> So perhaps then, the sentiment being as negative as it is, is revealing something about the hobby: that many participants, considered the metagame of being the first to do it, to be "smart enough" to have figured it out, the "street cred"
This is a very ingenerous interpretation.
I am a hobby hiker. My mountain hikes are so easy that basically anybody could do them: no street cred involved, it’s not even worth to speak about them. But it is important to me that most goals are only reachable by walking and putting in the effort: if a company offered a 20$/mo service that brings subscribers to the endpoint, carried in a luxury litter by robotized carriers, I would feel that my hobby has been devoided of sense.
> if a company offered a 20$/mo service that brings subscribers to the endpoint, carried in a luxury litter by robotized carriers, I would feel that my hobby has been devoided of sense.
As someone else who hikes: why? I do not understand. Do you not enjoy the hobby of hiking for the sake of hiking?
The views will be just as beautiful, the air just as fresh, and the feeling of moving my legs just as energizing, regardless of how others may decide to get to the destination themselves. Why would the experience of others have any impact on my own experience of a trail?
Might be stretching the analogy too far, but look what happens to remote places that become easily accessible. They become commodified, crowded, and polluted.
There is something about a place requiring effort to visit that makes it special, and it loses that quality when it can be trivially accessed. The air isn’t quite as fresh when there’s a parking lot there.
yes, gatekeeping has much more merit than given credit for. ive seen many communities, ideas, companies, online and off that have been ruined by their growth past a certain point. ive wondered if it's a "when everyone's special no one is" thing but maybe it's just a primal human community thing. idk
I think this is spot on. It's the journey, but its also the destination.
There is indeed something special about getting to the top of a mountain and knowing that anyone you encounter there went through the same thing you did to get there.
"I hope things will stay the same when other people come in but I'm acknowledging they will not"
Rather its the impact of others on, not their experience of, a space that would impact my own experience, for better or worse.
Thanks for framing this in a way that I've struggled to phrase.
At every turn it seems like a lot of intellectual pursuits are just being voided by this technology.
I've heard the "one level up" argument in software with the supposition being that the work's still there, it's just becoming more abstract... but even in software, this doesn't really track.
The injection of this technology into not just intellectual but artistic pursuits (since there are now commercial AI image and music generators) should be a red alert.
What is there to live for once everything you once loved to do has been optimized for maximum revenue? Where every time you do something for fun, someone will come out of the woodwork when you show it off to either tell you AI could've done it quicker, or that they made an AI version with a flashier UI or something?
> What is there to live for once everything you once loved to do has been optimized for maximum revenue?
if it brings you joy, what does it matter how someone else does it?
If you run for fun, what does it matter that someone else does it faster, or in a paid exhibition optimized for max revenue?
Do it because it brings you joy, there is no external dependency.
> Where every time you do something for fun, someone will come out of the woodwork when you show it off
See, this is where things get tricky, either the activity brings you joy, and/or the sharing of it brings you joy, and/or the showing off of it brings you joy.
For the first two, it is irrelevant what someone else has to say or do about it; ignore the noise. For showing off, yes, some activities are no longer worthy, so change is needed to find those that are.
Hopefully for a hobby, or for anything that you love to do, showing off is not a major criterion for why you do it.
Showing off can be the point. If I did something tricky and creative and got an interesting (possibly even useful!) result, why shouldn't I be proud enough of that to have a "hey, look at this cool shit I did/made" moment?
That aside, I've been lucky enough in my career to work alongside, mostly, people who have a personal interest in using software as a tool, and knowing their toolchains very well, be that a language, a command line, a system architecture, you name it. If you found something cool to do with a tool, you'd share it to disseminate the knowledge. That culture is very quickly dying off, I feel, because LLM-driven work encourages siloing to a degree I don't think gets discussed enough.
Lastly, using LLMs to write code is its own type of exhausting. I thought I could keep up my hobby by mentally checking out of work and working on projects by hand in my free time, but babysitting the LLM, reviewing the massive corpora of code and documentation it puts out (including those put out by colleagues), and the insane volume of context switches this technology encourages in the workplace makes me want to stay the hell away from computers alltogether if I can help it.
> If you run for fun, what does it matter that someone else does it faster, or in a paid exhibition optimized for max revenue?
This example is actually very clarifying - perhaps almost no one actually runs for fun?
if you run to be healthier, how does someone doing so faster affect your health
We are not robots and telling people how they should feel and how their mood should not be influenced by this or that is akin to saying to depressed people to just stop being depressed. The divide-and-conquer method you appear to be using is worthless for human psychology.
The cases of a niche culture destroyed by dilution are so common that there are essays around it (e.g. Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution), so it seems to be a very normal and human thing to happen. Blaming the individual members for failing to feel differently is not going to fix that.
> At every turn it seems like a lot of intellectual pursuits are just being voided by this technology.
If the goal was to show off your accomplishments on social media, sure.
This is a good illustration of the crux; that mindset makes absolutely no sense to me. Is hiking the Appalachian Trail meaningless because you can just drive from Georgia to Maine? Is camping in tents ruined for everyone because fancy Winnebagos exist?
But you still can do it without LLMs/AI. And even better you can be proud that you did something "by hand" without AI help. Do you know that you can still cooking, singing, programming and so on? You do not need to buy ready meals, generate music by prompts or let model to figure out solution.