This comment made me very sad
5,153 karma · joined June 9, 2015
On the other hand, my priority isn’t maximising my personal career benefit, but the collective benefit of my team, so I suppose I either see it more as a 2v1 sorta game, or perhaps my “player” is an amalgam of myself and my teammates. Playing this way, outsourcing everything you do to an LLM is the worst move, because you lose the touchpoints that tell you where the friction is in your team.
I remember a time in the ancient past (2025 maybe) that your PR was your responsibility, whether or not you typed it with your meat fingers or cranked it out of the Giant Plagarism Machine. It’s absurd to think that the above quote is now something approaching controversial.
LLMs have the same fundamental input regardless of modality, tokens. There is a preprocessing step before the “brain”, which is more akin to some super-synesthesia where all senses are translated into sound before becoming experience.
Oh boy.
> It is the pursuit of the common good that gives life to a people, understood not as a mere collection of individuals, but as a living reality in which people learn to recognize that they themselves are interconnected and jointly responsible for the res publica. In this sense, every person contributes to the building up of one’s people...
> When it comes to decisions regarding economic flows and digital platforms, as well as the governance of data and algorithms, we cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own; instead, we must build forms of cooperation that respect the various levels of the global community and make them jointly responsible for the common good.
> We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called “alignment” of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice.... What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.
Productivity as the be-all-and-end-all of personal aspiration exemplifies what is rotten in our industry and society at large: more for the sake of more, faster for the sake of better, no matter the consequences and with certainty no mind for the quality.
Ironically, I think this article serves as quite a strong defense of the hard problem, because it shows how hard it is to articulate or construct an argument against it at all.
> Everything Rust has … expressed as s-expressions. No semantic gap.