Same thing did happen to many work places. People at all levels proxy questions through LLMs and don't even bother to read/trim/edit the response.
Funny, how suddenly a tight, 1-2 sentence response on point is a sign of skill.
I wouldn't even say that it comes down to "social skills" in a lot of cases, it's just people who seem to be performatively using AI. I'd classify them as corporate climber "yes, boss" types more than lacking in social skills.
Wasn't it always?
A lot of people get this idea that "more verbosity = better" instead of optimizing for conciseness and information-density. I largely blame minimum word-count essays from school assignments.
Amusingly enough the advent of HTML-emails didn't produce any better formatted mails, despite the extra formatting options, than what you can do with a plain text email supported by a proper text editor.
Edit: although another quote comes to mind- "Quantity has a quality of its own."
It’s easy to send a pithy response that suggests experience and understanding without having either. Think of a middle manager spouting pithy buzzword laden cliches confidently in response to every request, then transferring the real problem to the grumbling employees who have to solve the actual hard parts of the problem which lie in the nuance.
And while I generally believe we should be pro-social in our communications both with each other as software engineers and with others who don't know what we know, I think it's also fair game to point out that the thing being asked of you is commonly available knowledge. Google may suck as my sibling comment points out, and I agree, but filtering good info from info dumps, be that Claude or Google search, is a life skill that's more critical now than ever. And if you work in tech, really at any level, you know how to do that.
What they feel like when they do it: "Man, I'm fucking brilliant. Look at me using new technology well. I was always the key provider of value here."
What they hear when you call out AI copypaste as less useful: "None of that is true."
Now we can debate on the factual merit of both sides, but that doesn't change the feelings.
Unfortunately, I don't see a way to change the feelings, because that dopamine burst of making non-experts feel like experts is something all the AI labs have a HUGE financial incentive to maximize in their products.
He got fired quite quickly after his boss realized it was all bullshit.
Not as a rule for all prs you want to reject, but any time it seems to be no-effort pure ai. Both to waste as little of your own time and effort as possible, but also to to help make this activity not rewarding.
I wouldn't worry about false positives and being unfair. This is self defense and also community defense. Anyone legit will manage to get your attention. You'd be filtering not on any specific detail or rule but on simply "care".
If a legit person fails to convince you that they are a human that cares, then that's just an unfortunate industrial accident. It's unfortunate but trying to do anything about it is worse.
Besides, any actual adult understands that if they can't prove their age right now, then they can't buy a drink right now, even though they normally have that right, and is never the one trying to cry about the travesty of justice at being denied. If I submit a pr that fails your ai sniff test, I get it and don't think you're abusing me. I can try harder and we can be friends later no problem at all.
Those weren't even that bad code-wise, some have uncovered realy problems, but I ended up asking /my/ LLM to ponytail them into shape, because the submitter didn't bother.
Communicating well has always been a sign of skill. Talking to most devs was like pulling teeth even before LLMs.
The experience in these spaces is largely the same. LLMs can be used there, too, but when the experts are using them with experience to back it up the results are a lot better.
The people who are really struggling in my few hobby groups (not PS5) are those who enjoyed some social status from their knowledge. They were heros and people sought them out and revered their work in 2023. LLMs came along and partially leveled the playing field. When a determined kid with a Deepseek subscription can produce a sloppy version of what took you years to find, that sense of being a heroic figure at the next level is gone.
I think this reveals another wrinkle, which is that the status hierarchy wasn’t that solid or worthwhile anyway. Outside of a few vocal people trying to enforce the status hierarchy, most people don’t care who releases their jailbreak or PS5 exploit. They just want it. Whoever gets it to them first becomes the new king.
This PS5 incident has some strange element where supposedly keeping the reveal secret for 2 more weeks would have changed something with the GTA6 release. There were also 3 people who found the same exploit independent and some large amount of money on the line for the first of them to report it. The person who reported it signed off to spend time with his dying mother, so can’t really fault them for doing the thing they earned according to the rules of the program.
"Commodification" might be a relevant word here.
You can fight that by "building a personal brand", but then you're suddenly brand building instead of hacking, and hacking was what you actually wanted to do.
I guess it works best if you're not in it for clout but because you want something to exist. But even then it is difficult.
> There were also 3 people who found the same exploit independent and some large amount of money on the line for the first of them to report it.
Ah yes, game theory. Oof.
An old guard always tries to enforce an ordering of respect based on seniority and who they think has earned it the most. Outside of a terminally online circle of Discord users few people care. They only want the thing so they can use it.
LLMs are a big disruption because now because effort and results have never been more uncoupled. When a kid with an LLM can do a sloppy but good enough version of the work in 1/100th of the time with 1/100th of the experience, the social hierarchy only matters to people who value it above the outcome itself.
Well it's that GTA 6 comes out in mid-November, so he wanted to wait until then to release the exploit so people could legally run GTA 6 on their hacked PS5s. Disclosing the exploit before the release means that they'll patch it before GTA 6 comes out so this is no longer an option.
I think this is unrelated because it happened after theflow0's statement, but Sony just released a major PS5 update that significantly increases the PS5's security ahead of GTA 6's release. Apparently it's impossible to rip games now without a hypervisor exploit, and since the last one just got reported to Sony this means that even people with hacked PS5s on old firmwares won't be able to pirate GTA 6 because nobody will be able to rip it. https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5_Jailbreak/comments/1wi0gpx/its_...
It is insane just how miserable the experience of FOSS hardware hacking in public is.
The expectation does not even the slightest match reality. You'd think "ah yes many eyes meaning all bugs get shallow", but instead you get worst of XDA-Developers and toxic wastelands where no sane person even answers anymore.
But this predates LLMs and was as miserable as it is now before as well.
In fact, I might even argue that LLMs made this _better_, because you can now avoid the "opening up in hopes of finding 1 helpful person below 99 annoying ones" through simple GPU compute.
Previously, you had to hope that through this self-inflicted horror, you'd find an expert that can augment you. Now that expert rests on huggingface.
It's still.. not perfect, of course. But it might be less miserable - provided that you adapt to the current state of things and stop with the "trawling for volunteers".
__
Of course, this does not help you against "skids let claude find bugs that you'd need and burn it for no reason" as per the twitter thread, but I wouldn't rule out that they would not have done that, if less information was public.
And.. that too was an issue before LLMs.
Information wants to be free, but so does your cat, and your cat gets run over by some crackhead in a 30 year old rusty pickup if you just put it outside without thinking.
So don't let it go out unattended.
That said, this "pep talk" is more directed at myself than at poor Andy. This must all suck big time.
Complaining about the inevitable toxic noise when the same boneheaded development decisions are made over and over like everyone has gone insane. You don't have to build a death trap on the land your cat and children roam.
Just like humans by their very nature are low quality, since they come from the biology ecosystem, where everything is built atop everything else.
Filthy carbon-based mammals.
This is definitely the case for me. Before AI tools became mainstream, it was already a difficult proposition to find other smart people who you could get along with and talk to, do something interesting together. The Internet made all the difference in my life because I was able to get outside my geographic region to do big things through open source and hacker communities. Now, that very important filter mechanism no longer works. It's Eternal September all over again. In a way, it's very much a domination of "ends" over "means" in the wider community that is being forced upon those who long focused on "means". For a lot of intelligent people, understanding something is /valuable on its own/, but for the wider world there is no value in simply knowing things, but what you do with that knowledge (or now that lack of knowledge). I even experienced this recently at DEFCON 34 where I saw other participants in some of the CTFs with me using AI tools and not really understanding what the tools were doing or what was happening, but just kind of bruteforcing/tokenmaxxing their way through. This isn't to say that those AI tools are fundamentally a bad thing to use in building open source software, security research, or even as a tool in a CTF, but that the "understanding" step needs to still be present or it destroys the fun in everything.
I'm certainly not having as much fun with computers these days, even as I've invested a lot of effort myself in local LLMs and trying to understand the tools and understand how to apply them reasonably, I've found I prefer much more analog entertainments. Thankfully there's always photography and lockpicking to entertain me at the moment and provide a pathway to meet other interesting fellows.
the idea of gatekeeping is often seen as elitist or exclusionary (fairly enough in many cases) but i think this can be an exaggerated description of a culture that necessarily requires a standard of... let's say, desire to engage with material on a sufficiently deep level. many things can be for anybody, but they are not for everybody.
in the past i've seen the phenomenon of "opening up" subcultures or previously-niche intellectual/art fields described as democratization but i think that ignores a big part of what causes this, which can more accurately be described as commodification. access to difficult things was formerly measured by one's ability to expend effort in order to get there (ignoring, for now, the structural conditions that set one up for success in that effort). when these things are commodified, these efforts and identities become products to purchase, the right to which is nearly never limited; in fact, it's almost seen as evil to imply that they should not be available to any individual at any time that individual may desire access.
i know we all have to start somewhere, but there has always been some historical filtration that leads people who are not truly engaged with a subject on a deep level to disengage at some point. that's changing at a novel rate and scale across so many subcultures. it seems like a lot of us are just surprised at how many people even want access to what were once our sanctuaries and we're not capable of grappling with what it takes to adapt to these changes.
i don't think this will pass or that things will return to "the way they were" but there will always be pockets that resemble previous subcultural forms. we just have to re-learn how to identify them with a keener eye and how to better avoid or more-appropriately interact with those who have a more superficial interest in them.
It gets bad when the subculture inhabitants get confused and adopt the social norms of the passer bys instead of remembering the importance of well-kept gardens. And then they start to introduce "policy".. which is just a backdoor for attackers to destroy your well-kept garden by arguing policy (as if that was what the subculture was about!).
true, but i think there's historically often been good-faith efforts to engage with newcomers in any field that requires intellectual or artistic curiosity or experimentation. what we're seeing played out is that this default good nature ignores the risk involved in growing a small garden beyond one's own property. there is a change in meta-social requirements at scale.
the extremes of this are super apparent in FOSS - one side of this being death-by-committee and overgovernance at the expense of the original project (requiring a support organization that outgrows the actual "work", for example, look at how many HNers view unions or internal policy committees), and the other side a harsh rejection of newcomers or calcification against new ideas at the expense of the long-term viability of a project. these issues can be imperceptible or not important in smaller projects.
but they're not limited to FOSS. i think these are probably fairly well-studied ideas in any form of organizations - business, social groups, churches, non-profits, unions, etc. i don't really know where to start to learn more about this or what the right approaches are (and i suspect they're often pretty unique to the group in question). i don't have an answer but i'm really interested in the huge grey area between fully-gatekept cultures and fully-open ones.
People who hate their job of course like to come out of the woodwork and say no one should enjoy it, but isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people can enjoy their work? I used to enjoy teaching but I'd never get a teaching job now because of how AI is being used in that sector.
Technophiles will say that we should embrace the future because its inevitable but how many good people quitting does it take before they realize that a vibe-coded future of fun isn't all there is to life?
That’s an interesting question. I thought about it for a minute and was surprised that I came to the conclusion that the answer isn’t obviously “yes”.
An analogous question is “isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people are rich?”, and I think that question should make it clearer to many people why that is so.
There’s a crucial difference between the two questions. “Rich” is a relative term: If everyone had the same amount of money, no one would be rich, you need someone to be worse off (poor) to have someone better off (rich). But someone enjoying their work has no bearing on someone else’s enjoyment of theirs.
The fact that so many people believe this is what bums me out.
You need to understand something: the people who want you to think this way do not have your best interests in mind, any more than the rabid right-wing Trumpers do.
In no way do I mean that someone has to suffer for someone else to thrive. We could (and should) all thrive and have our needs met.
I’m just saying the term is relative, like “tall” and “short”. If we were all the same height, no one would be tall or short, we’d just be. If we all had the same amount of money, no one would be rich or poor.
No one has to lose anything, in the sense that no one has to give up more than they think the product or service is worth to them. In your example, it's possible for everyone to grow taller.
For the third time, that is not the argument. Read what I wrote and try to steal man a bit. Get your preconceived argument out of your head and understand we are in agreement. The difference between wealth and money isn’t in question, that is something you just added to the argument and decided with zero basis that I disagree.
The fact that so many people jump to conclusions and immediately dunk on others who agree with them is what bums me out.
What a waste of a conversation. Why are you spending time criticising those who support the same points?
All I know is what you wrote, sorry. Same shit we could all read on Reddit: "If everyone had the same amount of money, no one would be rich, you need someone to be worse off (poor) to have someone better off (rich)."
If you frequently find yourself misunderstood in this way, work on expressing yourself more clearly.
By your own admission, you read my words and associated them with other conversations had by other people on another website. In other words, “all you know” is the preconceived bias you have in your head leading you to rushed wrong assumptions.
> If you frequently find yourself misunderstood in this way
I don’t, no. There you go again, making unsubstantiated claims based on faulty assumptions.
> work on expressing yourself more clearly.
You were obviously the only person confused. That makes it abundantly clear the problem wasn’t with my explanation but your comprehension. Perhaps a little humbleness on your part is in order, as opposed to, you know, doubling-down on your own misinterpretation despite having been spoon fed multiple clarifications.
It matters little how wealth is created. No one has to lose anything for the excessive concentration of wealth to cause the lives of everyone to be worse.
And once in a blue moon something good comes out of it back to the real project.
Cherrypicking the occasional winner is just a side benefit.
It doesn't matter if you have no interest in <autistic specialty>, the point is that you can force a bunch of nerds to bend to your will.