- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
The thing I hate the most about AI and it’s ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots. […]
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians—full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.
Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to “review this AI-generated patchset” for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.
Unusually well-written piece on the threat AI poses to programming as an art form.
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When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning.
Stealing this because it manages to put technical concerns into hand-waving manager speak.
And a pretty solid article. I think leaning on micro-enhancements to performance a little to hard at the end but the rest jibes with my experiences working in a large company where non-technical bloviators are leading the charge of changing the landscape of a field they don’t understand and have no training in.
“We’re bringing AI to OKRs!” they say hungrily, as their weak arms attempt to pull the rug.
“Sure you are”, I say, pretending to stumble.
Old man shakes hands at clouds.
You can still do things the old way, AI existing does not impact your ability to do so.
People still make mechanical watches by hand. People choose to carve things instead of 3D printing them. People choose to drive stick instead of automatic.
I think at most of the disdain comes from the business side. Sure I can opt out of AI at home but at work I’m constantly getting asked how AI has helped my productivity and potentially “graded” on how much or how effectively I use it. Business doesn’t care about your personal fulfillment, just your productivity, and if they grind you into dust to where you no longer find any joy or motivation in your work they’ll get the next college graduate that’s already used AI for 80% of their assignments and wonder why quality has tanked, integrations are failing, security breaches are up, and energy costs have doubled.
A coworker that regularly uses AI code assistants asked me to review 78 brand new files he made. That really puts my back against the wall. Do I spend a day going through everything “the old way”? Do I ask AI to summarize each function to bridge the gap in knowledge? Do I ask it, file by file, if it sees any issues? Or do I just rubber stamp it because I should trust the million-dollar product my boss thinks I should use more than Google or official docs?
You’re getting downvoted because you’re right and people don’t like that :)
He is right, but most will choose convenience. And I do believe that people in the future will suffer for it. The brain is like a muscle; you have to use it to keep your mind sharp. I fear that in the future will lack critical thinking or frustration tolerance because AI makes it so easy.
Look we can make the same argument for all tech. I’m sure someone said the same thing about numbers when the abacus was invented, and then the same thing when the first calculators came out.
The existence of cars has not stopped people from running, because they realize that running is not only pleasurable but also necessary for our health.
As always the complacent masses will let their natural abilities atrophy and let tech take care of it. It doesn’t matter, they were never going to be better anyways because that would have required effort. Those who have the drive, curiosity and desire will still choose to do things the painstaking way, just like there’s people out there that choose to interact with their OS using the command line only in 2025 when GUIs exist and are less painful to use.
A common, recurrent experience for me 🤷🏽♂️
Old man shakes hands at clouds.
I love the ageism in this “but you’re just old” defence. It was comically bad when your parents told you to wear your seatbelt, and it’s weak now.
Yes hyper fixate on the meme reference rather than the actual argument that sits below it. Does it ever get tiresome to actively look for things to be pretend upset about?
Just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20081208150839/https://www.globalnerdy.com/2008/09/30/old-man-yells-at-cloud/
I’m more and more distancing myself with computers, it already was “use this library”, then use this app, now it seems just ask the “AI”.
I took up painting and chess, viable replacements I hope.
I want to do this, too, but computers is how I earn money.
Yeah same here, I’m working on a “work less, spend less” lifestyle but it’s quite hard for some resaon to convince people to hire you at less than at full time. Personally I think I’d do the same job, or better, in 4 days. 3 days would yield less total work but more per day.
🤷🏼♀️
Go freelance.
Well careful though you might end up like me: work more earn less.
I’m trying to figure that one out, but any C/C++ job seems to be like both fulltime and let’s start for 6/9 months but implicitly you’re just gonna stzy here forever.
As I speak english I should maybe try the international market, any ideas where to look for jobs?
Well if you wanna go freelance you have to hustle a little bit. Looking for jobs will only find you jobs so you need to sell yourself as a service provider. I don’t do software myself so I wouldn’t know where to start.
I get when people say: “hey, this happened with every new tech…” But this one in particular gas many inherent problems: it’s built on stolen material, it doesn’t encourage critical thinking and it will create mini socio cognitive bubbles, distancing each other more and more. It’s built that way because the people that makes it want it to be like that.
Edit: the stolen material includes the way artists executes it’s art, say drawing (ghibli studios for example) or music, not just copyright
You lose me at stolen. If we are talking code anyway.
Of all the arguments against AI this is not one of them that holds any water. Copyright is bullshit and AI proved it in a very visceral way.
Plenty of good reasons to hate AI besides Intellectual Property.
Particularly code. B Gates grabbed code out of the trashcan to learn, then actively tried to kill open source.
Math, and code in particular, is something you have to work with to learn. The concepts cannot be stolen, the only thing you could is if you copied the whole program excatly and AI does not learn (or at least retain) that way.
Its not bullshit when ai use an artist signature work to generate its results. Make it sing or draw exactly like someone. It’s hurting directly the artist, taking him out the equation.
You are confusing art with capitalism. It is okay, you have been programmed to do this by corporations.
We have laws out the ass for every stupid thing. Bureaucracy so heavy that it prevents many people from even attempting to compete. AI is the first realistic means of bypassing it, its going to be a renaissance of innovation and productivity from the bottom up. You worry about Disney movies being displaced and intellectual property being breached, but we won’t need corporations like Disney when this matures.
Milei vibes here. Dangerous.
Ya his country was doing just fine before he took over, a real MMT utopia.
FYI it’s worse now thanks to him
