Please Use AI
shawnsmucker.substack.com
shawnsmucker.substack.com
I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone
For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel empty on new projects. You can produce so much things so fast, but if it should be something original - it is hard to get it generated by AI while still feeling that it is something that you came up with
Also I’ve been thinking that ai code is like cheap amazon furniture and hand crafted is well… hand crafted.
I sometimes wonder if people get into this to create an actual working something or they just enjoy sorting colored blocks for the heck of it.
I am on the other extreme end: I don’t give a rat’s ass about the code itself. The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts are what I find interesting. All the “file handling” and “logging” and syntax wrangling and caring if some “variable” is on the “stack” or the “heap” I can live without very happily. It’s not that they are uninteresting in and of themselves but I find it hard to justify keeping my focus on these microscopic issues again and again and again and again.
I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code.
If your goal is to become better at writing code, it almost certainly is a net negative.
If you define growth as shipping stuff and getting things done that you previously wouldn’t have had the time for, then it might be a positive.
Hell, it’s probably both at the same time and what each person cares more about is the deciding factor.
Think of the recent bun rewrite from zig to rust, around 1M lines of code. If you would have a team do that migration they would very likely have to become close to Rust expert, and develop an intimate knowledge of the codebase, its tradeoffs, have ideas for future improvements, good understanding of the technical debt they accepted, reliability of tests, etc. That's A LOT of expertise you can then apply to other things in your professional life.
Instead they went the AI way. The got the artifact (the migration) in ~1 week. But that's pretty much it? What did they learn from that project, other than the fact the AI can do that work? My guess would be pretty much nothing. And pretty much any other software engineer could have done the same migration. There is zero personal growth here.
Be careful with that claim. Abstractions more or less leak especially in CE where the OS and hardware you built on are already full of leaky abstractions, e.g. performance traits. It is still important to look through and comprehend code.
I don't believe this, every architect ive ever worked with that was not regularly in the weeds on various things in the codebase were universally terrible and out of touch.
When you are good at it there can be craft in it still.
A programming language is a formal intermediate language for turning human comprehensible instructions into machine instructions by means of an interpreter or compiler. We've now allowed that intermediate language to be English, because that's preferable to most people, and the "compiler" has become very complicated indeed as a result of that.
You still have to be able to express what it is you want in a way the machine can understand, it's just both simpler and less deterministic now.
You don’t need a precise definition of a term to know what a thing is and isn’t (Wittgenstein has taught us that much at least). We just need to know that programming languages are used to express an executable computer programs (usually by translating to simple machine instructions) and that a natural language has never been used in this way in a significant manner.
A case in point. I bet you can‘t find a definition for a fish which includes cods and sting-rays, but excludes dolphins and shrimp. And similarly the IAU were unable to come up with a definition of a planet which included Pluto and Mercury but excluded Ceres and Sedna.
I mean, a quarter century ago Dijkstra argued your point compellingly, and he was right back then. If you read his "On the foolishness of “natural language programming”" (1978) you'll find that all of his most compelling arguments are gone now. Things have changed, and the machines can now largely cope with the ambiguity of language as well as the average human being can.
Since human language is the original source for the specifications we turn into formal code most of the time anyhow, we're really just asking if that original specification the programmers turn into formal symbolism is a form of code or not, and whether a good spec is equivalent to good code. I think it's difficult to argue that it's not, especially given that we now have these handy Natural Language to Formal Symbolism compilers.
> We just need to know that programming languages are used to express an executable computer programs (usually by translating to simple machine instructions) and that a natural language has never been used in this way in a significant manner.
I did that like 30 times today. Maybe it wasn't in the past, today it is. The path is now Specifications->LLM->Formal Symbolism->Machine Code, it used to be Specifications->Human->Formal Symbolism->Machine Code. The inputs and outputs are the same, and I would argue that the process is still "programming" regardless of syntactic games with semantics.
Eventually we'll find a more efficient version of that formal symbolism and stop using code designed to be human readable at all. Still nothing will really changed besides the input method.
You did no such thing. You fed some text into a statistical machinery which was able to infer another text from it. The first text just so happens to be a natural language and the inferred text was a formalized programming language which the statistical model had had its weight tuned to produce.
Statistical inference is a completely different process then compilation. Inferring is a completely different verb from compiling. Two different verbs which mean different things.
If we take your logic and explore its implication, we can just as easily claim that a project manager writing JIRA ticket is programming, and that JIRA is a programming language. The project manager wrote a ticket in natural language which was picket up by a developer who translated it (by your defintion of translation) to a formal language which got compiled to machine instruction and executed by a computer. This is obviously silly. And as silly as you find my description, I find yours equally silly.
There is nothing in the AI photo worth re-looking at later, because there is nothing there. There is nothing to take from any of the 'details' in the image.
I am not a proponent of AI images, believe me, but I find it interesting to think that people would not like AI images. People don't really care if something is real or not. They just want to be told a good story.
i.e. we are fucked, but we have already been fucked for years without knowing. Call me a luddite but selfies is the fakest shit ever. I would rather take pictures of plants, rocks and animals than people.
That said, I wouldn't let AI build my Lego sets for me because the point of that is the building. But for work? As long as my boss is happy enough to keep funding my Lego hobby, I'm happy.
> I sometimes wonder if people get into this to create an actual working something or they just enjoy sorting colored blocks for the heck of it.
So yes, to be honest, some people write software for the "heck of it". Will my implementation of Lisp interpreter matter at all in the grand scheme of things? No. It is in fact a waste of time, because you _could_ have learnt how it works and implement it in less than an hour with LLM.
> The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts are what I find interesting.
To me, this is like saying the financial of the company is what determines the company's success, not whatever the engineering team is doing. So instead of thinking about the "The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts", just give the right monetary incentives and you will come up with a successful project.
From this perspective, can you empathize with the "low level" developers?
On the other hand, it feels like what people who weren't great software engineers say.
It's kind of a craft. I can't imagine an exceptional artist saying "screw the craft, I just want the painting that vaguely resembles what I requested".
I _can_ imagine artists that were not exceptional saying "it's so great that I can just prompt and get the damn painting, who care about how it's put together".
Up next, an architect who doesn't understand how concrete pours or how steel bends under stress? Hope the AI gets it perfect?
Interesting times we live in - and I realize this is an elitist take.
For my own sanity, I never allow AI to do everything. Either I write some code and turn to AI for debugging help and code review, or I let AI write the initial draft and I debug the AI-written code.
Instead of void shit, empty pleasure.
Some people got into software development because they love to code. Others got into it because they love bringing ideas to life and coding was the only means to do so.
I am of the latter. I love software development because it allows me to bring my idea to life. Yes, I love to code but it's a means to get to my ultimate goal. I don't have a lot of time outside of work and family to work on my ideas. They usually just sit in my head until I forget about them.
Being able to use AI to assist in feature planning while I'm on the go, break everything down into organize phases, put those phases into the structured tickets, work on architecture design, and have things come to life around my requirements and within my constraints has been a complete game changer.
At the end of the day I do not put my skills on a pedestal either, I can learn from AI the same way I learn from reading open source code.
I agree with you completely.
I started at a new company in February and was able to use AI to get fully on boarded 3 months faster than their typical onboarding cycle.
I use it to learn new things all the time and to enhance my existing decades of experience. Very humbling when it shows you how much you don't know.
There was always some subtle quirk, a bug that irks me once every so often, something I'd never want to unleash upon masses and although these people made their work available through various channels, paid or unpaid, for some reason I felt more of a grudge than gratitude.
And I tried to fix things I did. It was a breathless, thankless exercise of working through someone else's code line by line for decades while hardly being able to lift my head because of actual work I had to do to support my life. And thus a villain was born.
I am so glad it is over. It is all ingested into neural network weights and high-pressure sprayed to the masses through RNG. I am finally free. I don't have to learn your stupid aws commands, your helm configs, your systemd antics, your http api. I don't have to care about your life times, your gc params. I tell the computer and it clinks and clanks and eventually gets the job done like gene rodenberry intended.
Give it time. This is a skill (and tooling) issue.
AI enables so goddamn much creativity. You literally don’t know what to do with it, but once society adapts and we all calm TF down we are free to create in whatever capacity we like.
Your shirt? Go to town! Draw something yourself and let AI patch up some rough edges. Do some style transfer. Or don’t use it. That’s still an option. As you said it is hard to create with AI without losing your soul but that’s not inherent to the tech. It’s a massive skill and tooling issue.
Instead of choosing between “do it fully myself” and “let someone else do it” you get a slider now. You get to pick! How awesome is that?
I think you may have misread the parent comment.
And currently AI has no creativity nor does it enhance a human's creativity. It simply regurgitates and at best the human user can lie to themselves that they did it. Look at the "rinse and repeat" of animated movies. Humanity has been in a cycle of regurgitation for quite some time and AI is only going to make it worse.
That is a very black and white view you got there mate. I’m not sure I agree. Creativity does not need to be in the AI nor does the human need “enhancing”. We can just be creative in new and to me interesting ways. Just like how synthesizers enabled new sounds but you still need to be a musician to get anything good.
Society is still adapting. I say give it time.
The ONLY point of the words is to express a sentiment shared by the group, creating a bond and solidarity.
But if the sentiment did not come from anyone in the group or from the group as a collective, why put words on the shirt at all?
It's the lie of a shared connection without the reality. Just like social media "friends" or the "intimacy" of porn. Just another way to destroy a little more of our souls.
It definitely appears inherent so far. You could say infinite feeds optimized for engagement is just neutral tech too. The biggest mistake we made in the last tech revolution of ”social” media was to judge tech by its potential rather than the business model.
> You get to pick! How awesome is that?
It's awesome if you don’t derive meaning from the process. Like cheating in a single player game, you can just skip and watch the credits.
Ironically one of my most memorable game experiences ever is just walking and climbing for ages in Death Stranding, in poor weather, slipping, picking up baggage. It was miserable. But effort seems to create meaning.
realization was that you had been generating slop all this while before ai and somehow convinced yourself that it was original and human ?
I love people, I love spending time with them. Even though I am married, a parent, and living near to several relatives I still get lonely because of a lack of some forms of interaction.
At the same time, the form of interaction I'm missing is not "debating which font to use on a t shirt." I'm glad a robot can do that for me.
We need some genuine human creativity (or hell, use an AI if it gives you a good answer) for ways to get people to interact in joyful ways rather than over shared drudgery.
Let's go running together and let the computer make a t shirt to commemorate it.
The AI wasn't picking the font, it was picking the words.
No, I reject that. If there are to be pictures and shirts, let them be real, or let us forego them. If it's acceptable to offload something like this to AI, maybe it wasn't really that important anyway.
People are so accustomed to their community and purpose coming from their job that AI doing work on our behalf threatens not just our income, but our entire social identity.
I do agree on the "existential crisis" part of it. At work, every time I see someone sign-off of something AI generated without much edits, I feel this fear that we're on to slippery slope where there's no turning back.
My wife has an ongoing frustration with a colleague who has adopted the mindset, "I reviewed it, so I wrote it". I guess he must sleep well at night, and probably votes in the "AI gives me superpowers bloc", but it is pretty apparent he doesn't really review it much either, because it is full of flaws and absurdity.
It's like we no longer understand the purpose of language itself: to get thoughts out of our head and share them with other people.
1. Things which are done primarily to accomplish a specific goal
2. Things which are done primarily for the joy of doing them.
Many tasks have aspects of both of these things. Automation, in all it's forms, is a way of maximizing the first, often at the expense of the second. When a new category of task first falls to automation, I think it takes a while for us to figure out how to pursue it solely for the second, but the two can co-exist. Backyard gardening and industrial agriculture both have their place.
Right now, coding and tech is, seemingly, in the middle of that transition. It's going to take a while before people learn to separate the two kinds of goal I think.
I don't have patience for stuff like sewing or needle work. If I could automate that I would. But I know people who could spend hours on needle point or cross stitch or crocheting.
I also don't have patience for cooking or meal prep, even before AI. I'd batch cook protein and veggies and rice and we'd eat that for several days. AI has actually helped me streamline this in this regard, and it even helped me plan a special meal once a week that isn't just "eat for sustenance."
So I guess my point is. Automate the stuff you don't love. And spend more time on the stuff you do love.
Experience with modern society has shown that "third places" and human interactions get mowed over when you let algorithmic engagement take over. As I understood GP's point, the whole point of the "words on a shirt" was to get together as a group and attempt to form bonds, and by handing the task over to chatGPT they failed to do that.
Technically you can imagine a future where people use chatGPT "in moderation", but in practice they'll use it for everything and spontaneous/creative "hanging out" will suffer as a result.
Notice how the blogger simply calls it "Chat".
and feeding them into Chat
or Gemini
or Claude.I admit I was struck when I first heard someone use that shorthand in conversation at a party. It was the moment I knew that for better or worse LLMs use had permeated deep into regular life.
On that same spirit, Suno is why I bought a midi keyboard last December, and I'm experimenting with actual DAWs as well. I always loved music, and used to make beats with FL Studio (which was shunned by people much like AI for ages) and even within the Suno community I see people shunning others if they have AI writing lyrics for them, its really weird to me. I do feel weird if I try to make Suno make songs I personally cannot 100% relate to, or experiences I've never been close to living through, like I love gangsta rap, I would never feel comfortable making and releasing gangsta rap since it doesn't define who I was.
On the other hand: In terms of building software using agents I wouldn't call developers students, specifically when it comes to letting AI write the code, but its a similar concept: Good developers know how to architect and guide the coding agent, bad ones keep asking it to do the work they don't understand, or even if they do understand it, they don't take the time to stop and architect the problem. I've had amazing output from Claude Code, but apparently a lot of devs feel it is inadequate, some people it seems want the AI to code it perfectly in one shot, I go back and tell it what to fix, to add tests, to not change existing tests, etc.
That doesn't mean AI isn't a net positive (I won't comment on whether or not it is), but this is probably the most visible, simple, undeniable downside.
Getting an internet recipe from AI doesn't stop you from reaching out to your friend and finding out if they are going through anything, if anything it frees you up to do exactly that.
Same with this t-shirt slogan example. What you miss is the group activity and the spontaneity. But you can still do this without it being a side effect of a business objective. You can still talk to your friends, and with AI making everything faster you can talk to them even more now.
https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria
They were a race of humans that hated contact with other people. Each of of them lived in estates separated by acres of space.
We keep pushing our culture/society towards that sort of thing. We keep writing into to this "social" media (including what I am just writing) which is not social at all (but more akin to shouting opinions the middle of a mall).
It’s certainly on the surface impressive, but when I dive into the details of what it creates, the slop becomes so apparent I cant unsee it and it distracts me.
But you're right to have an existential crisis if you're in the creative industry, we all have that capable someone else on our phones now for $20/month.
"The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped."
AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise.
Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix.
So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
> So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.
For me, AI gives me feedback at places that I wouldn't have received it before. It does not replace the human feedback that I still look for.
I generally reject this litmus test that someone has to be “better” and an LLM in order for the human interaction and effort to be worthwhile.
You’re now part of the journey of this novel. They will thank you in the acknowledgements section. It’s this foundation upon which our lives, communities, culture and societies are built.
You do not need to be better. This act you did for a friend is not suddenly pointless and meaningless upon the release of the next model.
Beautifully said.
I think this is what the poem is all about. Some people (bizarrely, in my opinion) sometimes focus on whether AI is good enough or whether it lets them be more productive with their projects, in some mad rush to optimize life. But I think that's a red herring, and I think so does the poem's author.
If anything an underlying truth about humanity is being exposed: we take the easy way out far more often than we’d like to admit.
Perhaps, this truth being made explicit is a wakeup call that will teach us the value of that hard work anew.
After all, nothing the author’s written isn’t also true about Google, but nobody realized how bad of a mistake that was.
Because we are talking to the AIs instead of talking to them.
> After all, nothing the author’s written isn’t also true about Google, but nobody realized how bad of a mistake that was.
There was plenty written about how Google was making us dumber because we didn't need to remember anything any more.
Citation needed. People did not stop talking to family, friends and colleagues just because they're able to leverage LLMs.
Which people? There are clearly people who did—some with catastrophic, newsworthy results, but presumably more without.
AI psychosis is real.
People who talk to LLMs too much, get used to them sucking up. Real humans feel jarring after that. (Just like people who get used to being in echo chambers, stop wanting to interact outside of those echo chambers.)
After someone has an answer from an LLM, often that replaces reasons we would have talked to others. (See the OP for examples.)
It does fit the personal experiences of a wide variety of people that I've talked to about it. Including therapists who are having to deal with the fallout within families of these dynamics.
If you wait a few years, I'm sure that peer reviewed research will catch up with the current social phenomena. But by then there will be some other fairly new social phenomena where common experience is ahead of the research.
Speak for yourself. This is a sweeping generalization.
> There was plenty written about how Google was making us dumber because we didn't need to remember anything any more.
Oh yeah, and that other new-fangled technology the Greeks were complaining about – books.
No, and if you think that, your friends, family, and coworkers probably don't like you that much. You can push yourself harder for someone else, but it is and has always been something you do. Making it everyone else's problem to improve you makes you a codependent asshole. You can and should find purpose and meaning, even motivation and inspiration in others. It is not anyone's "job" to make you a better person.
That's precisely the kind of thinking that's landed us in the mess we're in. Abdication of personal responsibility. Shifting blame and responsibility from yourself onto anyone nearby. It is your job to make yourself a better person for the people around you. Not the other way around.
Some say we're losing our humanity: that can be seen as good or bad, depending on whether or not you think you are more useful than someone else.
You will always grow faster spending time with someone who says "couldn't you also try X" than someone who always says "that's good enough, why don't you relax and watch some TV".
It's about community. And real people often like to help. If your circle doesn't, find someone who does. Find a community.
I enjoy helping people be better, to reach new heights in their personal lives. It's about relationships.
My thoughts aren't about "abdication of personal responsibility" or "Shifting blame".
It's about humanity and people and community.
The "job" in the speech example would be "hey Joe, can I run this speech by you?"
In that scenario, the friend would:
* feel valued,
* connect with you,
* have something to do socially instead of "sooo uh whatcha been up to... uh... nice weather...", and
* get to hone their own speech skills by critiquing in a safe environment.
Speeches haven't gone away, videos are more popular than ever, and consulting within our social circle will continue on.
I think there's something to be said about there being an isolationist phenomenon in society that might be contributing in part to low fertility, but that significantly pre-dates LLMs. It's easy and convenient for us to be alone - people create friction. We've been entertained by the TV set for a century now. That said, we remain social creatures and enduringly have a need to be with others, at least to some extent.
There’s also limit to how much you can expect coworkers, friends, and family to review your work. An LLM can act as a rubber duck debug partner or a reviewer hundreds of times per time. You cannot have friends and family at your service all day.
I agree with the sentiment, however, by definition most people will not follow your advice.
I'd like for it to be a choice. AI is injected into search now, when you install vscode they have a prompt input sitting there and they nudge you to use it. Of course you can opt out of this stuff but it has become the default.
As someone teaching their nephew how to code i really want him to struggle and exercise his problem solving skills instead of having every touchpoint offer him an instant answer.
Isn't the point of the poem that you should, instead, ask a human? You'll get sidetracked and drawn into unrelated conversations, sure, but that's what it means to be human. Trying to optimize these distractions away means you deprive yourself from human interactions. And why optimize anyway, what's the end goal?
That's my take from the poem, anyway.
Taking the conversation to Derek of Veritasium feels like after having watched Koyaanisqatsi your mind goes to James Burke and how the invention of the plow has improved how we experience human society.
The video that I linked to is over an hour on why new technologies never transform education. He has a number of videos that critique what capitalism has lead big industries to. For example he has one on Monsanto's war on farming, another on how forever chemicals are poisoning us, and a third on how short-sightedness on protecting the health of rubber trees could be an existential threat to civilization.
Your model of him says that he should have done none of those things. The fact that he did is strong evidence that you've got a cardboard cutout that you're using as a strawman. Because it's a convenient punching bag. And not because it matches a real human very well.
Reading this poem I saw a similar critique of AI as Koyaanisqatsi critiqued technology. And any advocate of this technology for whichever purpose, even the ones who occupationally critique some aspect of it, feel very tame in comparison, and off the mark.
I put my views of Derik in parentheses on purpose. I wanted to share my bias towards him, while also saying: “This is besides the point”.
I see no reason to engage further in your assertions about what content is worthwhile.
As for why optimize, we should each decide what we care about, then optimize for that. I have personal reasons why I want to be a better speaker. Why I want to be able to stand in front of people, and have them connect with things that I care about. So it likely makes more sense for me to optimize building that skill, than for most.
You probably want to optimize on something else.
Why do you need it to be available now (for varying values of "now")? Why the urgency? What did you do before AI existed?
And why did you decide the AI makes you a better speaker than talking and getting feedback from your fellow humans?
I think this is also what TFP (The Fine Poem) is about. Why the rush? I get wanting to become a better speaker, that's also part of being human, but why do you need to rush it with AI? Where are you going that you need to get there so fast, and taking shortcuts? This is what I meant by "optimizing".
It seems to me a sort of "productivity death cult". Productivity for what?
You've just demonstrated a lack of reading comprehension. The choice that I made wasn't humans, OR AI. It was humans, OR humans+AI. All else being equal, more feedback is better.
> It seems to me a sort of "productivity death cult". Productivity for what?
Are you having a discussion with me, or a strawman that you're projecting onto me? Right now it looks like you're debating a strawman. Who doesn't look anything like me.
I said that I had personal reasons to become better at connecting with an audience. A big source of those personal reasons is that I and my family have been through a mental health nightmare since COVID. I've learned a lot from the experience that I'd like to be able to talk about.
To give but one example, what I've shared with my local Toastmasters club has helped it become both the largest, and the fastest growing, community Toastmasters club in Orange County. People are joining because we're really good at helping them overcome social anxiety.
I care about helping people. I'd like to be able to help more than just the few dozen people that I've talked to already.
Do you really think that my desire to have a positive impact in more lives makes me part of a "productivity death cult"? If so, then we're going to have to disagree on what makes something a productivity death cult.
My position is this. Each of us should figure out what we really care about. (In healthy humans, human connection tends to be a big part of that.) After figuring out that, we should set priorities for ourselves. To the extent that AI is honestly helpful, we should use AI.
Why are you escalating this? I didn't personally attack you or question your comprehension, I'm challenging some of what you said. Not even all.
> Are you having a discussion with me, or a strawman that you're projecting onto me? Right now it looks like you're debating a strawman. Who doesn't look anything like me.
Not a strawman. I'm addressing a broader context than just you, while relating it to what you said about the AI being "available" when humans weren't. I didn't mean to imply you personally were engaged in a productivity cult, and if I came across that way, I apologize. (Don't tell me you haven't seen the productivity obsession being brought up frequently on HN, either criticizing it or embracing it)
> A big source of those personal reasons is that I and my family have been through a mental health nightmare since COVID. I've learned a lot from the experience that I'd like to be able to talk about.
None of this was in your initial comment, how could I guess? This is additional context that does, indeed, change some of our conversation.
> To the extent that AI is honestly helpful, we should use AI
Yes, but let's be honest about what "helpful" means here, and to what end. Perfecting a speech (or helping you perfect it) doesn't seem to me a particularly necessary use of AI. That's essentially what TFA (poem) is about.
On personal attacks, you literally said that it looked to you like I am part of a productivity death cult. How was that not you attacking first?
Moving on, What you challenged was not what I said. It was a misunderstanding of what I said. A misunderstanding that is directly contradicted by what I DID say.
To verify, re-read the thread. Note where I first said that we should not reduce human interactions. And then realize that if we're not reducing human interactions, we're certainly not replacing human interactions with AI interactions.
> Not a strawman. I'm addressing a broader context than just you, while relating it to what you said about the AI being "available" when humans weren't.
In other words what you had to say should have been addressed to some other group, for some other reason.
Meanwhile, what I said is true. I have a number of people I get feedback from. I value it. They're there for me, I'm there for them. But if I want an extra 5 rounds of feedback, I'll feel guilty for disrupting my friend that much. I won't feel guilty after asking that from an AI. And unless a friend is in crisis, I wouldn't be happy with a friend who regularly demanded that much from me.
AI connections are not as meaningful. But they are definitely more available.
> None of this was in your initial comment, how could I guess? This is additional context that does, indeed, change some of our conversation.
Bullshit.
I said up front that I have personal reasons for wanting to be a better speaker. The default assumption when someone says that they have personal reasons for something, should be that they have personal reasons for it. And that their reasons are at the very least meaningful to them.
You didn't. You assumed the worst of me. You then misread me to be worse still. And then were confrontational about it. And now are standing on, "Who me? How could I have guessed at all that?"
> Yes, but let's be honest about what "helpful" means here, and to what end. Perfecting a speech (or helping you perfect it) doesn't seem to me a particularly necessary use of AI.
Since you've been honest, I'll be honest back. If you gave a shit, you'd know what my goal is. It isn't perfecting any given speech. You'd also know why it is important to me. And if that isn't enough in your books to justify what I'm using AI for, then I'll ignore your opinions on the matter.
Take something that someone else said. Come out swinging at a distortion of what they said. Then if they call you on it, say, "You seem very defensive and angry." Thereby dismissing what they said without having to engage in any self-reflection.
You'll always be right in your own mind.
Your insistence on framing this as someone "swinging" at you is a mistake.
On it's face, it seemed insane to not utilize this instant resource.
After a year I could no longer write for shit.
Now we're getting studies coining words like "deskilling" and "cognitive surrender", and I felt both acutely and personally despite guardrails I thought could keep me from those traps.
Now I don't even write near a computer.
Something that has a worse outcome for most people is worse for society.
Yeah it might be some antisocial hustler opportunity to get a leg up on everyone else. Huzzah.
Can SV Tech just make something that makes things better for society overall? No, impossible.
Personally, I find the idea of sounding even slightly more like ChatGPT repulsive. Would much rather just leave the gnarly bits in.
Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
I understand the impulse behind posts like this, and it's important to remember to maintain human connections. (Arguably, once we learn how to do this because we think it's a good in its own right and not because we have to, we'll be better off.) But I just don't like being emotionally browbeaten like this because I have a question that I need an answer for that I don't have the time, money, or access to go get in a different way.
I really don't understand the need to torture alternate meanings out of the writing of people we don't agree with. Nothing in the author's writing even comes close to implying what you're suggesting here.
The point was "talk to another human about shared experiences, whatever that may be".
I'll give an example. I just traveled to Serbia, and I went on a run through a park in New Belgrade, where I saw a monument written in Cyrillic. I snapped a pic of it and uploaded it to Claude; it translated and gave me some context.
I thought this was amazing!
But I'm sure someone could point out that I took a mental shortcut, that I made myself dumber by not grasping Serbian and Cyrillic to have a go at translating myself. Or they could say that I lost the human connection that would have come by finding a resident who spoke English and asking about what that meant.
In a sense, this are plausible critiques. But the reality is that I was on a run, and I almost certainly never would have done those things if Claude (or smartphones with cameras, for that matter) didn't exist. I didn't become lazier or lose the imperfections of human connections, the whole thing was a net add for me.
And so, in that light - it's okay to use a recipe book, or ask an LLM about fly fishing, or do some web searches to get some advice about how to write a wedding toast.
If that's missing the point somehow, so be it. Perhaps you could enlighten me (and thus cultivate a human connection)!
I wouldn'tve asked a stranger in a park in Serbia about a statue, but I do recognize that:
- I'm not thinking for myself almost at all when writing code, just orchestrating the work.
- I don't google to learn about topics/questions that come up, i just ask Claude for a summary.
- I don't reach out to people around me if I can just write a prompt.
And it feels like I'm consuming so much more information but retaining only the surface levels of it.
Google Translate provided OCR + translation from smartphones before LLMs became a thing so that doesn't manage to bolster your argument.
I remember calling the library reference desk from the phone behind a bar to settle bar bets. Once free long distance became a thing, you could justify calling west coast libraries during east coast happy hour, and I had a hand-written list of phone numbers on a piece of folded up yellow legal pad. The LA Central Library seemed to be the most patient with drunk midwestern college students shouting questions about medieval art at them. Now bets are settled before they even really get going, so it doesn't even feel fun to bet on, so people don't.
I've also taken several trips to Europe and only on the most recent one did it make financial sense for me to get a local data plan. I admit that the language of the country we visit is kind of a hobby of mine, and so talking to the locals is a lot of the fun of going, but even if that's not the case, what's wrong with a little mystery? You can snap the photo, and then for years down the rode if you show it to somebody, you can say "Here's a cool statue I saw in Serbia, but I'll be damned if I can tell you what the inscription on the plinth says." Or even 3 years ago, you probably would have posted it to $SOCIAL_MEDIA_PLATFORM with a caption like "Who can tell me what this says?" and perhaps even gotten a reply from somebody in the same city you were in and made a little connection.
As I learned just yesterday, this is exactly how the Guinness World Records books came about. :)
There were many benefits of the original web as well. But it rapidly turned into social media and caused us more harm than good.
So many people are very skeptical and guarded about the promises of AI now.
There isn't. This blog post is a great example. There isn't a hint of what you are asserting. You are assuming it out of thin air.
LLMs enable a lot and harm a lot. We should be able to talk about the harm without people assuming we are unaware of the enablement, and vice versa. LLMs are a gigantic topic.
The poem didn’t talk about asking around for info about fly fishing, not finding anyone, but then deciding that was okay and/or finding new interests based on the interests of the people he talked to.
This would have been very in-bounds thematically.
>it's their job to tell them how wrong they are
lol.
To be clear, my reply came from a desire to stick up for people who now have access to knowledge that they didn't have access to before - I think they should be able to access it without being guilt-tripped for doing so.
If that sentiment is being unfairly bolted on to this thing specifically, perhaps that's a fair critique: people on the Internet have a way of replying to arguments that people aren't actually making, and I'm certainly not immune from that. But the structure of the piece is clearly making emotional arguments so I don't think I'm wrong in that regard.
In another comment[0], I gave a personal example. In a sense you are correct, because I could have taken a year or two to go to the library and find books on reading Cyrillic and speaking Serbian, or maybe found something Duolingo-like (I have to hedge here because neither Duolingo nor Rosetta Stone offer Serbian, which perhaps challenges your point), or even hired a private tutor.
All of these options sit on some kind of spectrum of ease and cost. If you have enough money, you can get the best help in the least amount of time. If you don't, you have to maximize the time you can put in instead, and both will be constrained by your intellectual capabilities.
One of the primary purposes of technology is to unbundle what consumers actually want from the craft that was previously necessary to deliver it, and in so doing allows us to do more, experience more, be more. That doesn't mean that there are no possible drawbacks, but let's not lose the forest for the trees.
Didn't that guy start his channel because he didn't have a father growing up? Seems like important context.
It's a channel that increases access to knowledge for those who wouldn't otherwise have it, but disrupts a status quo in a way that some might find harmful. But in that case people seemed to pretty universally recognize that the pros outweighed the cons.
A YouTube channel about stuff your dad might know does not have the same potential for negative impact on human interaction as genAI. And the author never even claims "the cons outweigh the pros". Maybe they feel that way, but the dangers they advise against are absolutely real and do not require a broad stance like "everybody who ever uses AI should feel bad" in order to recognize those dangers. I use AI every single day, yet I do not feel the least bit browbeaten and my heart bleeds in agreement with this blog post.
I love a good strawman argument myself, but this is just madness. Who the heck finds substitute "dad advice" harmful?
The author of the poem, however, is clearly portraying that as a negative.
The author believes if you have a friend who cooks, see if they have a recipe. You believe there's no harm in going straight to Claude in the same scenario.
That's the whole disagreement.
Even NYC has a fishing meetup group with over 1000 members.
I love when I get someone to talk about something they clearly love, and they're giddy with joy and struggling to contain themselves. It's one of the finer pleasures of talking to strangers and not machines.
Start there.
You might not have a friend who is into fly-fishing, but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about. Maybe that's less efficient, maybe it's less direct. But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other, and technology is getting dangerously close to replacing relationships altogether.
I don't think this is meant to guilt you for using tech, but it is totally a wake up call to remembering WHY we fly fish and go to weddings and write memoirs and so on.
But this is the thing. Many people don't, or have some other real or imagined barrier preventing them from it. Many people are really extraordinarily isolated.
While I relate to the heart of the poem, there is an aspect of it that's essentially criticizing people for their suffering. There's a "just stop drinking" vibe.
Then let's talk about that, and encourage them to speak up and reach out, rather than entombing them and throwing away the key.
I can stand someone who is lonely, and awkward, or sad. I have been all those things. I cannot stand someone who is so hospitalized by talking to LLM constantly that they treat me like a jukebox, too. That they're not even stupid or bad with words, but cannot think at all, and do it in a high volume, high confidence manner, with lots of big words and things that seem to make sense until you put weight on them. So unless someone more patient than me comes along, as far as I'm concerned, they are now lonely for good, unless I can avoid it. And that's not a state of things I want for myself or others.
It's much better to forever wallow in your loneliness and lack of friends, instead of working on how to develop better friendships and relationships.
"It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love."
-- Stephen Hawking
I think we may be approaching some sort of watershed moment, if not conflict between those who hold such sentiments and those whose response is "oh yeah? hold my beer".
I know, right? The author clearly wants you to starve to death for the lack of a friend to teach you to fish
Much of the anti-AI sentiment has this sort of false dichotomy as its foundation. An imagination that the alternative to AI is the purest form of manual labour in some sort of idealized, bucolic form, filled with heartfelt, purposeful, sincere human connection.
So every time I'm thinking about what to make with the ingredients I have, I should text someone who cooks (I cook, so this is a hypothetical)? What a ridiculous canard, and absolutely no one would appreciate that. I can enjoy human contact without inventing ridiculous justifications.
Further, to quote from Unlearning Economics, everything already was AI [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg], at least in the demonized way that people use that phrase.
Wedding speeches? Overwhelmingly cliche bullshit, and if you've been to a number of weddings it starts to get incredible how blatant this is. The whole manner of "genres" of music, art, and so on, is everyone copying each other and mimicking styles.
Even the recurring "I can spot AI websites!" nonsense, as if everyone wasn't already copy/pasting the trend du jour.
Even programming, this site is stuffed with "I lament the loss of the craft" pearl clutching articles daily, yet most of you are terrible programmers. I mean this as nicely as I can. It's astonishing seeing the actual state of the industry and hearing people imagining the world's most skillful, conscientious, thoughtful developer as the only alternative to AI assistance. It's rather amazing.
And long before AI people were largely just duct-taping together whatever libraries they found mentioned in a StackOverflow post.
Is it possible to hand craft better creations? Absolutely. Was that the norm pre-LLM? LOL, not even remotely. People were churning out enormous volumes of garbage, in every field.
AI isn't the reason people aren't making "human connections", and the foundation of the article is perverse.
This is backwards. This false dichotomy is what irrational reactions against anti-AI sentiment use, not the anti-AI sentiment itself. It is exactly the false dichotomy the parent you are replying to is using.
This is very LLM. Did you use ChatGPT to write that bounces-off-me-and-sticks-to-you retort?
It's, of course, absolute nonsense.
The very foundation of the essay was AI or dichotomies, and that forms the entire basis of an anti-AI screed. A sort of laughably righteous screed as if everyone else is making bad choices, and this guy has it right.
It's hyperbolic silliness.
On the other hand, maybe we should stop doing bullshit things instead of doing them more and faster. Maybe we ought to have fewer, shorter speeches, simpler websites and so on. Instead, we're drowning the world in noise. Speeches written by nobody, about nothing, for nobody in particular.
Sure, humans repeat patterns, but they add their own delightful uniqueness and imperfection to the mix. Tiny random mutations that eventually evolve the genre. Humans get really good at following rules, but then they develop the taste to break them. Wisdom shapes their craft in unpredictable ways.
And I guess that's what being an internet dad is. You live a long, imperfect life and you learn all sorts of lessons, many of which are subtle and never written down, then you apply those lessons to your craft. What can a machine teach us about fatherhood?
The narratives about people not calling their friends for advice, but instead using AI... these are basically unfalsifiable. How could he possibly know that this is a thing that commonly occurs? That's right, he doesn't.
>Be sure to use AI when making your next, I don’t know, meal plan, for example. Definitely do not call your friend who loves to cook and ask her for her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals
I don't know about you, but if a friend were to call me for meal prep advice, I'd honestly be worried that they're having some sort of crisis and just need to talk to someone.
>Definitely do not text your friend who has fly-fished every river in Pennsylvania and biked every backwoods trail
Personally, I consider it kind of rude to pester someone who is an expert in a subject with extremely basic questions. Yes, sometimes they wont mind and will even be glad to answer your questions, but they would probably appreciate that you took the time to do research and aren't just using them as human Google search. The more genuine way to reach out to this person would be to learn as much about the subject as you can, and ask them to sanity check what you've learned. This is a much more considerate way to go about things.
>Be sure to use AI
>and while you do I’ll be over here in my 50th
>year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest,
>my arm falling asleep because I dare not move
>lest I scare away this moment,
What? Does using AI disqualify you from having this experience? This post is so ridiculous man.
Like the person you replied to said, AI doesn't prevent you from holding your napping daughter. And most people who need a recipe would have used the Internet, and then recipe books in the pre-AI era. Plenty of people who ask Claude about fly fishing probably would have gone to Google or Reddit, or maybe even the library.
Not everyone has a father to ask. His own family were abandoned by their father when he was 14 and his sister was 9. People die. Some people have abusive or neglectful parents.
Not every dad is good at everything.
So much to unpack here!
First, one of terrible contemporary social fallacies that AI's convenience reinforces is that your fly fishing questions are urgent. Web search first cultured this impulse, and smartphones first amplified it, going so far as to convince people to interrupt real social interactions to go look up some insignicant trivia on their phone, but AI threatens to cement it.
The occasions on which you need a quick answer, let alone an unreliable one from the internet or an AI chatbot, are vanishingly rare.
Truly. If you find that inconceible, you're living in some kind of frantic alarm state and may want to check in on yourself before the stress and anxiety takes its inevitable toll on your health.
Second, the answers to your fly gishing questions are still within reach without AI. AI -- in tgat role -- is just a shitty aggregator and paraphraser. What answers it has are better and more humanely available by calling/emailing an outfitter (they'd love to help!), reaching through your friend network to deeper nodes (people love to share their comnection!), or by finding one of the dozens of online communities for the topic and engaging with a human there (that's why they gather there! To discuss these things!)
And all of the above applies to pretty much every topic besides the most urgent medical emergency (for which you should call an emergency dispatcher or teledoc service!), not just fly fishing.
Consider the ways this actually would happen but a mere 3-5 years ago.
You would Google search for information about fly-fishing and find:
* Enthusiast websites & blogs * Enthusiast forums * Enthusiast YouTube & other social media
The source might not literally be your dad or your friend, but you would still connect with real people.
I got into fishing because my neighbor liked to take his kids out and I came with. Then I ran into an old man on a lake who could do all sorts of wild casting techniques (through fly fishing) and who explained to me his scientific approach to catching fish. It sounded very interesting when he spoke about it.
The way of sharing information has been upgraded, but the way of forming communities has not. The people who want to catch trout are very well served by modern tools, but the people who wanted an occasion to talk to others in a quiet outdoor space are not.
The reality was replacing human interaction with addiction to an algorithmic feed and endless hours of mindless consumption and very little creation and rapidly deteriorating mental health.
It is good to be skeptical of similar grandiose claims about AI, and consider what the reality might turn out to be.
I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.
Do you find HRT and gender-affirming surgeries to be borderline psychopathic? How about safe and effective cures for genetic, viral, and bacterial maladies that cripple or kill?
The big things about transhumanism are to figure out how fix the things that damage and destroy us, and figure out how to let each person shape themselves to be the best version of them possible. If your best you is a baseline human, then, great! More power to you! I know that mine sure as fuck isn't.
Will there be lots of trouble on the way towards teching up so that everyone can be the best version of themselves possible? Absolutely. Hell, we appear to be generally incapable of figuring out something so simple as how to provide good lives for everyone even if there's no useful work for them to do.
Come on, by that vague of a definition, Aristotle and Confucius were apparently transhumanists.
Transhumanism when put into practice will be about changing our environment to take away everything that allows humans to thrive and be happy and fulfilled.
It's about the destruction of families, communities, and human cultures built up over millennia with no serious thought put into what comes next and why it might or might not be better for human beings.
> How about safe and effective cures for genetic, viral, and bacterial maladies that cripple or kill?
This is not Transhumanism, the desire for these things far pre-date Transhumanism as a philosophy.
> Hell, we appear to be generally incapable of figuring out something so simple as how to provide good lives for everyone even if there's no useful work for them to do.
So maybe we work on that before diving head long into the post human future?
It's the same as Elon Musk "worrying" about saving humans and then it turns out it's all racism after all.
> Do you find HRT and gender-affirming surgeries to be borderline psychopathic?
What. These current class of tech oligarch support MAGA, which came to power with this being the major culture war flashpoint. They didn't seem to mind.
-Max Frisch
I feel this whenever discussion of consciousness comes up. Even though consciousness is not well understood at all (e.g. no scientific progress whatsoever on the "hard problem"), some people would rather say "it's just molecules and we don't have free will, we don't really exist, it's all an illusion, science will reduce it eventually, etc. etc." It baffles me that some people would rather contradict their very experience and declare that they don't exist! Rather than admit there's something that may be impossible to understand.
I know I have consciousness, and I know I am made up of molecules. I don't find that limiting or disappointing at all.
I am very confused by these people you say argue that we don't exist. I have never heard anyone argue that.
Those people frighten me.
This is a belief system which one does not have to believe in order to accept the findings of physical science.
> I know I have consciousness, and I know I am made up of molecules. I don't find that limiting or disappointing at all.
There's two things this can mean:
(1) You do genuinely believe you exist, but just that you're arising from a temporary arrangement of molecules -- essentially, all the statements that one can make about souls is true of you. In that case, you're not who I'm talking about.
(2) There is no such thing as "you", it is purely an illusion, and no legitimate subjective entities really exist.
To me, the contradictory view is the one assuming that everything in the world can be explained, except for humans. So far, people found that, given enough time and core knowledge, they could understand anything about the natural world, and we've been refining that process ever since. Since humans are a part of that world, are created in it and live in it, why would I think we're any different? There's a difference between thinking that humans are unique (in a way that makes us have immensely interesting properties) and thinking that humans are special (not subject to natural laws or constraints).
The troubling view for me is the alternative - the one that always tries to draw a hard line between humans and the 'explainable' rest of nature, like we must be different, alien and special to be worthy of interest and appreciation.
I think you've distilled it well: I don't believe that human consciousness can be explained.
Obviously, we find neural mechanisms for aspects of it: of cognition, learning, language, movement, etc. And obviously there are the effects of drugs, e.g. anesthesia, psychedelics, anti-anxiety, etc.
But these are all effects on consciousness, they are not an explanation for the very existence of the observer, so to speak. And I don't believe that can be touched rigorously. The best we'll ever be able to do is gesture at it broadly and say "well, it certainly seems like everything has a physical cause and explanation." Whereas I take a different view: it certainly seems as though there is something special about consciousness.
It is certainly of the universe, and obviously interacts with the physical. But it also seems to go beyond it. The experience itself exists. And I do believe that this is intuitively obvious - we know we exist, we know we have a type of free will (obviously imperfect, affected by various circumstances, but nevertheless we exist).
But because we want to feel that everything has an explanation, and physical science has been so powerful and effective in every other domain, there's a tendency to say - "well, that stuff must be an illusion. Human perception is fallible."
I think we're seeing some of this with people today due to doom scrolling and sedentary isolated lifestyles our technology is creating. AI is perhaps the final nail in the coffin for some as they genuinely treat these chatbots like they are friends and confidants and lose human connections to the real world.
Just look at how people behave these days, it's hard not to notice the widespread mental illness epidemic that has set in and seems to get worse daily. We've created little prisons for ourselves and locked the door. We're losing human connection in real time almost like people are willingly submitting themselves to the Matrix.
We are destroying the environments humans were designed to thrive in.
Yes, but that kind of ignores the more active elements. This story didn't languish with few upvotes and a few shallow comments, it was an instant HN darling so had to be killed, or it would still be on the front page.
[0] https://hnrankings.info/48323101/
And whatever the reasons or rationalizations for that may be, you can be 100% sure it was by a tiny minority.
Some of the least-mentally-healthy people I know see human dynamics as fundamentally 0-sum competitions, and I feel like some of these platforms are modeled on that, but not all of them (youtube is a mixed bag, reddit used to be pretty harmless).
But the more you lean on the internet or on technology, the more you feed that feedback loop of "in-person interaction = hard". Yes, things are difficult, but you're never going to figure out how to be comfortable in those situations if you're not actively putting yourself in them. Growth takes struggle, and I say that with all the empathy in the world.
As Snaut says in Solaris, man needs man.
When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?”
Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question.
I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them for brute-forcing boring stuff. Like, hey we’re making this thing faster. Let’s measure all this stuff, and you come up with whatever I’ve missed to include in benchmarks. Make a benchmark harness for each approach we’ll try. Create tests to ensure none of the changes alter behaviour or outputs of the system. Make it pipe results into this database with this schema. Let’s try these approaches. Which other approaches could work? Keep slamming these benchmarks until statistically significant results appear.
The thing we’re speeding up is usually a single query in the armpit of an application that in prior years I never would have been able to address. But now I can. By doing this I can improve the user experience and scale back our resources and other stuff we like.
Am I missing out? I don’t know. I program less. I get a lot more done. My employer is very happy. My team expresses appreciating my work more than ever. It’s a stark contrast, actually. It feels weird.
I’m still not sure what the answer is. I do miss tinkering. Yet I suppose the point was never me tinkering. It was me having a job to perform for a specific purpose for my employers.
Did it take away a bit of what my life is, or did it change it? I’m still using my brain. I’m still thinking through problems. I’m still finding bugs and mentally tracing them to understand how to work through it with Claude. But the actual moving of bits? I don’t do it anywhere near as much as I used to.
I’m still very conflicted about it.
I’m so disturbed when I see friends and family using AI for ‘real’ stuff. Recipes, images, writing, etc.
Is programming ‘real stuff’ too, though?
The deterministic nature of programming drew many of use to it, and that going away can create a crisis of identity.
I'm enjoying that aspect of it so much. How can we make it safer, more reliable, predictable? I don't think we'll have totally satisfactory answers for a long time, and it'll be a lot of fun to explore the space until we get there.
I think what really kills me is allowing non-deterministic agents to write non-deterministic code and not really being critical of the process or the results. That's poison for our industry, newcomers to the field, and frankly the profession itself. I'd like to see us take this more seriously.
At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.
There are 1) the tools that let us surface the human, then there is 2) the human, and then there comes 3) the factory generated business (someone doesn’t care but has to do it) content pretending to be human to sell stuff to humans. The human 2) is drowned out by the “had to do it” 3) while there is a small corner of some of us who are making 1) tools to surface and reward more 2).
I think this kind of elitism also misses the point.
Look. I am a massive fan of the janky old manually created website. <marquee> will never die and it is hilarious that browsers will have to retain the feature for years to come.
But "the blog was generated by a machine" isn't the problem with Substack. "Machine Generated" blog sites have been around ever since blogs went big. Blogspot and Wordpress were practically a duopoly in the peak days of blogging. The problem with Substack is two (really, only the latter):
1) It's gotten the Post-Zuckerberg "everything must follow our company letterhead" disease. That's not a substack exclusive problem and designers need to be bullied harder for it.
2) It's the nazi bar where all the nazi blogs are. This one is the actual reason you should not be using substack.
But I'm not entirely sure what you refer to in (1). Would you care to elaborate? I'd love to learn more.
I'm sorry but I think you're misunderstanding.
I do not mean "nazi" euphemistically. Not general right-wing politics, not even such hardcore opposition to immigration that it borders on Nazism. Not even crypto-fascists. (No not the bitcoin kind) I mean they're hosting blogs written by out and open nazis. The swastika-armband wearing kind that names their blog "NatSocToday".
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
There's some contrived argument about net neutrality in all this, but the Substack people have been pretty clear about their support for these nazis beyond merely hosting them. (And no matter how you look at it, being on "The Site With All The Nazis" despite many better alternative existing, is going to be a bad look)
> (1). Would you care to elaborate? I'd love to learn more.
Look at any contemporary Facebook page. Look at any of the older MySpace pages that preceded it. (e.g. A 2008 news article with a screenshot attached https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24161656)
Spot the difference.
Early platforms up to and including MySpace included functionality to write custom CSS (and HTML)
While Zuckerberg is not solely to blame, Facebook has popularized the removal of those features in favour of a uniform website design.
(And congratulations to the smart readers, who at this point in the reply have put together that the "MySpace-era" sites died and were supplanted by the (post-)Facebook era sites right around the same time when smartphones became big and that removing user-CSS features means the pages look the same in-app as on the web as well as making mobile-web responsiveness significantly easier.)
The consequence of this is a significantly more uniform and boring web, which amplifies the "soulless" feel of many of these newer Medium/Substack/etc blogs, as compared to older platforms.
I get it. There was a comma after my "(2)", I meant I see the nazis _and_ the slop.
The content is great. The tool gives writers a low-friction mechanism to charge for premium content, and works on most people's devices. I would rather have read this on substack, than the author get frustrated at having to learn how to publish pages by hand and give up.
Maybe we just need a better alternative to substack if that's the problem.
- My doctor friend does not wanting me pinging them asking for free medical advice every time I get health anxiety
- My chef friend does not want me calling them every time I'm struggling with a recipe
- My author friend does not want to read the 20th draft of my book, in which I've changed perhaps 10% of the content from the last draft
In these, the cost is a tax on the relationship -- relying on someone else too much to the point where it could potentially be impacting _their_ life.
Similarly, there are enough communities out there that are not accommodating -- even if I wanted to get a human answer and/or connect with someone, the interactions themselves can be painful. Do we remember what it was like posting on Stack Overflow? Do we believe Stack Overflow was a one-off outlier?
I also believe human imagination and knowledge shouldn't be bound to the relationships you have around you. What if my social group is small, or diversity of knowledge that my social group has is small? Should I not be able to think and explore an idea because my best alternative would be to contact a professor at a university that 99% of the time will not answer me?
I do believe that many people use AI now instead of learning and connecting -- I know my own programmatic knowledge has weakened now that AI has acted as a superhuman autocorrect. But on the other hand, with the help of AI I've also learned about a ton of things that would have otherwise been unavailable to me -- and I believe has improved me on the whole.
Sometimes it feels like all digital technology is simply an enterprise to replace human to human contact.
If they actually showed and picked you up, somehow the credit card machine wouldn't be working and then they'd aggressively insist they'd drive you to an ATM to get cash. It would magically start working if you told them that cash was not an option
The taxi service got what was coming to them, at least here they did. They had decades to make their service at least non-hostile to the consumer and instead it just got worse. I'll gladly pay for a rideshare where I can just put in my destination address vs have to deal with that nonsense
Hasn't it always been the case that technology reduces the contact with other people? Now with cars we don't need to sit next to others on trains, we don't need to ask pedestrians for directions thanks to GPS etc.
Technology has drawbacks, the question is are the drawbacks greater than it's benefits. Part of the answer is personal, some people can handle them better than others. Other parts are societal, what's the impact on society of the people that's can't handle it (mass shooters, roadrage, suicides etc).
It's a tough nut to crack.
I saw a video a while back on one social media site or another where someone sitting in a car recorded three young men shotgunning some beers on an apartment balcony. The insinuation being that hanging out was cringe, and that the poster had caught some losers in the act.
It's hard to gauge "real" general sentiment from social media, but if having a beer in a slightly silly way is the level of vulnerability at which you can be recorded for public ridicule, it's not hard to empathize with a generation reluctant to reach out for connection.
In that movie only the protagonist had the magic remote to fast-forward through existence. It was a tragedy of self-destruction.
But what if everyone gets the remote at roughly the same time?
He also had a lot of slop movies in career, so I don't blame people who do that... but it's a shame if you miss the good ones because his acting really makes these great.
I don't think it began with AI. We repeatedly catch the car we're very deeply programmed to chase. We want to minimize discomfort, risk, suffering, adversity. We want to maximize safety and comfort. We want all of our kids to make it to adulthood. We want to disinfect the planet of all diseases. We want our bodies to survive a career. We want our families to survive every winter. Those goals are all completely sensible.
But parents, for example, have been here before and recognize that optimizing these sensible goals have a consequence of missing the richness in the journies we no-longer need to take. So have those who have grappled with social media addiction or the withering effect of sedentary careers, or even the little things like waiting at the radio for your favourite song, your finger hovering eagerly over the record button of your cassette player.
I think this is going to be the supreme challenge. We're wired to seek the destination of comfort, but we lose the journey to reach it. It was easier when we had no choice. But we're doing a great job optimizing the soul out of being human.
So I understand, but can't excuse, people that fight the next Industrial Revolution simply to save their jobs. No one's job is more important than what is to come. I'd gladly give mine up for AGI. No individual takes priority over all future humans.
Like him not getting his way? If you don't want to use AI, then don't. But I'll use it whenever I want, thank you very much.
It's like we memory holed the last 20 years of social media that was supposed to be all upside; just democratic, global connectionism, empowerment, etc. I have too much exposure to people using AI in various, even sometimes subtle "wrong ways" to really agree.
This sort of comment plays exactly into the thrust of the piece.
With books you needed to consult people on which book to read first.
I don't have anything intelligent to say really. This poem made me go "Fuck yeah, poetry! Humans!!", and I'm grateful to the author, the submitter, and the people who upvoted it, so that I ended up reading it.
On the other hand, if I live in 150 years ago where telephone had not been invented, I may never make such decision to live so far away from my parents at all.
"Technology giveth and technology taketh away"
If AI is special, unlike any other tool, why aren't you using it that much?
I personally don't think it's anything special, and if I knew I'll die soon and were planning my last trip with my child, I'd use AI, just like I'd use a credit card, or my phone.
It allows me to spend more time with other people, getting boring tasks done much quicker.
People aren't reading what they're responding to.
You aren't reading what you are responding to.
AI took their job. There have been mass layoffs by foreign companies in India; fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India.
As a result, many service companies are moving to product businesses.
That's not necessarily because of AI. The trend has been going downward for some time, anyway.
Outsourcing has drawbacks; usually ones that aren't apparent, until it has been in place for a while (I won't go into what they are, because this isn't really the proper venue, and I don't feel like arguing). I think that many companies have been learning about these drawbacks, in the last few years.
But AI is likely to impact some (not all) jobs that would normally be offshored.
We are certainly scrambling for productivity with "token maxxing" and scrambling for entertainment with AI companions, but I haven't seen many thoughtful takes on how AI might look in a life well-lived.
I've seen other parents create AI videos of their toddlers being visited at night by Santa. I've seen parents happily throw their children into AI video generators to entertain them.
People are using AI recklessly. I can't imagine stealing the gift of a child's imagination away from them and instead, replacing it with these hollow representations of reality. It disgusts me.
I use AI all the time for coding, but I've drawn a hard line at the point of intermediation with others.
Some people learned that lesson and are now pushing back on letting their kids access AI. But not everyone.
Then there's this business about "AI removing connections to people". My wife's an artist (and now a Creative Director in a corp) and she used an early image model years ago to iterate on the design that we then had embroidered onto my sherwani[1] in India through a close friend's connection and I made a suno.ai tune to walk out for my wedding to. My wife and I use this new tech to model things and print it out on our 3D printer[2] so we can reuse my daughter's infant-stage play pen as gates now that she's older. My wife once tried to make us persimmon bread from a recipe that 3.5 gave us. We have a claw-like bot that is hooked up to our calendar, contacts, history, planes, airbnbs, hotels and so on and helps us with stuff.
By any measure, we are pretty social people and we are quite happy. And the thing to note is that, as far as I can see, we are not particularly remarkable. This seems to be the standard way most people I know use LLMs: to do things that they wouldn't cross the effort/reward threshold otherwise. And there's no grand disaster happening.
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
1: https://x.com/arjie/status/1855328068883353665?s=20
2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_Wit...
If someone hasn't gotten the memo yet, writing code got that serious at least a decade ago when web ate the world and chrome had won the web. Probably even earlier for certain industries like financial institutions.
This isn't just about "human imperfections" or something else sentimental. It's the fact that quality really does matter in a huge number of situations and the consequences are not forgiving in the slightest.
The second part assumes AI writing can substitute mastery of writing, and simultaneously, not be good enough.
We have, for a several thousand years, continued to develop labor and cost saving technology. We have been OK thus far.
On the other hand, tech in general (not just AI) does make an easier and easier path for people to go inward and neglect their community/family/friends. This does suck.
No one is forcing you or pressuring you to not call friend to ask for recipe. Even AI would say that you should talk to friends.
The only purpose of communicating is to transmit your thoughts to one or more other people.
If the thoughts are the thoughts of the AI, you are not communicating anything.
OP should consider a side career in poetry.
Stop using the computer to talk to strangers, take your feed and go to your neighbour and talk to them.
Stop buying online. Spend your free time in the crowded city and ask someone in the electronic store who doesn't know shit.
Just go to the place everyone else is going at the same time because its a lot more fun than trying to pre analyse it upfront.
How about stop buying pasta for once? Do you know how easy it is to make pasta at home? You only need to grow your wheat, store it, mill it, ...
Its a tool, its an interesting tool. Keep your brain engaged and keep an eye on it were it leads. Stop having knee jerk reactions like the old people...
And yes not everyone can take a sabatical to write their dream book. Surprise \o/ but perhaps i can get it out of my system and i might enjoy seeing a good enough version.
Anecdotally, I've seen the effects that people delegating their executive functions to AI have had and the damage is quick and harrowing
People use AI to replace other computer solutions for things. This is arguing against a straw man.
People today don't ask other people what 'time saving tipps' they have, you google and checkout some influencer etc.
I also have never asked some friends about their camping trip ideas. I use tripadvisor, or similiar things. My mom does it the same way and the rest of my family (all non it people).
He uses some hyperbole for the marriage proposal text but lets be honest, if a person is using that instead of trying it themselves, they wouldn't have tried it themselves anyway.
I also take pictures, you know how it felt already 10 years ago when people compared your pictures to evyerone else pictures? This train has departed. Everyone did red color key pictures, had their B/W phase etc.
How much time do we all actually sit in front of screens? Why are we discussiong this on hn? I don't know you, you don't know me. You don't care who i'm as a person.
My comment is genuin and its true.
For my first dev job, I was made to set up a sole proprietorship just so the company could illegally dodge minimum wage and severance. I didn't get mentored; I learned through constant abuse. It was only when I first used AI that I realized the people around me were teaching me garbage and my books were completely obsolete.
I envy that this person was surrounded by people who cared. Before AI, trying to learn programming just meant dealing with insults. They can stay in touch with their network because they were respected. I had zero people in my environment for intellectual discussions or programming.
It really shows how your environment shapes your relationship with tools. I have a love-hate dynamic with AI. It frustrates me that my manual coding skills are degrading, but I'm incredibly thankful for the easy access to knowledge I never had. At the end of the day, reading this just makes me envy those who get to live and work in a warm, respectful setting.
It seems unlikely to have happened to anyone else, ever.
"Before" AI there was internet, and before that often just your room, your computer, and tinkering with it for years before meeting anyone else with the same interest.
And trust me that there are many books better than AI.
I'm sorry for your experience, anyhow
as if you're choosing between "Claude, tell me how to make an omelette" and walking across the forest path to your sylvan neighbor, the former Michelin-star chef who set up an artisanal microgastropub by the pond
as opposed to googling "omelet recipe"
The only thing that makes sense is that it’s being flagged, I guess.
This is easiest to see in games, when people complain about the balance of a game, they often want some "problems" to be solved. "This map is massive, can't we just create teleportation nodes everywhere? Can't we just have a very fast flying mount?". To me this is missing the point, is battle mechanic an obstacle over the story? Maybe it is, but have you considered that they expected to experience the story with the combat?
In real life, it is not so easy to say "This problem is necessary for human life". If an LLM can infer what I want to say to someone in a much clearer form, should we do that? Should we use LLM to fix all of our grammars? Should making accounts be really cheap? Is market making a problem that we should solve? Should we really make it easier for people to invest i.e. democratizing finance? Should we really give everyone access to 1GBps bandwidth internet? Should we really want full internet access everywhere even in the middle of Amazon forest?
Personally, I don't know if the answer is that straightforward. For each of the items I listed, I can see things that we lose. A lot of humanity is problem solving, and we have solve a lot of problems that have kept humanity busy for most of their lives. We are not living in an era where problems that we face are unique and we are simply not designed for.
When I start thinking we programmers are the most pedantic people around, I just look at some writers and feel a little better.
The shit all looks the same. Every taco truck in town uses the same crappy style advertisements, all the food looks the same (AI tacos, not pictures of actual food...)
I liked small business advertisements better when it was full of crappy fonts, clashing color choices, horrifying JPEG artifacts and all.
Software, and knowledge work in general, is facing an even deeper form of alienation from AI. I don't see how I (just past 30) or future generations will be able to find deep satisfaction from "knowledge work" if this current trajectory holds. I don't think our brains are wired for a life of this without tremendous mental anguish.
Please use the internet.
Please use search engines.
Please use AI.
Everything old is good and everything new is evil. The irony of this being posted online in written form is lost on the author. Socrates would probably have an aneurysm.
AI is really cool technology, but the cost is tremendous.
Like I don't want to say it's a strawman exactly, because some people probably do use AI too much. But it's a really emotional (and not exactly logical) play to emotions that sort of implies don't use AI at all, which I don't agree with.
Like if you're writing a speech for my wedding, please do a sanity check against AI before saying a really crass or risky joke. Because some of us have those maybe-on-the-spectrum acquaintances and AI actually can be a great sanity check for those people.
- Dr. Snaut, Solaris (1972)
the weird line breaks
extremely jarring.
But it was an interesting
article nevertheless.
..which is only going to get worse the more you rely on a statisical model for things instead of talking to people.
Thank you!
I'm so sick and tired of the endless slaps on the wrist because I choose to live my life in a way that the author would not prefer.
Sure, buddy, you know how to live a meaningful life, then why are you trolling the internet?
> write a haiku for stop using AI for human things and use it for automating the boring stuff
Let humans create,
Leave the soul to living minds,
Let code do the chores.This is just obnoxious. People still bond, have discussions and arguments without pulling out their phones every few minutes. Relationships are still a thing. But for 99% of questions or tasks, I just want to get it done and not drag in friends and family.
Pretending it's an AI novelty is... disingenuous.
Pretending that AI is not incredibly useful is... disingeuous
> Pretending it's an AI novelty is... disingenuous.
yes, being able to debug your router through a simple conversation without bothering people is a novelty
The grandma that would have phoned her nephew to fix the phone will still do the same thing now. She will not have magically switched to querying LLMs after a lifetime of technological illiteracy.
The tech-savvy person that uses AI today would have been more than capable than figuring out how to fix their router by using Google even without prior networking skills/experience 5-10 years ago.
Using AI to solve these problems is a novelty for a specific subset of the population. And the topic does matter.
Even the somewhat tech-illiterate mom would have been able to Google a recipe 10 years ago, or watch an Instagram reel 5 years ago. They were surely not going to call their friends to ask instructions on how to make an apple pie.
Pretending this is an AI novelty is indeed disingeneous.
There's nothing "obnoxious" about this. It might be for you, and that's cool beans, but your post speaks in a broad generalization that just isn't accurate for everyone.
I wouldn't have called a friend for a meal plan or to figure out a hiking path 10 years ago, I would have used a search engine.
If I want to talk to a friend, I don't need an excuse to do so. And I'm not going to waste their time by asking something I can easily figure out on my own, today with AI, years ago with Google, and prior to that with printed material.
The anti-AI craze is just as bad as the "AI will solve everything" crowd.
Just because it gets results doesn't mean there isn't more out there, and that there isn't a benefit to engaging with your community.
I see the same sameness in the results when I use AI to explore such subjects. There's a certain level of homogeneity that comes with relying on Google, Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, and AI for our answers.
I am pleased that I can share musical discoveries with friends that were recommended by an AI, or make them laugh with some absurd image that fell out of Dall-E.
I am happy that, with the help of an AI, i can make a news reader that is full of bright patterns, instead of dark ones, that i can share with my friends so that their standard of life is ever-so-slightly better.
Reducing the commentary to "tool bad" is lazy, even when beautifully phrased
show me, and i will accept there is nuance
It's a pretty big stretch to liken a ranking algorithm based entirely on direct, intentional human inputs to what most people understand to be "AI".
most people understand it to be an LLM, but that doesn't make the term mean only that. the point was illustrative, perhaps Meta's attention maximization algos would be a better example
my point was not that they are the same, but that the author seems to advocate for some technologies, like video calling and text messages, but cannot make the leap to see that it is how we use that matters. It is a selective diabtribe, framed in a positive voice, hence my counter-examples to match