Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.
jolt42 12 minutes ago [-]
"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal
pocksuppet 15 minutes ago [-]
My boss pays me for the lines of code, right?
stavros 6 minutes ago [-]
I enjoyed the fact that AI was used to deliver the anti-AI message.
whatshisface 7 minutes ago [-]
People who have had the method for success in 2011 imprinted on them (to the point of being internalized) have a lot of difficulty separating out the two totally independent factors that drive this question:
1. What happens if shareholders have their financial interests realized for them by the professional intermediaries (investment bankers, financial managers, active investors) automatically (i.e. without anyone asking, "is this really what I want?" in response to being offered higher returns).
"Taste" is not something you'll be needed for at your job - end-user telemetry contains more data, and is more relevant because they are the customers, and you're only simulating them. The economic value of a developer with taste is that A/B testing is expensive and difficult to do correctly. If knowledge work is free, design-by-experiment necessarily takes over from human guess-work. Gatekeeping is also something that can be closed by A/B testing rollouts and analysis of metrics involving the customer pipeline. A prompt (to an ideally capable agent) could say,
"If the results of the test are negative, roll it back and write tests to guard against the cause."
LLMs that write can also remove obstacles like human conscience from socially important jobs like journalism and achieve better results by integrating with the measured feedback loops that have already been stripping human conscience from newspapers. LLMs can replace humans who don't like implementing casino-style manipulations in the video game industry. Every instance in which discovery of a vice has been communicated on a powerpoint slide to torpedo an art form is an example of where a computer (that can make those slides, just ask it) could replace "taste" which has already been replaced!
2. What happens if voters in democratic countries, against the trend of recent history, figure out how to tell apart their own interests from the interests of the owners of the websites they browse.
If you can survive this, it will be great. Do Olympic swimmers care that you could hypothetically tune a batting machine so that no human could intercept the ball it launched? Did engines destroy the prestige of being a chess master? Does the existence of airplanes make mountain climbers feel bad about themselves?
Is the comparison between track runners and cars so obvious and trite that it makes you think, "he was doing a good job until he brought up that one?"
If you can push a button on your computer and have it fill in any gaps left by nature in your attention span, or ability to distinguish cons from reality, or any other of the myriad of disability accessibility problems we've accepted as the defining characteristic of the modern food chain and of the just allocation of wealth, we won't have any problems anymore. That might sound unbelievable, but the main problem with utopianism so far has been, "you can't get that for free."
pydry 21 minutes ago [-]
I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop.
AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place.
I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential crisis is at its core, acknowledgement of of a skill issue.
citrin_ru 6 minutes ago [-]
Many managers are more bullish on AI and less able to recognize slop, they are unlikely to recognize quality crisis. And they are the people who decide who belong to the industry and who is not. As a result we will get an escalation of enshittification and people will start to forget that slop is not the only option.
Mistletoe 36 minutes ago [-]
> Every machine is waiting for the next machine.
I like that. We are all machines.
grantpitt 11 minutes ago [-]
You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.
34 minutes ago [-]
Rendered at 17:44:25 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
1. What happens if shareholders have their financial interests realized for them by the professional intermediaries (investment bankers, financial managers, active investors) automatically (i.e. without anyone asking, "is this really what I want?" in response to being offered higher returns).
"Taste" is not something you'll be needed for at your job - end-user telemetry contains more data, and is more relevant because they are the customers, and you're only simulating them. The economic value of a developer with taste is that A/B testing is expensive and difficult to do correctly. If knowledge work is free, design-by-experiment necessarily takes over from human guess-work. Gatekeeping is also something that can be closed by A/B testing rollouts and analysis of metrics involving the customer pipeline. A prompt (to an ideally capable agent) could say,
"If the results of the test are negative, roll it back and write tests to guard against the cause."
LLMs that write can also remove obstacles like human conscience from socially important jobs like journalism and achieve better results by integrating with the measured feedback loops that have already been stripping human conscience from newspapers. LLMs can replace humans who don't like implementing casino-style manipulations in the video game industry. Every instance in which discovery of a vice has been communicated on a powerpoint slide to torpedo an art form is an example of where a computer (that can make those slides, just ask it) could replace "taste" which has already been replaced!
2. What happens if voters in democratic countries, against the trend of recent history, figure out how to tell apart their own interests from the interests of the owners of the websites they browse.
If you can survive this, it will be great. Do Olympic swimmers care that you could hypothetically tune a batting machine so that no human could intercept the ball it launched? Did engines destroy the prestige of being a chess master? Does the existence of airplanes make mountain climbers feel bad about themselves?
Is the comparison between track runners and cars so obvious and trite that it makes you think, "he was doing a good job until he brought up that one?"
If you can push a button on your computer and have it fill in any gaps left by nature in your attention span, or ability to distinguish cons from reality, or any other of the myriad of disability accessibility problems we've accepted as the defining characteristic of the modern food chain and of the just allocation of wealth, we won't have any problems anymore. That might sound unbelievable, but the main problem with utopianism so far has been, "you can't get that for free."
AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place.
I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential crisis is at its core, acknowledgement of of a skill issue.
I like that. We are all machines.