5 ms·

I really do not get all of y'all claiming this causes you to "not be able to think". I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions i

by echelon 1mo ago

I really do not get all of y'all claiming this causes you to "not be able to think". I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions in daily transaction volume. I've built laser projection systems to play interactive games on skyscrapers. That ability is not atrophying. I'm able to do 10-20x what I was able to do before AI, and I'm able to work at a breadth, depth, and level of polish that was previously impossible without mastering other diciplines (CSS, design, etc). With AI, I've built several video games, my own SRS software, my own productivity software, and a business making $5M ARR and growing 70% month on month. I've now done more hardware projects in the past eight months than I have in the last ten years. I might even start doing physics and bio (I did my undergrad in biochem) if I can find the time. I'm also back to making movies. I was a major hobbyist filmmaker before the pandemic. I've shot dozens of films. They're extremely logistically complex and take so much time, and I was never capable of working in the high fantasy or sci fi genres I wanted to. Seedance is scratching so many of my itches it isn't even funny. It's like a gift from the gods. I'm working more now than ever before, and I'm turning those hours of writing pointless glue code or testing new libraries and frameworks into actual productive work. Getting real work done. 2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again. tl;dr - I can still write in cursive, but it turns out I just don't need to as I write my movie. I do not get you folks who claim this is bad. This is magical.

brookst 1mo ago
Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators. I’m with you — I’m producing more and better art, with a deeper understanding of the art which comes from scale. My music is more innovative, my simulations are richer and more fun, I can wake up in the morning with a new idea and have a prototype in hours. It is magical.
- Jcampuzano2 1mo ago
  Big difference is when you use a calculator or other tools, you still have to interpret and know what to enter. With modern AI, you basically just ask for something and what used to be days worth of work magically appears, you didn't really think through a single thing when it comes to implementation, architecture etc unless you made a conscious effort to audit that. We also generally still encourage students to learn how to do certain operations and what they mean without a calculator before letting them rely on it to make things quicker. If you never knew what a sin/cos was you'd never even know when to use those or why they even exist on a calculator. AI is a step up where you literally don't have to know what those are, you could just take a picture and ask for the solution and it would do that all for you if you let it. In reality modern AI is a massive test of willpower. You can completely let go of the reigns and it will happily do everything for you.
  - brookst 1mo ago
    I appreciate your reply and framing, but it strikes me as a spirited opposition to delegation. Or at least a strong assertion that AI use is similar to managing an organization. The reins metaphor is also interesting and cuts both ways: riders don’t expect to do the walking themselves, and setting direction is not the same as doing (even understanding, or being able to do) the work.
- claytongulick 1mo ago
  > Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators. Why do you think so many people prefer to listen to live music over an album playing on a jukebox? Live music doesn't have the polish and perfection of a studio recording, it's much less efficient to have to manually play instruments than to just hit "play" on a song. So why bother? I think it's because we're looking at things wrong all over the place. Similar to live music, I definitely prefer to read code written by a real human. I can get in their head, understand how they were reasoning to solve a problem, even if there were problems with their reasoning. When I hear all the breathless takes about AI "productivity" improvements, my brain just circles aback to the old saw about activity over achievement. What are your outputs? What is activity and what is achievement? A business person brags that AI is able to generate a report for them that used to require lots of manual work linking spreadsheets. OK. What was the value of the report? What was the goal? I like to follow this all the way down- - Widget sales report Why? - To inform inventory and production decisions, as well as marketing Why? - So that the company can make money? So that the founders can be proud of their product? So that the product can improve lives in some way? Why? - So that the people working can have improved lives, and/or more status in society Why? - So that collectively by competing with each other in structured ways, humans as a whole thrive and benefit Etc... OK. Where does AI fit into this? What has it taken away from the human experience, and how had it affected all of these goals? The goal isn't code. It isn't even the product that the code makes - it's the reward signaling that you get from cooperating and competing with other people. When you short circuit your efforts at creation by using AI, it feels the same to me as saying you're putting on a live music show, but instead just hitting "play" on an album.
wkjagt 1mo ago
I believe you. I'm just telling my own personal experience. What works for you doesn't seem to work for me. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? But also: I'm purely doing things for my own pleasure now, so whatever I enjoy more is what I'm free to do. Again though, that's just me.
- LogicFailsMe 1mo ago
  I would absolutely believe people on the spectrum with hyperfocus-oriented ADHD (such as myself) might knock things out of the park with coding agents while everyone else is befuddled by their bizarre behavior. But then, I don't get the slow pace and fake drama of reality TV and professional wrestling, yet so many others do. Similarly, starting with British serial dramas like Survivors and Blake's Seven in the 80s, I really enjoy serialized dramas with an intricately constructed world. We are not all alike inside IMO, but that's 100% a good thing too.
  - breezybottom 1mo ago
    ADHD is an inability to focus. ChatGPT diagnosed you incorrectly.
    - LogicFailsMe 1mo ago
      Not even wrong: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/hyperfocus-and-adhd https://health.clevelandclinic.org/hyperfocus-and-adhd "When you have ADHD, the problem isn’t that you lack attention, it’s that you struggle to control your attention — to put your attention where you want it to go rather than having it go where it wants to go. Hyperfocus is a natural consequence of that lack of control." Lived it. Made it work for me professionally in the end. Do not not need pointy hair edicts telling me how to do career development.
      - breezybottom 1mo ago
        Sounds like it's just telling you what you want to hear. ADHD is when you can't focus, or when you focus too much. Really meaningful label then.
eudamoniac 1mo ago
What is this 5M business?
- echelon 1mo ago
  https://getartcraft.com https://getartcraft.com https://youtu.be/kzvQMdg66Go https://youtu.be/kzvQMdg66Go (Now with full animation control, not just blocking and posing.) This isn't UGC. I know a lot of studios from my filmmaking and 30% of my customers are spending thousands of dollars a month. It's got really good word of mouth and 89% M3 retention. There are two films coming out in theaters this year that use ArtCraft. It's also completely open source (the desktop app and the server). There's another variant of ArtCraft that works with other subscriptions (Runway, Higgs, OpenArt, Comfy, etc.) that I'm testing with some artists: https://artcraftx.ai https://artcraftx.ai Artists are fine tuning their own workflows on top of my own source software and then sharing their variants of ArtCraft. I'm building OpenSourceRouter.com (soon) that will be an open source OpenRouter/FAL/RunPod/Featherless fine tunes. It already powers ArtCraft and is 90% complete to launch. Maybe in the future compute will be fully portable and you can just login to services with compute. I'm also building a collaborative space for AI artists to share workflows, refs, fine tunes, network, and collaboratively build. This side of the business is already here and growing and I haven't built the infra for it yet. It's currently in Discord and an assortment of other places. I'm going to make ArtCraft work with local models too. Comfy is not comfortable, and an all-rust/native, heavily opinionated product with lots of love from filmmakers and artists can do a better job than node graphs IMO. I really care about these tools and I'm doing all of this from a place of passion. I'm not a mercenary trying to get rich quick. I'm here for the mission of empowering artists (and I count myself - this is a tool for me.) It's growing really fast and I'm talking to bigger and bigger folks. It's kind of wild.
  - yard2010 1mo ago
    Dam everything about it sounds like a fairy tale. Way to go. That's so inspiring
  - PKop 1mo ago
    The comment on the YouTube video is accurate: "Soul-less slop for people who don't understand art nor craft". Cutting corners no doubt has appeal to some people in the industry making things, but this says nothing about the appeal to audiences that are supposedly going to want to pay to watch entire movies containing this nonsense. The end result shown in this video and on your website https://getartcraft.com/ https://getartcraft.com/ just doesn't look good, at all. > There are two films coming out in theaters this year that use ArtCraft. Which ones? Like the internet itself, if movies start filling up with more and more slop, it's just going to be another instance of enshitification.
yoyohello13 1mo ago
Links? What’s the business?
- echelon 1mo ago
  I responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500019
  - puelocesar 1mo ago
    So basically you created a Slop Maker.. I mean, you do you I guess..
    - echelon 1mo ago
      Prior to AI, I've made over a dozen films. Six AM call times and eighteen hour days, location release forms, insurance, lifting big props off of two story shelving at the prop house in sweltering heat, last minute fixes to catering for hundreds of people, running AD and logistics. During the pandemic I bought fifty grand of mocap gear to keep shooting virtually. Are you a filmmaker? Because this tech helps me tell stories more directly than photons captured on extremely expensive glass, set dressing full of cheats and tricks, and spreadsheets of logistics. I have several films coming out in theaters that use ArtCraft. I'm working on anime reboots of several popular series from the 80's and 90's. Full licensing and original authors on board. I'm talking to several major bands, huge directors, and tons of people in the space. I've talked to the leadership at many of the big studios and I'm working on deals. I promise I care more about film than you do. I spend so much energy on it that it consumes me. Hollywood already makes slop. Some of the projects that get greenlit are downright terrible. You don't need AI to make slop. There are hundreds of AI filmmakers doing absolutely phenomenal work, and the pool is rapidly growing. You don't criticize early CG film for relying on imprecise Blinn-Phong shading, yet people who aren't even trying to carve sculptures out of the new kind of clay are eager to jump on AI rendering artifacts while discounting AI works as a whole. An AI short film can take months and months of labor. An AI aided scene can take weeks. It's work. It's not "prompt and done". What sucks is that I know a room full of people that went to expensive film school and wound up in support roles where they never got to helm their dream projects. Hollywood funding was never amenable to following your vision as your heart desired. We've been fortunate in software to not live with that curse. How many young Scorseses withered on the vine because they couldn't access the capital they needed to tell the stories their heart desired? AI is going to fix that.
breezybottom 1mo ago
It sounds like you're experiencing a manic episode.
- echelon 1mo ago
  Why do you (and lots of other people with your mindset) speak to other humans this way? I post stuff I make on reddit and the teenagers (or grown men?) say things like, "your mother should have used a coat hanger if she knew you'd use AI". And it's almost a daily occurrence on social media. I'm having a great time, and you don't have to join the club. Do whatever you want with your life. But stop talking to us like this. I get that what I posted here is a critical refutation and not simply a neutral art or tech post about AI to a friendly audience. It invites critique and that's fine. But all the same, why do people go out of their way to frame it like this? To dunk on positive things and experiences people are having?
  - spankibalt 1mo ago
    > But all the same, why do people go out of their way to frame it like this? Because you (and your legion of likeminded folks on pseudosocial media) indeed sound like some washed-up, self-delusional salesman with a loaded gun to his head, desperately trying to land that sales pitch. And that's before we come to address all the usual cheap clichés, false equivalences, or if you wrote that slop yourself in the first place, etc.
    - yard2010 1mo ago
      Lead, follow or get out of the way
  - NateEag 1mo ago
    I don't make comments like the appalling one you quote, and I'm sorry someone said that to you. That said, I do hate genAI, and so have decent grounds for guessing why people would say things like that. In my case, my employers have mandated LLM usage and all but banned actually programming, and I can see it rotting my ability to code and understand things. That is extremely demoralizing, and I expect others going through it would be very likely to lash out in anger when they see people praising genAI as amazing and wonderful. Distinct from that, those of us who have at one point supported ourselves in a purely artistic domain we love, such as music or illustration, are deeply saddened to see genAI destroying the opportunity to be paid to do those things we love. We hope that other humans will continue to invest their wealth into art made by humans, but clearly some are not, and that group may grow as the generators get better. The pain of seeing the opportunities you had destroyed, both for yourself and for others, is made even more acute when you see someone shouting about how wonderful the tools causing the destruction are. Angry aggression is the expected result, we humans being what we are. Finally, many of us in the anti-genAI camp are both able to see that the tools can be effective force-multipliers, but can also see the manifold negative externalities of genAI: on-demand propaganda, genAI psychosis, anonymous virtual rape (I don't know a better way to describe generating and distributing videos of actual humans doing sex acts they've never done), super-persuader scammers, potential massive job loss, concentration of social / political power into the GPU-holders' hands, accelerated climate change from the massive resource consumption, actual unaligned paperclip optimizers (see e.g. the HuggingFace hack, which is a textbook example of a monkeys-paw / paperclipper scenario), actually-effective mass surveillance, the increasing risk of bioterrorism at massive scale, and the looming possibility that an ASI evolved from these systems will actually bring us to "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" or extinction scenarios. If you see all that, the urge to bully, insult, and denigrate people who are choosing all those consequences by using the things is very strong. Viewed from this angle, it's certainly hard not to conclude that those of us using genAI are being very, very selfish, choosing personal benefit over the collective good. I feel guilty daily for not having the courage to refuse to use and accept the economic consequences (if I weren't a special-needs family's primary breadwinner, I would just refuse and accept the consequences). Again, I'm sorry people are responding abusively to you, and I hope I will never react that way. Have I helped you see why people might react cruelly to your comments?
nunez 1mo ago
Let me assist. Yes, *you* are able to leverage your previous expertise *that you spent years accumulating with your own mind* to productivitymaxx to the extreme and work on all the things. AI is awesome for people who know what they're doing. This is well-documented. What is _also_ true is that people think less to a lot less when they defer work to AI. For those who are getting into this industry or learning new things (i.e. the people that you will eventually NOT hire for your growing business that you MIGHT have hired in the past), that is an absolutely terrible thing to have happen. This is _also_ well documented. Your success does not refute that.
polnoner 1mo ago
You were probably exposed to a wide range of art, music, culture and ideas growing up. I think there is a whole generation of people who were so culturally starved during their formative years they can only see a blank canvas as a useless white square. "Who is going to buy a painting of a white square?"
CodeMage 1mo ago
Others have already talked to you about the significance of your anecdata and your faintly dismissive tone, but there's something else in your comment that tickled me and that no one's addressed yet: > 2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again. Who do you think was responsible for that dystopia? It wasn't those people you mentioned, who built the 70% of the old internet. The enshittification started when the people whose passion in life is to make money caught the scent of money-making potential the internet had. But then, how did those people actually accomplish the enshittification we're dealing with now? The answer is: with the enthusiastic help of the True Believers. Crypto is the best example. Just recall how many devs were convinced that the blockchain was going to revolutionize everything. And I mean devs. Not snake-oil peddlers in suits, not LinkedIn influencers, none of the usual posse of posers, but people who actually wrote code and were reasonably good at that. And that's not the only example, just the best one. I've been there myself. Back when OOP, UML, capital-A Agile, CMMi, and MDA (Model Driven Architecture) were the Hot New Thing, I was one of the True Believers, following the trends and proselytizing my colleagues. Every bit of the dystopia you lament was pushed by the combination of ambitious MBAs and True Believer devs. And the reason I bring this up is because you're one of those True Believers now. It's easy to fall into that trap. All you need is to have enough good experiences with the Hot New Thing to suppress your critical thinking and believe that this will Make Everything Great Again. The same kind of people who profited off the tech dystopia you saw are now ushering a new, worse tech dystopia that you're turning a blind eye to. Your belief that this new tech will somehow balance and even counteract what those people did to the internet you loved is not based in facts. It's faith.
iamsaitam 1mo ago
Maybe instead of delving into physics and bio, delve into ethics and empathy.

by echelon 1mo ago

brookst 1mo ago

Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators. I’m with you — I’m producing more and better art, with a deeper understanding of the art which comes from scale. My music is more innovative, my simulations are richer and more fun, I can wake up in the morning with a new idea and have a prototype in hours. It is magical.

Jcampuzano2 1mo ago
Big difference is when you use a calculator or other tools, you still have to interpret and know what to enter. With modern AI, you basically just ask for something and what used to be days worth of work magically appears, you didn't really think through a single thing when it comes to implementation, architecture etc unless you made a conscious effort to audit that. We also generally still encourage students to learn how to do certain operations and what they mean without a calculator before letting them rely on it to make things quicker. If you never knew what a sin/cos was you'd never even know when to use those or why they even exist on a calculator. AI is a step up where you literally don't have to know what those are, you could just take a picture and ask for the solution and it would do that all for you if you let it. In reality modern AI is a massive test of willpower. You can completely let go of the reigns and it will happily do everything for you.
- brookst 1mo ago
  I appreciate your reply and framing, but it strikes me as a spirited opposition to delegation. Or at least a strong assertion that AI use is similar to managing an organization. The reins metaphor is also interesting and cuts both ways: riders don’t expect to do the walking themselves, and setting direction is not the same as doing (even understanding, or being able to do) the work.
claytongulick 1mo ago
> Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators. Why do you think so many people prefer to listen to live music over an album playing on a jukebox? Live music doesn't have the polish and perfection of a studio recording, it's much less efficient to have to manually play instruments than to just hit "play" on a song. So why bother? I think it's because we're looking at things wrong all over the place. Similar to live music, I definitely prefer to read code written by a real human. I can get in their head, understand how they were reasoning to solve a problem, even if there were problems with their reasoning. When I hear all the breathless takes about AI "productivity" improvements, my brain just circles aback to the old saw about activity over achievement. What are your outputs? What is activity and what is achievement? A business person brags that AI is able to generate a report for them that used to require lots of manual work linking spreadsheets. OK. What was the value of the report? What was the goal? I like to follow this all the way down- - Widget sales report Why? - To inform inventory and production decisions, as well as marketing Why? - So that the company can make money? So that the founders can be proud of their product? So that the product can improve lives in some way? Why? - So that the people working can have improved lives, and/or more status in society Why? - So that collectively by competing with each other in structured ways, humans as a whole thrive and benefit Etc... OK. Where does AI fit into this? What has it taken away from the human experience, and how had it affected all of these goals? The goal isn't code. It isn't even the product that the code makes - it's the reward signaling that you get from cooperating and competing with other people. When you short circuit your efforts at creation by using AI, it feels the same to me as saying you're putting on a live music show, but instead just hitting "play" on an album.

wkjagt 1mo ago

I believe you. I'm just telling my own personal experience. What works for you doesn't seem to work for me. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? But also: I'm purely doing things for my own pleasure now, so whatever I enjoy more is what I'm free to do. Again though, that's just me.

LogicFailsMe 1mo ago
I would absolutely believe people on the spectrum with hyperfocus-oriented ADHD (such as myself) might knock things out of the park with coding agents while everyone else is befuddled by their bizarre behavior. But then, I don't get the slow pace and fake drama of reality TV and professional wrestling, yet so many others do. Similarly, starting with British serial dramas like Survivors and Blake's Seven in the 80s, I really enjoy serialized dramas with an intricately constructed world. We are not all alike inside IMO, but that's 100% a good thing too.
- breezybottom 1mo ago
  ADHD is an inability to focus. ChatGPT diagnosed you incorrectly.
  - LogicFailsMe 1mo ago
    Not even wrong: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/hyperfocus-and-adhd https://health.clevelandclinic.org/hyperfocus-and-adhd "When you have ADHD, the problem isn’t that you lack attention, it’s that you struggle to control your attention — to put your attention where you want it to go rather than having it go where it wants to go. Hyperfocus is a natural consequence of that lack of control." Lived it. Made it work for me professionally in the end. Do not not need pointy hair edicts telling me how to do career development.
    - breezybottom 1mo ago
      Sounds like it's just telling you what you want to hear. ADHD is when you can't focus, or when you focus too much. Really meaningful label then.

eudamoniac 1mo ago

What is this 5M business?

echelon 1mo ago
https://getartcraft.com https://getartcraft.com https://youtu.be/kzvQMdg66Go https://youtu.be/kzvQMdg66Go (Now with full animation control, not just blocking and posing.) This isn't UGC. I know a lot of studios from my filmmaking and 30% of my customers are spending thousands of dollars a month. It's got really good word of mouth and 89% M3 retention. There are two films coming out in theaters this year that use ArtCraft. It's also completely open source (the desktop app and the server). There's another variant of ArtCraft that works with other subscriptions (Runway, Higgs, OpenArt, Comfy, etc.) that I'm testing with some artists: https://artcraftx.ai https://artcraftx.ai Artists are fine tuning their own workflows on top of my own source software and then sharing their variants of ArtCraft. I'm building OpenSourceRouter.com (soon) that will be an open source OpenRouter/FAL/RunPod/Featherless fine tunes. It already powers ArtCraft and is 90% complete to launch. Maybe in the future compute will be fully portable and you can just login to services with compute. I'm also building a collaborative space for AI artists to share workflows, refs, fine tunes, network, and collaboratively build. This side of the business is already here and growing and I haven't built the infra for it yet. It's currently in Discord and an assortment of other places. I'm going to make ArtCraft work with local models too. Comfy is not comfortable, and an all-rust/native, heavily opinionated product with lots of love from filmmakers and artists can do a better job than node graphs IMO. I really care about these tools and I'm doing all of this from a place of passion. I'm not a mercenary trying to get rich quick. I'm here for the mission of empowering artists (and I count myself - this is a tool for me.) It's growing really fast and I'm talking to bigger and bigger folks. It's kind of wild.
- yard2010 1mo ago
  Dam everything about it sounds like a fairy tale. Way to go. That's so inspiring
- PKop 1mo ago
  The comment on the YouTube video is accurate: "Soul-less slop for people who don't understand art nor craft". Cutting corners no doubt has appeal to some people in the industry making things, but this says nothing about the appeal to audiences that are supposedly going to want to pay to watch entire movies containing this nonsense. The end result shown in this video and on your website https://getartcraft.com/ https://getartcraft.com/ just doesn't look good, at all. > There are two films coming out in theaters this year that use ArtCraft. Which ones? Like the internet itself, if movies start filling up with more and more slop, it's just going to be another instance of enshitification.

yoyohello13 1mo ago

Links? What’s the business?

echelon 1mo ago
I responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500019
- puelocesar 1mo ago
  So basically you created a Slop Maker.. I mean, you do you I guess..
  - echelon 1mo ago
    Prior to AI, I've made over a dozen films. Six AM call times and eighteen hour days, location release forms, insurance, lifting big props off of two story shelving at the prop house in sweltering heat, last minute fixes to catering for hundreds of people, running AD and logistics. During the pandemic I bought fifty grand of mocap gear to keep shooting virtually. Are you a filmmaker? Because this tech helps me tell stories more directly than photons captured on extremely expensive glass, set dressing full of cheats and tricks, and spreadsheets of logistics. I have several films coming out in theaters that use ArtCraft. I'm working on anime reboots of several popular series from the 80's and 90's. Full licensing and original authors on board. I'm talking to several major bands, huge directors, and tons of people in the space. I've talked to the leadership at many of the big studios and I'm working on deals. I promise I care more about film than you do. I spend so much energy on it that it consumes me. Hollywood already makes slop. Some of the projects that get greenlit are downright terrible. You don't need AI to make slop. There are hundreds of AI filmmakers doing absolutely phenomenal work, and the pool is rapidly growing. You don't criticize early CG film for relying on imprecise Blinn-Phong shading, yet people who aren't even trying to carve sculptures out of the new kind of clay are eager to jump on AI rendering artifacts while discounting AI works as a whole. An AI short film can take months and months of labor. An AI aided scene can take weeks. It's work. It's not "prompt and done". What sucks is that I know a room full of people that went to expensive film school and wound up in support roles where they never got to helm their dream projects. Hollywood funding was never amenable to following your vision as your heart desired. We've been fortunate in software to not live with that curse. How many young Scorseses withered on the vine because they couldn't access the capital they needed to tell the stories their heart desired? AI is going to fix that.

breezybottom 1mo ago

It sounds like you're experiencing a manic episode.

echelon 1mo ago
Why do you (and lots of other people with your mindset) speak to other humans this way? I post stuff I make on reddit and the teenagers (or grown men?) say things like, "your mother should have used a coat hanger if she knew you'd use AI". And it's almost a daily occurrence on social media. I'm having a great time, and you don't have to join the club. Do whatever you want with your life. But stop talking to us like this. I get that what I posted here is a critical refutation and not simply a neutral art or tech post about AI to a friendly audience. It invites critique and that's fine. But all the same, why do people go out of their way to frame it like this? To dunk on positive things and experiences people are having?
- spankibalt 1mo ago
  > But all the same, why do people go out of their way to frame it like this? Because you (and your legion of likeminded folks on pseudosocial media) indeed sound like some washed-up, self-delusional salesman with a loaded gun to his head, desperately trying to land that sales pitch. And that's before we come to address all the usual cheap clichés, false equivalences, or if you wrote that slop yourself in the first place, etc.
  - yard2010 1mo ago
    Lead, follow or get out of the way
- NateEag 1mo ago
  I don't make comments like the appalling one you quote, and I'm sorry someone said that to you. That said, I do hate genAI, and so have decent grounds for guessing why people would say things like that. In my case, my employers have mandated LLM usage and all but banned actually programming, and I can see it rotting my ability to code and understand things. That is extremely demoralizing, and I expect others going through it would be very likely to lash out in anger when they see people praising genAI as amazing and wonderful. Distinct from that, those of us who have at one point supported ourselves in a purely artistic domain we love, such as music or illustration, are deeply saddened to see genAI destroying the opportunity to be paid to do those things we love. We hope that other humans will continue to invest their wealth into art made by humans, but clearly some are not, and that group may grow as the generators get better. The pain of seeing the opportunities you had destroyed, both for yourself and for others, is made even more acute when you see someone shouting about how wonderful the tools causing the destruction are. Angry aggression is the expected result, we humans being what we are. Finally, many of us in the anti-genAI camp are both able to see that the tools can be effective force-multipliers, but can also see the manifold negative externalities of genAI: on-demand propaganda, genAI psychosis, anonymous virtual rape (I don't know a better way to describe generating and distributing videos of actual humans doing sex acts they've never done), super-persuader scammers, potential massive job loss, concentration of social / political power into the GPU-holders' hands, accelerated climate change from the massive resource consumption, actual unaligned paperclip optimizers (see e.g. the HuggingFace hack, which is a textbook example of a monkeys-paw / paperclipper scenario), actually-effective mass surveillance, the increasing risk of bioterrorism at massive scale, and the looming possibility that an ASI evolved from these systems will actually bring us to "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" or extinction scenarios. If you see all that, the urge to bully, insult, and denigrate people who are choosing all those consequences by using the things is very strong. Viewed from this angle, it's certainly hard not to conclude that those of us using genAI are being very, very selfish, choosing personal benefit over the collective good. I feel guilty daily for not having the courage to refuse to use and accept the economic consequences (if I weren't a special-needs family's primary breadwinner, I would just refuse and accept the consequences). Again, I'm sorry people are responding abusively to you, and I hope I will never react that way. Have I helped you see why people might react cruelly to your comments?

nunez 1mo ago

Let me assist. Yes, *you* are able to leverage your previous expertise *that you spent years accumulating with your own mind* to productivitymaxx to the extreme and work on all the things. AI is awesome for people who know what they're doing. This is well-documented. What is _also_ true is that people think less to a lot less when they defer work to AI. For those who are getting into this industry or learning new things (i.e. the people that you will eventually NOT hire for your growing business that you MIGHT have hired in the past), that is an absolutely terrible thing to have happen. This is _also_ well documented. Your success does not refute that.

polnoner 1mo ago

You were probably exposed to a wide range of art, music, culture and ideas growing up. I think there is a whole generation of people who were so culturally starved during their formative years they can only see a blank canvas as a useless white square. "Who is going to buy a painting of a white square?"

CodeMage 1mo ago

Others have already talked to you about the significance of your anecdata and your faintly dismissive tone, but there's something else in your comment that tickled me and that no one's addressed yet: > 2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again. Who do you think was responsible for that dystopia? It wasn't those people you mentioned, who built the 70% of the old internet. The enshittification started when the people whose passion in life is to make money caught the scent of money-making potential the internet had. But then, how did those people actually accomplish the enshittification we're dealing with now? The answer is: with the enthusiastic help of the True Believers. Crypto is the best example. Just recall how many devs were convinced that the blockchain was going to revolutionize everything. And I mean devs. Not snake-oil peddlers in suits, not LinkedIn influencers, none of the usual posse of posers, but people who actually wrote code and were reasonably good at that. And that's not the only example, just the best one. I've been there myself. Back when OOP, UML, capital-A Agile, CMMi, and MDA (Model Driven Architecture) were the Hot New Thing, I was one of the True Believers, following the trends and proselytizing my colleagues. Every bit of the dystopia you lament was pushed by the combination of ambitious MBAs and True Believer devs. And the reason I bring this up is because you're one of those True Believers now. It's easy to fall into that trap. All you need is to have enough good experiences with the Hot New Thing to suppress your critical thinking and believe that this will Make Everything Great Again. The same kind of people who profited off the tech dystopia you saw are now ushering a new, worse tech dystopia that you're turning a blind eye to. Your belief that this new tech will somehow balance and even counteract what those people did to the internet you loved is not based in facts. It's faith.

iamsaitam 1mo ago

Maybe instead of delving into physics and bio, delve into ethics and empathy.