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Comment by ejj28 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, lots of things are more important than "the hacker ethos". Like critical thinking and independent thought, self-reliance, the joy of actually creating something yourself (which AI is a hollow, artificial substitute for).

Why shouldn't one lament sacrificing individuality and creativity, and increasing our reliance on corporations, all for the sake of convenience?

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I think you just wrote "lots of things are more important than the hacker ethos, like [axiomatic rederivation of the hacker ethos]". That's not a persuasive argument.

I think it's just easy to dismiss "the hacker ethos" without considering the qualities it actually consists of. Maybe you'd disagree, but I think those qualities are very important and worth protecting.

I'm not saying it's not important, just that you can't reasonably expect to orient all of society around it. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about how computing is going to work for ordinary people.

I'm not expecting to orient all of society around it, but I do believe that it's harmful to remove or replace it where it does exist.

Ease and convenience are not worth the cost of giving up bits and pieces of our humanity here and there until there's nothing left; Pre-AI computing has already taken enough of it.

When you suggest that ordinary people should not use personal applications that they've built with AI because it robs them of the hacker spirit, that's what you're doing: orienting all of society around your aesthetic preference.

Obviously I'm going to have beliefs about what I think is good or bad for society, same as yourself.

> I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems.

Is this not also "orienting all of society around your aesthetic preference"?

But you expect to orient all of society around LLMs.

No, I'm following society's lead on this one. Maybe people won't want this! Then we'll fail. I'll be fine with that.

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