everything away and embrace it or there are structural reasons on why is something to be taken with big warning labels? Avoiding them because they do their work too well may be a global system approach, but decision makers optimize locally, their own budget/productivity/profit. But if they are perceived risks, because they are not perfect, that is another thing.
- yubblegum 6mo agoI fear that outside of cataclysmic global warfare or some sort of butlerian jihad (which amounts to the same) this genie is not going back into the bottle. This tech is 100% aligned with the goals of the 0.001% that own and control it, and almost all of the negatives cited by Kyle and likeminded (such as myself) are in fact positives for them in context of massive population reduction to eliminate "useless eaters" and technological societal control over the "NPCs" of the world that remain since they will likely be programmed by their peered AI that will do the thinking for them. So what to do entirely depends on whether you feel we are responsible to the future generations or not. If the answer is no, then what to do is scoped to the personal concerns. If yes, we need a revolution and it needs to be global.
- underlipton 6mo agoGonna beat this drum till it breaks: General strike and bank runs. Not to collapse the economic system, but to present a credible threat of collapsing the economic system which AI development, as these elite and their platforms know it, relies on. When they're freaking out, we call for negotiations. This only works if people with "secure" livelihoods not just participate, but drive the effort. Getting paid six figures or more in a layoff-proof position? Cool, you need to be the first person walking out the door on May 1st (or whenever this happens), and the first person at the bank counter requesting your max withdrawal.
- yubblegum 6mo agoGeopolitical realities and considerations require that the effort is synchronized and global. Assume great power X's society revolts and decides to reign in the financial and technological barons and lords, and do away with such things. Meanwhile, great powers Y, Z etc. are not doing this and one day people in X will wake up to AI drone swarms of these powers taking them over and they're back to square 1 and now not even a great power. Collective humanity needs to think this matter through and take global action. This is the only way I fear, short of natural calamities (act of God) that unplugs humanity from advanced tech for a few generations again.
- nradov 6mo ago
- skyberrys 6mo agoThe reasons laid out in this article are why it's so important to share how we are using AI and what we are getting in return. I've been trying to contribute towards a positive outcome for AI by tracking how well the big AI companies are doing at being used to solve humanitarian problems. I can't really do most of the suggestions the article, they seem like a way to slow progress. I don't want to slow AI progress, I want the technology we already have to be deployed for useful and helpful things.
- abricq 6mo ago> ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would call Imagine being starting university now... I can't imagine to have learned what I did at engineering school if it wasn't for all the time lost on projects, on errors. And I can't really think that I would have had the mental strength required to not use LLMs on course projects (or side projects) when I had deadlines, exams coming, yet also want to be with friends and enjoy those years of your life.
- ethan_smith 6mo agoThis is the part that worries me most. It's not really about individual discipline - it's that anyone who chooses to struggle through problems the hard way is now at a measurable disadvantage against peers who don't. The incentive structure actively punishes the behavior that produces deeper understanding.
- brotchie 6mo agoYeah, I think about this a lot. Those days of grinding on some grad school maths homework until insight. Figuring out how to configure and recompile the Linux kernel to get a sound card driver working, hitting roadblocks, eventually succeeding. Without AI on a gnarly problem: grind grind grind, try different thing, some things work, some things don't, step back, try another approach, hit a wall, try again. This effort is a feature, not a bug, it's how you experientially acquire skills and understanding. e.g. Linux kernel: learnt about Makefiles, learnt about GCC flags, improved shell skills, etc. With AI on a gnarly problem: It does this all for you! So no experiential learning. I would NOT have had the mental strength in college / grad school to resist. Which would have robbed me of all the skill acquisition that now lets me use AI more effectively. The scaffolding of hard skill acquisition means you have more context to be able to ask AI the right questions, and what you learn from the AI can be bound more easily to your existing knowledge.
- 4ndrewl 6mo agoThere are two sides to each coin though. For an employer, that grind is just additional cost that could be reduced by "AI". It's like the difference between hand-made furniture and IKEA. Until OpenAI etc need to turn a profit.
- ori_b 6mo agoSome people like roasting marshmallows. Others think that setting the house on fire may have downsides.
- MrBuddyCasino 6mo agoThe Industrial Revolution - the greatest thing ever to happen - required the British govt to deploy more troops against Luddites than they had fighting Napoleon at the same time. Damaging machinery was made a capital offense and they had dozens of executions, hundreds of deportations. At every stage, the steady progress of civilization is fragile and in danger of being suffocated. Its opponents cloak themselves in moral righteousness, call themselves luddites, the green party, or AI safety rationalists. Its all the same corrosive thing underneath.
- throw4847285 6mo agoThis kind of black and white moral thinking is corrosive to one's intelligence. You're allowed to talk about who benefits from massive society change and who suffers. You are allowed to talk about the ways that technology is implemented and how that leads to pros and cons. An attitude of "if we ever stop moving forward and think then the evil bad people win" is deeply anti-intellectual.
- MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Gooblebrai 6mo ago> The Industrial Revolution - the greatest thing ever to happen - required the British govt to deploy more troops against Luddites than they had fighting Napoleon at the same time Source of this claim?
- MrBuddyCasino 6mo agoE.P. Thompson, „The Making of the English Working Class“. It is admittedly a specific cherry picked point in time at which this was true, but useful to illustrate the issue.
- Jeff_Brown 6mo agoAs a consequentialist who shares the author's concerns, I feel fine (ethically) using AI without advancing it. Foregoing opportunities meaningful to yourself for deontological reasons when it won't have any impact on society is pointless.
- zshn25 6mo agoThe comparison to automobiles changing streets is thrown around a lot. But I feel AI is fundamentally different. It is not a technological change like the internet which brought us huge amounts of opportunities in so many different directions. AI’s goal is to automate (in other words, replace) us.
- AdamH12113 6mo agoThis reminds me a bit of the ending of In the Beginning Was the Command Line: > The people who brought us this operating system would have to provide templates and wizards, giving us a few default lives that we could use as starting places for designing our own. Chances are that these default lives would actually look pretty damn good to most people, good enough, anyway, that they'd be reluctant to tear them open and mess around with them for fear of making them worse. So after a few releases the software would begin to look even simpler: you would boot it up and it would present you with a dialog box with a single large button in the middle labeled: LIVE. Once you had clicked that button, your life would begin. If anything got out of whack, or failed to meet your expectations, you could complain about it to Microsoft's Customer Support Department. If you got a flack on the line, he or she would tell you that your life was actually fine, that there was not a thing wrong with it, and in any event it would be a lot better after the next upgrade was rolled out. But if you persisted, and identified yourself as Advanced, you might get through to an actual engineer. > What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem, and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.
- Ifkaluva 6mo agoI don’t think this is the right take. To take the car analogy: it matters how we use the car. The car in itself can be used to save time and energy that would otherwise be used to walk to places. That extra time and energy can be used well, or poorly. - It can be squandered by having a longer commute that defeats the point - Alternatively, it can be wasted by sitting on a couch consuming Netflix or TikTok - Alternatively, it can be used productively, by playing team sports with friends, or chasing your kids through the park, or building a chicken coop in your back yard It’s all about wise usage. Yes it can be used as a way to destroy your own body and waste your time and attention, but also it can be used as a tool to deploy your resources better, for example in physical activities that are fun and social rather than required drudgery. I think it’s the same for LLMs. Managers and executives have always delegated the engineering work, and even researching and writing reports. It matters whether we find places to continue to challenge and deploy our cognition, or completely settle back, delegate everything to the LLM and scroll TikTok while it works.
- layer8 6mo agoWhile I agree in principle, I don’t know how much faith is warranted in humans using it wisely in practice.
- pixl97 6mo agoI have a lot of faith they will use it unwisely.
- layer8 6mo agoIndeed.
- Ifkaluva 6mo agoI agree with you that the majority of people will use it to feed their attention and energy to the attention economy. Meta will be more profitable than ever, as will TikTok, Netflix, YouTube But the majority have always chosen the path of least resistance. This is not new! Socrates’ famous exhortation is “the unexamined life is not worth living”. People were living mindlessly on autopilot before TikTok. I think if you want to give a call to action, as this piece does, the right call to action is “think carefully about how you can make a good use of your time and energy, now that the default path has changed.” I know it’s not as simple or emotionally powerful as “go down kicking and screaming, stick it to the man”, but as a rule of thumb, the less fiercely emotional path is usually the right one.
- grvdrm 6mo agoTwo years ago, I was enjoying a drink with my wife, her friend, a very senior female VC partner, and another friend. Somehow we talked AI in some depth, and the VC at one point said (about AI): “I don’t know what our kids are going to do for work. I don’t know what jobs there will be to do.” That same VC invests in AI companies and by what I heard about her, has done phenomenally well. I think about that exchange all the time. Worried about your own kids but acting against their interests. It unsettled me, and Kyle’s excellent articles brought that back to a boiling point in my mind. Edit: are->our
- throwanem 6mo agoAnd people wonder why I'm doing all I can to ensure that world will never, ever again even pretend to try to find a place for me.
- grvdrm 6mo agoCorrect! Mobile typo - sorry!
- nothinkjustai 6mo agoVC’s aren’t exactly known for being both wise and intelligent.
- grvdrm 6mo agoPerhaps but it’s more the concept/contrast presented that stuck with me more than the persona. That said - that VC isn’t alone along with many other capital allocators.
- wrs 6mo agoAssuming “phenomenally well” means what it says, the conversation would have suddenly gotten a lot more real if she had said that more precisely: “I don’t know what your kids are going to do for work.”
- fnimick 6mo ago
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- matusp 6mo agoDespite all the AI hype, I wonder how much it only exists in the tech bubble full of terminally online folks. Unless you spend significant part of your day online, most of the AI risks mentioned in this series are probably negligible. The most affected demographic is computer nerds that grew up enjoying utopian Web that is now turning dark.
- ericmcer 6mo agoSeriously try saying "LLM" to anyone else. There is a class next door to my office. An old woman is teaching ~20 people how to be insurance agents with a slide show. It seems like a two week course with a certificate at the end. They don't seem worried that the slideshow could be pasted into an LLMs context window and outperform all of them on the test in 5 seconds and are diligently taking notes.
- voidhorse 6mo agoThis is completely true. From what ai can tell talking to people outside of tech, the agi and "omg this stuff is wild" hype and fears have completely dissipated. Ironically the average person sees these tools how typically you'd expect a cold, rational technologist to see them: just another tool. I think a lot of people are just getting their firs taste if agent harnesses plus slightly better models right now, and yes, the first time you use them it seems scary and amazing. By the hundredth time though, it's very apparent that there is still tremendous work to do before any kind of fully automated software pipeline (let alone any other domain) can be realized.
- srinathkrishna 6mo agoI couldn't help but resonate with a lot of what Kyle says here. If not already, we will soon lose the ability to think if AI is helping humans (an overwhelming majority of them, not a handful), considering how we are steaming ahead in this path!
- dang 6mo agoHere are the articles in this series that got significant HN discussion (in chronological order for a change): ML promises to be profoundly weird* - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689648 - April 2026 (602 comments) The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703528 - April 2026 (106 comments) The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730981 - April 2026 (169 comments) The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754379 - April 2026 (180 comments) The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766550 - April 2026 (217 comments) The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778758 - April 2026 (178 comments) * (That first title was different because of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47695064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47695064 - as you can see, I gave up.) p.s. Normally we downweight subsequent articles in a series because avoiding repetition of any kind is the main thing that keeps HN interesting. But we made an exception in this case. Please don't draw conclusions from that since we'll probably get less series-ey, not more, after this! Better to bundle into one longer article.
- aphyr 6mo agoIf you enjoyed reading these and would like more, very few folks read sections 2, 4, or 6. They might be up your alley: 2. Dynamics - https://aphyr.com/posts/412-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-dynamics https://aphyr.com/posts/412-the-future-of-everything-is-lies... 4. Information Ecology - https://aphyr.com/posts/414-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-information-ecology https://aphyr.com/posts/414-the-future-of-everything-is-lies... 6. Psychological Hazards - https://aphyr.com/posts/416-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-psychological-hazards https://aphyr.com/posts/416-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...
- munificent 6mo agoThis series is seriously the best thing I have read about AI. Thank you thank you thank you for doing so much hard thinking and taking the time to write it all up. It's a monumental work and extremely valuable. The next time someone asks me where I think AI is going, I'll just point them at this series.
- jimt1234 6mo agoOne of the "lies" that concerns me is AI-generated music and its deterioration of the personal connection between musician and listener. As MCA from the Beastie Boys said, "If you can feel what I feel then it's a musical masterpiece." The listener feels a connection to the musician (and other people) with sad songs because everyone has felt sad, or with love songs because everyone has fallen in love, and so on. The listener can still get a feeling from AI-gen'ed music, but is it the same? What is the connection? Or, has that "connection" between musician and listener always been bullshit? That is, has it always been just about music triggering your brain to make you feel a certain way, and the source of that feeling really isn't what people care about - just give me a feeling?
- camgunz 6mo agoWe should consider how we came to be so powerless. The cringe "people gave their lives for that flag" line is actually true, and we're trading it away for what? Not having to get out of our gaming chairs? The reason you can't beat index funds is the people who build the market built a system that benefits them and them alone; the index fund is the pitchfork dividend (what you pay to avoid getting pitchforked). The reason you can't get your congressperson on the line is (mostly) they built a system where the only way to influence them is to enrich them; voting is the pitchfork dividend. The way to build a society that runs on reality is to build it by whatever means possible, then defend it by any means necessary. The only societies that matter are the ones that survive. I want to build it. I don't wanna build a fuckin crypto app, a stupid ass agent harness, or yet another insipid analytics platform. I want to build a society that furthers the liberation of humankind from the vicissitudes of nature, the predation of tyranny and the corruption of greed. I believe it is possible, and I want to prove it out.
- cindyllm 6mo ago[dead]
- orangecoffee 6mo agoNoble thought, but words are empty. Have you perchance written up anything specific? The only one who's written thus is Marx, but those ideas has not found broad socital support.
- heroicmailman 6mo ago> And if I’m wrong, we can always build it later. That's the rub: if we build it later, our economy crashes in the meantime.
- oxag3n 6mo agoThe "Stop" part should have been expanded. AI doesn't get most value from someone just using it, here's my personal take on what should we stop doing starting with the most impactful: * Cut the low entropy sources, this includes open source, articles (yes, like the one above will feed the machine), thoughtful feedback (the one that generates "you are absolutely right" BS). * Cheer the slope. After some time fighting slope in my circles, I found it's counter-productive because it wastes my resources while (sometimes) contributes to slope creators. Few months ago it started as a joke, because I thought the problem was too obvious, but instead the sloper launched a CRM-like app for local office with client side authentication, in-memory (with no persistence) backend storage. He was rewarded something at the local meeting. More stories we have like this - the better. * Use AI to reply, review or interact wit slope in any way. Make it AI-only reply by prompting something without any useful information. One example was an email, pages and pages of generated text, asking me to collect some data and send it back. The prompt was "You are {X} and got this email, write a reply".
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- merb 6mo agoWhat doomsayers or tech bros never really understand, you can’t be rich without an economy. Which basically means that if 90% of the people loose their jobs, their home, the system by itself will collapse even the stuff that the rich people are needing. AI will basically either enrich our life like the loom did or it will outright kill the current economic system of the world which might stop poverty at all or it will sort of start a big collapse where people suffer at the beginning but than it will still have a positive outcome at the end. Humankind always found a solution in the past and it will even do that in the future.
- mcguire 6mo agoOut of curiosity, what if the "can be useful" part is Gell-Mann Amnesia?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- chungus_amongus 6mo ago"carbon emissions" sneed
- jakejoyner 6mo agoI think it is really easy for us to be dogmatic when talking about the future, as when we know what is going to happen, it quells our fears. I think, in reality, no one knows what is going to happen with AI. We are at a turning point in human history, and it is easy to blame Anthropic's engineers and tell them to quit their job, but the reality is that they are probably in the same position you are. There is no one true solution. We do not know if this is going to be analogous to automobiles - we don't know anything. I think it is courteous to think about these things before telling people to quit their jobs.
- andyjohnson0 6mo agoFrom here in the Uk the site just says: "Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act [...] Now might be a good time to call your representatives." So I fired-up a vpn, and it appears to be a personal blog. About ai risks. The geo-block is kind of a shame, as the writing is good and there appears to be nothing about the site that makes it subject to the OLSA.
- Terr_ 6mo ago> there appears to be nothing about the site that makes it subject to the OLSA. The regulators of OSA say otherwise. Or at any rate, they refuse to agree and won't rule it out. ____________ For the geo-blocked, reproducing relevant content [0]: > A few months back I wound up concluding, based on conversations with Ofcom [1] that aphyr.com might be illegal in the UK due to the UK Online Safety Act. > [...] This blog has the same problem: people use email addresses to post and confirm their comments. I think my personal blog is probably at low risk, but a.) I’d like to draw attention to this legislation, and b.) my risk is elevated by being gay online [0] https://aphyr.com/posts/395-geoblocking-multiple-localities-with-nginx https://aphyr.com/posts/395-geoblocking-multiple-localities-... [1] https://blog.woof.group/announcements/updates-on-the-osa https://blog.woof.group/announcements/updates-on-the-osa
- andyjohnson0 6mo agoThe OLSA is far from perfect, particularly in the definitions it uses, but its focus is social media platforms and the like, not simple blogs. OFCOM has a q&a-based tool [1] to advise on whether the OLSA applies to a site. I'm not a lawyer, but its pretty clear that a non-adult-themed personal blog where people can post only textual comments on content that they dont control, is not going to be subject to the act. [1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/check https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
- jexe 6mo agoI'm concerned that there's no real way to "opt out" of an AI future realistically. Is this something that people are seriously thinking they'll be able to do and successfully stay gainfully employed and contributing to the world?
- ertgbnm 6mo agoAgreed. I think the starting comparison actually works here. It's a bit like the automobile. The advice of "just don't" doesn't work for cars. It takes a deliberate effort on every scale of society to accomplish, it's not something an individual can just do and succeed at. An American can't just not have a car the same way someone from the netherlands might be able to.
- scruple 6mo ago> Is this something that people are seriously thinking they'll be able to do and successfully stay gainfully employed and contributing to the world? No. I resisted for a bit but have started using it at work. Mostly because I believe usage is now being monitored. I'm in a very high-scale engineering environment involving both greenfield and massive brownfield codebases and the experience is largely a net loss in productivity. For me and some others who I've spoken to in my org, opting in is a theater that we're required to engage in to keep employment and not a genuine evolution of our craft. These tools struggle with context once you get deep into a codebase with many, many millions of lines of code and sprawling dependencies. Even for isolated Python scripts or smaller, supporting .NET apps, the time spent correcting subtle bugs or bullshit, or just verifying the bullshit, often exceeds the time it would take to have written it from scratch. Regardless, what I've observed is that these tools do nothing for the actual bottlenecks of software engineering: requirements gathering (am I writing the right thing?) and verification (does it work without side effects?). Because LLMs are great at generating text, they're actively exacerbating these issues by flooding our process with plausible looking noise.
- munificent 6mo agoThere isn't. Just like with climate change and governments, we're all effectively in one big boat together. You can stop paddling towards the waterfall, but you can't stop everyone else from paddling and you can't get off the boat.
- green_wheel 6mo agoI wonder if the author would advocate for us to stop driving cars as well.
- aphyr 6mo agoI would! I grew up in a low-density suburb near Portland, then lived in small-town Minnesota, Madison, SF, Chicago, and Cincinnati. I didn't own a car until my 30s, and I currently drive about once a month---camping, Costco, lumber, that sort of thing. Pretty much all my day-to-day travel is and has been by bicycle (now an e-bike), foot, train, or bus. Situations vary, obviously! I'm no stranger to rural life, I wound up in a car-dependent suburb with terrible bus service for a bit, and my partner is in the trades. Private vehicles are sensible and essential answers to lots of problems. But as the Netherlands illustrates, it's not all-or-nothing: reductions in car utilization and car infrastructure have real benefits. Broadly speaking I think we can and should disincentivize private car use, increase public transit frequency, and build networks of protected infrastructure for pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-car means of getting around.
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago> Some of our possible futures are grim, but manageable. Others are downright terrifying, in which large numbers of people lose their homes, health, or lives. I don’t have a strong sense of what will happen, but the space of possible futures feels much broader in 2026 than it did in 2022, and most of those futures feel bad. Well, yes, the entire world order is currently being upended. The USA is completely unrolling its place in the global order and becoming isolationist (and soon an authoritarian single-party state). The Petrodollar is either dying or being converted to a Northwestern-Hemisphere-Petrodollar, with the Yuan in the ascendancy (so there goes the strong economy powering VC money). China, EU, and Russia are the new global leaders. The Middle East and its oil is being taken over by Israel. Taiwan will fall to China and thus the whole technological world follows. Countries that are friendly with China will have good renewable tech, countries that aren't will be doubling down on oil and coal. Fresh water will become as valuable as oil. A world war will decimate global productivity for decades. Most of the democracies in the world will be gone by the end of the century. But none of that has to do with AI. Bad things will always happen in the world. Good things will happen too. But you're only focusing on the bad. That's not good for your health, or others'. > Refuse to insult your readers: think your own thoughts and write your own words. Call out people who send you slop. Flag ML hazards at work and with friends. Stop paying for ChatGPT at home, and convince your company not to sign a deal for Gemini. Form or join a labor union, and push back against management demands that you adopt Copilot [..] Call your members of Congress and demand aggressive regulation which holds ML companies responsible [..] Advocate against tax breaks for ML datacenters. If you work at Anthropic, xAI, etc., you should think seriously about your role in making the future. To be frank, I think you should quit your job. He's freaking out, and rejecting AI completely, out of fear. And that's okay; we all get a little freaked out sometimes. But please try not to make other people freaked out as well? Just because you are scared of something doesn't mean the fear is justified or realistic. What's going to happen now is the same thing that happened during the pandemic. A bunch of irrationally fearful people will decide that the only way they can cope with their fear, is to reject the basis of it. COVID deniers and anti-maskers/anti-vaxxers were essentially so terrified of the loss of control they had, that they refused to acknowledge it. They instead went full-bore in the opposite direction, defying government mandates and health warnings, in order to try to regain some semblance of control over their lives. And it did not go well. That's what's now gonna happen with AI deniers. They're so freaked out about AI that they're going to reject it en-masse, not because it is actually doing anything to them, but because they're afraid it might. And the end result is going to be similar: extreme people do extreme things, and the end result isn't good. So please try to reign in the doomerism a bit, for all our sakes.
- 11101010010001 6mo agoThe future is uncertain, always has been. Is the future more uncertain than in the past?
- munificent 6mo agoYes, it is, 10000%.
- Animats 6mo ago"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people than jobs for them. Gradually, more jobs for smart people were developed, but not until WWII did the demand start to exceed the supply. Hence the frantic technical training efforts of WWII and the following college boom. This was the golden age of upward mobility. It's hard to imagine this today. Read novels from the 18th century to get a feel for it. See who's winning and who's struggling, who rises and who falls, and why. Jane Austen's novels are a good start. The nerds didn't take over until very late in the 20th century. There were very few rich nerds until then. Computing was once a very tiny world. You could not get rich working for IBM. The ones who left and got rich were in sales. So what was valued? Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values. That may be where we go once AI does the thinking. That's where we go when smarts are not a scarce resource.
- ahartmetz 6mo agoI think you forgot discipline and long-term thinking in your core values. Even before high technology, there were things to plan and resources to manage. Especially after the beginning of agriculture.
- seer 6mo agoWhat the author is missing is that in his decision to limit the use of LLMs in his work, he omits the part where he “can”. E.g. he is resourceful and accomplished enough to be able to do the work he desires with no LLMs - but most people actually can’t. There are whole swaths of people software engineers that don’t write tests because “it slows them down” but they have never learned how to write testable code. And when thrust into an environment where they need to learn quickly - they don’t really have a way not to use ai, if they don’t someone else will, and take all the credit. Learning how software is built is hard and gruelling work, and you need to constantly invest in yourself. Trouble is there is no time left to “go back to basics and learn FP” for example, because you also need to keep up with all the new LLM stuff happening on top of that. It is easy for us who already have the foundational knowledge to be able to step back, take the wheel and try to do it ourselves, but plenty of people simply don’t have that option. And I expect this trend to deepen and broaden. There will definitely be a lot more “witches” than actual engineers.
- munksbeer 6mo agoPeople learn what they need to learn to be successful (if they want to be successful). The newer generation of coders will learn exactly what it takes to be better than their peers, and that will still include building rock solid, highly performant software to beat the competitors, or they'll lose their jobs and someone better will do it. If they do it entirely using AI to code, and the end output is good enough, they'll learn all the right skills to do this. Human's always think everything is sliding into doom, and inevitably, it doesn't.
- prismatix 6mo agoExactly this. People are so "doom and gloom" about the future with AI, but I think it's because they are subconsciously worried they can't keep up. I am not immune to it. I feel that dread every once in a while too. But at the end of the day, does it really matter to most people how a car works? No. When it breaks, we still have professionals to fix it. The same can be said about software. Does it actually matter how it gets built or what the code looks like, so long as it works and there are no security vulnerabilities? Not really. We will always need people who know how to debug/fix it, albeit that number might be smaller than it is today.
- richardkielbasa 6mo ago[dead]
- harryquach 6mo ago> I have never used an LLM for my writing, software, or personal life Must be nice to not have a paycheck tied to using this tech. For many people, myself included, its either use it (adapt) or lose your job. Most of us relay on our jobs to pay bills and live in the modern world.
- aucisson_masque 6mo agoAuthor seems depressed, my personal take is that no one can change technological évolution. It's going to happen. Just flow with it and all it's bullshit, yeah life will be a little worst but it will still be better than those who chose to completely ignore it. If the world is going mad, be the craziest of all these crazy motherfucker. At least it's interesting, I'm very curious to know what the world will look like in 10 or 20 years. Maybe, just maybe lol, we'll finally have this dreamed world where robots do all the work and we, human, can just enjoy ourselves 24/24.
- AuthAuth 6mo agobut what if I care about the world? I dont want to embrace craziness if there is any chance to preserve normality.
- socketcluster 6mo agoWe need Universal Basic Income UBI and we have the right to demand it: - LLMs trained on OUR copyrighted works and OUR open source code which was licensed for human use (MIT license explicitly says for "Persons"). - A monetary system that has been centralizing opportunities and creating an asymmetric playing field due to the Cantillon Effect caused by government and institutional money creation. Either of these points on its own entitles us to as much UBI money as we need. I think even without AI or any technological progress, the monetary system is itself enough to create the kind of massive centralization that we've been seeing. People have been saying that for years before LLMs. People are now blaming AI for the fact that some people can't get jobs but it's not the root cause. Software devs won't be able to get jobs as plumbers either because the plumbing sector in many countries has become insanely regulated... Society has been fundamentally corrupted. I only see two ways forwards; - Communism with UBI (closer to what we have now) - Abolish all regulations and have Capitalism again.
- sillysaurusx 6mo agoQuestion: The author makes this article available on the web as a series of posts, a PDF (https://aphyr.com/data/posts/411/the-future-of-everything-is-lies.pdf https://aphyr.com/data/posts/411/the-future-of-everything-is...) and an EPUB. What do you suppose their tooling looks like? Is there a single "document containing all the words," and it updates the website, pdf, and epub whenever you change it? What struck me was that the presentation is beautiful. It seems worth emulating. But that raises the question of what format you'd write your original words in. Do you suppose they just use Markdown files, or something more elaborate?
- tmoertel 6mo agoI am not the author of the site in question, but I suspect that your guess is right, and that Pandoc is the hub between the spokes. For my blog, I write posts in Markdown. Then the build process uses Pandoc to convert the posts into web pages and, for certain pages, PDF files typeset with TeX. For example, here is a post in both web and PDF versions: (Web) https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql.html https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql.... (Typeset PDF) https://blog.moertel.com/images/public_html/blog/pix-20240601/sampling-with-sql.pdf https://blog.moertel.com/images/public_html/blog/pix-2024060...
- sillysaurusx 6mo agoBeautiful. I don't suppose you have public, detailed installation steps for how to go from "nothing exists" to "Pandoc can push posts to https://blog.moertel.com/ https://blog.moertel.com/"? :) The best I was able to do was http://github.com/shawwn/wiki http://github.com/shawwn/wiki, which has been broken since 2020. You can't spell Haskell without Hell. If you wouldn't mind pulling up a `claude` in your repo and running `/init` and showing the result, that'd give me at least a vague idea of what to do.
- tmoertel 6mo agoThanks. I do not have a public, detailed description of how my blog works. But in short, my site build system is powered by a Makefile that invokes Hakyll [1]. My Hakyll configuration has the following rule baked into it for generating HTML docs from Markdown docs in the `posts/` directory: match "posts/*" $ do route $ setExtension "html" let ctx = postCtx tags compile $ pandocMathCompiler >>= loadAndApplyTemplate "templates/post.html" ctx >>= saveSnapshot "content" >>= loadAndApplyTemplate "templates/add-comments.html" ctx >>= loadAndApplyTemplate "templates/default.html" ctx >>= relativizeUrls The `pandocMathCompiler` bit invokes Hakyll's Pandoc subsystem with support for rendering formulas using MathJax. The site Makefile also has rules to build PDF versions of the articles that I want to typeset. The rules just invoke Pandoc directly. For example, here's the rule used to generate the PDF file in my prior comment: sampling-with-sql.pdf: posts/2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql.md ( cd posts && pandoc --metadata-file=../templates/latex-header-includes.yaml -t pdf -o ../$@.tmp --pdf-engine=pdflatex ../$< && mv -f ../$@.tmp ../$@ ) It's basically a straightforward invocation of Pandoc with a little shell boilerplate to prevent the PDF file from being moved into its final location unless Pandoc exits with success. The Makefile has a final "push" target that makes sure the site's assets are up to date (invoking Hakyll if needed) and then pushes the static site up to the content distribution network I'm using to publish my website. [1] https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/ https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/
- copypaper 6mo agoWe are one technological breakthrough away from AGI. Seriously what happens when, for example, a viable room temperature superconductor (remember LK-99 lol) gets discovered? Next thing you know we have 3d stacked chips operating at THz speeds with virtually zero heat output, batteries that can charge instantly, etc. I know a RTSC is the holy grail, but it really feels like AI is in the same stage computers were in the 80s. I used to be extremely bearish and think AI was useless, but I've taken a total 180 the last 6 months. If these things get better (they will), nobody's job will be safe.
- Aurornis 6mo ago> what happens when, for example, a viable room temperature superconductor (remember LK-99 lol) gets discovered? Next thing you know we have 3d stacked chips operating at THz speeds with virtually zero heat output Room temperature superconductors don’t enable THz chips with no heat output. If superconductors broadly allowed this, we’d already have such chips available because we could super cool them and keep them at that temperature easily.
- copypaper 6mo ago> we could super cool them and keep that at that temperature easily As far as im aware, 3d stacking chips requires the inside to be cooled as well (not just the outside). I don't think they've solved this yet.
- peacemosaic 6mo ago[dead]
- mumbisChungo 6mo agoI think it's shortsighted to dismiss the utility of these technologies for learning. I find personally that putting the LLM into an argumentative state then having it challenge my assertions forces me to learn and develop my own thoughts and feelings more effectively than writing does these days, and I find that interrogating a model on a subject can teach me more about the subject per unit time than reading a textbook or research paper. Sometimes I'll even just have it read the raw text out loud- then interject and have a conversation about a specific thing that I don't have the domain knowledge to fully understand. Other times we'll end up off on a productive tangent. Interactive learning and thinking is underrated, in part I think because of the cynical (and likely accurate) assumption about what the laziest among us will do with the tools, but projected onto everyone.
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- TychoCelchuuu 6mo ago[dead]
- botanrice 6mo agomy first thought reading this was that Ai might make coding more of an art or tradition. I felt admiration for those of us who still know how to write the now ancient coding languages of yonder. But then i read this at the end: > This piece, like most all my words and software, was written by hand—mainly in Vim. I composed a Markdown outline in a mix of headers, bullet points, and prose, then reorganized it in a few passes. With the structure laid out, I rewrote the outline as prose, typeset with Pandoc. I went back to make substantial edits as I wrote, then made two full edit passes on typeset PDFs. For the first I used an iPad and stylus, for the second, the traditional pen and paper, read aloud. Then you realize the context of this article, who is writing it. No hate to my man here but clearly this is someone who has the desire and time to make things difficult for themselves and take pride it in it. It's needless effort in this day and age. but hey, to his own analogy, plenty of gearheads love their old cars and making em work. Those guys are some of the most knowledgeable, and I respect that, but also.. that same group is gonna hate on any new technology and complain it isn't the old way.
- orangecoffee 6mo ago> Prospective clients ask Claude to do the work they might have hired me for In all the 10 articles, I think this is the only thing really. I think we have to learn how to overcome and thrive in the new world. The gravy of CS careers is gone for all :(
- ayewo 6mo agoExactly. Nothing hits home about what's about to hit you, now and in the foreseeable future, like when your livelihood today is materially affected by widespread availability of LLMs that can passably mimic your highly specialized skills.
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- benh2477 6mo ago[dead]
- voidhorse 6mo agoI agree with much of the analysis, and originally I would have subscribed to the recommended action (resistance), at this point in time however, I think that advice is severely misguided. We have already passed the critical point. The LLMs, the agent harnesses are here. There is too much willpower, capital, and risk behind these technologies now—the automobile has landed, thousands of people have purchased it already, protesting the car won't undo it at this point. What you can do that will be meaningful, is to instead understand the new car, and understand it deeply, Use that understanding to carry the values you care about into the new world and re-articulate them. Make the car safer, push for tactical regulations on it. If you are privileged enough to be able to forgo its use entirely, sure, but that advice is not uniformly applicable. People forget that being able to simply opt-out of certain things is often only a viable option when you are already in a certain position. What we really need are the heavy skeptics to stop falling for luddite temptation and to start bringing their critical lens to bear in positive ways on this new technology to make it safer and better. By opting out and staging a feeble resistance you won't do anything other than let the current dangerous power consolidation continue.
- BLACKCRAB 6mo ago[dead]
- keeda 6mo agoEh, this has been a disappointing series to read from the person that wrote all those Jepsen write-ups and the technical interview series. All articles are mostly a regurgitation of all the negativity that gets aired here all the time (a lot of it already fixed or debunked) and 0 discussion of utility. This is more befitting Zitron than aphyr. Where's the sharp incisive wit and deep insights? At least he realizes this technology is unlikely to slow down. With international relations as they are, it's MAD all over again, only the "D" is a fuzzy, hypothetical thing nobody can name, so even that bit of deterrence is lost. Yet finally he ends with the most uninspired advice of all: "we should try, unsuccessfully, to stop it." Everyone must understand: for all of history, progress and productivity and value creation overall could only scale with people. Now it can scale with power and compute. This is a tremendous economic force, akin to a force of nature, that is nigh impossible to stop. (I always did think the Butlerian Jihad was the biggest plot hole in Dune.) My advice is this: we have no choice but to adapt. We must realize that, by a stroke of luck, this is a power available to us more than the capital class. If they can scale without people, so can we. But because harnessing AI effectively requires hard skills -- at least for now -- that the capital class don't have and used to pay us for, we might even scale better than them! Carpe diem.
- simoncion 6mo ago> All articles are mostly a regurgitation of all the negativity that gets aired here all the time (a lot of it already fixed or debunked) and 0 discussion of utility. There are multiple sections that talk directly about utility. Here's one of them: [0] But, sure. I'll bite. Here's the third paragraph of the first part of the essay [1]: This is *bullshit* about *bullshit machines*, and I mean it. It is neither balanced nor complete: others have covered ecological and intellectual property issues better than I could, and there is no shortage of boosterism online. Instead, I am trying to fill in the negative spaces in the discourse. “AI” is also a fractal territory; there are many places where I flatten complex stories in service of pithy polemic. I am not trying to make nuanced, accurate predictions, but to trace the potential risks and benefits at play. I'd say that the specific sort of "utility" discussion that you're probably looking for would be classified as "boosterism". [2] > Now it can scale with power and compute. Eh. Carefully read through and consider [3]. [0] <https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess#models-are-smart https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...> [1] <https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...> [2] Due to their nearly-universally breathless nature, I know that's how I classify the overwhelming majority of such discussions. [3] <https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/apr/09/llms/ https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/apr/09/llms/>
- ymyms 6mo agoThere are definitely salient points in the article and I appreciate its value in imploring us to really stop and consider the ramifications of what this technology might deliver. I think the analogy to cars and the unintended consequences for all manner of society is particularly apt. That said, the final point is one I take issue with: > For example, I’ve got these color-changing lights. They speak a protocol I’ve never heard of, and I have no idea where to even begin. I could spend a month digging through manuals and working it out from scratch—or I could ask an LLM to write a client library for me. The security consequences are minimal, it’s a constrained use case that I can verify by hand, and I wouldn’t be pushing tech debt on anyone else. I still write plenty of code, and I could stop any time. What would be the harm? To me, there is no intrinsic value in solving this problem other than rote problem solving reps to make you a better problem solver. There isn't anything fundamental about the protocol they've never heard of that operates the lights. It's likely similar to many other well-thought out protocols in the best case and in the worst case is something slapped together. There are certainly deeper, more fundamental concepts to learn like congestion control algorithms in TCP. Most things in software though are just learning another engineer's preferences for how they thought to build something. I poke at this because if an exercise only yields the benefit of another rep of solving a problem, then it holds less water to me. I personally don't think there will be fewer problems to solve with this technology, just a different sort at a different layer of the stack.
- magic_hamster 6mo agoThese are thoughts of someone who's very good at putting words together, but sadly has little experience with the subject matter. > I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few years, and I think the best response is to stop. This is exactly where it shows. LLMs, agents and whatever comes next are not only the future of tech, but they are going to be national resilience drivers for the countries that will be able to support them with power, water and science. Who is supposed to stop? The US? China? Russia? Everyone? Of course this won't happen. This is an arms race. But even if it weren't, stopping is the wrong answer. You don't have to outsource your thinking, writing or reading. How you use LLMs is entirely up to you. There is a way to use LLMs which is beneficial. I treat them as a private tutor available to me for questions. This solved a lot of friction I had with my relationship with LLMs. More telling is that the author mainly thinks about their relationship with LLMs while in reality the space has moved on to automation with agents. You don't interact with LLMs as much as before, and if you still do, then soon you won't. Ahents are not really ML. It's harnesses and parsing and memory and metrics. It's software. Should we stop this as well?
- vogelke 6mo agoYour core skills are fine. Unfortunately, appreciation for those skills has already been blasted into orbit by the AI-BS bubble. This tech has made it easier for second-handers to pass off inadequate work as the equal of your work. They're too lazy to exert the effort to read/think/write, and being second-handers, they're fine with the APPEARANCE of reading, thinking, and writing. This has been going on for millenia, and the only fix I've seen is to call it out every time it rears its head.
- zerotoship 6mo agoIf you use coding tools too much, you lose the ability to think long-term since you become entirely dependent on the tool. If you don't use them, you risk falling behind everyone else. so the boundary is blurry... I'm not sure what to do
- Cthulhu_ 6mo agoBit of both I think; spend time writing code on your own, use coding tools at work if they encourage / pay for it. I think we'll settle into a new norm over the next few years, but the role of software engineer will change though. Ultimately, always remember (and remind your boss) that you are in charge and, more importantly, responsible.
- Jtarii 6mo agoJust spend 30 minutes a day without using them. Think of it like practicing an instrument.
- arc_light 6mo ago[dead]
- 21asdffdsa12 6mo agoIm so tired by this failed attempts to shore up what is basically a failure at the fundamental level to build a high trust society. Security, Guards, Locks, Cameras, the mockery of the naive, bumbling fools who easily trust one another - as if that ability to not be capable to form such members of society is something to be proud about. The endless self upselling "protectors", the shards of glass on the wall, the scams, the con artists, proud in ripping of the "Naive and stupid" all these zero-sum gameplayers, producing nothing and furiously proud of their retardation. A whole industry to support a mountain of dysability. If the culture you grew up in is not capable of forming such a society, you are not part of the west. You can not be and never will be. All the shoring up work named above, even with society enforced norms be damned. If your presence is a detriment, the answer is to build a society without you. Arcologies, cooperate cities, Amish towns - call it what you want. Place where the "stupid" can be "easily gullible" and cooperate and work. And others where the "real ones" can roam around and rip each other off to their hearts content. A harsh wall in the middle, razor-wire on top - and thats the end of that illusion.
- christkv 6mo agoThere is the whole dead internet theory that I think will happen. Anything not in person is potentially a lie or at best bots.
- deepseasquid 6mo ago[dead]
- hardlianotion 6mo agoCan't see from the UK as the poster claims the UK Online Safety Act prevents them from showing it to me (unless folk use a VPN, I guess).
- YeGoblynQueenne 6mo ago>> Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act >> Now might be a good time to call your representatives. Turns out you can bypass that sort of nonsense the same way you can buypass paywalls: https://archive.ph/eXuD0 https://archive.ph/eXuD0