3 ms·

Dismissing this as just another anti-AI blog could appear a shallow dismissal, but in reality, it 8s mostly the pain of adapting to the change. The writer has c

by zkmon 6mo ago

Dismissing this as just another anti-AI blog could appear a shallow dismissal, but in reality, it 8s mostly the pain of adapting to the change. The writer has certain framework of norms or world where good and bad are well defined, and that he knows what's desirable and what's not. This is not new. This happened with every new technology or paradigm change. The old norms take a while to adapt to the new world and it involves some pain, emitting writings like this one. Impersonation by using abilities that are not biologically their own, has been the strategy of dominance for human race. Horse-riding knights with bows and arrows dominated other humans that didn't have horse or arrows. What are you complaining about? Quality of the software produced? Quality of objectives? Here is the truth. None of that is the root goal. You need to change your assumptions and norms and root goals.

tovej 6mo ago
Quality of work is not the goal? What is the goal, then? Maximizing profit for the corporation? I would not want to work anywhere where that is the only goal, even at the employee level. Maximizing profits is not very popular at the moment, for good reason, look at what it's done to the world.
- zkmon 6mo ago
  If profit is not the root goal, only hobbies exist, not work or any business. Quality is a means for profit, never the root goal. People pretend that quality and performance are the root goals, because they don't want say the fact that those two are the means for profit. Even for opensource, the quality and performance are desirable aspects only because success of that opensource is directly tied to it's usage in profit-oriented products.
  - tovej 6mo ago
    You have it backwards. Why is profit a goal? It's nolever a goal in and of itself, it can only ever be an instrumental goal. "With profits, we can achieve <goal>". If profit is the main goal of all economic activity, then we are doomed to destroy humanity and the environment.
    - zkmon 6mo ago
      Profit is the main goal of all economic activity. Economy is an activity of making and moving money around, which is only possible if you make profit.
      - svnt 6mo ago
        But this only makes profit the root goal of a certain class of economy, not the actual root goal.
      - tovej 6mo ago
        The goal of economic activity is allocating resources to human needs. Money is an instrument to facilitate this, as is profit. Neither of them is the end, they are means. They are also not the only possible means. Also, you can definitely move money around with making a profit. How is that impossible? Are you telling me no money changes hands if I, e.g. sell something at a loss, or to break even. Please, think about it for a second.
- tappio 6mo ago
  Maximizing profit for the corporation is the goal of any corporation by law, isn't it? Apparently not in the US, but for example the Finnish law explicitly states that the goal of a corporation is to generate profits for the shareholders. If you for example give away company assets for free, it can be considered breaking the law. This probably is just culturally different understanding of the phrase, because US corporations indeed feel to act greedy, and there is no similar level of protection of the employees. However, the thing is, in the long term, the business has to make profits to be sustainable. If the company does not make profits, it will die. Its the short term thinking that breaks down companies. You can maximize profits and be ethical at the same time, if the goal is to do it in the long term. I do understand that the "maximizing profit for the corporation" is a synonym often for short term thinking and vulture capitalism, but for me it meant something else. This is actually quite fascinating now that I think of it, because this phrase means completely different things in different cultural contexts. So I guess the trigger is that "maximize short term profits over long term sustainability" is the kind of company where I'd never work for.
  - tovej 6mo ago
    Oh I'm aware of Finnish law on the matter (moikka), and that is my point. I think the LLC (OY), which is the political institution that creates this profit maximizing incentive, is _the_ main driver of the current multi-crisis situation that he world finds itself in. LLCs and the profit motive will not save us from climate change, they will drive us deeper into it. Sustainable human living and continuous economic growth are not compatible.
  - limagnolia 6mo ago
    I don't know about Finnish law, but in most US states, when you form an entity, you can put most anything as a purpose. It is quite common to put it as "to engage in any lawful activity". Beyond that, publicly traded company directors may have (depending on the state) various duties to shareholders to consider profit, but it is generally not considered to be so extreme as to profit above all else. IRS regulations distinguish between a trade or business and a hobby by looking at the intent to make a profit (as well as the effort). see https://uslawexplained.com/trade_or_business https://uslawexplained.com/trade_or_business But it is generally possible to form a legal business under state laws with no intent to profit, the IRS may just treat it as a hobby for tax purposes. (You can't deduct expenses incurred pursuing a hobby, but you can deduct expenses incurred carrying on a trade or business).
sesm 6mo ago
Are you talking about dominating your peers to get a promotion?
- zkmon 6mo ago
  External success for any business is defined as dominating the peers in selling. People call it as "wins". This percolates into internal context as well. Business units compete with other, teams compete, and peers within a team compete or performance ratings. If you say you never think of competing with your peers, you are probably not being honest.
  - sesm 6mo ago
    But it's a team sport. For example, in Dota 2 you should be trying to dominate your opponents. If you are trying to dominate your teammates instead (by prioritizing better KDA) you are most likely ruining the game.
    - zkmon 6mo ago
      If you are a manager, you desire that your team should work like it is a team-sport, but at your peer level you would compete with your peers. The same happens at every level.
great_psy 6mo ago
Problem is that it does not produce better or more work, it actually shifts the work to a different/future engineer. Today’s slop which gets engineer 1 a promotion, is engineer’s 2 problem next month when they are oncall and the codebase makes no sense. Your horse riding analogy, is like riding a horse into battle without your weapon because it’s slowing you down. Sure you got through the enemy first by outmanoeuvring, but you missed the point all together. Maybe you got a shiny medal but all your mates are dead.
- zkmon 6mo ago
  That's a very good revert on horse-riding analogy. But you might still be making an assumption that the horse package doesn't come with a weapon. It might boil down to saying "AI can not achieve the skills of a senior engineer" - which might not have a strong basis.
  - great_psy 6mo ago
    My view is that ai makes it very easy to pump out a lot of code, and that makes it too time consuming to just merge it without understanding it 100%. The person pushing the PR is getting promoted because their are delivering so mane features, but after some time the codebase is a mess. Sure the same person might end up dealing with some of the cleaning up, but more likely those refactoring tasks end up getting spread across the team as the need arises. People are incentivized to push out code, which under human-written coding standard usually meant a level of pro-efficiency, so they should be rewarded. But with the new model of pushing out code with ai, a better metric of a good engineer that should be promoted would be lines deleted, or something like that. Much harder to measure, and hard to justify to management.

by zkmon 6mo ago

tovej 6mo ago

Quality of work is not the goal? What is the goal, then? Maximizing profit for the corporation? I would not want to work anywhere where that is the only goal, even at the employee level. Maximizing profits is not very popular at the moment, for good reason, look at what it's done to the world.

zkmon 6mo ago
If profit is not the root goal, only hobbies exist, not work or any business. Quality is a means for profit, never the root goal. People pretend that quality and performance are the root goals, because they don't want say the fact that those two are the means for profit. Even for opensource, the quality and performance are desirable aspects only because success of that opensource is directly tied to it's usage in profit-oriented products.
- tovej 6mo ago
  You have it backwards. Why is profit a goal? It's nolever a goal in and of itself, it can only ever be an instrumental goal. "With profits, we can achieve <goal>". If profit is the main goal of all economic activity, then we are doomed to destroy humanity and the environment.
  - zkmon 6mo ago
    Profit is the main goal of all economic activity. Economy is an activity of making and moving money around, which is only possible if you make profit.
    - svnt 6mo ago
      But this only makes profit the root goal of a certain class of economy, not the actual root goal.
    - tovej 6mo ago
      The goal of economic activity is allocating resources to human needs. Money is an instrument to facilitate this, as is profit. Neither of them is the end, they are means. They are also not the only possible means. Also, you can definitely move money around with making a profit. How is that impossible? Are you telling me no money changes hands if I, e.g. sell something at a loss, or to break even. Please, think about it for a second.
tappio 6mo ago
Maximizing profit for the corporation is the goal of any corporation by law, isn't it? Apparently not in the US, but for example the Finnish law explicitly states that the goal of a corporation is to generate profits for the shareholders. If you for example give away company assets for free, it can be considered breaking the law. This probably is just culturally different understanding of the phrase, because US corporations indeed feel to act greedy, and there is no similar level of protection of the employees. However, the thing is, in the long term, the business has to make profits to be sustainable. If the company does not make profits, it will die. Its the short term thinking that breaks down companies. You can maximize profits and be ethical at the same time, if the goal is to do it in the long term. I do understand that the "maximizing profit for the corporation" is a synonym often for short term thinking and vulture capitalism, but for me it meant something else. This is actually quite fascinating now that I think of it, because this phrase means completely different things in different cultural contexts. So I guess the trigger is that "maximize short term profits over long term sustainability" is the kind of company where I'd never work for.
- tovej 6mo ago
  Oh I'm aware of Finnish law on the matter (moikka), and that is my point. I think the LLC (OY), which is the political institution that creates this profit maximizing incentive, is _the_ main driver of the current multi-crisis situation that he world finds itself in. LLCs and the profit motive will not save us from climate change, they will drive us deeper into it. Sustainable human living and continuous economic growth are not compatible.
- limagnolia 6mo ago
  I don't know about Finnish law, but in most US states, when you form an entity, you can put most anything as a purpose. It is quite common to put it as "to engage in any lawful activity". Beyond that, publicly traded company directors may have (depending on the state) various duties to shareholders to consider profit, but it is generally not considered to be so extreme as to profit above all else. IRS regulations distinguish between a trade or business and a hobby by looking at the intent to make a profit (as well as the effort). see https://uslawexplained.com/trade_or_business https://uslawexplained.com/trade_or_business But it is generally possible to form a legal business under state laws with no intent to profit, the IRS may just treat it as a hobby for tax purposes. (You can't deduct expenses incurred pursuing a hobby, but you can deduct expenses incurred carrying on a trade or business).

sesm 6mo ago

Are you talking about dominating your peers to get a promotion?

zkmon 6mo ago
External success for any business is defined as dominating the peers in selling. People call it as "wins". This percolates into internal context as well. Business units compete with other, teams compete, and peers within a team compete or performance ratings. If you say you never think of competing with your peers, you are probably not being honest.
- sesm 6mo ago
  But it's a team sport. For example, in Dota 2 you should be trying to dominate your opponents. If you are trying to dominate your teammates instead (by prioritizing better KDA) you are most likely ruining the game.
  - zkmon 6mo ago
    If you are a manager, you desire that your team should work like it is a team-sport, but at your peer level you would compete with your peers. The same happens at every level.

great_psy 6mo ago

Problem is that it does not produce better or more work, it actually shifts the work to a different/future engineer. Today’s slop which gets engineer 1 a promotion, is engineer’s 2 problem next month when they are oncall and the codebase makes no sense. Your horse riding analogy, is like riding a horse into battle without your weapon because it’s slowing you down. Sure you got through the enemy first by outmanoeuvring, but you missed the point all together. Maybe you got a shiny medal but all your mates are dead.

zkmon 6mo ago
That's a very good revert on horse-riding analogy. But you might still be making an assumption that the horse package doesn't come with a weapon. It might boil down to saying "AI can not achieve the skills of a senior engineer" - which might not have a strong basis.
- great_psy 6mo ago
  My view is that ai makes it very easy to pump out a lot of code, and that makes it too time consuming to just merge it without understanding it 100%. The person pushing the PR is getting promoted because their are delivering so mane features, but after some time the codebase is a mess. Sure the same person might end up dealing with some of the cleaning up, but more likely those refactoring tasks end up getting spread across the team as the need arises. People are incentivized to push out code, which under human-written coding standard usually meant a level of pro-efficiency, so they should be rewarded. But with the new model of pushing out code with ai, a better metric of a good engineer that should be promoted would be lines deleted, or something like that. Much harder to measure, and hard to justify to management.