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I'm so frustrated by both the zealous AI bulls and the blind AI opposition. There's a lot of issues, ranging over technical, cultural, environmental, and moral
by nixpulvis 4mo ago
I'm so frustrated by both the zealous AI bulls and the blind AI opposition.
There's a lot of issues, ranging over technical, cultural, environmental, and moral problems. But there's also obvious value. To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools.
It's one thing to get an AI google response and feel like it's dubious, it's another thing to know what you want and have an LLM find the APIs for a framework you're not familiar with yet and put the pieces together. The only way I use AI for programming still involves a large amount of rejecting the responses and a massive amount of reading and validating.
Am I able to write things faster with LLMs, yes. Am I missing out on the work involved in learning things I would be forced to otherwise, also yes. Are coworkers pushing stuff they don't understand more, surely.
It's a mixed bag, and we need more balanced takes in the discussion around this.
- Ethee 4mo agoNuance has been completely lost on our society. If it doesn't spark immediate outrage or joy it has no place in our attention economy. I really wish this wasn't the case and I'm not sure how we can reverse it. Most people just aren't interested in the 'balanced takes' because it's just not exciting enough it seems sadly.
- nixpulvis 4mo agoI recently learned the term "thought-terminating cliché" and it's so incredibly prevalent in society these days. Always has been I'm sure, but short form text based anonymous communication must be making it worse.
- noman-land 4mo agoIt is what it is.
- arcanemachiner 4mo agoAnd that's just the way things are.
- mpalmer 4mo agoIt's a useful term but humorously risks becoming auto-exemplary.
- pydry 4mo agoThere is plenty of nuance to go around generally still but on any topic where there are incredibly powerful or wealthy parties spending a fortune pushing a narrative it immediately stops being possible. Nuance simply gets overwhelmed by repetition. The most recent opinion forming narrarive Ive been seeing repeated endlessly on this topic is about some supposed "split" in programmers between those who "enjoy the process" and those who "want the outcome". It is very carefully designed to miss the point and is some quite clever propaganda - it presupposes that the outcome is the same without directly stating it and implies that skeptics are dinosaurs without needing to be too direct about it.
- BoredPositron 4mo agoNo, we can't all be friends. Never happened, never will be.
- torben-friis 4mo agoIt is good to remember that the discourse is not fully real. There are fake accounts pushing AI everywhere, and people burned out by the marketing that react positioning too aggressively in the opposite direction (particularly when it's their boss who bought into the marketing and makes unreasonable demands).
- antonvs 4mo ago> To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools. There's also a lot of ideological opposition, which often tries to claim that the tech is useless etc. > Am I missing out on the work involved in learning things I would be forced to otherwise, also yes. Yes, but many of those things are things you might not really care about learning about. And if you want to learn about them, AI can be a big help, if you use it appropriately. The "mixed bag" comes from the way people use it, mostly not from the tech itself.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- shimman 4mo agoGet it right, 99.99% of ideological opposition is mostly do to the naked display of wealth concentration where we are literally forcing Americans to bear the higher costs of electricity, noise pollution, actual pollution, and increased cancer rates while they are flushing down trillions of dollars into the drain while Americans lack medicare for all, universal childcare, free higher education, or even a public jobs program (fun fact, all these programs poll above 70-80%). The naked display of the elites willing to fuck over large swaths of Americans is not only despicable it is in our civic duty to rightfully fight and reject this. No one wants this yet it is being thrusted upon us and we are forced to pay for this madness. If you ask most Americans they would probably be completely okay with nationalizing big tech or seizing their assets. Why does this tech have to champion naked displays of greed where the elites feign surprise that people are willing to fight for their lives? This is the single issue that unites Americans across parties, incomes, and race; it's the class issue of the century and the people yearn for material change.
- antonvs 4mo ago> Get it right What did I get wrong exactly? What I pointed out is that ideological objectors often try to claim that AI is actually technically useless. The problem with that is that it makes their arguments seem less credible, and even misleads their own supporters into underestimating what they’re dealing with. It’s a literally self-defeating position.
- watwut 4mo ago> Am I able to write things faster with LLMs, yes. LLM is great at identifying useless writing - if you have llm writing it, it should not exist.
- asadotzler 4mo ago>It's one thing to get an AI google response and feel like it's dubious, it's another thing to know what you want and have an LLM find the APIs for a framework you're not familiar with What I'm hearing is that the 0.00001% use case is great while the 99.9999% use case is shit--and we're supposed to think that's reasonable. Feeding nonsense to pretty much the entire population is just fine with tech bros because a few programmers have an easier time cranking out some code to more effectively sell ads? That's not a mixed bag, friend. That's a bag of horse shit with one M&M at the bottom.
- nixpulvis 4mo agoGoogle was never immune to spitting out junk BTW. Like I said, if you can't see the value in AI, I'd hedge a bet you haven't tried. Even a brief conversation with google's can help identify a gap in your understanding of many topics. How we balance the positives with the negatives is the hard part I want to hear thoughtful and studied opinions on.
- lapcat 4mo ago> There's a lot of issues, ranging over technical, cultural, environmental, and moral problems. But there's also obvious value. To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools. Why would you try to make use of these tools when there are obvious environmental and moral problems with them? What do you tell yourself about those problems, and how do you get past them?
- asp_hornet 4mo agoNo OP but I can tell you exactly where I find my peace: 4 dependents, a cost of living that keeps rocketing and an industry that’s decided “the people who don’t glaze this shit don’t get to continue”. Maybe Ive sold out but what’s the alternative, I’m 17 years in, I can’t figure how I pivot my expertise and still support the family’s demands.
- lapcat 4mo agoFair enough. I have no criticism for people whose employers are forcing it on employees. I blame the employers there. But the OP didn't sound like one of the reluctant.
- asp_hornet 4mo agoYeah, it sucks man. There was a good moment where I thought it wouldn’t come for my org but here I am. Not saying the tech doesn’t have merit but if you’re not blasting the slop cannon constantly and praising Dario for the pleasure, you’re on the list.
- thatfunkymunki 4mo agoI've heard it being described as an iterated prisoner's dilemma and very many people are very publicly defecting.
- nixpulvis 4mo agoI think it's worth understanding the technology so we can have informed strategies for how to best regulate it. We don't solve the climate crisis by abandoning all the technological progress which has put such a strain on our ecosystem, we solve it by rethinking how we use this technology, and finding new technologies and policies to better meet our needs.
- skywhopper 4mo agoThere’s “obvious value” in lots of things that aren’t forced on us and that aren’t pretended to be something everyone is required to learn and use before sticking to their existing toolset or their preferred methods for getting things done. Morality wise, it might have “obvious value” to poison my competitors and steal from my business partners, employees, and customers. That doesn’t mean I am obligated to “try to make use of these tools.”
- BrenBarn 4mo agoI think it's possible to acknowledge that the technology has value while still being pretty much entirely opposed to AI as it exists and is being used today. It's sort of like believing we should have a police force while also believing that pretty much every existing police force should be disbanded and reconstituted from scratch (which also generated polarizing responses), or believing you need a government while also believing that all people currently in office are crooks. It's true there might be a version of something like AI that would be a net good, but I think that's quite far from what we actually have.
- gamblor956 4mo agoBut there's also obvious value. To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools. The issue is not that AIs are useless. It's that they are objectively worse at the job (except apparently programming[1]), than a cheaper, entry-level worker on their first week still learning how to do the job, even though nearly a trillion dollars has been spent on them by this point. The worker gets substantially better over time, and slightly more expensive. LLM models get slightly better over time, but substantially more expensive. [1] The output of even the latest models would have gotten a junior programmer PIP'd back when I was still programming many years ago. That is now considered to be above average code quality is a disheartening referendum on how bad programming standards have fallen since then.
- stefanfisk 4mo agoThat’s assuming that the tools should be able to replace juniors. I have a hard time seeing how a junior could take over the role which Claude code currently fills in my line of work and certainly not at the same price point even if I paid for the tokens rather than a subscription.
- pydry 4mo agoJuniors slowed me down way way way before AI came along but theyre getting stiff competition these days from the AI slop I'm having to wade through.
- gamblor956 3mo agoI have a hard time seeing how a junior could take over the role which Claude code currently fills in my line of work and certainly not at the same price point even if I paid for the tokens rather than a subscription. At the current, VC-subsidized price point, sure. But at the real market cost at which the AI companies would break even on their offerings, the junior is cheaper and more effective than Claude within about 3 months. And to be blunt, if that's not the case then the kind of programming you do is already basically junior-level development anyways and it's a waste to have seniors handing the role that could and should be handled by juniors.
- KronisLV 4mo agoTried writing down my own take on it: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-psychosis-and-anti-ai-psychosis/ https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-psychosis-and-anti-ai-psycho... To sum it all up, there are good arguments both for and against AI, but it increasingly feels like it's ideologically driven and feeds into delusions. Not only that, but while the technology itself isn't inherently evil, you can leave it up to humanity to absolutely misuse it - together with unregulated capitalism, it results in one big mess.