Challenge Is Gone
blog.alxgsv.com
blog.alxgsv.com
I think you just need to push yourself to do harder problems. For me, I pushed pretty aggressively into the hardware space, building things as a hobby that I originally felt would be far too time-consuming. This is an area where AI can certainly help accelerate but asking it to make small changes can be an expensive (token wise) proposition, so it forces you think through all the critical decisions and research up-front, and let AI do the boring scut-work.
For me, the quickest way to turn a labor of love into something you hate is to monetize it.
LLMs enable me to iterate quicker, accelerate and parallelise, research, scour the literature and integrate cross-disciplinary knowledge, easily implement more complicated algorithms, and are generally better at avoiding trivial mistakes.
Before LLMs, I can't believe how many hours I wasted debugging computer graphics or computer vision algorithms only to realise the problem was my handling of coordinates, flipping x and y, or one program needing the y axis flipped, or typos when copying the algorithm from equation to code. I have no nostalgia for that era.
I do feel like I should be thankful to be alive right now though. I witnessed the evolution from Kirby on the Game Boy to Half Life 2 to VR to LLMs. The tools we use today were science fiction only a few years ago.
I just wish society was in a better state to make this tech a greater good instead of a tool for advertisement, warfare and wealth concentration. I feel a deep sense of loss because of this. 20 years ago I had no doubt that technological progress was an obviously good thing, that it would improve the lives of everyone. Do I still believe this? I'd like to, at least.
And there will be a lot of ego death, esp. with people deep in a lot of kowledge work.
But if you claim that AI is absolutely a waste and bad for humanity I feel sorry for you if you can't see how incredible it is that we have this new technology. -That it will most likely solve some very core issues humans are working on, and that it is a kind of evolutionary moment in human history, creating artificial intelligence. I feel sorry that you can't see past your own nose to see the bigger picture in that sense.
I tend to think big changes will always make things better and worse at the same time. If you look at the long horizon of history (100s of years) it appears that it makes things better on balance. But who really knows for sure what will happen.
There's nothing good at the end of this path.
Like programming? Or what else, I'm not sure I understand what that would mean.
Programming is one such creative endeavor, but they're all under attack.
I don't think everyone will agree with me, and we might have truly AI generated movie and pop stars, but I think most people won't want synthetic art- it's missing the point of what art is for, for expressing something about humans.
You're betting on AI continuing to be bad, or on humans rejecting it wholesale. While I wish humans would reject it, I'm not so optimistic.
For most people, art is just entertainment. For artists, it's a source of income.
AI can likely solve entertainment cheaper than artists can.
It's going to solve your kids? Or eating food? Or enjoying fresh air?
much worse than having one's identity entirely subsumed by typing code and reading software documentation
Intellectual anything? Doing things? Pfft. Just breathe the fresh forest fire air in the fresh, new, brightly incinerated climate we're building towards. It's all anyone could ever aspire to leave their children.
Build a garden and harvest food, creating a bee- and butterfly-friendly environment while watching the little beasties feed on the bounty supplied by the plants' sex organs.
With the magic of grit and glass, make a telescope, then spend evenings observing with your organic eye, planets, and waiting for those moments of atmospheric stability and clarity when you see the most amazing detail.
AI won't keep me from any of these things, but the need for money to live does.
The AI generated posters are an utter disaster. What a time to be alive! Shills, poseurs and influencers.
People are scared. I suppose they should be. A lot of people have been invested in ensuring that things stay roughly the way they are. I am not sure that was ever sustainable, but now it seems like an impossible dream.
Cat is out of the bag. Milk is spilt. Hanninal crossed the alps.
Am I worried? Yes. But it is still fucking amazing to watch it unfold.
Accessibility, sanitary infrastructure (in developing countries), generally improving health (including making it cheaper), and environment/wildlife preservation being some good examples of largely unsolved problems that technology still holds the key to dramatic improvement.
This might be the right time to start working on these things. Ironically, warfare, advertisement, and wealth concentration helped advance technology rapidly, making it easier to tackle other problems.
Yes, many smart people didn't want to go into politics and management because the low-level tinkering was too much fun and more interesting. Now that is gone, maybe we'll see some brains in politics and management.
Tech has certainly stopped being good for people.
I was genuinely considering whether or not I still liked programming - the excitement and risk of technical failure had dropped off. Most failures were for other organizational and process and management reasons. I respect the value of executing those aspects well, but I have no interest in becoming fluent in solving that class of problems. It just bores me. I want to build big beautiful, complex, intricate machines.
The agentic tools are, for me, a step up into tackling broader projects I had put on the shelf as "not doable without investment". I can self-fund my ideas now. Things I anticipate would have taken about a decade or so to play around with and build out as a sole developer, I'm taking on as a sole developer.
But that said, I do appreciate that we can't be sure of what exactly this churn will produce. The other factors that go along with the technical achievement aren't too rosy.
This. All of a sudden, I have real personal goal timeline of things I want to build. The odd thing is, there are still hard things on that horizon, where I can see clearly things will require a team of humans, who understand how things really work under all these abstractions.
Many people have not even experienced community these days. Imagine where you feel part of something bigger than yourself. A gestalt, where the whole is greater than the sum.
We People grew being in that situation - we would hunt, farm, fix things, make things - better not just for ourselves but for our community. It became our nature, just as it has became the nature of sheep dogs to herd.
Imagine a sheep dog who lives a life with no sheep. They have all that built into their nature and never get to be that. That is you and so many other people. So there is your challenge.
No LLM can help companies that didn't care about software quality in the first place. If they did, they wouldn't have fired QA testers. And now that they've been gone for a decade while revenues have soared, why would they bother using LLMs for QA testing when they could execute on the stakeholder's vision instead!
You'd expect to see the majority of benefit to independent devs who previously _couldn't afford_ QA or a full team, and now can. But since the target audience for this stuff is niche, you're less likely to hear about it unless you're plugged into the subcommunities (see e.g. how LLMs have helped with game preservation, retrogaming).
There's a challenge for you right there. Learn to spell or learn to live with mistakes.
> ...spelling and punctuation mistakes in this post were corrected with AI.
or
> ...spelling and punctuation in this post was corrected with AI.
So it highlights the point.
Edit: I stand corrected.
Many things we used to learn are becoming obsolete by AI.
A analogy (if not the best one)3 People used to be much less sedentary, and in some ways healthier, before automobiles (or working from home).
So setting aside intentional exercise became much more necessary to be less sedentary and healthier.
But it requires discipline and motivation, and many people don’t exercise enough as a result.
Before AI, learning was a necessity to get things done. We had to check our own spelling/grammar before these tools existed. Etc.
Now, learning and using these skills will be simply for the “exercise” of using our brains in ways that were necessary before AI.
Some people will continue to code ok the side “for fun” or “for exercise”, but it will no longer be a means to simply getting something done — that can be done with AI.
Any you certainly won’t be doing for a company whose primary focus is to make money.
A significant portion are deciding that the game is rigged. I don't know if I could look them in the eyes and tell them them that they're wrong.
Not actually worse than for spelling, because both use cases equally allow it to insert bullshit into the text.
I remember the old USENET Days, back them people were noto concerned with spelling, at least in the groups I read.
For many problems, the LLMs look like they might be making progress, but once you zoom out far enough you realize it's just pushing the toothpaste around in the same tube with the cap still on. The mass of the overall system is not changing despite the appearance of localized progress.
If your primary source of identity was gatekeeping the Pantone colors of the various office furniture, then yes perhaps the challenge is now gone. But, if you were focused on mission and 'big picture' (what furniture and why), it's plausible that the challenge could actually increase in its intensity.
Yes AI can solve very difficult problems without requiring you to understand enough about it.
This gives the impression that you can solve anything, create anything, and put it out there. And because this seems to be true, you feel less motivation to go and do it, because it’s so easily achievable. It seems AI is robbing your ability to differentiate yourself and push hard on a direction and build something that matters.
However, I have a feeling that is increasing over time. I believe that this is not true at all.
Even with AI, an enormous amount of energy needs to come from within one self, to truly create something meaningful that is used by other people. Just because AI can spit out code that solves a set of problems, it doesn’t mean it’s ready to be used and that it will turn out to be something people actually care and use.
If your only ambition was solve a hard problem, and the problem was purely technical, I agree you are in a bad spot, but then again this is not gone. People play single player videogames fully knowing they can finish the game and they can even hack if they wanted but they don’t, they still enjoy playing, it just means this is now perhaps a hobby rather than something you can profit from.
Creating a product however, remains difficult I believe. A product that people actually enjoy using and solves something. If anything the bar is higher, and it is very hard to differentiate. I think this is more challenging than before, not less.
So if you shift your ambition to be, I want to create something people actually enjoy and it’s useful, and I can survive the next few years and have a competitive advantage, I think this is incredibly difficult.
Yeah but will it pay off to invest time in those challenges and become an expert in them? My gut feeling says no.
This is true in general: janitorial work is likely to outlive white collar work in this hell we're building.
It's not that I couldn't have. I wouldn't have.
AIs are still pretty bad at all this stuff.
It’s made we wonder if future AIs will get much better at machine language and will skip writing human readable source code and just dump out CPU opcodes (ie write the binary directly).
It also wrote a nifty remote LUKS unlock utility. So handy
The main one I see is the question of how we can use an LLM as humans to produce something harder than the LLM can by itself.
I like to think of it with an analogy. Suppose I was granted the privilege of having a world renowned human expert as my personal assistant, but she had no initiative of her own. How could I collaborate with her?
I would definitely need to keep learning more to understand what she says. I would also need tools to augment my ability to follow along and she would need tools to bring knowledge down to my level of understanding.
One might argue humans are unnecessary in the above process, but I think that's just failing the challenge of keeping up. So I try
How long do you think other fields have?
We can consider what makes a human a net negative in the loop and augment humans with tools to collaborate.
I don't know how to sustainably withdraw from society, but every day the desire gets stronger.
This is just a discussion on a news site. Neither of us wants to bring in a dystopia.
You can argue about the risks of a brain interface and maybe I will agree. But just dooming and being dismissive makes the world less bearable today rather than a future hypothetical.
Good luck
Nobody wants dystopia, it "just happens". Oops.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tlQ7EoJDTQY
I wouldn't care if you were building a hell for yourself, but the actions of the tech industry are globally destructive. Everyone has to cope with the lack of foresight.
As far as taking a break: if I could leave, I would. There's not so many places I can go without this shit being imposed on me against my will. From everything I use getting buggier, to slop writing, to artistically inclined friends friends having trouble making ends meet, to advertising telling you how you don't need to hire people anymore, to... Well, everything: this is actively making life worse, and if the tech improves, it only accelerates the damage done to humans.
Anyone who has translated a book, a literature one, knows it isn't something that is well done by AI.
So there was little "challenge" to begin with.
I think that we as a society fail to see that the speed we built things was rarely the problem. The real shortage was in the ideas - having them, finding the motivation to act on them, sharing them, and the biggest driver was the desire of showing off, being told you are great and your idea was great.
I am afraid that by removing the ick to fix things, to challenge everything and being rewarded for that, we will end up with less innovation, not more. Why bother? Why do anything if everything is cheap, why start a new project only to be shrugged away as being yet another thing any machine could have done? Why show off when the merits are the machine's?
HN went from being a constant stream of Show HN to AI news after AI news. The most interesting projects AI have enabled are to run old stuff onto other things.
Rehashes of old ideas keep sprouting out of everywhere, keeping new ones at bay. I think we are probably entering a long winter and all that will be left is permutations of what we did before '23
Here's a challenge: see yourself from the outside.
Realize that however effective you are as a programmer now, you were once a hopeless beginner.
Then you must acknowledge that you are still a hopeless beginner, relative to the you that doesn't exist yet.
In the spirit of fellowship, I tell you:
git gud
And as you continue to learn, you'll see this for yourself, but I guarantee to you now that AI opened paths to writing novel software which no one has noticed yet. Software that was possible before but perhaps annoying to build, etc. Software which perhaps will only ever be imagined by someone who learned exactly the things you have, in exactly the order you did.
Never make the mistake that AI knows how to do everything just because it knows how to do everything we've done so far.
And don't think of your work as "mining" engineering problems! Forget engineering problems. Find a human problem and think about it for an entire month.
I feel like possibility has arrived.
I can build anything I want.
Even so it’s still very challenging to build anything worthwhile.
For most of my life the “main quest” was always obvious. I went to school, found my soul mate, got married, bought a house, had kids, paid off the mortgage, got yelled at by Howie Mandel, won the awards, achieved my career goals.
But now there’s no main quest. It’s just a whole wonderful, brilliantly rendered world of side quests for me to pick from. I’m spoiled with choice…
The thing is… main quests drive you, but you have to drive the side quests; they’re perfectly content to not get done. It’s an adjustment, and I’m optimistic that I’ll overcome it. But I’m currently trapped in the doldrums of figuring out what to do between now and when the credits roll.
It is a failure of imagination to think that there is no longer much challenge. But I guess all humans have a problem with tunnel vision, to various extents.
When you pigeonhole yourself into only finding challenge in one field, you're bound to be disappointed eventually. While I do miss some of the challenge, these tools have given me more freedom to tackle difficult problems outside of software, both personally and professionally.
Well on with the fusion reactors, human Mars landers and the like if you can solve anything. I look forward to it.
LLMs make what was formerly hard trivial, that is true. But they cannot do everything with simple prompts, you must increase your ambition to what was formerly impossible. Try building a bigger game, more complicated software or hardware…what have you always wanted but written off as something only a multi-millionaire with a large team of domain experts could accomplish? Because you have one now.
Great. Practical nuclear fusion power, please.
Assuming you didn't use AI for more than spelling
I'm sorry, but I find this a bit silly. Either:
* your imagination is extremely limited (which is OK, no worries!), and the statement is true because of that, or
* your imagination is fine and the statement is just false, or
* your imagination is fine and the statement is true, in which case: what's stopping you? We all agree that there are engineering challenges, the solution to which would make the world a better place (or make you fabulously wealthy, whatever floats your boat), so get cracking if it's so easy now!
Which is it?