The Rise of Whatever

https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/

by cratermoon • 1 year ago

644 504 1 year ago

tptacek8• 1 year ago

LLM output is crap. It’s just crap. It sucks, and is bad.

Still don't get it. LLM outputs are nondeterministic. LLMs invent APIs that don't exist. That's why you filter those outputs through agent constructions, which actually compile code. The nondeterminism of LLMs don't make your compiler nondeterministic.

All sorts of ways to knock LLM-generated code. Most I disagree with, all colorable. But this article is based on a model of LLM code generation from 6 months ago which is simply no longer true, and you can't gaslight your way back to Q1 2024.

beckthompson3• 1 year ago

AIs still frequently make up stuff up - there isn't really a way to get out of that. Have they improved a lot in the last six months? 100%! But they still make mistakes its quite common

tptacek8• 1 year ago

LLM calls make stuff up. Your compiler can't make things up. An agent iterates LLM calls. When your LLM call makes an API up, your compiler will generate errors. The errors get fed back into the iterative loop. In pretty much ever real case, the LLM corrects, but either way: the result is clear. The code may be wrong, but it shouldn't hallucinate entire APIs.

csomar4• 1 year ago

You can improve on that

1. A type-strict compiler.

2. https://github.com/isaacphi/mcp-language-server

LLMs will always make stuff up because they are lossy. In the same way that if I ask you to list the methods for some random object lib you'd not be able to do that; you use the documentation to pull that up or your code-complete companion. LLMs are just getting the tools for that.

62702b077f3• 1 year ago

The garbage generator generates garbage, but if you run it enough times it gets something slightly-less-garbage that can satisfy a compiler! You're stupid if you don't think this is awesome!

KPGv2• 1 year ago

I had Copilot for a hot minute. When I wrote things like serializers and deserializers, it was incredible. So much time saved. But I didn't do it enough to make the personal cost worth it, so I cancelled.

It's annoying to have to hand-code that stuff. But without Copilot I have to. Or I can write some arcane regex and run it on existing code to get 90% of the way there. But writing the regex also takes a while.

Copilot was literally just suggesting the whole deserialization function after I"d finished the serializer, 100% correct code.

ipdashc2• 1 year ago

I don't understand the point of this style of argument.

There are oh-so-many issues with LLMs - plagiarism/IP rights, worsening education, unmaintainable code - this should be obvious to anyone. But painting them as totally useless just doesn't make sense. Of course they work. I've had a task I want to do, I ask the LLM in plain English, it gives me code, the code works, I get the task done faster than I would have figuring out the code myself. This process has happened plenty of times.

Which part of this do you disagree with, under your argument? Am I and all the other millions of people who have experienced this all collectively hallucinating (pun intended) that we got working solutions to our problems? Are we just unskilled for not being able to write the code quickly enough ourselves, and should go sod off? I'm joking a bit, but it's a genuine question.

literalAardvark• 1 year ago

Counter point: the brain also generates mostly garbage, just slower.

Shorel6• 1 year ago

You are right about this.

Also, someone mathematically proved that's enough. And then someone else proved it empirically.

There was an experiment where they trained 16 pigeons to detect cancerous or benign tumours from photographies.

Individually, each pigeon had an average 85% accuracy. But all pigeons (except for one outlier) together had an accuracy of 99%.

If you add enough silly brains, you get one super smart brain.

ipdashc2• 1 year ago

There was an article that made the rounds a few weeks ago that still rings true. Basically, it feels like one is going crazy reading either "extreme" of the whole LLM conversation, with one extreme (obviously) being the "AI can do anything" Twitter techbro types, but the other extreme being articles like this that claim it can't do anything.

I know the author already addressed this, literally calling out HN by name, but I just don't get it. You don't even need agents (though I'm sure they help), I still just use regular ChatGPT or Copilot or whatever and it's still occasionally useful. You type in what you want it to do, it gives you code, and usually the code works. Can we appreciate how insane this would have been, what, half a decade ago? Are our standards literally "the magic english-to-code machine doesn't work 100% of the time, so it's total crap, utterly useless"?

I absolutely agree with the general thrust of the article, the overall sense of disillusionment, the impact LLM abuse is going to have on education, etc. I don't even particularly like LLMs. But it really does feel like gaslighting to the extent that when these essays make this sort of argument (LLMs being entirely useless for coding) it just makes me take them less seriously.

paulddraper2• 1 year ago

it just makes me take them less seriously

Indeed. This is how to spot an ideologue with an axe to grind, not someone whose beliefs are shaped by dispassionate observation.

csomar4• 1 year ago

LLM outputs are nondeterministic.

LLM outputs are deterministic. There is no intrinsic source of randomness. Users can add randomness (temperature) to the output and modify it.

But this article is based on a model of LLM code generation from 6 months ago

There hasn't been much change in models from 6 months ago. What happened is that we have better tooling to sift through the randomly generated outputs.

I don't disagree with your message. You are being downvoted because a lot of software developers are butt-hurt by it. It is going to force a change in the labor market for developers. In the same way the author is butt-hurt that they didn't buy Bitcoin in the very early days (as they were aware of it) and missed the boat on that.

tptacek8• 1 year ago

There hasn't been much change in models from 6 months ago.

I made the same claim in a widely-circulated piece a month or so back, and have come to believe it was wildly false, the dumbest thing I said in that piece.

reasonableklout• 1 year ago

Nit: in practice, even at temperature 0, production LLM implementations have some non-determinism. One reason is because many floating point computations are technically non-commutative even when the mathematical operation is, and the order can vary if they are carried out in parallel by the GPU. For example, see: https://www.twosigma.com/articles/a-workaround-for-non-deter...

lovich4• 1 year ago

agent constructions
But this article is based on a model of LLM code generation from 6 months ago which is simply no longer true, and you can't gaslight your way back to Q1 2024.

You’re ahead of the curve and wondering why others don’t know what you do. If you’re not an AI company, a faang, or an AI evangelist you likely haven’t heard of those solutions.

I’ve been trying to keep up with AI developments, and only learned about MCP and agentic workflows 1-2 months ago and I consider myself failing at keeping up with cutting edge AI development

Edit:

Also six months ago is Q1 2025, not 2024. Not sure if that was a typo or a need to remind you at how rapidly this technology is iterating

eviks2• 1 year ago

or they suggested an elaborate and tedious workaround that would technically solve the problem (but introduce new ones).

There is no value in randomly choosing an API that exists. There is value in choosing an API that works.

When LLM makes up an API that doesn't even exist it indicates that it's not tied to the reality of the task of fetching a working API, so filtering out nonexistent APIs will not help the other results match better. But yes, they'll compile.

tptacek8• 1 year ago

Give me a break. First, that's not the claim the article makes. Second, that's not the experience of anybody who actually uses Claude Code or Gemini Desktop or whatever people are using this week. This is what I'm talking about: people just gaslighting.

LLMs can write truly shitty code. I have a <50% hit rate on stuff I don't have to rewrite, with Sketch.dev, an agent I like a lot. But they don't fail the way you or this article claim they do. Enough.

d4rkn0d3z• 1 year ago

Isn't this saying "We get it that our nondeterministic bullshit machine writes crap, but we are wrapping it in a deterministic finite state machine in order to bring back determinism. We call it 'Agentic'".

Seems like 40 years of effort making deterministic computing work in a non-deterministic universe is being cast aside because we thought nondeterminism might work better. Turns out, we need determinism after all.

Following this out, we might end up with alternating layers of determinism and nondeterminism each trying to correct the output of the layer below.

I would argue AI is a harder problem than any humans have ever tried to solve, how does it benefit me to make every mundane problem into the hardest problem ever? As they say on the internet ...and now you have two problems, the second of which is always the hardest one ever.

mumbisChungo2• 1 year ago

I think there's a decent chance that folks on the fringes find interesting uses for immutable and programmable distributed ledgers, even if the prevailing culture of crypto is hellish.

Analemma_• 1 year ago

I keep hearing this theory, that “eventually” we will find the use cases for distributed ledgers, and I don’t buy it. Bitcoin was invented at roughly the same time as the iPhone, and the iPhone immediately found use cases. Right away the global economy reoriented itself around the smartphone, because it demonstrated real value to actual people. We did not need to wait and twiddle our fingers for years going “I think there’s a decent chance people find interesting uses for this someday”.

Immutable distributed ledgers, by contrast, have found no use cases other than crime and financial speculation in coming up on twenty years. Exactly how long do we have to wait for these interesting uses that are “surely” coming?

mumbisChungo2• 1 year ago

You make it sounds like it's a struggle between two sides. It's just another option for a creative person who has a problem to solve. Maybe it'll be used for something interesting. Maybe it won't be. It's just a piece of maybe frivolous optional technology.

yieldcrv7• 1 year ago

there are many people with many use cases for distributed ledgers. we are already aware of the flowchart of your argument path

“list them”

“oh I can do that in this other convoluted way that doesnt solve any of these users goals or problems”

“I’m not the target audience for that so it doesnt count”

“ah so financial speculation, that doesnt count despite being the largest application and sector on the planet”

“marketcap doesnt matter and isnt indicative of anything in that economy, I would rather hold digital assets at a separate different standard than every other asset on the planet out of total ignorance that my same arguments apply to asset classes that I respect”

“see I proved my point for myself, there is no use case after 17 years, classic HN”

“those are strawman arguments despite all conversations following this same predictable path enough for any language model to regurgitate it verbatim”

m0wer5• 1 year ago

Isn't being able of anonymously send you something of value that no one can take away from you a pretty big use case?

A third of the world is unbanked. A permissionless monetary system makes a huge difference for those.

When I was still very skeptical about Bitcoin, I met a guy in Turkey who was from a very poor African country and was just studying there. His father would buy Bitcoin in their home country with the local currency (P2P) and send it to his son, that would then convert it also P2P for Turkish Liras. They could do this securely an within minutes. The alternative was using Western Union and paying taxes in both countries, which in total added up to ~50% of the sent amount.

It's great not needing Bitcoin, as it is great not needing Tor. But that doesn't mean there's no use case for them.

tyre• 1 year ago

The author is mad at Stripe and PayPal for banning transactions involving unicorn wieners but this is imposed on them by the backing banks.

The reason behind banning adult materials has to do with Puritanism and with the high rates of refunds on adult websites.

anonzzzies• 1 year ago

I have an issue with Stripe or Paypal banning merchants without recourse that do not sell adult stuff or anything else bad/high refund, just because 'AI flagged the account'. And I know from Paypal that they have used 'AI' (statistics) to flag accounts, without recourse, almost since they started. It did cost us a lot of money; we had no refunds or anything and paypal was simply (in email and on the phone) repeating that there was no recourse. We moved to an EU system which we are using for 15 years now and never had any issues of course (as we never did anything weird, ever); also, I can call them or visit them if anything happens unlike the impersonal big guys. Far cheaper too. Screw paypal & stripe (their fees are an absolute joke, no idea why they are so popular), thanks.

movetheworld• 1 year ago

Which EU system did you move to?

dspillett• 1 year ago

no idea why they are so popular

Momentum. They are the big games in town because so many people use them, so many people use them because they are the big games in town. There was a time for both when they didn't suck as much as they do now, at least relative to what other options existed.

N_Lens2• 1 year ago

There's a reason "Paypal mafia" is in the lexicon.

tavavex• 1 year ago

I still think it's mostly puritanism. "Adult transactions" is a massive category of goods and services, and I'm willing to bet that John the average guy buying an overpriced subscription on generic porn website #729 and regretting it 20 minutes later is much more likely to trigger a refund or chargeback than someone commissioning an artist or buying goods (anything from real-life things to 3D models).

Yet, the payment processors will all reliably treat anything NSFW equally by suppressing it as much as they can. From banning individuals who dare do transactions they don't approve of to directly pressuring websites that might tolerate NSFW content by threatening to take away their only means of making money. If they only cared about refunds and profitability, they wouldn't ban individual artists - because the fact how these artists often manage to stay undetected for years suggests that many of their customers aren't the kind to start complaining.

It's quite fascinating how this is the one area where the companies are willing to "self-regulate". They don't process sales of illicit drugs because the governments above them said no and put in extensive guardrails to make these illegal uses as difficult as reasonably possible. Yet, despite most first-world governments not taking issue with adult content at large (for now), the payment processors will act on their own and diligently turn away any potential revenue they could be collecting.

paulddraper2• 1 year ago

Either that, or live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal.

The irony of this rant next to the AI rant.

Progress is not uniformly distributed I guess.

washmyelbows• 1 year ago

Couldn't agree more on many of these points. There is so much 'whatever' everywhere on the web that I legitimately don't understand people being interested in the platforms that suck everyone's time. Its frustrating as someone who used to enjoy the early web a lot and it's frustrating to see people that I have a lot of respect for buying into these awful systems with their time and attention. Worse still, I'm something of an outsider in many situations for opting out of them.

The author lost me a little on the AI rant. Yes, everything and everyone is shoving LLMs into places that I don't want it. Just today Bandcamp sent me an email about upcoming summer albums that was clearly in part written by AI. You can't get away from it, it's awful. That being said, the tooling for software development is so powerful that I feel like I'd be crazy not to use it. I save so so much time with banal programming tasks by just writing up a paragraph to cursor about what I want and how I want it done.

gyomu• 1 year ago

Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there.

But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline.

There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though.
I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?”

When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good.

But up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle.

I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come.

maegul• 1 year ago

Agreed!

The only silver lining I can see is that a new perspective may be forced on how well or badly we’ve facilitated learning, usability, generally navigating pain points and maybe even all the dusty presumptions around the education / vocational / professional-development pipeline.

Before, demand for employment/salary pushed people through. Now, if actual and reliable understanding, expertise and quality is desirable, maybe paying attention to how well the broader system cultivates and can harness these attributes can be of value.

Intuitively though, my feeling is that we’re in some cultural turbulence, likely of a truly historical magnitude, in which nothing can be taken for granted and some “battles” were likely lost long ago when we started down this modern-computing path.

bruce5117• 1 year ago

To be fair, LLMs are just the most recent step in a long road of doing the same thing.

At any point of progress in history you can look backwards and forwards and the world is different.

Before tractors a man with an ox could plough x field in y time. After tractors he can plough much larger areas. The nature of farming changes. (Fewer people needed to farm more land. )

The car arrives, horses leave. Computers arrive, the typing pool goes away. Typing was a skill, now everyone does it and spell checkers hide imperfections.

So yeah LLMs make "drawing easier". Which means just that. Is that good or bad? Well I can't draw the old fashioned way so for me, good.

Cooking used to be hard. Today cooking is easy, and very accessible. More importantly good food (cooked at home or elsewhere) is accessible to a much higher % of the population. Preparing the evening meal no longer starts with "pluck 2 chickens" and grinding a kilo of dried corn.

So yeah, LLMs are here. And yes things will change. Some old jobs will become obsolete. Some new ones will appear. This is normal, it's been happening forever.

pjc502• 1 year ago

More fundamental question: if everyone can generate an album in an afternoon, why would anyone else listen to any of those? It turns into dust in the long tail.

dvaun• 1 year ago

All we are is dust in the wind.

ninetyninenine9• 1 year ago

The things that were revolutionary in the past all eventually become common place and boring. It's happened to almost everything and continues to happen to anything new that comes out.

LLMs will accelerate the pace of this assimilation. New trends and new things will become popular and generic so fast that we'll have to get really inventive to stay ahead of the curve.

dale_glass3• 1 year ago

Anyone can write a comment here in less than a minute. Why should anyone read it?

IMO, because it's good in a way or another. I'm not reading your writing because I imagine you toiled over every word of it, but simply because I started reading and it seemed worthwhile to read the rest.

raincole2• 1 year ago

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization.

Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invented. World record of how many digits of pi memorized kept improving even when a computer does that indefinitely times better.

It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal models when we live in a reality where powerlifting is a thing.

zwnow6• 1 year ago

My guy its not only about the art its about killing passion and the lifeline of people. Your take is incredibly ignorant to people who value human created work. These things will kill industries. What jobs should people work in, who got their income cut by LLMs? Force them into blue collar work?

bryanrasmussen• 1 year ago

LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is.

I would not buy a calculator that hallucinated wrong answers part of the time. Or a microwave oven that told you it grilled the chicken but it didn't and you have to die from Salmonella poisoning.

tgv• 1 year ago

Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so

Even though that is a generalization that you cannot prove, you implicitly admit that it will prevent everybody else from gettings any skills. Which is quite a bad outcome.

powerlifting is a thing

Those people have a different motivation: looks, competition, prestige, power. That doesn't motivate people to learn to draw.

Your easy dismissal is undoubtedly shared by many, but it is hubris.

ninetyninenine9• 1 year ago

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is.

You generally don't need a lengthy explanation because it's common sense. When someone doesn't get it then people have to go into lengthy convoluted explanations because they are trying to elucidate common sense to someone who doesn't get it.

I mean how else do I elucidate it?

LLMs are different from any revolutionary technology that came before it. The first thing is we don't understand it. It's a black box. We understand the learning algorithm that trains the weights, but we don't understand conceptually how an LLM works. They are black boxes and we have limited control over them.

You are talking to a thing that understands what you say to it, yet we don't understand this how this thing works. Nobody in the history of science has created anything similar. And yet we get geniuses like you who can use a simple analogy to reduce the creation of an LLM to something like the invention of a car and think there's utterly no difference.

There is a sort of inflection point here. It hasn't happened yet but a possible future is becoming more tangible. A future where technology surpasses humanity in intelligence. You are talking to something that is talking back and could surpass us.

I know the abundance of AI slop has made everyone numb to the events that happened in the past couple of years. But we need to look past that. Something major has happened, something different then the achievements and milestones humanity has surpassed before.

Cthulhu_5• 1 year ago

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is.

No it's not (like OP's article says). With a calculator you punch in 10 + 9 and get 2 immediately, and this was 50+ years ago. With an LLM you type in "what is 10 + 9" and get three paragraphs of text after a few seconds. (this is false, I just tried it and the response is "10 + 9 = 19" but I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect). With a microwave you yeet in food and press a button and stuff happens the same way, every time.

Sure, if you abstract it to "doing things in an easier and lazier way", LLMs are just the next step, like IDEs with built in error checking and code generation were since 20 years ago. But it's more vague than press button to do a thing.

KaiserPro3• 1 year ago

Up until recently, I could, if I wanted to have a living doing VFX. I could, if I wanted to, craft new worlds, and get paid for it.

In two years, that won't be the case.

Its the same for virtually all other Arts based job. An economy that currently support say 100% of the people now, will at most be able to support 10-30% in a few years time.

It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal

Map reading is pretty much a dead art now (as someone who leads hikes, I've seen it first hand)

Memorising books/oral history is also a long dead art.

Oral story telling is also a dead art, as is folk music, compared to its peak.

Sure _rich_ people will be able to do all the arts they want. Everyone else won't

Unearned5161• 1 year ago

Something notable to recognize when comparing LLM's to calculators, is the fact that the skill a calculator is replacing can be learned by any competent adult in about a week. Manual division, addition, even more complicated stuff, it will just take much longer. However, the skills that an LLM is targeting, once atrophied are not replaceable in such short time frames.

Being good at coming up with ideas, at critically reading something, at synthesizing research, at writing and editing, are all things that take years to learn. This is not the same as learning the mechanics that a calculator does for you.

aredox2• 1 year ago

World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invented.

Obesity rates keep "improving" since the car was invented, up to becoming a major public health crisis and the main amplifier of complications and mortality when the pandemic stroke.

Oh, and the 100m sprint world record has been set for more than a decade and a half now, which means either we reached human optimum, or progress on anti-doping technology has forced a regression on performance.

maleno• 1 year ago

I think it's interesting that practically every time this point is made (and it is made so very often), the examples that are used to prove the point are objective and easy to measure. A 100m sprint time or a calculation of Pi is not the same as a work of art, because they can be measured objectively while art cannot. There is no equivalent in art-making to running a 100m sprint. The evaluation of a 100m sprint is not subjective, does not require judgement, does not depend on taste, context, history, and all the other many things the reputation and impact of a work of art depends on.

As ever, the standard defence of LLM and all gen AI tech rests on this reduction of complex subjectivity to something close to objectivity: the picture looks like other pictures, therefore it is a good picture. The sentence looks plausibly like other sentences, therefore it is a good sentence. That this argument is so pervasive tells me only that the audience for 'creative work' is already so inundated with depthless trash, that they can no longer tell the difference between painting and powerlifting.

It is not the artists who are primarily at risk here, but the audience for their work. Artists will continue to disappear for the same reason they always have: because their prospective audience does not understand them.

Caelus9• 1 year ago

Totally agree. Calculators didn’t kill math. Cameras didn’t kill painting. Tools change the baseline, but people still push the edges. The ones who love the craft won’t stop just because it got easier for others.

andrepd2• 1 year ago

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is.

Well you sure showed them.

The TFA makes a very concrete point about how the Whatever machine is categorically different from a calculator or a handsaw. A calculator doesn't sometimes hallucinate a wrong result. A saw doesn't sometimes cut wavy lines instead of straight lines. They are predictable and learnable tools. I don't see anyone addressing this criticism, only straw manning.

Ygg2• 1 year ago

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is.

There are clear differences. First of a calculator and microwave are quite different, but so is LLM. Both are time savers, in the sense of microwave saves time defrosting and calculator saves time calculating vs human.

They save time to achieve a goal. However calculators come with a penalty, by making multiplication easier they make user worse at it.

LLMs are like calculators but worse. They both are effort savers, and thus come with a huge learning penalty and unprecise enough that you need to learn to know better than them.

lloeki2• 1 year ago

World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invented.

A very good example! (...although probably not how you think it is ;)

Indeed the world record is achieved by a very limited number of people under stringent conditions.

Meanwhile people by and large† take their cars to go to the bakery which by foot would be 10min away, to disastrous effect on their health.

And by "cars" I mean "technology", which, while a fantastic enabler of things impossible before, has turned more people into couch potatoes than athletes.

† Comparatively to world record holders.

armchairhacker• 1 year ago

IMO AI isn't like a calculator, it is like a microwave. Another analogy would be like takeout. The difference is that you don't get to choose the details, and usually get worse quality, but sometimes that's OK.

mystified5016• 1 year ago

AI is the equivalent of going from stone abacuses straight to smartphones, skipping all computer and calculator development in between.

We go from a society where only a very few people are literate in math to one where everyone has a literal supercomputer at all times. What do you think that would do for math literacy in a society? Would everyone suddenly went to learn algebra and calculus? Or would the vast majority of people use the easy machine and accept its answers without question or understanding?

17186274402• 1 year ago

But you are not allowed to use either until you can already cook and calculate.

ineedasername2• 1 year ago

The jump from Assembly to Python is an enormous skill difference. But the shift from Python to Python with Copilot? Not as much, and every counter to this sort of comparison that I have heard is strongly in want of a true Scotsman.

It’s time to move on. The history of tech is a steady march of tools that demand less prep, less precision, and less friction from their users.

All this hand-wringing seems to show is that a worforce whose aggregate work ethos usually mocks “get off my lawn” attitudes in others was hiding a significant “but I never thought it would happen to me”, often couched in some variety of “but think of the children”.

Besides, it could be worse: it’s not like when other professions went obsolete practically overnight, like switchboard operators, or cuirassiers.

madmask• 1 year ago

The point is what value can the common man reasonably provide in the free market to support a family when most of white collar work is also automated?

The industrial revolution automated a lot of blue collars, AI is starting to seriously automate white collars to the point less people are needed.

They are automating the mind, there’s not much else to compete with to provide value. Which color people should pivot to?

johnnyanmac21• 1 year ago

But it really is.

it really isn't. Calculators don't steal from acuators. Actuators and calculators grabbed from nature. Microwaves didn't take from the fireplace.

People really want to pretend that LLM's aren't just storing massive amounts of other people's data with reckless abandon and pretend instead that it's like the car to a horse. Cars didn't need literal horsepower.

It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal models when we live in a reality where powerlifting is a thing.

I agree that athletes are the last thing to be replaced by our robot overlords. If there's one cheatcode to the human element, it's charisma. And people bouncing balls real good is a trillion dollar industry that warps out entire civlization, from forming hobbies, to shaping what we find as "attractive".

That's more of a cultural thing than a practicality thing, though. People respect athletes. They do not apparently respect artists nor engineers, let alone blue collar work that turns out to be way more expensive to automate.

kenny239• 1 year ago

Yeah at least at its current stage it still is. but a calculator boosts productivity just like a microwave. A lot of experiments and boilerplate code with low entropy is made a lot easier with LLMs.

ako7• 1 year ago

Agreed, it'll be a big problem if we don't keep our skills and rely on AI too much. Same with outsourcing manufacturing, at some point you loose the skill to produce products completely and are dependent on other countries.

With the WWW we thought everyone having access to all information would enlighten them, but without knowledge people do not recognize the right information, and are more likely to trust (mis)information that they think they understand.

What if LLMs give us all the answers that we need to solve all problems, but we are too uninformed and unskilled to recognize these answers? People will turn away from AI, and return to information that they can understand and trust, even if it's false.

Anyway, nothing new actually, we've seen this with science for some time now. It's too advanced for most people to understand and validate, so people distrust it and turn to other sources of information.

uh_uh• 1 year ago

What other sources of information will people turn to? Kids are growing up asking ChatGPT in school. I just can't see a mass exodus happening.

autumnstwilight2• 1 year ago

I learned Japanese by painstakingly translating interviews and blog posts from my favorite artist 15+ years ago, dictionary in hand. I also live and work in Japan now. Today I can click a button under the artist's tweets and get an instant translation that looks coherent (and often is, though it can also be quite wrong maybe 1/10 times).

In terms of the artist being accessible to overseas fans it's a great improvement, but I do wonder if I had grown up with this, would I have had any motivation to learn?

franciscop2• 1 year ago

I am learning Japanese (again) now and it's such a stark improvement vs when I first tried. When I don't understand something, LLMs explain it perfectly well, and with a bit of prompting they give me the right practice bits I need for my level.

For a specific example, when 2 grammar points seem to mean the same thing, teachers here in Japan would either not explain the difference, or make a confusing explanation in Japanese.

It's still private-ish/only for myself, but I generated all of this with LLMs and using it to learn (I'm around N4~N3) :

- Grammar: https://practice.cards/grammar

- Stories, with audio (takes a bit to load): https://practice.cards/stories

It's true though that you still need the motivation, but there are 2 sides of AI here and just wanted to give the other side.

johnnyanmac21• 1 year ago

I'd say a 10% error rate is quite drastic for spoken communication. Can you imagine if you lost 10% of the context for the comments here on HN?

I don't know, I feel like one of the worst things to do on the internet is to miscommunicate. And that can be hard enough with 2 native speakers (I just had a response completly blow up on me because they assumedly took my comment the wrong way).

but I do wonder if I had grown up with this, would I have had any motivation to learn?

Machine translation has come a long way where I can at least get the general feel of say, a translated article. It is still far from the point where I feel like I can read a machine translated article and not have it come off as clunky. That last 10% or so is just uncanny enough for it to impact my reading experience.

ninetyninenine9• 1 year ago

age-ism will disappear.

worldsayshi3• 1 year ago

I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come.

This should be comparable to how much fewer people in the west today know how to work a farm or build machinery. Each technological shift comes at a cost of population competence.

I do have a feeling that this time it could be different. Because this shift has this meta-quality to it. It has never been easier to acquire, at least theoretical, knowledge. But the incentives for learning are shifting in strange directions.

ramon156• 1 year ago

My friend actually went to "yeah well I don't like it enough to hobby program in my free time, otherwise I might lose the enjoyment"

2 years later and he thought of a project he really wanted to make. He didn't succeed, but its very clear he changes his mind

PeterStuer• 1 year ago

The first time I had the "beginner" reflex was when I got an always on computer with an editor and storage.

Before that, I had an TI-99 4A at home without a tape drive and the family tv as a display. I mainly was into creating games for my friends. I did all my programming on paper, as the "screen time" needed to be maximized for actually playing the games after typing it in from the paper notebook. Believe it or not, but bugs were very rare.

Much later at uni there were computer rooms with Mac's with a floppy drive. You could actually just program at the keyboard, and the IDE even had a debugger!

I remember observing my fellow students endlessly type-run-bug-repeat until it "worked" and thinking "these guys never learned to reason through their program before running it. This is just trial and error. Beginners should start on paper".

Fortunately I immediately caught myself and thought, no, this is genuine progress. Those that "abuse" it would more than likely not have programmed 'ye old way' anyways, and some others will genuinely become very good regardless.

A second thing: in the early home computer year(s) you had to program. The computer just booted into the (most often BASIC) prompt, and there was no network or packaged software. So anyone that got a computer programmed.

Pretty soon, with systems like the Vic-20, C64 and ZX Spectrum there was a huge market in off the shelf game cassettes. These systems became hugely popular because they allowed anyone to play games at home without learning to program. So only those that liked programming did. Did that lose beginner programmers? Maybe some, for sure.

Cthulhu_5• 1 year ago

When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good.

Fair point; I think this feeling is exacerbated by all the social media being full of people looking like they're good at what they do already, but it rarely shows the years of work they put in beforehand. But that's not new, compare with athletes, famous people, fictional characters, etc. There's just more of it and it's on a constant feed.

It does feel like people will just stop trying though. And when there's a shortcut in the form of an LLM, that's easy. I've used ChatGPT to write silly stories or poems a few times; I look at it and think "you know, if I were to sit down with it proper I could've written that myself". But that'd be a time and effort investment, and for a quick gag that will be pushed down the Discord chat within a few minutes anyway, it's not worth it.

safety1st• 1 year ago

I don't DISAGREE with anything he said, particularly.

But personally, I don't feel as upset over all this as he does. It seems that all my tech curmudgeonliness over the years is paying off these days, in spades.

Humbly, I suggest that he and many others simply need to disconnect more from The Current Thing or The Popular Thing.

Let's look at what he complains about:

* Bitcoin. Massive hype, never went anywhere. He's totally right. That's why I never used it and barely even read about it. I have no complaints because I don't care. I told myself I'd care if someone ever built something useful with Bitcoin. 10 years later they haven't. I'm going back to bed.

* Windows. Man I'm glad I dodged that bullet and became a Linux user almost 15 years ago. Just do it. Stuff will irk you either way but Linux irks don't make you feel like your dignity as a human being is being violated. Again, he's right that Windows sucks; I just don't have to care, because I walked away.

* Bluesky, Twitter, various dumb things being said on social media. Those bother him too. Fortunately, these products are optional. I haven't logged into my Twitter account for three years. I'll certainly never create a Bluesky one. On some of my devices I straight up block many of these crapo social sites like Reddit etc. in /etc/hosts. I follow some RSS feeds of a few blogs, one of the local timeline for a Mastodon instance. Takes ten minutes and then I go READ BOOKS in my spare time. That's it. He is yet again right, social media sucks, it's the place where you hear about all this dumb stuff like Bitcoin; I just am not reading it.

I'm not trying to toot my own horn here it's just that when you disconnect from all the trash, you never look back, and the frustrations of people who haven't seem a little silly. You can just turn all of this stuff off. Why don't you? Is it an addiction? Treat it like one if so. I used to spend 6 hours a day on my phone and now it's 1 hour, mainly at lunch, because the rest of the time it's on silent, in a bag, or turned off, just like a meth addict trying to quit shouldn't leave meth lying around.

Listen to Stallman. Listen to Doctorow. These guys are right. They were always right. The free alternatives that respect you exist. Just make the leap and use them.

liendolucas• 1 year ago

I absolutely agree with you, it is like having human beings fed constantly whatever their want into their minds for free, effortlessly, without knowing nothing at all. Getting the whatevers ready for consumption. Perhaps this will lead to a new generation where everyone is the "expert novice".

It's killing the accumulative and progressive way of learning that rewards who tries and fail many times before getting it right.

The "learning" is effectively starting to being killed.

I just wonder what would happen to a person after many years using "AI" and suddenly not having access to it. My guess is that you become useless and with a highly diminished capacity to perform even the most basic things by yourself.

This is one of many reasons why I'm so against all the hype that's going on in the "AI" space.

I keep doing things the old school way because I fully comprehend the value of reading real books, trying, failing and repeating the process again and again. There's no other way to truly learn anything.

Does this generation understand the value of it? Will the next one?

BlueTemplar• 1 year ago

Charles Stross' Accelerando's 3rd chapter (2002) has a fascinating take on it by exploring what happens when someone's 'exocortex' is stolen :

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

Also to the thief that tries to wear it.

Set a few years from now.

guicen• 1 year ago

Maybe the point isn’t whether LLMs replace skills, but whether they help more people reach those skills. Lifting the floor is not the same as lowering the ceiling.

lloeki2• 1 year ago

You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right.
up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle.

https://www.deviantart.com/scotchi/art/keep-tryin-690533685

Exactly.

Only putting the work is going to get anyone places. And yes it takes _time_, like, tons, and there's no shortcut.

And I can explain in excruciating detail how to do an ollie or a kickflip even and from a physics point of view you would totally get it but to land the damn thing you simply have to put a shitload of time on the board and fail over and over and over again.

We come from a place where we've been trained as engineers or whatever to do this or that and - somewhat - critically think about things. Instead picture yourself in the shoes of a beginner: how would you, a beginner who has not built their own mental model of discipline $foo, even begin to be critical of AI output?

But we're being advertised magic powder and sweating overalls and whathaveyou that makes you lose weight a) instantly† and b) without going to the gym and well putting in the effort††.

LLMs are the speed diet of the mind.

† comparatively

†† not that putting any arbitrary amount of effort is going to get you places, there _is_ a thing such as wasteful effort; but NOT putting the effort is a solid guarantee that you won't.

pier25• 1 year ago

Something rather new in the history of civilization is the gamification of everything. It has created the expectation of receiving (fake) constant results for very little effort.

CuriouslyC5• 1 year ago

The transformation is to aesthetic awareness over raw technical facility, and to "freshness" over skillful adherence to norms.

The best artists will spot holes in the culture, and present them to us in a way that's expertly composed, artful and meticulously polished. The tools will let them do it faster, and to reach a higher peak of polish than in the past, but the artfulness will still be the artist's.

Futuristic tools aren't replacing art, they're creating a substrate for a higher order of art. Collages are art, and at its most crude, this higher order art reduces to digital collages of high quality generated assets with human intention. With futuristic tools, art becomes reductive rather than constructive. To quote Michelangelo's response to how he made David: "It is simple, I just removed everything that wasn't David"

icameron• 1 year ago

Love this writing. One paragraph hit very close to home. I used to be the guy who could figure out obscure scripts by google-fu and rtfm and willpower. Now that skill has been completely obliterated by LLMs and everyone’s doing it- except it’s mostly whatever

I don’t want to help someone who opens with “I don’t know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn’t work”.

N_Lens2• 1 year ago

I use LLMs for coding everyday and agree with most of the article, even if it does attack me as an "indignant HackerNews mudpie commenter".

In the same vein, I've actually worked on crypto projects in both DeFi and NFT spaces, and agree with the "money for criminals" joke assessment of crypto, even if the technology is quite fascinating.

Shorel6• 1 year ago

I am still the guy doing google-fu and rtfm.

The skill has not been obliterated. We still need to fix the slop written by the LLMs, but it is not that bad.

Some people copy and paste snippets of code without knowing what it does, and in a sense, they spread technical debt around.

LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline.

The issue I see is that the amount of code having this level of technical debt is created at a much faster speed now.

darkwater• 1 year ago

LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline.

I'm SO stealing this!! <3

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y75• 1 year ago

LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline.

Yeah? What about what LLMs help with? Do you have no code that could use translation (move code that looks like this to code that looks like that)? LLMs are real good with that, and they save dozens of hours on single sentence prompt tasks, even if you have to review them.

Or is it all bad? I have made $10ks this year alone on what LLMs do, for $10s of dollars of input, but I must understand what I am doing wrong.

Or do you mean, if you are a man with a very big gun, you must understand what that gun can do before you pull the trigger? Can only the trained can pull the trigger?

sunrunner• 1 year ago

I always imagine that there's essentially a "knowledge debt" when doing almost any development today, unless you're operating at the lowest level (or you understand it all the way down, and there's also almost a level below).

The copy-paste of usable code snippets is somewhat comparable to any use of a library or framework in the sense that there's an element of not understanding what the entire thing is doing or at least how, and so every time this is done it adds to the knowledge debt, a borrowing of time, energy and understanding needed to come up with the thing being used.

By itself this isn't a problem and realistically it's impossible to avoid, and in a lot of cases you may never get to the point where you have to pay this back. But there's also a limit on the rate of debt accumulation which is how fast you can pull in libraries, code snippets and other abstractions, and as you said LLMs ability to just produce text at a superhuman rate potentially serves to _rapidly_ increase the rate of knowledge debt accumulation.

If debt as an economic force is seen as something that can stimulate short-term growth then there must be an equivalent for knowledge debt, a short-term increase in the ability of a person to create a _thing_ while trading off the long-term understanding of it.

8n4vidtmkvmk4• 1 year ago

I have to frequently tell the LLM to RTFM because it's wrong. But I can usually paste the manual in which saves me some reading. It's scary because when it's wrong and you don't happen to know better... Then your code or whatever is just a little worse

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y75• 1 year ago

No one is losing that skill, as LLMs are wrong a lot of the time.

No one is becoming a retard omniscient using LLMs and anyone saying they are is lying and pushing a narrative.

Humans still correct things, humans understand systems have flaws, and they can utilize them and correct them.

This is like saying someone used Word's grammar correction feature and accepted all the corrections. It doesn't make sense, and the people pushing the narrative are disingenuous.

wiseowise7• 1 year ago

a retard omniscient

That’s a nice description, to be honest.

wiseowise7• 1 year ago

I used to be the guy who could figure out obscure scripts by google-fu and rtfm and willpower. Now that skill has been completely obliterated by LLMs and everyone’s doing it- except it’s mostly whatever

And thank fuck it happened. All of shell and obscure Unix tools that require brains molded in 80s to use on a day to day basis should’ve been superseded by something user friendly long time ago.

moralestapia2• 1 year ago

by a man whose other claims to fame are inventing JavaScript

But he did invent JavaScript ...

Doxin• 1 year ago

calling it a "claim to fame" is not implying it's not true. It's an idiom. Wiktionary defines it as "That for which one has bragging rights; one's reason for being well-known or famous."

moralestapia2• 1 year ago

Nice, TIL.

alternatex2• 1 year ago

I have a feeling you don't know what the "claim to fame" expression means :)

vasco2• 1 year ago

Well they even call them "content creators", is there anything more whatever? It's literally "whatever" content needed to load the ads around it. It's not painters or musicians or documentarians, it's content creators.

kzrdude• 1 year ago

I'm delighted to see the point about "content" in the blog post, finally someone saying that (I also think so and have thought so).

vasco2• 1 year ago

I always found it weird that the new generation embraced being called the id of the div they put stuff in.

doug_durham4• 1 year ago

Wow, the lack of self-awareness on the part of the writer of this is stunning. To say "I don't go out of my way to dunk on people who use LLMs", and then write a multipage blog post doing exactly that is fascinating.

You do you, and I'll do me. Perhaps spend more time coding which you say you like to do and less time sneering at people who use different tools.

arthurbrown2• 1 year ago

You've read that paragraph backwards. They are talking about LLM enthusiasts dunking on people who aren't using.

doug_durham4• 1 year ago

The author mocks LLM enthusiasts, because they "dunk" on him. While writing an blog post that "dunks" on LLM enthusiasts. Total lack of awareness. If they had taken the time to read their blog before posting it, they might have avoided embarrassment.

bflesch• 1 year ago

Excellent and well-written article.

simonw3• 1 year ago

Looks like I was the inspiration for this post then. https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lt2xbayttk2...

Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

The reaction to that post has been interesting. It's mainly intended to be an argument against the LLM hype! I'm pushing back against all the people who are saying "LLMs are so incredible at programming that nobody should consider programming as a career any more" - I think that's total nonsense, like a carpenter quitting because someone invented the table saw.

Analogies like this will inevitably get people hung up on the details of the analogy though. Lots of people jumped straight to "a table saw does a single job reliably, unlike LLMs which are non-deterministic".

I picked table saws because they are actually really dangerous and can cut your thumb off if you don't know how to use them.

ninetyninenine9• 1 year ago

You have to realize that we're only a couple years into wide spread adoption of LLMs as agentic coding partners. It's obvious too everyone, and you that LLMs currently cannot replace coders.

People are talking about the trendline, what AI was 5 years ago versus what AI is today points to a different AI 5 years down the line. Whatever AI will be 5 years from now it is immensely possible that LLMs may eliminate programming as a career. If not 5 years... give it 10. If not 10, give it 15. Maybe it happens in a day, a major break through in AI, or maybe it will be like what's currently happening, slow erosion and infiltration into our daily tasks where it takes on more and more responsibilities until one day, it's doing everything.

I mean do I even have to state the above? We all know it. What's baffling to me is how I get people saying shit like this:

"LLMs are so incredible at programming that nobody should consider programming as a career any more" - I think that's total nonsense, like a carpenter quitting because someone invented the table saw.

I mean it's an obvious complete misrepresentation. People are talking about the future. Not the status quo and we ALL know this yet we still make comments like that.

simonw3• 1 year ago

The more time I spend using LLMs for code (and being impressed at how much better they are compared to six months ago) the less I worry for my career.

Using LLMs as part of my process helps me understand how much of my job isn't just bashing out code.

My job is to identify problems that can be solved with code, then solve them, then verify that the solution works and has actually addressed the problem.

An even more advanced LLM may eventually be able to completely handle the middle piece. It can help with the first and last pieces, but only when operated by someone who understands both the problems to be solved and how to interact with the LLM to help solve them.

No matter how good these things get, they will still need someone to find problems for them to solve, define those problems and confirm that they are solved. That's a job - one that other humans will be happy to outsource to an expert practitioner.

It's also about 80% of what I do as a software developer already.

indigoabstract2• 1 year ago

I don't know what will come in the future, but to me it's obvious that any variation of LLMs, no matter how advanced won't replace a skilled human who knows what they're doing.

Through no fault of their own, but they're literally blind. They don't have eyes to see, ears to hear or fingers to touch and feel & have no clue if what they've produced is any good to the original purpose. They are still only (amazing) tools.

squidbeak2• 1 year ago

The thing is that at this stage, LLMs, and perhaps AI in other forms, also have careers. Right now they're junior developers. But whose career will develop faster or go further? Theirs? or the new programmer's?

wiseowise7• 1 year ago

Who cares?

rcxdude8• 1 year ago

Also, if you don't have a table saw, just cutting a straight line efficiently and accurately is a fairly important baseline skill for doing carpentry, something which becomes a lot less of an issue with a table saw, and that makes some of the skillset of carpentry less important for getting good results (especially if you then make things that only consist of straight lines and so you also don't need to be able to do more complex shapes well). I think it's a pretty decent analogy.

latexr3• 1 year ago

Looks like I was the inspiration for this post then.

You were not, as is patently obvious from the sentence preceding your quote (emphasis mine):

Another Bluesky quip I saw earlier today, and the reason I picked up writing this post (which I’d started last week)

The post had already been started, your comment was simply a reason to continue writing it at that point in time. Had your comment not existed, this post would probably still have been finished (though perhaps at a later date).

It's mainly intended to be an argument against the LLM hype! I'm pushing back against all the people who are saying "LLMs are so incredible at programming that nobody should consider programming as a career any more" - I think that's total nonsense, like a carpenter quitting because someone invented the table saw.

Despite your restating, your point still reads to me as the opposite as what you claim to have intended. Inventing the table saw is a poor analogy because the problem with the LLM hype has nothing to do with their invention. It’s the grifts and the irresponsible shoving of it down everyone’s throats that’s a problem. That’s why the comparison fails, you’re juxtaposing things which aren’t even slightly related. The invention of a technology and the hype around it are two entirely orthogonal matters.

simonw3• 1 year ago

For your benefit I will make two minor edits to things I have said.

Looks like I was the inspiration for this post then

I replace that with:

Looks like I was the inspiration for finishing this post then

And this:

Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

I can rephrase as:

Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the introduction of the table saw.

cousin_it2• 1 year ago

This reminds me of the normie/autistic/sociopath triangle. The idea is that sociopaths can see through normies, normies can see through autists, and autists can see through sociopaths - when there's a sociopath, often the normies in the group will be easily fooled by him, but the autists will be onto him right away. Don't know why that is, but it's true in my experience.

Same with AI. I'm notably more autistic (or more aspie, or whatever) than my friend group, and also I much more easily recognize AI text and images as uncanny slop, while my friends are more easily wowed by it. Maybe AI output has the same "superficially impressive but empty inside" quality as the stuff that sociopaths say.

test1235• 1 year ago

is it to do with patten matching maybe? maybe autists can spot sociopaths 'cos they behave just ever so slightly differently ... and maybe you can recognize AI text 'cos you see a pattern in the content which non-autists do not?

cousin_it2• 1 year ago

It's the opposite of that. All the superficial patterns are there, all the words and their combinations. But the core, the meaning, isn't there.

wiseowise7• 1 year ago

The theory is bullshit, if you didn’t understand from lack of any studies.

Most likely yet another flawed output from human-LLM (4chan) so online schizos have something to identify themselves with.

sanitycheck• 1 year ago

Is this a known thing? I've called myself 'immune to charisma' which seems at least related, and I've thought perhaps it's an autistic/aspie trait but have never come across any studies or articles mentioning it.

lovich4• 1 year ago

I read through the essay and really resonated with some parts and didn’t resonate with others, but I think they put some words to the feelings I have had on AI and its effect in the tech industry

There are people who use these, apparently. And it just feels so… depressing. There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though. That’s management, a fairly different job. I’m not interested in managing. I’m certainly not interested in managing this bizarre polite lying daydream machine. It feels like a vizier who has definitely been spending some time plotting my demise.

I was several minutes of reading before this paragraph when the idea hit me that this person hates managing. Because everyone I’ve met who hates using AI to produce software describes to me problems like the AI not being correct or lying to them if the model thought that would please you better, and that’s my experience with junior engineers as a manager.

And everyone I’ve met who loves AI at some point makes an analogy to it, that compares it to a team of eager juniors who can do a lot of work fast but can’t have their output trusted blindly, and that’s my experience with junior engineers as a manager.

And then anyone whose been trying to get an Engineering manager job over the past few months and tracking their applications metadata has seen the number of open postings for their requirements go down month after month unless you drop the manager part and keep all the same criteria but as IC

And then I read commentary from megacorps about their layoffs and read between the lines like here[1]

… a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the company is reducing managerial layers …

I think our general consternation around this is coming from creators being forced into management instead of being able to outsource those tasks to their own managers.

I am not really sure what to do with this insight

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/tech/microsoft-layoffs-9000-e...

pm2153• 1 year ago

I think there's still a difference even if you look at it as "supervising a bunch of juniors". I'm happy to review the output of a human in that case because I believe that even if they got some stuff wrong and it might have been quicker and more interesting for me to just do the thing, the process is helping them learn and get better, which is both good in itself and also means that over time I have to do the supervision and support part less and less. Supervising an LLM misses out both of those aspects, so it's just not-very-fun work.

lovich4• 1 year ago

… the process is helping them learn and get better, which is both good in itself and also means that over time I have to do the supervision and support part less and less. Supervising an LLM misses out both of those aspects, so it's just not-very-fun work.

Legitimately I think you are missing my point. What I quoted out of your response could be applied to prompt engineering/managment/tinkering. I think everyone who likes doing this with juniors and hates it with AI is conflating their enjoyment of teaching juniors with the dopamine you get from engaging with other primates.

I think most people I’ve met who hated AI would have the same level of hate for a situation where their boss made them actually manage an underperforming employee instead of letting them continue on as is ad infinitum.

It’s hard work both mentally and emotionally to correct an independent agent well enough to improve their behavior but not strongly enough to break them, and I think most AI haters are choking on this fact.

I’m saying that from the position of an engineer who got into management and choked on the fact that sometimes upper leadership was right and the employee complaining to me about the “stupid rules” or trying to lie to me to get a gold star instead of a bronze one was the agent in the system who was actually at fault

vincnetas• 1 year ago

After reading "...the press release and in the fine print it says that now it can count the number of letters in “Mississippi” correctly or whatever" tried to count letters in another word :)

You said: how many letters are in the lithuanian word "nebeprisikaspinaudamas"? Just give me one number. ChatGPT said: 23

You said: how many letters are in the lithuanian word 'nebeprisikaspinaudamas'. Just give me one number. ChatGPT said: 21

Both are incorrect by the way. It's 22

molteanu• 1 year ago

I got 22 the first time. But then 21 the second time. And the third time...

fsh2• 1 year ago

I'm all for making fun of LLMs, but asking this from a software that processes vectors of tokens is a bit silly. The information isn't really there in the input.

layer83• 1 year ago

Then it shouldn’t pretend to know the correct answer.

827a• 1 year ago

What are we actually saying here — that even Microsoft has to evaluate usage of “AI” directly, because it doesn’t affect performance enough to have an obvious impact otherwise

Oh wow.

resonious• 1 year ago

I agree with a lot of this at the outset, but don't really like the gloomy outlook. I don't think there's much to gain by writing off all this unfortunate stuff as people being stupid and greedy. I mean sure, that may be true, but you can flip it around and say that it's impressive that we have it as good as we do despite having to co-exist with stupidity and greed. Better yet, you can see it as a challenge to overcome.

And I'm not the only one saying this but - the bit about LLMs is likely throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yes the "AI-ification" of everything is horrible and people are shoehorning it into places where it's not useful. But to say that every single LLM interaction is wrong/not useful is just not true (though it might be true if you limit yourself to only freely available models!). Using LLMs effectively is a skill in itself, and not one to be underestimated. Just because you failed to get it to do something it's not well-suited to doesn't mean it can't do anything at all.

Though the conclusion (do things, make things) I do agree with anyway.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y75• 1 year ago

every single LLM interaction is wrong/not useful

I think it is defense mechanism, you see it everywhere, and you have to wonder, "why are people thinking this way?".

I think those with an ethical or related argument deserve to be heard, but opposite of that, it seems like full blinders, ignoring the reality presented before us.

8n4vidtmkvmk4• 1 year ago

The free models are also useful. A little more limited, but still useful.

notpachet• 1 year ago

you can flip it around and say that it's impressive that we have it as good as we do despite having to co-exist with stupidity and greed

I have a feeling that line of thinking is going to be of diminishing consolation as the world veers further into systemic and environmental collapse.

rglover• 1 year ago

You can—except for the researchers and pioneers at the low-level—write most of the fervor off as mimetic behavior.

We live in a world now where people scare one another into making significant choices with limited information. Person A claims it's the future you don't want to miss, Person B takes that at face value and starts figuring out how to get in on the scam, and Person C looks at A and B and says "me too." Rinse and repeat.

That's why so much of the AI world is just the same app with a different name. I'd imagine a high percentage of the people involved in these projects don't really care about what they're working on, just that it promises to score them more money and influence (or so they think).

So in a way, for the majority, it is just stupid and greedy behavior, but perhaps less conscious.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y75• 1 year ago

IMO, this is more ranting about people who meet the metrics of the platform.

You're a platform drone, you have no mind, yada. Yet, we are reading the author's blog.

The author may hate LLMs, but they will lead to many people realizing things they never were aware of, like the author's superficial ability to take information and present it in a way that engages others. Soon that will be a thing that is known. Not many will make money sharing information in prose.

What the author refers to as "LLMs" today, will continually improve and "get better" at everything the author has issues with, maybe in novel ways we can't think of at the moment.

Alternative take:

"Popular culture" has always been a "lesser" ideal of experience, and now that ontological grouping now includes the Internet, as a whole. There are no safe corners, everything you experience on the Internet, if someone shared it with you, is now "Popular culture".

Everyone knows what you know, and you are no longer special or have special things to share, because awareness is ubiquitous.

This is good for society in many ways.

For example, with information asymmetry, where assholes made others their food, it will become less common that people are food.

Things like ad-driven social networks will fade away as this realization becomes normalized.

Unfortunately, we are at the very early stages of this, and it takes a very long time for people to become aware of things like hoaxes.

wiseowise7• 1 year ago

I’m in your camp, but what makes you think assholes won’t suffocate the technology in its infancy and use it to oppress others even further?

chrismorgan2• 1 year ago

Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type " and the result is "|"? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it.

I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press something to exit the delimited region anyway, whether that be an arrow key or the closing delimiter, so just… why did the first person even invent the idea, which just complicates things and also makes it harder to model the editor’s behaviour mentally? Were they a hunt-and-peck typist or something?

In theory, it helps keep your source valid syntax more of the time, which may help with syntax highlighting (especially of strings) and LSP/similar tooling. But it’s only more of the time: your source will still be invalid frequently, including when it gets things wrong and you have to relocate a delimiter. In practice, I don’t think it’s useful on that ground.

sonofhans• 1 year ago

Preach it. I’d rather hit right bracket than right arrow.

arkh3• 1 year ago

Maybe the origin is the fact not everyone uses qwerty mappings.

On a french keyboard, ~#{[|\\^@]} all require the "alt gr" modifier key which is usually just right of the space key. So totally outside the realm of shift, caps lock, ctrl or alt.

atemerev• 1 year ago

Because otherwise it would break syntax highlighting until you finish writing the string. And no, sorry, I like my syntax highlighting, I won't turn it off.

This feature is useful for me. So are LLMs. If someone doesn't want to use this or that, they are not obliged to. But don't tell me that features that I find useful "suck".

willvarfar• 1 year ago

Sad this is downvoted, because syntax highlighting is a very plausible explanation for this editor behaviour.

You can perhaps imagine an editor that only inserts the delimiter if you type the start-string symbol in the middle of a line.

chmod775• 1 year ago

Because otherwise it would break syntax highlighting until you finish writing the string.

You can always insert the second " as a ghost(?) character to keep syntax highlighting working. But it's not like any modern language server really struggles with this anyways.

BlindEyeHalo• 1 year ago

I think it is practical when highlighting text and then pressing " once puts quotes and the start and the end of the highlighted region.

But I agree that in normal input it is often annoying.

matejn• 1 year ago

I hate that even more, especially since Visual Studio introducted it. I had the habit of selecting some text, and then typing to replace it. Now when my replacement starts with a parenthesis or quote, the text just gets surrounded instead!

Maybe this is just an XKCD moment https://xkcd.com/1172/ ...

tehnub• 1 year ago

Pair programming with coworkers over the years, many seem to have trouble with the keyboard, to the point where pressing right parenthesis is a significant burden and they don’t use right or down arrow to get out of the span but actually move their hand to their mouse and click out.

piker• 1 year ago

Okay, so optional accessibility issue?

Cthulhu_5• 1 year ago

I've said it in another comment (might be here or Reddit, I don't even know anymore) and it feels like basic skills are just overlooked or taken for granted these days - computer use, mouse / keyboard / typing skills, reading comprehension, writing ability, communication skills, etc.

I'm nowhere near a hiring position but if I was I'd add assessing that to the application procedure.

It feels like this is part of a set of growing issues, with millennials being the only generation in between gen X / boomers and gen Z that have computer skills and can do things like manage files or read a whole paragraph of text without a computer generated voice + RSVP [0] + Subway Surfers gameplay in the background.

But it was also millennials that identified their own quickly diminishing attention spans, during the rise of Twitter, Youtube, Netflix and the like [1].

I want to believe all of this is giving me some job security at least.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presentati...

[1] https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/ (originally published 2003, updated over time to reference newer trends)

thasso• 1 year ago

I'm shocked every time I go to City Hall and wait while the clerk types my name letter by letter with two fingers. Doesn't he do that every day?! How as it never occurred to him or anyone else that maybe, just maybe, they would benefit from a typing course. It’s just one example of a pattern I’ve noticed with a lot of office workers.

arkh3• 1 year ago

right or down arrow

If you have to use multiple keyboards, arrows, end, home etc tend to be at different position on the keyboard. Almost no better than using a mouse.

That's were old school vi / emacs shine. CTRL? Always same area, so ctrl-f to go forward? Same gesture whatever brand of a laptop I have to work on.

cess112• 1 year ago

My REPL-style interfaces don't have it while my editors do, I don't feel either is particularly special and there are little pros and cons with both.

_thisdot3• 1 year ago

I have this turned on in my code editors and Obsidian. The main advantage is reducing the cognitive load. You don’t have to double-check whether you remembered to close your string, bracket, or parenthesis — it’s just there.

elric3• 1 year ago

The cognitive load of typing two quotes? Golly. That term is starting to take on "whatever" meaning, apparently.

Cthulhu_5• 1 year ago

You don't have to anyway, a syntax error will show up on your screen pretty much immediately.

rasur• 1 year ago

Emacs user here, and the whole "electric-mode" stuff (for matching parens or other balanced pairs of things) I find really quite useful. And closing a pair is usually something like shift+enter, which is quite simple (but also - at least in Emacs - generally completely configurable). I think the benefits outweigh the pitfalls, personally.

Can't speak to other editors though.. I don't want to sound like I'm trolling, but they generally feel quite clunky, compared to Emacs (ducks, runs ;p )

b112• 1 year ago

There's nothing wrong with emacs. Both vim and emacs are just targeting different segments of humanity, that's all. Vim is clean, concise, slim, where as emacs is more bulky, cluttered, stifling.

It's just matching, and reflecting the way different humans think, and reason, that's all.

(yes, said in jest)

matsemann• 1 year ago

and it’s wrong often enough

How is it ever wrong, though? If I insert a (, and then a {, and the editor appends so that it's ({}), that's always ?correct. Can it ever not be.

Maybe because on a Norwegian keyboard { is a bit awkward, but I like it. Then even if we're 5 levels deep with useEffect(() => {(({[{[ I can just press ctrl+shift+enter and it just magically finishes up everything and put my caret at the correct place, instead of me trying to write ]}]})) in the correct order.

rcxdude8• 1 year ago

It certainly can, because it doesn't necessarily know where the closing brace should be, especially when inserting as opposed to writing a completely new line. I'm often deleting random crap in the editors I use with the 'feature' as I'm adding delimiters. '"' tends to be even worse, because the distinction between opening and closing is not obvious.

e.g.:

(a + b > c) -> ((a + b > c) -> (()a + b > c) -> no, I was aiming for ((a + b) > c)

(it sound like you're talking about a different feature/implementation, though, since in the annoying case there's no 'completion' shortcut, it just appears)

jltsiren• 1 year ago

Most editors are not smart enough to do it consistently right. For example, VS Code often inserts extra quotes when I try to break "long string" into "long " + something() + " string". And when I try to write a half-open interval [a, b) in a comment or within a string, the editor inserts an extra ].

Kon5ole• 1 year ago

How is it ever wrong, though?

Whenever you edit something existing that already has the ), ] or } further down and you end up with a ()), []] or {}}. Or when you select some text that you want to replace and start with a quote only to end up with "the text you wanted to replace" instead of the expected ".

I never notice when it works but get annoyed every time it doesn't, so I feel like it never works and always sucks.

I guess it's muscle memory and some people are used to it, but it feels fundamentally wrong to me to have the editor do different basic editing things based on which character is being pressed.

Attrecomet4• 1 year ago

can just press ctrl+shift+enter and it just magically finishes up everything and put my caret at the correct place, instead of me trying to write ]}]})) in the correct order.

I think here you are talking about a different thing -- completion of already started parentheses/"/whatever with content in-between, not the pre-application of paired braces or quotation marks, as the author did, no?

charles_f• 1 year ago

I can't count how many } I've deleted across the years because of that feature

8n4vidtmkvmk4• 1 year ago

I hated this feature until I realized I could just type the closing quote anyway and it wouldn't double up. Doesn't seem to bother me now that I'm used to it. Once in awhile my editor tries to get too clever and messes things up, but not often

whoisyc• 1 year ago

That’s what GP said about “harder to model the editor’s behaviour mentally” though. In a dumb editor you type a quote and you get a quote, in a “smart” editor whether or not you get two quotes, one quote, or no quote at all is context dependent and more confusing.

feelamee• 1 year ago

You have to press something to exit the delimited region anyway, whether that be an arrow key or the closing delimiter, so just…

Hah, fun about this is that I press exactly the matched symbol ( `}` to `{` , etc) to exit this delimited region and VS even understand what I want! Incredibly useless thing

kqr2• 1 year ago

I've never noticed some editors do this because I always type both opening and closing symbols at the same time, and then back up into them if I want to fill them out. I think I learned it from my father and just anecdotally I make mistakes of unbalanced symbols nowhere near as often as others.

pxc2• 1 year ago

But it’s only more of the time: your source will still be invalid frequently, including when it gets things wrong and you have to relocate a delimiter. In practice, I don’t think it’s useful on that ground.

Maybe it's like a pale imitation of structural editing? There are editing modes for some editors that more or less ensure the syntax is always valid as you edit, and they of course include this feature.

dalemhurley3• 1 year ago

"live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal."

I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our banking system worse so they could compete, much like Uber.

zpeti5• 1 year ago

I don't get this sentence. It's pretty damn hard sending money in the EU too. We only had SWIFT and CHAPS too like in the USA. The EU isn't some banking haven with ultrafast transfers. If they are talking about the new legislation about fast transfers (SEPA), that came 1 decade after paypal.

dofubej• 1 year ago

We currently (as in the for the last months) have instant transfers but for the longest time we didn’t and had to use PayPal as well if we wanted to send somebody money instantly without paying the bank an extra for it. I’m confused as to what the article means. It’s possible the author is misinformed.

elric3• 1 year ago

What do you mean? Europe has had SEPA payments pretty much since the Euro came out. And most of Europe had functional bank transfers using online banking (including international ones) long before the Euro was a thing.

Edit: Do you mean that the speed of the transfers was the problem?

quonn2• 1 year ago

pretty damn hard sending money in the EU too

You literally enter an IBAN and the transfer will appear in the other account the next day. And if you need the money in the target account immediately (within 10 seconds) you can do it, too, by checking a checkbox for a small fee and that fee will drop to ZERO across the EU in October 2025.

adastra223• 1 year ago

The US doesn't have SWIFT btw.

Attrecomet4• 1 year ago

Even before SEPA, we didn't use checks in the EU -- or at least in Germany -- because bank transfers were a thing and just worked.

robin_reala• 1 year ago

In the EU PayPal caved and officially got a banking licence from Luxembourg.

layer83• 1 year ago

In the EU, the value proposition of PayPal is (1) that it it hello instantaneous instead of taking one or two days like a regular bank transfer, and (2) it doesn’t disclose your banking info to the other party. The first one is now finally being obsoleted by SEPA instant payments.

immibis7• 1 year ago

(3) steals your money at random without warning

dalemhurley3• 1 year ago

Banks in Australia on the NPP have 16 seconds to complete the transaction.

martin-t• 1 year ago

I hate that companies try this. They should pay massive fines and execs should go to prison for this.

This is not rhetorical - if you (try to) make the life of literally millions of people worse in a small way, the amount of time and money wasted by them should be calculated and used to determine the punishment.

dalemhurley3• 1 year ago

Unfortunately this is a by-product of capitalism and lobbying

thombles2• 1 year ago

Speaking as a grump who recently chilled out, put reservations on hold and gave Claude a crack... it turns out that the anti-AI crowd (which still includes me in many regards) gets a lot wrong about the experience of using it, as demonstrated in TFA. You don't get reams of wishy-washy code unless you ask for it. If you're an experienced developer who Knows What They Want then you can wield it like a scalpel. None of the output is a surprise because you discussed the context and requirements first. It just gets there (probably) faster than you might have typing out keywords yourself. If the goal is Whatever, then sure, you will get that faster.

nottorp4• 1 year ago

If you're an experienced developer who Knows What They Want then you can wield it like a scalpel.

But that's not what the marketing says. The marketing says it will do your entire job for you.

In reality, it will save you some typing if you already know what to do.

On HN at least, where most people are startup/hustle culture and experts in something, they don't think long term enough to see the consequences for non experts.

thombles2• 1 year ago

Well I never set much store by marketing and I'm not planning to start. :) More seriously though it helps explain the apparent contradiction that it sounds scammy at a macro level yet many individuals report getting a lot of value out of it.

adastra223• 1 year ago

In reality, it will save you some typing if you already know what to do.

This goes too far in the other direction. LLMs can do far more than merely saving you typing. I have successfully used coding agents to implement code which at the outset I had no business writing as it was far outside my domain expertise. By the end I'd gained enough understanding to be able to review the output and guide the LLM towards a correct solution, far faster than the weeks or months it would have taken to acquire enough background info to make an attempt at coding it myself.

hyper57• 1 year ago

You don't get reams of wishy-washy code unless you ask for it.

I've found that they get pretty wishy-washy when you correct them. As an example, yesterday I was working on porting a function from the open-source CUE4Parse project from C# to Python (for a hobby project), and the LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro) suggested the following translation of a C# method:

    @staticmethod
    def from_name(name: str) -> 'FPackageId':
        # C# Encoding.Unicode is UTF-16 LE in Python
        lower_name_bytes = name.lower().encode('utf-16-le')
        hashed_id = CityHash64(lower_name_bytes)
        return FPackageId(hashed_id)

I noted that the original used a custom ToLower() implementation:

This custom ToLower(), does that produce the same result as .lower() in Python?

Gemini answered with a lot of text and concluded: "You should use Python's standard lower() method for your port."

I pushed back with:

Right, but for this to work (looking up an asset by its hash as contained in global.utoc), I probably have to match the behavior of Unreal Engine...

  Gemini: You are absolutely right. My apologies, your insight is spot on. For the purpose of matching hashes that are pre-calculated by Unreal Engine and stored in files like `global.utoc`, you **must** replicate the engine's behavior exactly. My previous advice to use Python's `.lower()` was incorrect in this specific context.

  You need to implement a function that behaves identically to the C# `ToLower` you highlighted. The engine uses this specific, non-Unicode-aware, ASCII-only lowercasing function before hashing the path to generate the `FPackageId`. Using Python's standard `.lower()` would produce a different byte sequence for any path containing non-English characters, leading to a hash mismatch.

From my experience this is representative of the typical LLM interaction once one ventures into niche topics like Unreal Engine modding.

rcxdude8• 1 year ago

It's pretty difficult to have a useful back and forth with an LLM, because they're really heavily finetuned to be agreeable (and also they're not particularly smart, just knowledgeable, so their 'system 1' is a lot better than their 'system 2', to analogize with 'thinking fast and slow'). Generally speaking if they don't get a useful answer in one shot or with relatively simple, objective feedback, they're just going to flop around and agree with whatever you last suggested.

prmph2• 1 year ago

Exactly.

But, to make a comparison here with Claude Code, I was initially impressed with Geminis ability to hold a keep a conversation on track, but it rarely gets the hint when I express annoyance with its output. Claude has an uncanny ability to guess what I find wrong with its output (even when I just respond with WTF!) and will try to fix it often in actually useful ways, Gemini just keeps repeating its last output after acknowledging my annoyance.

swat535• 1 year ago

Yes, if they make a mistake and you point it out, they will make another mistake. In many of those cases, it's better to scrap it and start with a fresh context, try a different prompt (or provider smaller context).

Also, more importantly, they will ignore negative directives. So telling it: "don't do X" , will get ignored. You are better of using positive directives instead.

alittlebee• 1 year ago

I like this perspective, it’s not a replacement for thinking, it’s a replacement for typing what has already been typed countless times.

moritzwarhier3• 1 year ago

Cool post, but:

And the only real hope I have here is that someday, maybe, Bitcoin will be a currency, and circulating money around won’t be the exclusive purview of Froot Loops. Christ

PLEASE NO. The only thing this will lead to is people who didn't get rich with this scheme funding the returns of people who bought in early.

Whatever BTC becomes, everyone who advocates for funneling public money of people who actually work for their salary into Bitcoin is a fraud.

I don't think the blog author actually wants this, but vaguely calling for Bitcoin to become "real money" indirectly will contribute to this bailout.

And yes, I'm well aware that funneling pension funds money etc into this pyramid scheme is already underway. Any politician or bank who supports this should be sued if you ask me.

rcxdude8• 1 year ago

Yeah, I think for crypto to actually turn into something net-positive, Bitcoin needs to lose a lot of value. It would almost certainly be some other network that would actually solve this problem, given Bitcoin's essentially frozen in a half-completed state now (Ethereum still seems to be trying to make something that scales to a point that would be usable, but it is also the nexus of a lot of the scams for the same reason)

fsflover• 1 year ago

Bitcoin needs to lose a lot of value

Why is that? You can just buy 0.00000001 BTC.

m0wer5• 1 year ago

Would it change your view if they mined instead of buying?

If you were to create a decentralized and limited supply currency, how would you distribute it so that it's “fair”?

Sounds a bit like if the world was running only on proprietary software created by Microsoft and you criticized the move to open source because that would enrich Linus Torvalds and other code creators/early adopters.

Are people better off by continuing to use centralized broken software that they have to pay a subscription for (inflation) than if they did a lump sum buy of a GNU/Linux distro copy from a random guy and become liberated for the rest of their life?

tromp2• 1 year ago

It's more fair if every generation gets to mine the same amount. You want supply to be predictable and for the inflation rate to go steadily down, but there's not much point in limiting the supply [1].

[1] https://tromp.github.io/blog/2020/12/20/soft-supply

amiga3863• 1 year ago

But can't you see what he actually wants?

He wants normal banking and money transfer... but just to anybody, and for any reason. As an example, he'd like people to be able to pay him to draw bespoke furry porn for them. Or as another example, why can't a US citizen pay an Iranian citizen to do some work for them? (e.g. write a computer program)

That is totally possible. The only thing that stands in his way, and drives him into the arms of the cryptocurrency frauds, are moralising and realpolitiking governments that intentionally use their control of banks to control what bank customers can do with their money.

In an ideal world, government would only regulate banks on fiscal propriety and fair-dealing, and would not get in the way of consenting adults exchanging money for goods and services. But because government does fuck with banks, and sometimes the banks just do the fuckery anyway and government doesn't compel them to offer services to all (e.g. Visa/Mastercard refuse to allow porn merchants?), normal people start listening to the libertarians, the sovereign citizens, and the pump-and-dump fraudsters hyping cryptocurrencies.

He wants decentralised digital cash. How can it be done, if not Bitcoin et al?

moritzwarhier3• 1 year ago

Use the a similar protocol with better properties (less energy consumption, better transaction usability) and start from zero.

Also, I'm not sure if a radical lack of regulation / full decentralization is a good thing when we are talking about money.

In my opinion, money should be regulated by governments.

But this discussion tends to escalate and the arguments have been made ad nauseam, so I'm tuning out here, sorry.

abareplace• 1 year ago

Eevee is she, not he. See the website footer and the home page.

nottorp4• 1 year ago

Emphasis:

-----

This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.

"Content"... is Whatever.

-----

People, please don't think of yourself as "content consumers".

layer83• 1 year ago

I upvoted your content.

rednafi• 1 year ago

Software programming used to be a blue-collar thing in the early days, when hardware wiring was all the rage.

Then it became hip, and people would hand-roll machine-specific assembly code. Later on, it became too onerous when CPU architecture started to change faster than programmers could churn out code. So we came up with compilers, and people started coding at a higher level of abstraction. No one lamented the lost art of assembly.

Coding is just a means to an end. We’ve always searched for better and easier ways to convince the rocks to do something for us. LLMs will probably let us jump another abstraction level higher.

I too spent hours looking for the right PHP or Perl snippet in the early days to do something. My hard-earned bash-fu is mostly useless now. Am I sad about it? Nah. Writing bash always sucked, who am I kidding. Also, regex. I never learned it properly. It doesn’t appeal to me. So I’m glad these whatever machines are helping me do this grunt work.

There are sides of programming I like, and implementation isn’t one of them. Once upon a time I could care less about the binary streams ticking the CPU. Now I’m excited about the probable prospect of not having to think as much about “higher-level” code and jumping even higher.

To me, programming is more like science than art. Science doesn’t care how much profundity we find in the process. It moves on to the next thing for progress.

eddiewithzato3• 1 year ago

LLMs will not be doing that. I wish they could, but they just spit out whatever without verifying anything. Even in Cursor which has the agent tell you to run the test script they generated to verify the output, it just says “yep seems fine to me!”.

AI at the current state in my workflow is a decent search engine and stackoverflow. But it has far greater pitfalls as OP pointed out (it just assumes the code is always 100% accurate and will “fake” API).

wiseowise7• 1 year ago

That’s where you, human, come into the scene.

archagon• 1 year ago

LLMs are not an abstraction. If anything, they are the opposite of an abstraction.

Al-Khwarizmi5• 1 year ago

I disagree with many of the points on LLMs (but broadly agree with 80% of the post). But regardless of agreeing or not, it was a pleasure to read this because it's beautifully written, the arguments are solid, it makes you think, and the website has a personality, which is rare nowadays.

I clicked halfheartedly, started to read halfheartedly, and got sucked into a read that threw me back into the good old days of the internet.

A pity that the micropayments mentioned in the post never materialized, I'd surely throw a few bucks at the author but the only option is a subscription and I hate those.

sunnybeetroot• 1 year ago

It is a nice read but something tells me it’s AI generated due to the frequent em dashes so I wouldn’t place all bets on it being entirely human written.

Edit: I apologies, the author has pre-gpt posts that use em dashes so likely it’s part of their writing style.

Al-Khwarizmi5• 1 year ago

It would be a monument to hypocrisy if this piece with this specific content were AI-generated.

Color me naive but honestly I'm pretty sure it's not, though. We all tend to be worse at distinguishing AI from human text than we think, but the text sounds genuine to me and transpires an author with a quirky personality that seems difficult to imitate by an LLM. And that could include using em dashes.

JBits• 1 year ago

Some people just like em dashes—myself included. You can find em dashes in articles written by the author before LLMs became a thing.

rcxdude8• 1 year ago

This strikes me as written by someone who would bother to put in em dashes themselves.

EraYaN2• 1 year ago

If you use a nice enough writing tool it will do en/em and any other dash for you semi automatically anyway. Even Word does it when AutoFormat is turned on. Although it normally chooses the En-dash (U+2013) instead of the Em-dash (U+2014), this also depends on your language.

silveraxe93• 1 year ago

I disagreed with a _lot_ of what they said. But I really hope the author doesn't suffer the indignity of reading this comment.

lmm3• 1 year ago

Eevee writes well but this is not one of her better posts IMO. Too many micro-digs at people who are white or straight, too much of the Twitter/Bluesky tone where you drop a snark bomb on the heckin' evil du jour and then just move on. If anything I'd say this has a lot less personality than older posts I remember.

kixiQu• 1 year ago

I know many people come to the comments before they decide if they want to read the article. For these people I would like to point out that

- there are zero digs of any kind about sexuality in this piece

- the only reference in the text I can possibly find that someone might have considered a "micro-dig at people who are white" is

This is the driving force behind clickbait, behind thumbnails of white guys making 8O faces, behind red arrows, behind video essayists who just read Wikipedia at you three times a week like clockwork, [...]

To me this feels more like it's identifying a specific thing than a "micro-dig", but opinions may differ.

lelanthran• 1 year ago

Too many micro-digs at people who are white or straight, too much of the Twitter/Bluesky tone where you drop a snark bomb on the heckin' evil du jour and then just move on.

I'd really like to know why tubgirl spam raids are bad but unicorn weiners are not; I don't really see much difference between the two, TBH.

windenntw• 1 year ago

100 times this

zpeti5• 1 year ago

But the dream has died. It almost came true, and then it was immediately co-opted by a bunch of get-rich-quick grifters and a bunch of turbo-libertarians whose entire identities are defined by the Things that they Own and who want to cryptographically impose that on everyone else too because they’re mad that World of Warcraft nerfed warlock or something.

Oh come on. As someone who works with plenty of entrepeneurs, you don't get much more enthusiasm from anyone about what they are doing than them, who care about it as much. It's up there with professional sports and professional artists.

Just because things didn't get built that were the absolute dream of what things could be, doesn't mean people didn't care and didn't put in all their efforts to build things. Just because they didn't meet this couch critic's expectations doesn't mean people didn't put the effort in.

I really don't like this attitude. He's really unhappy about paypal and stripe existing? What exactly is the alternative? What alternate universe are they dreaming about? Perfection doesn't exist.

rcxdude8• 1 year ago

I really don't like this attitude. He's really unhappy about paypal and stripe existing? What exactly is the alternative? What alternate universe are they dreaming about? Perfection doesn't exist.

They're unhappy that something better doesn't exist, and that the dream of cryptocurrencies, that they would actually become a useful technology for everyday movement of money, has essentially been killed and buried by the sheer quantity of grift in the ecosystem (to be fair, there's a lot of fundamental technology issues that make that a difficult dream to achieve in practice, but it's sad that it basically doesn't seem to get much at all of the substantial resources poured into the ecosystem, and the general stench of it now makes legitimate use so much harder. So many people associate crypto == scam that adoption for real payments has actively gone backwards since the first few years).

alternatex2• 1 year ago

Presumably the universe promoted by crypto enthusiasts. Which is to say the universe they don't actually care for, but act like they want because it can bring them more money in the current universe.

Arch-TK• 1 year ago

Is everyone else working on projects built exclusively out of lists of primes and rebalancing binary trees?

Yes that is actually roughly the take away here. LLMs are getting so popular in programming not because they are good at solving problems but because they are good at reproducing a solution to some minor variation of an existing problem which has already been solved many times.

Most of the work that most of the industry does is just re-solving the same set of problems. This is not just because of NIH but also because code reuse is a hard problem.

This is not to say that everything is the same product. The set or problems you solve and how you chain those solutions together (the overarching architecture) as well as the small set of unique problems you solve are the real value in a product. But its often not the majority of any single codebase.

dwedge• 1 year ago

It's probably just me but I really struggle to read this whiney tone that became common around ten years ago. It's not about the subject matter itself, it's about the jokes that are always sad somehow, the font choice, the tone of the language. Some kind of perpetual-victim style of writing.

lubujackson• 1 year ago

I agree, it's immature, repetitive, polemic and dismissive. Not that it doesn't capture a popular mindset or make a decent point, but it does so without clarity or persuasion. Then again, it's just a blog post.

saubeidl• 1 year ago

This entire article is a critique of capitalism and how it's ruined everything. I'm not sure the author is aware of that, however.

lr0• 1 year ago

That's exactly what I was going to say. It's a long piece of how anything is always going great just before capitalism gets involved.

VMG• 1 year ago

Finally, society says, with a huge sigh of relief. I don’t have to write a letter to my granddaughter. I don’t have to write a three-line fetch call.

one of these things is not like the other

I agree with the author, I usually do not care how exactly the fetch call looks like. Whatever indeed.

OvbiousError• 1 year ago

Bitcoin failed as a currency because the people who got most invested in it do not care about currency

As far as I understand, bitcoin is fundamentally unusable as a currency. Transactions are expensive and limited to ?7k? every few seconds. It's also inherently deflationary, you want inflationary currency, you want people spending, not hoarding.

fsh2• 1 year ago

It's much worse, the maximum on-chain transaction rate is something like 7 per second. Also the time intervals between blocks have a huge spread, so it can take more than an hour for a transaction to be confirmed if you are unlucky. This is obviously impractical, so people came up with schemes such as Lightning to avoid touching the blockchain as much as possible. Of course this makes it much more difficult to judge whether the system can be cheated in some way...

m0wer5• 1 year ago

Blockchains don't scale. But that's a feature, not a bug.

Great protocols are built in layers.

You have decentralized instant settlement for an average of 0.005% even for micropayments with the Lightning Network (another protocol built on top of Bitcoin). That's orders of magnitude away from the settlement time and resilience of the current payment networks.

aredox2• 1 year ago

Also, making your own website is kinda hard? You have to, like, learn things.

That seems snarky ("you don't want to learn things") when the reality is that the problem, the finite ressource that is the bottleneck, is _time_.

This is also why hyperlinks are underused: few people go through every single one of the words in their last post to try to add appropriate hyperlinks.

marcus_holmes• 1 year ago

I think I share the conclusion, but coming at it from the other side.

The point of doing things is the act of doing them, not the result. And if we make the result easily obtainable by using an LLM then this gets reinforced not destroyed.

I'm going to use sketching as an example, because it's something I enjoy but am very bad at. But you could talk in the same way about playing a musical instrument, writing code, writing anything really, knitting, sports, anything.

I derive inspiration from other people who can sketch really well, and I enjoy and admire their ability. But I'm happy that I will never be that good. The point of sketching (for me) is not to produce a fantastic drawing. The point is threefold: firstly to really look at the world, and secondly to practice a difficult skill, and thirdly the meditative time of being fully absorbed in a creative act.

I like that the fact that LLMs remove the false idea that the point of this is to produce Art. The LLM can almost certainly produce better Art than I can. Which is great because the point of sketching, for me, is the process not the result, and having the result be almost completely useless helps make that point. It also helps that I'm really bad at sketching, so I never want to hang the result on my wall anyway.

I understand that if you're really good at something, and take pride in the result of that, and enjoy the admiration of others at your accomplishments, then this might suck. That's gotta be tough. But if you only ever did it for the results and admiration, then maybe find something that you actually enjoy doing?

AndrewDucker• 1 year ago

The point of nearly everything I do in the office is the result, not the doing.

For art/craft you are completely correct though.

prmph2• 1 year ago

Are you not contradicting yourself? If the point of doing things is the doing itself, not the result, then how is it meaningful to just issue a low-effort prompt for the AI to do it?

Revisional_Sin• 1 year ago

They are saying that the option to make AI art, but not doing so, helped to clarify their purpose for making art.

Ezhik3• 1 year ago

I feel it. We can debate AI over and over and over but my ultimate problem is not even the tech itself but the "whatever" part.

I'm a bit annoyed with LLMs for coding, because I care about the craft. But I understand the premise of using them when the end goal is not "tech as a craft" but "tech as a means". But that still requires having some reason to use the tech.

Hell, I feel the "tech as a means to get money" part for people trying to climb up the social ladder.

But for a lot of people who already did get to the top of it?

At some point we gotta ask what the point of SEO-optimizing everything even is.

Like, is the end goal optimizing life out of life?

Why not write a whole app using LLMs? Why not have the LLM do your course work? Why do the course work at all? Why not have the LLM make a birthday card for your partner? Why even get up in the morning? Why not just go leave and live in a forest? Why live at all?

What is even the point?

wiseowise7• 1 year ago

You need to take a break from your “craft” if fancy autocomplete makes you question reason to live.

Ezhik3• 1 year ago

And do what, given that AI-as-marketed optimizes out having relationships with people and enjoying art/cinema/music?

Touch grass all by myself?

gattr• 1 year ago

On a more positive note, LLMs (or their successors) could be used to create a perfect tutor. Taylored for every individual, automatically adjusting learning material difficulty, etc.

But yeah, first we'll go through a few (?) years of the self-defeating "ChatGPT does my homework" and the necessary adjustments of how schools/unis function.

Ezhik3• 1 year ago

Oh yeah, it's going to be really interesting when the hype dies down and we start seeing the actual good use cases get homed in.

vrighter• 1 year ago

So you suggest training a model for each individual student? Because LLM "inference" sure as hell isn't capable of tailoring anything to anything, or change in any way.

And also, how is personalized bullshit better than generic bullshit? We'd need to solve the bullshit problem in the first place, which is mathematically guaranteed NOT to be possible with these types of architectures.

senko• 1 year ago

This reads like people have been sleeping through mountains of shit being thrown at them (content, news, user-hostile services...) for decades, and then suddenly woke up and blame the most recent hype.

Most of Internet is crap. Most of media is crap. This does need to stop you (or me) from creating.

rcxdude8• 1 year ago

Sturgeon's law multiplies as accessibility increases. You see more of everything, but many more times more crap than not. Generative AI does substantially lower barriers to making all kinds of things, so the increase in crap is substantial.

defanor• 1 year ago

Rather annoyed by the hype around LLMs myself, but I notice, both in this article and more generally, that some of the criticism seems to attribute to LLMs specifically the issues that are neither unique to them, nor caused by them.

Why would someone using a really cool tool that makes them more productive… feel compelled to sneer and get defensive at the mere suggestion that someone else isn’t doing the same?

It sounds like it is about people seeing others doing things in a way they view as inefficient or wrong, and then trying to help. "Sneer and get defensive" does not sound like trying to be helpful, but they probably would not describe themselves as sneering and getting defensive, either.

I might have strong opinions about what code looks like, because I might have to read it, but why would I — why would anyone — have such an intense reaction to the hypothetical editor setup of a hypothetical stranger?

As above, but even closer to this particular question, see the editor war.

But the Bitcoin people make more money if they can shame everyone else into buying more Bitcoin, so of course they’re gonna try to do it. What do programmers get out of this?

Apart from "helping" others, a benefit of promoting technologies one uses and prefers may be a wider user base, leading to a better support, proliferation of technologies they view as good and useful.

We’ve never had a machine that can take almost any input and just do Whatever.

Well, there is Perl. It is a joke (the statement, not the language), but the previous points actually made me to think of programming languages with dynamic and weak typing, similarly allowing to pretend that some errors do not happen, at the cost of being less correct, and doing whatever when things go wrong. Ambiguities in natural languages come to mind, too.

That means they aren’t even reading the words they claim as their own!

Both homework and online discussions featured that before LLMs, too. For instance, with people sometimes linking (not necessarily copying) materials to prove a point, but materials contradicting it. Carelessness, laziness, lack of motivation to spend time and effort, are all old things.

I can’t imagine publishing a game with, say, Midjourney-generated art, even if it didn’t have uncanny otherworldly surfaces bleeding into each other. I would find that humiliating. But there are games on the Switch shop that do it.

I heard "AI-generated game" mentioned as a curiosity or a novelty, apparently making it a selling point. Same as with all the "AI-powered" stuff, before LLMs. There is much of that used for marketing: as block chaining and "big data" were added everywhere when those were hyped, and many silly things are similarly added into items outside of computing if they have a potential to sound cool at least to some (e.g., fad diets, audiophile hardware).

But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless.

This also sounds like yet another point in the clash between prevalent business requirements and more enthusiastic human aspirations. The economic and social systems, and cultures, probably have more to do with it than particular technologies. Pretty much any bureaucracy/corporate/enterprise-focused technologies tend to lessen the fun and enjoyment.

recursinging2• 1 year ago

Aside from the old-man-in-a-wooden-rocking-chair-on-a-porch tone, it seems to me that the author's beef is mainly about back-patting, and how the "Whatever" machines are flooding the pat-me-on-the-back platforms with "Content" that makes their own stick out less, resulting in fewer back-pats.

The last line of the article summarizes it perfectly.:

Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can see them.

I subscribe fully to the first two sentences, but the last one is bullshit. The gloom in the article is born from the authors attaching the value of "making things" to the recognition received for the effort. Put your stuff out there if you think it is of value to someone else. If it is, cool, and if it's not, well, who cares.

I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?” This is kind of darkly fascinating to me, because it gives rise to such an obvious question: if anyone can do that, then why listen to your music? It takes a significant chunk of 3.5 hours just to listen to an album, so how much manual work was even done here? Apparently I can just go generate an endless stream of stuff of the same quality! Why would I want your particular brand of Whatever?

This gem implies that the value of the music (or art in general) is partially or even wholly dependent on whether or not someone else thinks it's good. I can't even...

If you eliminate the back-patting requirements, and the stuff we make is genuine, then it's value is intrinsic. The "Whatever" machines are just tools, like the rest of the tools we use, to make things. So, just make your things and get on with it.

pebble• 1 year ago

and the stuff we make is genuine

hmmm

probably_wrong• 1 year ago

I think there are more generous interpretations than "the value of art is dependent on whether someone else thinks it's good".

I had an interesting discussion with a piano teacher once. Some of his students, he told me, would play for themselves but never for any kind of audience. As the saying goes: if a musician plays a piano in a closed room with no one to hear it, does it make a sound?

Obviously there's nothing wrong with extremely personal art that never gets released to the wider public - not every personal diary should be a blog. But there's also the question of what happens to art when none of it gets shared around, and vibrant art communities are, in my opinion (and I think also the author's), something to encourage.

recursinging2• 1 year ago

if a musician plays a piano in a closed room with no one to hear it, does it make a sound?

I get what you're after, but that's not a very good example. If a musician is playing an instrument, then of course the musician hears it.

Now, imagine instead that it's a player piano, and the lone "musician" is not actually playing anything at all, but hears the sound of the tones he/she had randomly generated by a "Whatever" machine, resonating through the actual struck strings, and resonant body of a piano, and the hair on the back of their neck stands on end. Then the music ends, the vibrations stop, and all that is left of the moment is whatever memory the "musician" retains.

Was that music while being heard by the "musician"? Is it music when it's just an melody in the "musician's" head? What if it's wasn't a piano at all, but just birds singing? Is it still music? If it is, is it "good" music?

Yes, the world is changing fast, and no, we humans don't seem to handle it well. I agree with the article in that sense. But I see no use in categorizing technology as dystopian, just because it's been misused. You don't have to misuse it yourself, or even use it at all if you don't want to. Complaining about it though... we humans are great at that.

Almondsetat• 1 year ago

The author claims that computers aren't fun anymore and then talks about payment methods and social networks. Not only I fail to see how a website would magically make a piece of hardwars boring, but computers have always been boring and it is the job of the user to get something fun out of them

gwd• 1 year ago

Er, they all seem pretty connected:

1. Computers could be more fun if you could buy things more easily. Crypto could solve that, but the people involved don't care about crypto, they care about Whatever.

2. Computers can be fun when people do cool things on them. The web could make that possible, but unfortunately the economics of ads incentivize people to post Whatever.

3. Programming can be fun, but LLMs just generate Whatever.

roncesvalles• 1 year ago

It feels like the same attitude that happened with Bitcoin, the same smug nose-wrinkling contempt. [...] But the Bitcoin people make more money if they can shame everyone else into buying more Bitcoin, so of course they’re gonna try to do it. What do programmers get out of this? Unless you work at Microsoft and have a lot of stock options, you aren’t getting rich off of how many people use Copilot.

The reason for this is as follows: A good number of software engineers make a fuckton of money, but not all of them (it's bimodal/trimodal/whatever). SWEs are also one of the highest paid people within tech companies, often earning more than the MBAs, the CPAs, and the JDs (who tend to come with massive chips on account of actually having actual credentials, and tech companies being prestigious destinations within these profession).

It seems that over time, this phenomenon has caused the emergence of a large coterie of people whom I would kindly describe as being "bearish" of these high-end software engineering salaries and double-down on any narrative that undermines the livelihood of the software engineer, basically just to make themselves feel better.

tl;dr people desperately want AI to succeed because they're envious of software engineers

rob_c3• 1 year ago

Learning to use LLM effectively is like learning how to use scripting in office. Useless to a lot of people. Dangerous if you get it wrong. Full of many bad things from the internet. But still the most powerful thing to happen to computing in a generation. And probably soon about to be turned off by default for security reasons to follow the analogy.

Just because you failed to use an LLM effectively the first time, or it doesn't live up to your version of the hype doesn't mean you have a magic window into how sh1t they are. Many people who use them regularly know just how bad they are and what it's like to move beyond the original context window length. But having auto complete on steroids is still the best thing with regards to making computing "fun" again in a generation. No more boiler plate, no more beating your head against a desk looking for that minor coding bug that could have been fixed by a awesome regex if only you had the time to learn it. No more having to break your stride and go through about 20 websites with popups to find that someone else solved the problem got you, just getting on with stuff and having fun whilst doing it.

Edit: no retort, just flagging and down-voting... lovely

ZoomZoomZoom• 1 year ago

But the dream has died.

I don't know why shitty ecosystem around cryptocurrencies drives the author to this conclusion. Crypto is the most convenient and respectful of your human rights way to just send money. It's there, it's useful and in many cases absolutely vital.

Andrew_nenakhov• 1 year ago

Yeah, people in Russia and Iran use it all the time to circumvent the sanctions. A godsend, basically.

redhale• 1 year ago

But whose creative output consists solely of doing things a million people have already done? Is everyone else working on projects built exclusively out of lists of primes and rebalancing binary trees?

Yes. Most developers in the corporate world are building CRUD apps that are 90% boilerplate. Hopefully this helps explain the disconnect.

And even if GenAI progress stops here and it never gets better, it's incredibly useful. Why do people realize that it can't do EVERYTHING and then get stuck to the view that they can't use it for ANYTHING, confused as to why others are getting benefit from it?

Two things can be true (and I believe they are): the hype can be "staggeringly overblown" AND it can still be useful in many cases.

Havoc• 1 year ago

That really code have done with some editing and pruning cause that's just an omnibus stream of thought talking about whatever came to mind.

Agree with the sense that we're at a weird moment though.

tsurba• 1 year ago

I agree with everything up until the AI part, and for that part too, the general idea is good and worth worrying about. I’m scared af about what happens to kids who do all their homework with LLMs. Thankfully at least we still have free and open models, and are not just centralizing everything.

But chatgpt does help me work through some really difficult mathematical equations in newest research papers by adding intermediate steps. I can easily confirm when it gets them right and when not, as I do have some idea. It’s super useful.

If you are not able to make LLMs work for you at all, and complain about them on the internet, you are an old man yelling at clouds. The blog post devolves from an insightful viewpoint into a long sad ramble.

It’s 100% fine if you don’t want to use them yourself, but complaining to others gets tired quick.

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 year ago

Reading this person's blog, I came upon this article[0].

I can absolutely relate. That was ten years ago, so I'm not exactly sure where they are, now, but they still seem to be going strong.

[0] https://eev.ee/blog/2015/06/09/i-quit-the-tech-industry/

PoshBreeze• 1 year ago

The only browser with built-in tipping is the one spearheaded by a man whose other claims to fame are inventing JavaScript and wanting to outlaw my marriage, and the token it uses apparently had 80 whole sellers in the past 24 hours. Sounds like all of that is going great.

Brenden Eich's beliefs about marriage aren't relevant. It been what well over a decade since he was ousted from Mozilla? Wasn't that enough? People constantly bring this up as a reason why you shouldn't use Brave. There are valid reasons not to use Brave Browser. Brendan Eich's beliefs about marriage isn't one of them. It some tired old jab at Eich who like most older people have beliefs that are considered backwards by today's standards.

This is starting to get away from the main thesis of Whatever but every time I hear about students coasting through school just using LLMs, I wonder what we are doing to humanity’s ability to think critically about anything. It already wasn’t great, but now we’re raising a whole generation on a machine that gives them Whatever, and they just take it. You’ve seen anecdotes of people posting comments and submitting papers and whatnot with obvious tells like “As a large language model…” in them. That means they aren’t even reading the words they claim as their own! They just produce Whatever.

People were cut and pasting Wikipedia articles into University work and doing zero effort back in the mid-2000s while I was in University. There is a deeper problem with education generally and it isn't people copying stuff with AI.

The most obnoxious people like to talk about how Stable Diffusion is “democratizing art” and that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. There is no fucking King of Art decreeing who is allowed to draw and who isn’t. You could do it. You could do it right now. But it’s hard, so you’d rather spend that time crying on Twitter about how unfair it is that learning a skill takes work and thank god the computer can give you all of the admiration with none of the effort now.

This isn't what is meant when people say this.

What people typically mean is that people can cheaply create things in the AI that match what they have in their head.

e.g.

- There are parody songs / music videos made for internet streams I watch by other fans of the show. In the past people used to cheaply copy and paste stuff into a video editor and crudely animate it and they weren't great. I literally laughed a parody song that was done like a sea shanty that mocked a well known e-celeb.

- I make cheesy YouTube Thumbnails for my videos because I have zero budget for an artist and my skills with image editing software isn't stellar. I can use the AI to generate me some of the thumbnail and the rest I can do in GIMP. I get something that looks better than if I didn't have the AI IMO. This does democratise it, because I don't have to spend literally hundreds on a graphic designer.

- AI can help with animations. A friend of mind could take a 20 FPS animation and have the AI interpolate the animations accordingly. He has told me this saves him a huge amount of time.

arkh3• 1 year ago

If it’s something I don’t know, I can go find out about it, and now I know more things.

Do you realize how many person-hour of highly intelligent people have been spent on ORM just so people could not learn SQL? Most people don't value learning.

bgwalter• 1 year ago

What a great article, I hope it becomes Internet lore. We have been in the Whatever Economy for quite a while and the LLM hype is the logical conclusion.

Like the author, I'm mystified by those who accept the appearance of output as a valid goal.

Even with constrained algorithmic "AI" like Stockfish, which, unlike LLMs, actually works, chess players frown heavily on using it for cheating. No chess player can go to a tournament and say: "I made this game with Stockfish."

ecocentrik• 1 year ago

Summarize this article as a prompt that can be fed back to Claude to generate similar content. https://claude.ai/share/5e348270-2eb8-40c3-ac32-ba9066a6fcee

I understand the frustration people have with technology but it's not the technology that keeps selling them out. Bad actors take control of the technology and use it to gain and consolidate power. Identify those bad actors and bad use cases for technology and avoid giving them power. Writing whiny tropey angst ridden blog posts doesn't help anyone.

WesolyKubeczek• 1 year ago

I imagine the future people, unless WW3 obliterates this iteration of civilisation, will be using slop for everything, and craftsmanship and doing the thing will be done in buildings not unlike gyms of today. Where you will pay for the privilege to exercise your mind.

f38zf5vdt• 1 year ago

open blog

But yes, thanks: I was once offered this challenge when faced with a Ren’Py problem, so I grit my teeth and posed my question to some LLM. It confidently listed several related formatting tags that would solve my problem. One teeny tiny issue: those tags did not and had never existed. Just about anything might be plausible! It can just generate Whatever! I cannot stress enough that this is worse than useless to me.

The probabilistic machine generated a probabilistic answer. Unable to figure out a use for the probabilistic machine in two tries, I threw it into the garbage.

Unfortunately, humans are also probabilistic machines. Despite speaking English for nearly a lifetime, errors are constantly produced by my finger-based output streams. So I'm okay talking to the machine that might be wrong in addition to the human that might be wrong.

It feels like the same attitude that happened with Bitcoin, the same smug nose-wrinkling contempt. Bitcoin is the future. It’ll replace the dollar by 2020. You’re gonna be left behind. Enjoy being poor.

I mean, you were left behind. I was left behind. I am not enjoying being poor. Most of us were left behind. If we invested in Bitcoin like it was the future in 2011 we'd all be surfing around on yachts right now given the current valuation.

tempodox• 1 year ago

This article should be pinned to the top of HN for the next 10 years or so.

Procrastes• 1 year ago

This captures something I've been struggling to describe, and "Whatever" is the perfect term for this.

Private Equity & Financialization: Whatever for business Flood the Zone & Deadcatting: "Whatever" for politics

It's what I think about when I hear all of the "AI is going to eliminate all the jobs." That's just a convenient cover story for "Tax laws changed so R&D isn't free money anymore, and we need to fire everyone."

When almost every drop of wealth is in the control of a tiny number of people, it's not surprising that the world turns into one big competition for ways to convince those people that you have a way for them to sop up the remaining thimbleful too.

ddorian43• 1 year ago

The tax law for R&D got fixed though with the big bill.

ranger207• 1 year ago

I liked the idea in there about how there's so many people out there that look at a thing merely for its potential to "line go up", and the actual thing itself doesn't matter at all, it's just Whatever. The current crypto is the perfect distillation in that regard, but it does apply more broadly to everything. It's the same problem with management as a skill entirely separate from what's being managed: It's abstracting around Whatever (be it a particular crypto token, Netflix show, or plumbing company), and when the abstraction inevitably leaks, the MBA solution is to crush whatever leaks, since that's not purely related to "line goes up". Of course, abstractions don't only leak trivial details, and so when the leaky part is cut off to try to shove the Whatever back into the box, it's cutting off important parts of the Whatever itself, causing it to wither and die. The second half of the article about LLMs and stuff I agree with, but I think that insight from the first part of the article is the more important one

CursedSilicon• 1 year ago

I was late to this blog post but I added some of my own thoughts. Copied below for those just stumbling across this post

The bigger picture that I think too few people focus on is the desperation of it all. The slop machine is just the latest in tech's desperate attempt to recapture what they did in the 90's where they connected a chunk of the planet to the fucking internet at large. Of course, they forget the part where "buying pet food on the internet" doesn't mean we want to be in Zuckerberg's legless dystopic "metaverse" for fucking standup meetings. Even when we had SecondLife 20 years earlier (and I guess VRchat and friends today)

I think the only people that really know this are Nvidia and AMD. The same way the only people who made money in the California gold rush were the people selling pickaxes and supplies and all that. Nvidia's stock price soaring to the size of half the fucking planet like Nortel or Standard Oil before them.

But the dogfooding, good god the dogfooding that is already going on. It feels like that the majority of people have either resoundingly rejected using the slop machine, or, much more troubling for capital. Their uses of it simply aren't "profitable". In the same way that having a speaker on your kitchen counter you can ask "what's the weather today" doesn't actually make you any money but we're going to pretend because we manufactured billions of these fuckers and if we just grin and pretend the musical chairs won't stop just yet. Right? Right?

So you've got an unprofitable product that you dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into. The only thing you can do to stave off your own demise as a C-suite (for making the line not go up. Or, heaven forbid making the line go down) is to feed one end of your workforce into a woodchipper and shackle the remainder of them to the slop machine you bought by installing it on all their desks and demanding they use it so you can pretend your workforce is some order of magnitude more productive now. If you as a C-suite (somehow) come from a tech background you might even know, deep down. Where you push all those feelings down into that it's all a lie, a farce. A distraction for the forces of capital that are even bigger than you are. Unless you're someone like Intel and they push you out the door for not making the line go up fast enough, of course.

But the question I keep coming back to is if there'll ever be a point of reckoning. When does this money black hole escape confinement and suck all the players into oblivion with it? That's been the historic reality of everything from tulips to houses. Or has tech found a way to truly become so inescapable, so irredeemably beyond understanding that they've escaped financial reality for their own mistakes?

oars• 1 year ago

Great article and interesting comments. Will be interesting to come back and read this in 5 years.

darksome• 1 year ago

Bitcoin was an experiment, in retrospect it's obvious that it has major design flaws which prevent it from being "an electronic cash system" (privacy, scalability, fungibility). It technically can be fixed, but it won't ever be because of the mentioned "graph goes up" lunatics.

Monero is what Bitcoin should have been.

econ• 1 year ago

This writeup makes the www worth it. Thanks for writing it up. "Whatever" captures the context wonderfully.

Values at times seem like a property of an extinct subspecies. Like being born with a tail.

praptak• 1 year ago

This sounds like Marx's alienation from labor. Do whatever, get your wage but not the satisfaction from a job well done.

octo888• 1 year ago

Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one

This drives me mad in JetBrains' products mostly because there are about 14 ways to completely disable it (including Rider, which is different to the others). There should be a single toggle for "Disable all 'smart' completions"

Expurple• 1 year ago

This is a very good description of the modern issues with slop "content" and advertising plaguing everything they touch. (including human-made slop, as the author correctly identifies)

But I disagree on LLMs being "worse than useless".

Sure, "vibe coding" an entire app from a short prompt will always give you fragile, subtly broken nonsense. *Code is the spec*. In most cases, you can't meaningfully "compress" your requirements into a short informal prompt. We need better formal languages for expressing requirements concisely and declaratively! Think: Prolog, Haskell...

LLMs are good at small tasks that you can review much quicker than doing it yourself. Something tedious, like doing some local refactoring, writing ad-hoc Bash scripts, SQL queries, FFmpeg commands. I use Bash and SQL regularly, but somehow I always have to google the exact syntax. I already use ShellCheck, by the way. It's a must, and it helps a lot when reviewing LLM output.

I like the autocomplete feature too. It often saves time when writing repetitive or obvious code. `if bad_stuff {` usually autocompletes `return Err(BadStuff)` for me. `MyStruct {` initializer usually autocompletes the list of fields for me. I know that incorrect suggestions piss off some people and make it a net-negative for them. Incorrect suggestions are common, but they don't bother me in practice.

UPDATE: I've turned this comment into a blog post. https://home.expurple.me/posts/my-take-on-llms-for-coding/

soueuls• 1 year ago

I found some interesting bits in this article but overall I think it’s being overly cynical.

In the past ten years, I worked with one guy from Nigeria and a bunch of people from Iran. Bitcoin (or rather cryptocurrencies in general) have been more than just mere gimmicks.

Sending money from one side of the world to another, for such a low fees, even when the central bank of Nigeria is blocking USD transfers, even when bank transfers to Iran are being blocked, has been very useful in itself.

As for AI, yes if you use it as a God, you will be disappointed. Yes it can’t do everything. Yes it will hallucinate.

But it’s been a great learning environment for me, I keep asking questions to get an overview of things.

I used to learn concepts such as « clean architecture » because AI is never tired, it can provide endless variations to the same problems, until you better understand the underlying principles and the recurring patterns.

When I work on a project, 20-30% is creative, cutting edge, never seen before. 70% is CRUD, necessary boilerplate.

I know what I am supposed to be doing, I can verify the result, double check the validity of it.

Why would I waste hours typing letters?

Do I rely on AI for everything? No I don’t.

But pretending it’s completely useless, is nonsensical.

Yes it’s just statistically inferring the next token, but it’s actually a very simple, powerful concept.

The Rise of Whatever

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