> the .com days...
Oh, you mean the period that is colloquially referred to as "the .com bubble?
1,130 karma · joined July 5, 2017
Oh, you mean the period that is colloquially referred to as "the .com bubble?
This is a massive and dangerous assumption. Given that humanity could not have picked a worse time to double-down on ever increasing its emissions, we're going to need to do a lot better than "this massive increase in energy usage _could_ be temporary, despite all evidence to the contrary."
> It also allows engineers to more quickly arrive at efficient solutions for their problems - enabling more efficient systems being deployed earlier - possibly saving energy in the long run.
I'd have to be a _damn_ slow programmer for your average prompt session to be more energy efficient than my laptop running Vim.
I find the rest of your argument to be equally unconvincing, but you could have just stopped here, because no other points are remotely as important as AI's impact on climate change.
It may have been good (for the US), but that definitely doesn’t make it normal, and unfortunately I don’t see how such a situation occurs again without similar circumstances. I’d love to be wrong, though.
Of course there is. Permanently replacing labor is quite obviously and quite literally the point of AI. No previous tech shifts are comparable.
If by "audience" you mean "people," sure, but I don't think that's particularly meaninful. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that podcasts and TV shows aren't even kind of comparable or able to replace one another.
Deep understanding, taste, aesthetic, sensitivity to nuance, and so on...none of that can be developed without intimate involvement with the process, with the thing itself.
Your example of poisonous paint vs buying it in tubes is a fallacy, because that isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about _actually painting_ vs just...telling someone else to paint.
I keep giving AI-assisted programming a serious try, but time and time I land in the exact same place: reading the code is more exhausting than writing the code, _and_ I end up with a far worse understanding of what is being built than if I had just written it myself. The fact that LLMs tend to write _way_ too much code certainly doesn't help.
And what makes me sad is that, if you follow this line of inquiry, you eventually realize that capital isn't challenging the value of humans _writing_ the code, but rather the value of humans _understanding_ the code. Because, as I've experienced many times when talking to those how have completely bought in on the hype, the answer is always to just "let the AI handle that." AI writing too much code? Have it summarize it for you. Your understanding of the code is worse than if you wrote it yourself? If it works, who cares!
And yes, I think we are well on our way to becoming Markdown jockeys.
3Brown1Blue recently posted an excellent video on how he's thinking about AI's impact on math, which of course is in a similar position as programming. One of the points he made was that machines' abilities to lift heavy things has no bearing on the value of exercise -- which is to say that, just because AI can now code/do math extremely well, that has no bearing on the positive effects (the "mental exercise") one gets from programming/doing math "the old way;" the same can be said about one's enjoyment.
The problem here, though, is that I used to get the enjoyment/"exercise"/upskilling/etc from the same 8 hours that paid for my life. Now, I have to squeeze that in _outside_ of those 8 hours. So AI has, very clearly and simply, reduced my downtime outside of work -- I literally have less time for non-programming hobbies and activities because of AI.
This announcement, plus the prospect of Thunderbird Enterprise, makes me wonder if perhaps Mozilla could begin to position itself as a kind of competitor to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Proton Suite. They're perhaps the only company I can envision nailing the feature set of the first two, with the privacy and security of the latter.
If I could pay for a bundle that includes a hardened browser, a solid email/calendar client, a VPN, and email/calendar/cloud file storage (this of course is the thing that Mozilla is lacking), with all of it tied around my preferred browser, I'd certainly consider moving my company over.
He's a Sieg Heil-ing man-baby who's so fragile he paid people to play video games for him. He called a a guy trying to save children a pedophile just because the guy rightly pointed out Elon's idea was stupid. He has a weird breeder fetish, while disowning children who call him out for his hateful, moronic politics and horrendous parenting (or lack thereof). He's illegally influenced elections and very potentially put his thumb on the scale. I could go on and on.
The only thing that worries me about him being one of the most hated people on the planet is that not everyone thinks so and that he still somehow has fans.
IMO the _material_ being taught is secondary; what truly matters is teaching kids to think, to be bored, to engage with something they don't love but do a good job anyway, to find things they _do_ love that might exist on the other side of some amount of difficulty. They need to be taught how to think, and to have some grit.