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Comment by deng | Hacker News Reader

Oh the irony: "They Live", a movie famously about alienation and dehumanization, and you let AI do all the coding.

People have jobs and lives, let them make things quick with the tools available if its for fun.

Interacting with a computer in natural language is much more human than typing in special codes and punctuation.

So telling someone to make a table for you is more human than making it yourself, because you're using natural language instead of saws and hand planes?

I would say yes, conversing between two humans, maybe even collaborating, is more human than a solitary human using inanimate objects.

Basket weaving is more human than conversation. Language is entry level artificial man.

Even if the table collapses down badly instead of doing a proper one with a good set of tools?

But the extension works, not "collapses down badly."

I can't know how To hear anymore about tables

Have you seen me work?

Yes, I build furniture for my wife’s designs. Without her my furniture wouldn’t exist. I’m the LLM in this case, capable of building things but not furniture design.

> telling someone to make a table for you is more human than making it yourself

That's a bad comparison. You have to compare crafting a table manually to doing it via CNC.

Commissioning a craftsman you respect to make custom furniture to your taste and specifications sounds human enough to me.

The human world is full of special codes and obscure gestures that only have meaning if provided in the right sequence to the right people. Computer programming being documented and formalized makes it more accessible than many social circles.

Imagine writing this comment on 2013 Hacker News with a straight face.

I once built a Chrome extension to play this audio (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8itH10OFc8), encoded as base64 in the extension, on certain UI interactions on a sports site. I did it all by my big self. Should I be proud of that? Because I think we both know the answer is no.

Are you writing code in a computer instead of using pen and paper? Preposterous!

What if it wouldn't get done otherwise?

(Genuine question as we're all trying to figure this shit out)

It wouldn't have. I put this off for 11 years, the joke wasn't worth the manual effort required

AI is amazing at jumping into an unfamiliar codebase, it was probably 20 mins total work

I think this is false dichotomy. It's been a while since actually empowering and encouraging humans was considered normal and attempted at scale. But not that long. How quick we forget. I think it's worth getting back to.

I think we can agree that this is not something anybody will actually use, but rather an homage to "They Live", and IMHO, letting this be done by AI is in contrast to the basic premise of the movie.

The joke wasn't worth 10+ hours manual work

That argument could be taken to any extreme at the end of the day. They Live, at its core, is a commentary on unrestrained capitalism. You could fault OP for using a Google browser. You could fault OP for using a Microsoft cloud repository. The line may be blurrier than one thinks...

Any argument can be taken to any extreme. This is why it's a popular rhetorical tactic, called "appeal to extremes".

So, why did you use it in this case?

So you consider calling something "ironic" an extreme position? On a more general note, you will find that many people are uncomfortable with the idea that AI will replace human work, especially when it relates to art, which this project in question references.

But there are many more tech things we take for granted that could be seen as ironic as well. I think I never saw this movie but being a young adult and an Internet nerd in the late '90s early -00s I remember perfectly how many people were negatively discussing it because it was dehumanizing, destroying personal relationships in flesh and a long etc. And while the future turned out to be not so good as some early adopter thought, it also never turned into something so bleak as detractors said it would.

And I think the same will apply here, with GenAI.

What's the premise of the movie? I thought it was about psyops.

(Also interdimensional shapeshifting reptilians.)

We'd all be better off for it. I don't want you to take a shit on the table and call it dinner. Even if you don't cook.

That sounds like you're denying that anything valuable can be produced with these tools. That would be an extreme position.

When people burn down their neighbor's houses to roast marshmallows, I think that it's worth taking a strong position against them.

If you listen to what effects the companies building this claim their products will have, you conclude that either they're going much farther than burning a few houses, or they're lying through their teeth. Neither of which lead me to thinking that the harm of empowering them is outweighed by having more low-effort software.

So, yes. As someone that has to live in the world those assholes are building, they can go fuck themselves. I want nothing to do with their creepy, infantilizing, bleak, dystopian future.

Maybe that's an extreme position, but I'm very glad I don't have children; I don't think I could look them in the eyes and tell them they had a bright future.

Why should anybody be interested in using software nobody was interested in making?

This is the labor theory of value

Why should anybody be interested in using software nobody was interested in...

Writing their own assembly for? manually allocating their own memory for?

By that argument no software would ever exist.

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