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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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
>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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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) :
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ].
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)
> 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?
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!
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".
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 )
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.
> 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
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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)
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?
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?
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].
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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?
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.
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.
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?
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
Also to the thief that tries to wear it.
Set a few years from now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
But I agree that in normal input it is often annoying.
Maybe this is just an XKCD moment https://xkcd.com/1172/ ...
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".
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.
You can perhaps imagine an editor that only inserts the delimiter if you type the start-string symbol in the middle of a line.
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.
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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 )
It's just matching, and reflecting the way different humans think, and reason, that's all.
(yes, said in jest)
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Edit: Do you mean that the speed of the transfers was the problem?
> 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”.
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.
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.
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.
I'm SO stealing this!! <3
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?
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.
That’s a nice description, to be honest.
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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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Edit: I apologies, the author has pre-gpt posts that use em dashes so likely it’s part of their writing style.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Why is that? You can just buy 0.00000001 BTC.
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?
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.
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?
[1] https://tromp.github.io/blog/2020/12/20/soft-supply