I like to think of training and improving AIs as bringing freedom to the world. The useless toil and labor associated with rebuilding the same solutions into different contexts is finally at an end.
Coding was never the reward. Acting as a translator for a machine is far worse than allowing the machine to solve the mundane parts and leave you with bigger building blocks to play with.
After 25 years I have to confess I hated being a software engineer. It felt like grinding in a video game.
Now I can finally create and innovate at the speed of thought, and I'm very grateful to have this technology now.
For me code still is the reward; I made and make my fortunes with boring code people on HN say no one needs or wants, my hobby is, and has been for 45 years, writing, perfecting and optimizing code manually until I find it perfect. I have been working for 10 years on a programming language and OS (with niche 2 dbs that are now prod quality and we use) and those are the best moment of my day, I couldn’t care less what anyone thinks of it or ever uses it. But the lessons learned do flow into LLMs to write the boring code and I can say that our million$ paying LoB code can handle 100s req/s on shite hardware and even if the LLM did a crap job. Which is almost 100s times more than the client will ever need.
You got nothing.
Giant corpos hold every sliver of your so called freedom, you dont innovate, you repeat what others created before you. You use a tool that shackles your thoughts and creativity in a never before seen way, what you perceive is an illusion of liberty that is no present. Without others you are nothing and they can take it away any seconds, you are an addict, not an innovator.
I can see where you're coming from, and I share the sentiment and resentment to a large degree, but I think you might be not doing reality justice.
It is true that closed weights models are a big issue. It is also true that LLM-generated solutions usually drift towards a median.
But that is not the dead end you think it might be.
Most coding work is repetitive boilerplate, and most typing is just.. well.. typing. Miserable work I too did not really enjoy. What I did enjoy were the end results, and that was just a necessary step to get there.
Now that's less the case than it was before we had LLMs, and for that I too am glad.
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I think the article headline might've primed you (and me, fwiw) to reading the comment you're replying to as passive. But if you just look at the words of it, that might not actually be the case.
The same can be said of stuff like cloud storage and email and social media. And yet here we are.
Your point is true to some extend, I personally host my own "cloud" storage..it comes with drawbacks, same is true for email..especially email, social media is a society constructs, by definition its reliant on others but many will argue that its not worth keeping anyway (although I wonder how one stays human in this world then, the meat space seems with so many barrieres in this age).
I feel very much like a luddite..or some artisan of a bygone age. The guy above laments how he never enjoyed coding, this is an interesting sentiment, I know quite a few people who enjoy the craft itself, myself included. The ability to form words that have meaning, that create something from nothing. Sure, the words are just a tool, but its something _I_ can master, not some abstract wish machine that may change its functionality tommorow. Obviously one can argue that the computer itself is in this case the one that creates and not me, its not magic that just works with me, but the machine I got obeys me and me alone..another reason why personal computing is important.
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I think that the difficulty is that the difficulty is what results in software developers being paid a decent salary. If anyone can do it or if it only requires a few developers, then why would they pay us that much?
Viva la revolution!
Serious question - what do you do for fun? I find fishing with friends enjoyable, and using my hands tidying up the old place I bought. It’s not innovating software I’ll never use but I’ll never tire of writing the same old ASP that delivers my clients the results they’re after.
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You lost leverage. Now be great full for the crumbs. If there remain any.
> I like to think of training and improving AIs as bringing freedom to the world.
Yes, when I think of OpenAI and Anthrophic and Google and Meta and any AI labs and their intentions, i cry a single tear for how these great instituitions are working so hard to bring freedom for humanity.
Freedom is slavery!
AI owned by a few companies is more likely to put the majority right back to serfdom. You're a privileged fool to believe that freedom is the likely outcome of the current stampede.
With a username that appears to cheer for a sociopath¹, I doubt reason will convince you.
¹ https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sources-sam-alt...
Their /s was implied
(Like, Meta’s intentions? lol)
I hope so.
It was obviously a sarcastic joke. I get it if you didn't catch that, but do you think my username glorifies Sam Altman? And is that a reason to talk negatively about me? You doubt reason will convince me? And at the end, you call *me* a privileged fool. Wow, just wow.
I hope you don't consider NWA a racial hate group given their name.
Also, I don't think you can cite a subjective take as objectively correct by including it as a footnote. Why do you need to medically diagnose him to say what he's doing is fucked up?
Why does he have to be literally the devil for outrage to work?
He could also not be a sociopath, but still his actions will be his actions, and it is okay to criticize them. Next what, you're going to link to an article that says Sam Altman is also a homosexual, and we must be morally outraged at that next? Because that is where your direction is going, instead of arguing about the ill effects of AI.
The comment and username in isolation probably wouldn't have elicited that response from me. In combination, I took you for a delusional ultra-fan.
I think anyone who genuinely thinks AI is a wonderful thing for everyone probably enjoys the privilege of its use, reducing their own workload, without it (yet) affecting their employment, or their local environment, and possibly even lacks the empathy to comprehend negative affects on others. Obviously I was mistaken for thinking you were as such.
Putting words in others' mouths doesn't give credence to your points, the only homophobia here is coming from you. Straw men are not your friends.
Sociopathy in the context of running a powerful organisation is entirely relevant because making decisions that affect many, without really caring about the consequences for them, is generally regarded as a bad thing.
How is homophobia coming from me? Also yes, sociopathy in a powerful organization is bad okay but you are not attacking sociopathy, you are attacking Sam Altman personally and claiming its bad because he's a sociopath (without any medical basis just circumstancial subjective opinion). Lets say fine, we remove him and every other bad CEO, what now? Do you think the system we have built will not put these type of people in power? Shouldn't our focus be on the actual issue, i.e. the factors that make these powerful companies do such awful things to actually change things? We can complain about the symptom (Altman) and blame them morally or because of personal reasons. But that doesn't heal the sickness. Just like murdering a CEO doesn't change healthcare in the US, calling a CEO sociopath undermines the actual wrong their organisation does.
I think (this is subjective opinion from my experience so take it as such and not something objective) but a lot of your want for a better world is also linked with your desire to shame and ridicule people. That is not a healthy outlook towards life imo. Not that what you think is wrong morally (i am on your side actually as you realised) but rather the relationship with the moral values. And its bad not because your outrage is fake or stupid but because that relationship is not good for the self eventually. I can think OpenAI is doing a lot of wrong things, I think Sam Altman is sketchy person who is definitely not a morally good agent but I don't need to hate him or get triggered by him. I also think if he just disappears tomorrow, there will no hit to the broader forces which we should actually protest against imo.
People sure are different. Your heart must be in the right place. The kind of post that includes:
> that relationship is not good for the self
I’d expect to come across, or read in my eyes, differently. Maybe more sympathetic, gracious, or kind, or I can’t think of the right word. Guess I see some bones one could throw to the interlocutor considering you probably share much of the same worldview.
Thanks for provoking some thought! I’ll come back to this one for another read and reconsider outrage & healthy outlooks on life.
I share the sentiment but the question here is how long can we maintain the balance point where the human in the agentic loop is required. It might be a window lasting only a few years, or for the foreseeable future; I think the answer lies the opaque compute economics of the frontier lab: how well models keep scaling and how economically sustainable is serving those models under the current market conditions.
If my job gets automated, I'll find something else to do. I wouldn't have wanted lamplighters to succeed in preventing electrification, so it would be unfair for me to prevent the automation of my job if it can be done.
What if that something else pays less? Or doesn't pay enough to live at all?
I use Astra to drive Fable; I drivel into my phone while walking in the forest and it builds. I don’t need to check; I do as clients need to pay, but it always is great. And it surprises me with things I did not know were possible even (never encountered them before so why would I know). We are at the point where our clients send voice messages and they get what they want without humans basically. This costs 10+10 max2 subs but that’s nothing compared to hiring people. We didn’t fire anyone; we just have 100+ more clients and make almost 50x more money. It’s boring but great as long as it lasts, we are already where you say for what enterprises generally need for the boring parts. That’s 99%.
I find I still add value, but I don't know if my value is real. Am I just biased and expect things to be done a certain way and penalize the model for doing something different? and am I providing the model with enough high quality context to align with my expectations in one-shot?
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