Adoption of AI at a FOMO corporate pace doesn't seem to include this consideration. They largely want your skills to atrophy as you instead beep boop the AI machine to do the job (arguably) faster. I think they're wrong and silly and any time they try to justify it, the words don't reconcile into a rational series of statements. But they're the boss and they can do the thing if they want to. At work I either do what they want in exchange for money or I say no thank you and walk away.

Which led me to the conclusion I'm currently at: I think I'm mostly just mourning the fact that I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. I can still code at home.

More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.

We're obviously in an era where "good enough" is taken so far that, what used to be the middle of the fictional line is not the middle point anymore but a new extreme. You're either someone who cares for the output or someone who cares how readable and easy to extend the code is.

I can only assume this is done on hopeful purpose, with the hope that the LLM's will "only keep improving linearly" to the point where readability and extendability is not my problem by it's "tomorrow's LLM" problem.

Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, now it’s a bunch of omniscient robots and maybe half of those original people are using the robots instead.

Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all?

Yes, code is cheap now. That's the new reality. Your value lies elsewhere.

You can lament the loss of your usefulness as a horse buggy mechanic, or you can adapt your knowledge and experience and use it towards those newfangled automobiles.

> (Regardless, why do I keep being told it’s an ‘extreme’ stance if I decide not to buy something?)

> The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates.

This sort of reasoning is why you might have been called extreme.

It's less extreme to say "many people see and/or get lots of benefit, but it's wrong to use the tool due to the harms it has".

There's nothing wrong with extreme, but since you asked.

Now i still show clean code videos from bob and other old things to new hires and young collegues.

Java got more features, given but the golden area of discovery is over.

The new big thing is ai and i'm curious to see how it will feel to write real agents for my company specific use cases.

But i'm also seeing people so bad in their daily jobs, that I wish to get their salary as tokens to use. It will change and it changes our field.

Btw. "Is there anything, in the entire recorded history of human creation, that could have possibly mattered less than the flatulence Sora produced? NFTs had more value." i disagree, video generation has a massive impact on the industry for a lot of people. Don't down play this. NFTs btw. never had any impact besides moving money from a to b

So while I do worry about AI's impact on blogging/writing/etc., I do think to some extent, you either love the process or you don't. If you only write in order to have readers, you're in the wrong game.

Suppose that I have discovered a novel algorithm that solves an important basic problem much more efficiently than current techniques do. How do I hide it from the web scrapers that will steal it if I put it on GitHub or elsewhere? Should I just write it up as a paper and be content with citations and minor glory? Or should I capture AI search results today for "write me code that does X", put my new code up under a restrictive license, capture search results a day later, demonstrate that an AI scraper has acquired the algorithm in violation of the license, and seek damages?

I don't see any proof that software development is not dead. Software engineering is not, and it's much more than writing code, and it can be fun. But writing code is dead, there is no point of doing it if an LLM can output the same code 100x faster. Of course, architecture and operations stays in our hands (for now?).

Initially I was very sceptic, first versions of ChatGPT or Claude were rather bad. I kept holding to a thought that it cannot get good. Then I've spend a few months evaluating them, if you know how to code, there is no point of coding anymore, just instruct an LLM to do something, verify, merge, repeat. It's an editor of some sorts, an editor where you enter a thought and get code as an output. Changes the whole scene.

Also, yes, I know the origin is Star Wars, but it went viral recently a very specific way.

The power of edgelord memes.

For the article it was nice, but the font is really what got me.

Alas I think tech crowd have collectively painted humanity into a corner where not playing is not an option anymore.

The combination of having subverted copyright and enabled cheap machine replication kills large swaths of creativity. At least as a viable living. One can still do many things on an artisanal level certainly and as excited as I am about AI it’s hard not to see it as a big L for humanity’s creative output

Was this how other professionals dealt with their grief? Like a translator in the advent of ML based translations? Like a lift man?

You don't have to give up on everything to participate, but it can be a space to go to if you're tired of every social interaction being mediated by (I'm being glib) hustlers

You can try to avoid consuming AI-generated material, but of course part-way through a lot of things you may wonder whether it is partly AI-generated, and we don't yet have a credible "human-authored" stamp. But you can't really keep them from using your work to make cheap copies of you, or at least reducing your audience by including information or insights from your work in the chat sessions of people who otherwise might have read your work.

In what world is "the media" not an integral, tightly-bound part of the ratchet mechanism that seeks to suppress all distinction?

The supposedly starved don't seem to care much for such food. Blogs are kind of a wasteland.

You seriously need to go outside and touch grass if you are so defeated by another chess winning machine

Nobody wants to Watch AI play chess, nobody wants to read ai blogposts

AI makes human writing more valuable, not less.

I will pay good money for pure human made books certified as made without a single word auto generated whether in original or during process of Translation.

I'm really getting tired of the programming obituaries. As if LLMs didn't fail at any complex task, as if they didn't vomit shit code and as if they didn't just copy patterns surrounding the new code, and as if they didn't hallucinate and downright write wrong code or made up libraries. Yet for some reason, every time you bring it up, someone will come along and say "You're not using it right then.", Is it that, or is it just that they're only doing toy projects? I'm led to believe the latter.

At this point I don't know what's organic and what's not. Reddit is filled with astroturfing for big LLM. Maybe this place is too? Even if that was not the case, I'm led to believe that it isn't uncommon for people to swallow up all of the big LLM propaganda and fall into despair, or fall into unrealistic expectations, and just parrot it everywhere else. One thing is for certain, LLM evangelism has all the money of the world, and LLM denial doesn't. It's only natural to think that the balance is tilted in terms of media presence.

Even at the best, or worst, LLMs can't do anything you couldn't do yourself better with a scaffolding prompt + manual editing, and at the end of the day, you still need the cognitive energy to review, veto, come up with, the implementation. What does this exactly do anyways other than saving you a bunch of keypresses? I wonder if the people touting it to be all that really didn't think before LLMs, of just switched their brain off on them.

I used to really like this site, but I think that just consuming the RSS feed is enough for me. I think that lobster.rs has less "trend chasing" point of views these days, and I do wonder if it might be on here there's larger amounts of non technical people jumpy to call for the funeral of things.

I think most people cannot destinguish between "genuine" creativity and an artificial almalgamation of training data and human provided context. For one, I do not know what already exsists. Some work created by AI may be an obvious rip off of the style of a particular artist, but I wouldnt know. To me it might look awesome and fresh.

I think many of the more human centric thinkers will be disappointed at how many people just wont care.

What AI represents to me is a teacher! I have so long lacked a music teacher and musical tools. I spent my entire career doing invisible software at the lowest levels and now I can finally build cool tools that help me learn and practice and enjoy playing music! Screw all the haters; if you're curious about a wide range of topics and already have some knowledge, you can galavant across a vast space and learn a lot along the way.

AI is a bit of a bullshitter but don't take its bullshit as truth, like you should never take anything your teacher says as gospel. How do we know what's true? The truth of the universe and the world is that underneath it all, it is self consistent, and we keep making measurement errors. The AI is an enormous pot of magic that it's up to you to organize with...your own skills.

You have to actively resist deskilling by doing things. AI should challenge you and reward you, not make you passive.

Use AI to teach yourself by asking lots of questions and constantly testing the results against reality.

For me right now, that's the fretboard.

Well, there’s not much of a point leaving a comment saying “yes, this, exactly this,” so I’ll leave one here on behalf of my fellow lurkers.

The more AI gets shoved down my throat, the less I’m inclined to use it for anything, and the more I’m inspired to write my own writing, make my own art, and create my own code — with great creative joy and burning anger. Enjoy your 1000x productivity gains and your inevitable burnout as you downskill to a glorified inference loop.

According to the author AI is 99% hype.

That 1% of AI utility can unlock more for humanity than 99.999% of blogs; static text hosted from a laptop in a closet.

Odd ball position that cheap publishing via the web is a path to The Next Generation for humanity is 100% hype.

Other than feeding dopamine addiction humanity has not improved greatly since we read all those insipid posts on GeoCities no one remembers today.

It's all been 99%+ hype to feed Wall Street. Young GenX and older Millennials with tech jobs were temporary political pawns and gonna end up bag holders like may older GenXers and Boomers who lived through the car boom, the housing boom, the retail boom.

Same old human shit, different hype.

The broader corporate world has never wanted code monkeys. They want "boring" reliability and pay a reasonable wage for it. On the other hand, they also won't tolerate contrarians who can't deliver, so maybe some of the fear from people posting this sort of thing really is justified.

Setting aside the self delusion that makes a considerable number to erroneously rate themselves above average, the reason you create blog posts should not be for the attention you might gain, there simply are not the eyeballs. You create as a form of self expression, to organise your thoughts, to create a record of them.

AI can never challenge in those areas because it is, as it has always been, the act of creation is the goal.

Might be just me though, but I definitely don’t get why blogging should be the solution.

Therefore, things like writing, film, sales, etc are less productively scalable by bots

And things like code, where people don't care how the sausage is made as long as it "works" are more productively scalable by bots

And even in the situation of code, the job description leans more on defining what "works" which requires the human touch

Imagine having 6 software engineering jobs, each paying maybe $150k a year, all being done by agents.

Hell, I might even do this secretly without their consent. If I can hold just 10 jobs for about 3 or 4 years, I can retire and leave the industry before it all comes crumbling down in 2030.

The problem of course, is securing that many jobs. But maybe agents can help with applying for jobs.

I mean, to put a price tag on enabling vastly more creation than would otherwise have occurred!

Everyone wants to be a famous author, or at least a published/somewhat acknowledged one; few are willing to write their novel and be satisfied with zero or near-zero sales/readings.

But that is exactly what you need to do, especially in the age of AI. Everyone who was "in it to win it" (think linkedinslop which existed before AI) is going to certainly use AI - because they do not give a shit about the quality of themselves - they just want the result.

And you can only become a writer (unpublished, unread, or no) by doing the writing - it takes time (10,000 hours?) that cannot be replaced by AI, just like you can't have the body of a marathon runner without running (yes, yes, the joke). You may be able to get 26 miles and change away, even very fast, but unless you personally do the running of that distance without cheating, you will not get the inherent benefits.

And if you instruct an AI, or another human even, to write for you, you may get some of the results you want, but you won't have changed to become a writer.

We shouldn't celebrate the successful blogs; they're already rewarded enough. It's celebrating the unsuccessful blogs that is needed - even if, frankly, the vast majority of them are sub-AI levels of crap it is still a human changing and progressing behind them.

Babies fall over a lot but unless you take them out of the stroller and let them do so, they'll never progress to crawling, walking, running.

More pretentious gatekeeping from luddites who like to yell at clouds. This is someone who would love a piece of artwork created using ai tools right up until someone told them it was created using ai tools.

There is nothing new about using machinery to automate boring / repetitive tasks, including the wall of resistance that comes up. But it should be clear that genuinely useful tooling and automation tends to become a normal part of life, from the plow, to the printing press, to the dishwasher, to digital video editing, to autocorrect, and now to large language models.

There's a lot that has to be worked out with LLMs in particular as they are now encroaching heavily upon human creativity and thought. This is an extremely important topic. But rants like these with terms like "the plagarism machine" and "the solution is that we all must vow to never use AI in any shape or form" are not really contributing.

Mixed messages fr

Hot take, folks packing it in because of AI probably were not difference makers before AI, and wouldn't be difference makers after it either.

I agree with the author, keep writing. It helps hone your ability to communicate effectively which we all need for some time to come (at least until we become batteries).

- spend tons of tokens on useless stuff at work (so your boss knows it’s not worth it)

- be very picky about AI generated PRs: add tons of comments, slow down the merge, etc.