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Comment by hiduck | Hacker News Reader

more people should have such a healthy approach not only to llms but to life in general. Same reason I partake less and less in online discourse: its so tribal and filled with anger that its just not worth it to contribute anymore. Learning how to be in the middle did wonders to me as a programmer and I think as a person as well.

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Personally I hate this “in the middle” as it’s so relative you can shape to fit your narrative.

For example: what’s in the middle for programming?

For me 0 is writing 0 and 1. For others 0 is making the nand ports.

And 100 is ai llm vibe.

So 50/middle would be what exactly? It all depends.

Same for anything really. Some people I know keep saying not 8 not 80 to mean the middle.

Like what’s in the middle for amount of coding per day? 12 h? 8h? 2h?

What’s middle for making money? 50k, 500k, 500m?

What’s the middle for taking cyanide ? 1g? 1kg?

What about water? What about food? What about anything?

As you can see, it’s all relative and whomever says it, is trying to push his narrative as “middle” aka correct, while who does more or less is “wrong”.

I think both me, and person before me, were commenting more about the fact that taking reserved approach is just healthier and prevents "shitstorms" in discussions that are non existent in current internet landscape. Without offending you, but creating a straw man scenario about how much cyanide one can take and getting angry at it is exactly what I had in mind; I just code, I want to code, sometimes use llm or stack overflow or ask another person for advice about code. The approach in the middle is not taking to the extremes, and making use of any available tools to do our work/hobby and just live life and not be a target of hate (I received hateful messages and even one death threat over a comment where I said that I asked Claude to explain some concept in Zig). I could go and say that "in the middle" is more of a metaphor to just being reserved about stuff but I would be probably called out for "moving goal posts" and "backtracking on own comment". Sorry if something is written weirdly, English is not my first language, I'm open to talk more tho.

Maybe your “sometimes” is too much for me or others. How can you ensure it’s in the “middle”? Maybe I consider extreme. Maybe others consider not enough. Like driving every day: is it extreme driving, or moderate?

You see how makes no sense this in the “middle” concept?

Then how should I call my approach? I definitely wouldn't portray myself as either pro or anti-llm: moderate? Moderate in the colloquial speech would also be not much more than trying to stay in the as you pointed out "relative" point of view. Unless you want to say that everyone is a bit of an extremist.

Good question. I don’t know either. Just I know “middle” is not the right thing. It’s so easy to draw the narrative you wish - self fulfilling

Well, then how would you describe your approach? If the the vague middle is not right thing for you?

Better maybe fact based? I use ai X amount of hours per day. I use Ai for % of needs? My personal feeling of AI improvement in my life is +X%

Something like that. What you think?

Sounds good, but I'm scared that for some other people it's not an improvement since there will always be someone saying that X amount is too much or not enough. But yeah, I could say that 1/4 or 1/5 of coding (or rather, googling of stuff I simply don't know) I do is now delegated to an llm, question is if another person would look at this statement and say something along the lines of "cool, I use it more/less but I'm happy that it helped you/I'm sad that it caused you trouble", I slowly think that we might be discussing kind off the wrong thing. But yeah, numerical/fact based approach doesn't sound half bad even though I have some feeling at the back of my head that it can also be kind off self fulfilling but nonetheless it helps in conveying the message better than what I used before (the I use it a lot/not much/I try to stay in the middle).

“I use the computer a lot” :

For an average person: maybe means 8 hours.

For a dev maybe means: 16 hours

For a farmer: 2 hours.

Who’s right?

You can hate it all you want but the world ain't black or white but a scale of greys. You're over focusing on which exact shade of grey one's talking, but it's indeed relative.

> So 50/middle would be what exactly? It all depends.

Using LLMs to explore code bases, doing deep research, asking it to do code reviews or find bugs, but not pushing code that LLMs have authored might be one example in the middle.

> What’s the middle for taking cyanide ? 1g? 1kg?

Cyanide has an LD50 (50% chance of death) in the 1-2 mg/kg range when taken orally. So middle for taking cyanide is probably 1.5mg/kg. 90mg for someone 60kg.

Sadly the middle ground in other topics is less easy to define!

Yeah but what’s the bottom and the top?

Bottom is 0? Or is 1mg? Or what?

Top is killing a human by dose? Killing an elephant dose? Make you feel dizzy?

What’s too much? What’s being in the middle?

You see, it’s a stupid logic “in the middle”. The point is being in the middle or moderate is not always “good”.

Also it’s hard to define. Tbh only non logical people throw words like “in the middle” etc

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