bemtevi

Ah I have fond memories of The Next Generation. And Patrick Stewart introduced me to earl grey tea. I should have a cup tomorrow morning!

True. We should fight for them though, and that's the entire point of an article like this.

We do protect them in some ways. People who don't want to use the internet should still have phone numbers to call, and they should still be able to go into a bank and store their money or cash their paycheques.

The Amish are even protected by law in some ways. They don't have to pay social security for one, which is more compatible with their lifestyle (they take care of their own).

> If you still avoided it, get familiar with AI tools. It is easy to use

Or, not. What about if people don't want to use AI? Personally, I do want to focus on reality but not because I fear AI. Rather, I detest it. People should have the option of not using it.

> to unlock your team's curiosity

God, what sort of a world do we live in where curiosity has to be "unlocked". No. Curiosity is the thing that happen when you naturally want to know something. If it has to be unlocked, it's not curiosity. And even if there were some meaning one could ascribe to unlocking curiosity, it wouldn't be with some sort of vibe-coded behemoth AI analytics system....

Glad I got out of the corporate world as soon as I could. It's all rather inhuman.

Some thoughts:

1. I don't think AI is inevitable. If there is a global economic crash, that might be sufficient to stop AI because it wouldn't be profitable or sane for anyone to build it.

2. If AI is inevitable, I think it would be better if it caused a disaster sooner rather than later so the vast majority of people will truly hate it and get rid of it.

3. I don't think AI has provided any benefits. Solving math problems is not a benefit - having a community of mathematicians solving problems is. And in general, it's making education worse because it's too addictive for students.

4. I don't see the logic of "protecting the greatest number of people" in the short-term. Often that leads to long-term consequences that are even worse for a the entire population.

5. I personally won't work on AI but neither do I fear it. I hate it.

Don't know what voting has to do with anything.....and I don't worry about billionaires either. I couldn't care less if they didn't have a penny or were thrown in jail...but I'm not sure what your point was?

The number one criticism against Wordpress seems to be the plugin architecture. But if you only use a small set of plugins, maybe Akismet, and Loginizer, you can do a lot of things already. Plenty of people don't need many plugins. So maybe this alternative CMS is good too, but I think for a basic blog/website Wordpress is still a good choice. Of course, the author has a point if you have to use hundreds of plugins....

Still using the M1 Macbook Air for 4K video editing on Davinci Resolve and Photo Editing with Darktable (open source). Just 8GB of Ram too and I've never really needed more. Obviously these new versions are great but even the original is not too shabby.

I think that makes sense. The question is, is that a good thing? I sometimes wonder if contact with sufficiently 'lower levels' actually supports mental health in a way. Maybe not coding in 1's and 0's, maybe not even assembly, but maybe there is an optimal distance from the bare metal and we're moving farther away from that optimal...

> But I am seeing a lot of very high quality software that simply wouldn’t have been possible before

Personally, I haven't seen too much of that. What I've seen is software that _looks_ pretty, has a shiny interface, a well-designed animated website made with god knows what, but under the hood it's a bit of an alpha mess....

As a part-time software developer, one of the problems I think is the following: AI/LLM coding may actually be improving some software, true. But I think it's often in domains where we've already made a lot of progress, and AI helps put the finishing organizing touches on things.... but when it comes to new ideas or new software, I think AI is making things worse.

For instance: an AI-assisted developer can probably make a pretty decent basic text editor, but let's say they need to make an entirely new type of app, then I think the new app will lack polish or finesse because no one has made that before. Or AI can help find bugs in mature, well-written code but what if someone needs to write a new kind of app? Then there's a lack of polish again...

I basically agree with you, even though I think AI is a bad thing. But I think your list should be qualified. AI itself modifies expectations and changes the nature of the game, so that people care less about rigor in the way you described. With AI, since it's so easy to make new apps, people will care less about whether an app is correct or well-defined. And over time our expectations will change and our reactions will be gamed so that the person who makes the app the quickest with the most flash will win over those who put more care into things.

There's always been a tension between rigour and marketing of course but AI is a new order of magnitude shift towards the marketing and hype side of things. So I think while your skills are still needed, they will be overshadowed by a new set of skills to manipulate the audience or userbase to use the suboptimal more than was possible before.

Thank you for the feedback :)

That sentence was just in reference to the eco-socialist types who often do believe in such things.

> If the productivity benefit from AI is real, there's no reason you shouldn't be paid the same for less time because your output is the same/better.

That reasoning makes sense in a world where people are paid in proportion to the value they create. But it doesn't make sense in a world where supply and demand determine the price paid for something. Because if you can do the same work in less time in means you've actually increased the supply of producing things and thus decreased its worth.

For decades tech companies have promised that devices save time....but to do what? The pitch was that they would save time for us to do more 'creative stuff'...but I think that pitch and idea is fundamentally flawed. From doing creative stuff for a couple decades, I can make a few observations:

(1) More tech doesn't save time if it's developed in the direction/dimension of more information flow. Because it seems that the best environment for creativity is a somewhat restricted environment of information. And if one needs to engage with information to take advantage of this new tech, it actually impedes creativity.

(2) A lot of the grunt work that we seem to be automating also encourages creativity. From what I've observed from many artists and programmers (I hang out with both), it seems that creativity strikes best when it's not forced, and the "downtime" doing grunt work actually accelerates it.

So I think that AI breaks these two principles (minimal information and the removal of the crucial grunt work), and actually makes us work more for less.

The only gains seem to be those short-term kinds (a program can be made faster, rewards can be reaped by senior people who have thought about stuff for a while), rather than encouraging a healthy environment of creativity....

I already wrote about this previously. But I do believe the biggest threat of AI is that it is used to create entire supply chains and tools for production so that most of what needs to be done can be done without the majority of us. In other words, it is the next stage after capitalism where the elite just have endless power through the production of goods using machines, so that the majority of us are either eradicated or subjugated in some horrible way.

Unlike the author of the linked article though, I don't even see why AGI would be necessary for this. AGI refers to an AI having some sort of true intelligence but the system of current AI + human being already has that, so AGI is kind of a red herring in this situation.

All you would need is a sufficiently powerful AI, plus some advances in robotics, to make this work. After all, an AI doesn't need to be intelligent to drive a car, find new raw materials, and build stuff.

I think the question is rather, what will happen to human beings when any possible personal intellectual accomplishment will no longer be seen as interesting or relevant by other human beings when AI can do most of it?

It's all well and good to say that we should just go on these journeys for our own enrichment, but even so they will just be doing it alone...or else not do it at all because they need a shared human effort surrounding them to do it, and therefore end up depressed and immersed in drugs or media all day.

Of course we're awed at what AI can do now, because all of us observing it have had the luxury of having such opportunities before AI. I got my PhD before AI and I found satisfaction in participating in a shared math community, which I wouldn't have done if I were starting my PhD now, because I would find the current academic environment unacceptable and useless.

I think there are more. Because there are a lot more half-assed projects out there with things that just don't work quite right.

Guns are also singled out as being harmful and are surrounded by endless regulation. Last time I checked, I couldn't just order a gun on Amazon....

Pure math may be that, but I was referring to the human beings behind pure math.

Because the best way to do that is in a sufficiently minimal enviroment so people can just think and go their own way. Being bombared with machine-generated results is antagonistic to this process.

I love solving problems. But I don't enjoy sharing my solutions with the way the world is today. My comment was directed towards the "sharing" aspect, not the making aspect. I still solve problems on my own and learn on my own but I'm not a fan of the way the world has become.

Seems like this is more a bash against the GPL.

> As soon as you leave this club and want to pull code from a GPL-licensed project into your MIT-licensed project, well, sorry, too bad for you.

So what? The GPL seems like a decently fair way of saying that "I'll make a contribution, as long as everyone else using it keeps making that same open contribution".

Personally, if I wanted to release open source code, I wouldn't want it to fall under an MIT license, because then some corp could simply take it and not make the same contribution back.

The author claims this "harms developers of non-GPL-licensed FOSS software" - give me a break. Does it break their legs? Give them the flu? It doesn't harm anyone. Maybe just inconveniences them. Cry me a river.

I don't see why it would. It might make education more efficient like a factory in some ways, but I simply don't see why it would aid in learning. At least, from my experience as a student, here are some observations:

1. Computers have allowed me to gather more information, access more journals, more results from around the world, but what really seems to matter in learning is just sitting down with a tiny bit of material like one book and REALLY understanding it.

2. Computers make things more distracting because while they make typing up reports, proofs, and assignments more efficient, there's actually just too much information. What really seems to help is having LESS information so there's some space to just think and work things out.

The fact is, what computers do is help you keep up with other people in the field, so they might accelerate progress at the research level, but what they don't do is help you become a rigorous, independent thinker.

Academia in fact has always been an uneasy tension between the two: building capable individuals and getting results and money for progress. Computers help with the latter - they certainly impede the former.

The problem is, why even produce something greater now when someone is just going to clone it with AI? And moreover, what differentiates software now will no longer be the care put into it but marketing and trends. The highly commercialized nature of software means that there's not much point now in doing anything except getting there first and exiting with a decent nest egg.

It's simply because AI has no motivation, no care, no desire to say anything, so how can it burn with a passion to make its point?

I personally would never participate in this. I think clarifying proofs generated by a machine is a contemptible way to spend time. A lot of people will ask, isn't the purpose of math to generate results? I don't think so. I think the purpose of math is to gain a precise and clear understanding of the world through a shared human practice of math - human only.

I know most people here will disagree because most people here are at the top of the consumption food chain of just consuming the latest and greatest of whatever the world produces, so why not have more to consume? But slowly the joy is being sucked out of the world by AI for those not at the top and being replaced the narcissistic activity of enjoying superficial sensory stimulation in a vacuum.

A rather sad state of affairs...