917 karma · joined March 26, 2020
> I also don't think these things are wholy incompatible with our current societal structure.
Wholy incompatible? By no means, this industry is making tons of money. Surely it is compatible.
I think of it more like a handbreak. Yhe current capitalist societal structure is putting a hard limit to our potential as a society to fully leverege these technologies to better our lives. Open source is just a glimpse of what can be accomplished when money doesn't get in the way of our work exchange. And imagine what our humanity could have achieved if 1000x people did open source without having money issues.
You were onto something with this but then got sidetracked.
The fundamental difference is that software (digital product) is cannot be given away and cannot be consumed, it can only be copied. Any other non-digital product, a bread loaf, a pipe, for someone else to use it, you have to give it away. You must not own the bread anymore so that the other person owns and uses it. Not the same with software since you never give away software, you give a free copy that costs nothing. Both you, the creator and the user now have a copy of the same thing and can use it indefinitely (this is the second difference, it is not consumed)
This is the fundamental difference that "disrupts" the classic capitalist economic flow. The proof of this disruption can be found in the continously changing pricing strategy of digital products and software, since companies are trying to adjust a fundamentally different product onto classical economic transactions.
The solution is a communist economy, where money won't be a transaction wall for product exchange and one's well being (as opposed to having to make money to live by)
If we wanted to treat words literally, the true rogue nation is USA. The only nation on earth to have actually dropped nukes on people. Have been prooved to spy on the entire world population. Plants coups around the globe. Invades any country they fancy in the name of democratization.
If that ain't a rogue nation I don't know what is
There is, it's the system's name: Capitalism
Noone ever in the universe claimed that this system serves primarily the needs of humans. It serves profit. Now there is a ven diagram that has a union area between profits and needs, but the system does not care about making this union bigger, it cares about making the profits bigger. When that overlaps with needs... it is just a happy side effect.
So it looks like "we" cant tackle multiple bad things at once. Just some. And just the less importsnt ones
So the criticism is empty and imo it only serves to catch the eye of the people who politically sympathise with the general opinion of "oh no capitalists have gone off the rails with some stuff, let's keep them in check"
And this is what my original comment is about. Let's keep them in check when they fiddle with our football tickets, but we don't have to name names when the worst on earth is happening.
No, we chose to be engineers because someone has to actually do work and deliver stuff while everyone plays with the new toy.
Here is the question that no hype-driving AI coding enthusiast has answered so far on HN, or anywhere: Show us what what did you build in 3 months that we would have built in 3 years?
I still haven't got anyone to answer this, maybe this will be a first.
It's not about excluding animals, the quote was in the context of talking about people. You can apply the very same thing to any entity
Amazing analysis.
Intelligence is the ability of the human body to organize its own contours in a way that corresponds to the objective contours of the world.
Evald illyenkov.
And yes, the mind is part of the body, thus thinking consists of an action of organization to the contours of the world
And where is the problem with that?
The problem is that the system wants to ensure the subordinates believe what they're told to believe. And this requires precise control. But there is a methodological problem when we move from one-way narrative control from TV and social media to a two-way interaction like an LLM chat.
When you ask an LLM a political question and it disagrees with you then you argue and at the end it tells you you're right. So it doesn't really matter what it's initial political output is.
So the actual "problem" is that LLMs fail to stay true to carefully crafted political propaganda like other media. Which I don't care at all.
A healthy thinking person should only use an LLM as a mapping tool, not a truth seeking machine. About every topic including politics.
Also, asking out of ignorance, what things need to move forward? I thought wikipedia is a solved problem, the only work i would expect it to need is maintenance work, security patches etc.
It's called capitalism
Here is another use case i found helpful for html: i use a different, dimmer color for the closing html tags.
I now only use my own tree-sitter syntax and my own neovim highlight colors, i literally stripped all the defaults.
I started writting code with literally white text on a black background, and i only added new highlight groups when my brain really needed it. This way every color becomes deliberate and i gradually add in just what i need
1. There is a big difference between terrible code that works in production, and terrible code that doesn't even work. And tge vast majority of the code I've generated by my LLM doesn't even work.
2. Software is inherently useful to enable change. If you don't want to change it, burn the program onto a chip and have it run faster. But we are here talking because you want to be able to change it. Terrible code makes change harder, riskier, slower, more expensive. The curves have already been discovered by others, I am not inventing any new knowledge here: there are software projects where longevity is of buisness criticality and there are others where the project will be thrown away in 1,2,3,5 years. If you'll throw it away, sure go ahead and vibe it. If you want it to stay, you're gonna have a bad time as changes become more and more expensive.
After 10 years of writting software, i know exactly what i want out of my IDE, so i took up a clean (completely clean) neovim and started building every single functionality by myself exactly as i like it. I call it, jokingly, unlazyvim.
I had been using vim for many years, but finally, after so many years my editor feels like a fine glove. Don't look up my code, don't ask what I built. Go build your own.
I am currently kind of an anti-AI black sheep in engineering department because I refuse to fully embrace the exponentials and give in to the vibes.
I avoid burnout by simply switching off my brain from all this noise about vibe coding - i have thought hard and long, i know the way this is being implemented is wrong, i know they will create problems for themselves down the road (they already have, the signs are already there), i will be here to dig them out when the time comes.
So far I don't see anyone shipping faster or better with AI than I can manually, so I'm good.
I'll wait for the day they will release a js library to programmatically do all this llm context juggling, instead of using a UI, and then I will adopt it by doing what I do now, writting code.
I will write code that orchestrates llms for writting code.
Edit: This is obviously a joke... but is it really a joke?
Simply, deny to carry out the work UNLESS you are directly and clearly instructed to by EMAIL. Oh, and be sure to make this request by email as well, as a record. So send an email saying "hey i was told to do that and i am concerned about the legality, please give me clear instructions over email"
This will calm them down.
Are we still calling it intelligence?