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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

>>“I didn’t care about practicality, building useful programs, or writing code per se: all I wanted is to understand how the machine works.”

I like lifting heavy things and moving them around. In fact I like it so much it’s a massively effective buoy for my mental health. However, I don’t expect the economy to make space for me to move farm equipment around to make food and expect to get paid a living wage doing it.

Software like food is now a civilizational requirement and transient LLM crappiness notwithstanding, accessing well-built flexible plentiful software is a major unlock for humanity.

I’m happy now to go the gym and lift heavy things and let everyone have plentiful food grown by mechanized agriculture. I’m looking forward to do the same for my intellectual pursuits.

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Why do you look forward to this happening to your intellectual pursuits?

If I grant you that cheap plentifull code will be a net boon to humanity, it's still normal to be unhappy that it's you specifically that will need to be ground-down in the cogs of progress. 5 years ago I also believed that the future could (and would!) be vastly better for many people, I just didn't know that betterment would be conditional on me losing the work I enjoy. In that sense LLM's are only a loss to me.

Many people feeling equanimous about this stuff are financially secure, later in their career or working at a manegerial level. That's fine, but at that point you're obviously not suffering the same pain as the author.

I think personal lament is different from organizing to stop what is good for civilization.

There is a lot of the latter happening so my comment remains relevant.

“I need to block abundance for all because I don’t feel safe with change”

is probably the most dangerous sentiment coursing through our civilization right now, and it’s coming now for me, and this is my rationalization from giving in to my baser instincts.

I’m imploring others to do the same

"For all" is a bit of a stretch. Abundance for a very select few. The rest remains unclear.

The few already have Abundance. I don’t care about them.

I’m talking housing, infrastructure, shipping, medical care, all critical services and sectors where fixing decades of lagging productivity will help the working class the most.

But AI is touted as the replacement for the working class? It’s TAM is “the combined wages and salaries of everyone below the C-suite” and it gets trillions of investment dollars, and letters of marque for copyright infringement and hacking, to pursue this market.

I mean, just look at the sequence of events you’re expecting here:

1. Ai companies achieve their stated goals

2. ???

3. Housing, infrastructure, medical care, etc get better for the working class

Are you the king of the underpants gnomes or something? How could it ever turn out this way? Why does anyone think it would? Am I taking crazy pills?

> AI companies achieve their stated goals

If those goals are fully eliminating need for human labor, then I agree it probably won't be good for most people. But that will probably take at least decades.

Anything short of that, and I think economy will be pretty similar to what it is now. You still need working class and need it to be productive, so you do need them to be reasonably happy, housed, healthy, and you need good infrastructure. With lower cost for all this, why wouldn't things improve, like all times throughout history?

Not parent but I could image an (utopian?) society in which AI/LLM helps us develop software and hardware that can help generating better and cheaper outputs in those fields. Not saying it's going to happen but it could be a possible outcome.

“Are you the king of the underpants gnomes or something?”

No I’m just at the frontlines of this so called “replacement” and all I’m seeing is people doing more with less with no possibility of replacement. I have no idea what all this marketing pablum about TAM replacement is. All I’m seeing is growing businesses serving more people with less resources.

Could it be that CEO’s of struggling businesses are lying about why they’re doing the layoffs? Why are we suddenly believing them on this one issue?

Who says that just because production becomes cheap anyone but the few will benefit from that? The few already control AI, what makes you think they will share its bounties? Why would they? The goodness of their hearts? The same guys that are sitting on their pile of gold like a dragon right now while countless die every day from things their resources could've fixed? What makes you think they'd suddenly change their behavior?

> “I need to block abundance for all because I don’t feel safe with change”

… is a pretty grotesque straw man, but sure, fight it if you want.

How are we establishing that this is good for civilisation?

Every technology revolution since the Gutenberg press has followed the same pathway? There is no evidence AI is any different. They had oligarchs back then, hell they had feudal lords backs then!

There are definitely transient upheavals as civilization adapts to the new norm and we can do much to reduce those effects.

But the end result is the same, more of everything made cheaper for the working class.

We are at the tail end of a 50 year productivity plateau and rising costs. We’re looking down the barrel of the first reduction in the QoL for our kids. I for one want to see what this tech has to offer.

I completely disagree with the way you frame this.

The "abundance" is not all positive valence. It is a flood of superficial good with an unmanaged ratio of negative byproduct mixed in.

Some of the "change" is not merely doing things a bit differently. The LLM flood is effectively attacking existing feedback and control mechanisms without any attempt to establish appropriate replacements.

I think there are several more dangerous sentiments coursing through civilization these days:

1. That people bear no moral responsibility to act in good faith, and the corollary that one can enjoy the fruits of production while externalizing all the liabilities.

2. That strategies like "move fast and break things" and "fake it until you make it" are universally applicable and appropriate, rather than only in the low-stakes entertainment/media/marketing fields where they flourished in recent decades.

3. That mere acquisition of capital gives one the right to perform N=1 experiments on global civilization, the economy, and the enviromment.

“The LLM flood is effectively attacking existing feedback and control mechanisms without any attempt to establish appropriate replacements.”

I think these are problems to be worked on and they are being worked on. The work just looks boring and will not make any newsfeeds anytime soon. Our systems are changing and adapting as we speak.

See my other comments as to why that sentiment is the most dangerous sentiment. It’s easy to point to the problem of oligarch’s or clearly labellable “bad actors” and incompetence.

But neighbors agitating to block housing, unions blocking productivity enhancing technologies? Much more difficult to treat these as a “problem” as they are just a mass of historically disenfranchised people protecting their interests. But they are doing wide damage, and that same sentiment is now coming to software developers.

What is civilization if not the amalgamation of people?

If sentiment around people is that they don't want this (and that seems to be the case, based on many many articles like the above, as well as opinion surveys), then who are you to tell them what's good for them?

People don't seem to want an improverishment of mind and soul in exchange for vague promises of some sort of other abundance.

Why are they being forced to that dubious trade?

> Why are they being forced to that dubious trade?

Because it's just the prisoner's dilemma in disguise. Most people don't really like the idea of AI, a lot of people especially outside of programming hate it, and I bet deep down inside a lot of programmers would prefer if AI never existed.

But it's easier to say that AI will bring great wonders because the alternative is acknowledging the reality - the diminishing returns of technology. And that brings a lot of cognitive dissonance if you're a programmer.

I'm not sure it maps well to game theory. I think it's more of a false dilemma.

There is the old adage in many academic fields that "progress happens one funeral at a time." It's an age-old, rueful take on how our own learning and adaptation proceeds within a collective society. It is a rendering of an objective truth seen at the intersection of evolutionary processes, memetics, and the human condition. It is not a call to action.

Sometimes, I think the most worrisome thing is the ever so slight possibility that some clever, naive upstart will hear this adage and, rather than ponder the lesson about patience and complex social systems, instead conclude that the short path to a lot of progress is a bunch of killing.

Even if we ignore the obvious psychopathy it takes to embrace such an idea, it is still fantastically myopic. Yes, in a hypothetical way it might happen... after the great chaos, some new civilization might emerge with an impressive growth spurt.

But, it is infantile fantasy to believe that such chaos can be applied in a goal-directed fashion, or that the perpetrator(s) can expect to survive it and enjoy the result. Nobody can control who nor what knowledge passes through the gauntlet, nor what direction it spins after that.

What troubles me most, perhaps, is that the current zeitgeist makes me think some people are oblivious to these caveats.

> What troubles me most, perhaps, is that the current zeitgeist makes me think some people are oblivious to these caveats.

Same here. "Are we all going crazy?" is the feeling I often have.

It wasn't programmers who brought us the idea that all problems, obstacles and goals can be conceptualised as an insufficiency of code, apps or gadgets, without any thought to politics, negative externalities, institutions, or philosophy.

That came from SV technocrats and associated capital owners.

I am a professional programmer whose employers have compelled me to use genAI.

I have no qualms about saying I hate it, every workday is utterly miserable, I can see my skills eroding, and I see almost nothing but downside to it.

FWIW, a past manager once dubbed me "the Luddite programmer," a badge I wore with pride.

Make no mistake, I do love computers, and writing software. Steve Jobs' metaphor of a "bicycle for the mind" captures well the role they played for me in my teens and twenties.

Alas, LLMs are like a freight train for shipping all minds to one destination, instead of freeing them to all find their individual ways to unique places.

...and also, the freight train's destination is hell.

I'm glad you can just say it. I think if you love computers and programming, then it's natural to hate AI. Especially if you like putting your own touch on your code and figuring out how things work by learning things.

Those that like it seem to like seeing the results more than the learning, especially since there's a lot of attention given to results these days. But hang in there! I also do a lot of programming for my job and I hate AI too, but luckily I don't have to use it. Just protect yourself as much as possible from AI!

Not even touching your caricature of the AI argument, but “most dangerous sentiment [in] civilization right now” is a crazy thing to say during the current global political zeitgeist.

This argument spans AI, housing, infrastructure, scaling medical access, the whole shebang of critical solutions to 21st century problems is held back to couch the discomfort of the few.

Whether it’s neighbors blocking housing, union bosses blocking port automation at the height of COVID, medical association’s controlling doctor quotas it’s the same sentiment, a fear of change.

I grant that a healthy distrust of the (capitalist) parties involved is fine but the reaction when given power is the same, veto: Stop everything now. Change is scary.

I see a different outcome.

- significant amount of money that used to be wages now paid to AI companies

- causing significant power shift to the owners of AI companies

- significant amount of people out of jobs, at the same time blue collar workers still have to work

- causing anger and resentment within society

- fueled by AI owners who will train their models to subtly argue in their favor

- protecting themselves with drones

- significant amount of countries simply go bankrupt or fall apart

- unable to let go of the basic capitalist mindset that cannot work when there simply is no available work for many people

> Why do you look forward to this happening to your intellectual pursuits?

Because he's arrived at the final stage of grief and is ready to move on.

Computer code has from its inception until today wholly been about automation and thus about taking people's jobs away.

Each individual who has ever worked as a programmer has been in the business of taking away several other people's jobs.

That's why people have little empathy for programmers specifically when their jobs are taken away now by AI.

That's a very, very narrow view of software. The firmware inside an internal combustion engine control unit did not take someone's job away. The software to assemble genomes from DNA fragments did take someone's job away. Nor did an MP3 codec, a game, or a search engine. All this stuff gave us more than we had before, it wasn't just automating existing capabilities.

Even when software has been used for automation it's been done to eliminate boring labour, not creative work. Eliminating jobs like switchboard operators or coal stokers is a good thing because those were unenjoyable and even dangerous jobs that nobody wants to do.

> The firmware inside an internal combustion engine control unit did not take someone's job away.

Of course it did. Cars and motorcycles used to need to be taken to the mechanics all the time. Now they just run and run without issue, thanks to what you mention.

> All this stuff gave us more than we had before

Absolutely. Just like all automation. It takes away jobs, but increases production. That's why it's worth it in the end.

> Even when software has been used for automation it's been done to eliminate boring labour, not creative work.

Yes, and now AI is eliminating the boring labour of programmers. Will they come to terms with the fact that their jobs are unenjoyable and nobody actually wants to do them, like the coal stokers and switchboard operators?

But I agree with you that there are some outliers within programming that go beyond automating jobs and processes. Like the examples you give.

Cars still need to be taken to mechanics all the time. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that there are far more mechanics now tab there were prior to ECUs.

> Yes, and now AI is eliminating the boring labour of programmers. Will they come to terms with the fact that their jobs are unenjoyable and nobody actually wants to do them, like the coal stokers and switchboard operators?

If it was just replacing the boring part there would be no problem. In fact, we could just use it to replace the boring bits and give ourselves more time to be creative and do the human part. The danger is it ends up replacing thinking completely, though.

I wonder if you've ever done a truly unpleasant job like those mentioned? Have you never written software that has made people really happy because it makes their job less unpleasant?

I've personally been working on software to help with cancer treatment for the past 6 years. You can't even say I'm taking away the jobs of undertakers because people will still die anyway and demand for healthcare is never going to decrease.

The enjoyable part of a job is receiving the salary. That's how it is for many or even most people.

> I wonder if you've ever done a truly unpleasant job like those mentioned?

I've had some of the worst jobs you could think of, and I was proud that I could make my own living and not depend on anybody else.

> In fact, we could just use it to replace the boring bits and give ourselves more time to be creative and do the human part.

That's the ideal outcome. However, there's limited demand for that. "Grunt work" is still what's needed mostly, whether done by man or machine.

> I've personally been working on software to help with cancer treatment for the past 6 years. You can't even say I'm taking away the jobs of undertakers because people will still die anyway and demand for healthcare is never going to decrease.

You probably took away potential jobs from administrators who would have done the things manually which your software does. Or if you're a better programmer than your peers, then you took away the jobs from the two programmers which would have been needed to do the same job as you do by yourself.

What I'm saying is that working as a programmer is about automation and efficiency and that means taking away jobs. Just like the steam machine and everything else we've automated. That's why nobody cries for programmers now that they are being out-automated themselves.

Can you put yourself in other people's shoes and see how it is offensive that tech workers now demand continued employment at comfortable jobs with high salaries, when there is no longer any demand for them? Instead of being grateful for having enjoyed such a good situation for many years while others haven't.

I fully expect my own job to be replaced by AI in the coming years. It's inevitable, and I can only be grateful for what I've been given and that I had the chance to enjoy a comfortable job while it lasted.

Honestly it just sounds like you're jaded after years of working meaningless tech jobs. It's not all like that. I've been working on improved early detection of cancer. Humans are totally incapable of detecting cancer that early; it's not taking automating any existing job. You can do good stuff with computers. It's not all about shovelling shit that people don't need, although all of big tech is, sadly, about that, of course.

I'm sorry that you think the enjoyable part of work is getting paid. Again, it's not all like that. A lot of people's jobs give them satisfaction from seeing jobs getting done that aren't easy. Nobody wants to be machine, we get joy from using our brains to solve problems.

The bad part about AI is it's replacing the need to think. I think everyone is going to get depressed when they've all forgotten how to think.

I don't work a tech job, and I'm enjoying my job and find it meaningful. But AI is already becoming capable of doing it, so it will be only a matter of time. What can I do, force customers to pay us to do something AI can do for "free" and just as well?

The enjoyable part of work getting paid was in reference to coal stokers and switchboard operators, these professionals you mentioned who were happier to be replaced.

> You can do good stuff with computers.

Of course! I'm not arguing for nor against automation and machine replacing man. What I'm saying is that programmers are the group who should be the last to complain, as that is what they've been doing to others since the beginning.

And many or even most of them realize this and do not complain about these new tools.

> I've been working on improved early detection of cancer. Humans are totally incapable of detecting cancer that early; it's not taking automating any existing job.

That sounds amazing and congratulations for doing it!

That and the fact that people void of any skills, coding or engineering ones, could still find a six figure job.

> Computer code has from its inception until today wholly been about automation and thus about taking people's jobs away.

No it hasn't. It's been about making bomb-ass simulations and cool games and stuff.

This is like saying the steam engine took people's jobs. It did. Industrialization created even more. This isn't a vouch for industrialization or capitalism but software has certainly enabled all kinds of new classes of creativity and opportunity.

Exactly! So while people would have empathy with people losing their jobs to a steam engine, would they have empathy with workers at the steam engine factory losing their jobs to an automatic riveting machine? Would they have empathy with a steam engine designer losing his job?

Programmers were all futurists, then the future came for their job.

Few years from now we'll be fighting to get a semi stable job that will pay like any other office job, and feel lucky we did.

I found that since LLMs can produce any code I want, I don't really feel the same drive to learn React or whatever is popular and trendy to make myself useful in a new job. Instead I feel like I have the space to play with something that I enjoy instead, like learning Z80 assembly and writing games for the Gameboy that I would have wanted as a kid. I think you're right that it feels just like going to the gym, intellectually.

Yes, but in terms of your marketability--even in a world with LLMs--it seems to me that learning React or whatever is popular and trendy is quite vital. You can't propose good architectures in /plan or review slop PRs in React without knowing React to a level of depth that could only come from having toyed with it, and thought in code.

It is still an open question though exactly how big the need will be to propose good architecture or review slop. I petsonally think it will still be important, but it will vary by application for sure.

Take some comfort, if you like, in the notion that LLMs are limited to emitting convolutions of their training, plus whatever is stuffed into context.

Personally speaking, I started my programming journey a long time ago, building stuff for DOS - one of the first-ish things I did was build a Windows-like GUI interface, which was quite functional given the circumstances, basically writing pixel colors to the framebuffer in C.

The whole thing was quite functional, and a few thousand lines total, and built a bit naively - the framework and the app were under 10k lines combined total.

Later I tried rebuilding it for Win32, and it ended up being more code (sans bespoke UI framework), and I'm not sure it was better, though I'm certain, the whole mass of code doing the thing was an order of magnitude more.

If I were to attempt building it in Electron, I could add 2-3 orders of magnitude to that easy, all for the same basic functionality.

All I'm saying is abstraction isn't really what it's cracked up to be.

True, but the DOS version was fixed resolution and had no internationalization support.

And probably didn't support partial redraws. A lot of GUI complexity comes from handling partial redraws.

It didn't (fully), but adding it wouldn't have been more than a days work. You have a hierarchy of enclosing layout rectangles, you take an invalidation rectangle, and you recursively intersect children and them draw them with the painters algorithm.

Vestiges of the system did exist, as there were scrollable panels and controls had an idea that they were not visible due to falling outside of their parent rect, and all drawing functions were aware of being clamped to a boundary box.

So I'd say some of the hard(ish) stuff was already done, and people did end up using it in production so it actual survived contact with a paying customer, which is saying something.

Partial redraws are mostly a waste of complexity at this point. It's much faster easier just to re-layout and re-draw the whole thing in a frame. It can be done in a millisecond if you're not beholden to the browser.

At this point, yes. In early Win32 days, absolutely worth it.

Can you show me something, that is not just a one-off or demonstration, that is well-built? Code that is a joy for humans to read? That is not a harness or anything like that, but something we wish we could have gotten made this well so easily before, and that we now have?

the problem is we refuse (americans) to let things that we need to be civilized to be in the public domained, "owned" by government and pushed into our "free" spaces.

Libraries are the last time americans agreed on basic principal that a public space with a public good is worth investing in everywhere.

aren't libraries nowadays serving as a dual purpose as day-shelters for homeless and mentally ill people?

Why is america so much against public services in general?

Honest: racism. Social services would benefit black people. Since 60s "integration" half the country has convinced themselves that cementing pools, literally, is better than letting black people integrate.

It comes in lots of flavors but it all is a facade against allowing black people benefits.

That's certainly honest, but isn't remotely accurate. I know plenty of people who are opposed to social services through the government (note the qualifier there), but are perfectly happy to have black people in their lives and communities. They simply believe that social services are best provided by private charity, not the government.

https://theconversation.com/the-forgotten-history-of-segrega...

Completely true. Absolutely hidden behind bullshit "welfare queens" and the rest.

Anyone who denies this history just likes the privelege that "business" interests generates.

I could have done many different things as a career - I chose what I do because I love(d) it. I think many of us were raised believing that a job you love is not a job and we’re now grieving the loss of fulfillment that came along with doing something you love and getting paid for it. I spend far more time working for people I don’t know than I do with my family or my hobbies, and perhaps I was foolish enough to think I’d escaped from wasting my life doing something I despise. You are correct that we can all seek fulfillment outside of work, but for those of us that used to get it there it hurts, or maybe it’s just me.

I know things get worse before they get better - but some of us are at the point in our career where we likely won’t be around to see it get better again.

I think you're right. And no, it's not just you. You've tapped into something very central and animating about software as a craft, and the cognitive and psychological feedback that got most of those who are really good at it to be interested in it in the first place. I share your sense that we'll probably not be arounds to see what "better" looks like, if it ever even happens.

I want to be intrinsically motivated too, and I am a good bit of the time. But let’s not pretend intrinsic motivation is an infinite well. We can suffer intellectually from a lack of places to socialize our pursuits.

Francis Fukuyama's "megalothymia" seems relevant here, too.

This metaphor does fall apart somewhat when you consider that farm tractors are not made from farmhand muscle fibers, whereas LLMs are in fact made out the stuff they’re rapidly replacing.

No, but I think you could tell a sufficiently compelling allegorical / metaphorical story about how farm tractors, in destroying the livelihood of farmhands, might as well have pried their muscle fibres out of their live bodies.

I meant more that you can build farm tractors whether or not you have farmhands; you cannot train LLMs without human text.

For sure. No, there's a tragically awful irony in the fact that the clankers run entirely on the (unpaid for) intellectual output and cognitive labour of humanity, white-collar professionals, academics, specialists and creatives, yet the idea is that these people are supposed to be obsoleted by the clankers.

Great sentiment about reserving intellectual heavy lifting to your personal life. I've always valued keeping enough in the tank for myself (and now my family) outside of work.

It seems in our profession there might be less satisfaction from work, but if it leaves me with more space to accomplish things in my own time, I think I prefer it.

If you do intellectual things only in your free time, well, working people don't have much free time. One of the perks of software development (and other LLM-impacted professions) for nerdy types is that it allowed them to do intellectual things all day, and even get paid for it. Now all those hours at work are no longer fulfilling.

> It seems in our profession there might be less satisfaction from work, but if it leaves me with more space to accomplish things in my own time, I think I prefer it.

I wonder why you expect to have more space to accomplish it. What happens when the managers realise that they can get more 3x, 5x, 10x, whatever x more software?

Also, let's briefly revisit the source of all economic value: scarcity. If you can kick your feet up more, you can't expect to be paid as much for it.

>food, physical fitness, health (obesity, life expectancy, etc)

Those are unfortunate examples. The US doesn't do them very well compared to other OECD countries.

> The US doesn't do them very well compared to other OECD countries.

Are you thinking Southeast Asian countries, or European, or what?

> transient LLM crappiness notwithstanding

Bold of you to assume.

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