ipsod

You use 3.1 Pro?

I should try it, I guess - I always default to Flash 3.8.

Yeah, I'm not saying this is an example of great work. It's sufficient for the job - more time spent refining my instructions isn't necessary.

What I'm saying is, with just the effort it takes to notice and somewhat-sloppily mention things, they get fixed, and usually fixed well. Further testing will tell us whether it needs more work or not.

They may have never had these troubles at all, if I'd coded by hand originally, but then, this particular app would've never been written, because it wouldn't justify that amount of work.

More like google (when google just served content off of the website you were searching for), but also fed every form of media, turned up to 11, and given agency far beyond retrieval.

I'd love to know if you still felt that way after seeing what I do in a day. Company IP won't allow it. Maybe I'll stream some personal dev work or something.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but, I'd be shocked if you were still so adamant (assuming you're rational and not in your own psychosis).

Here's something I'm about to drop on AI. Like 90% of things like this, when I ask for a fix (with a few skills), get fixed with fewer edge cases left dangling than I'd have left if I'd spent all week on this stuff. And, it'll be done before tomorrow, with no further input from me. This is a list I put together in about 1 hour.

    Things to fix with OCR text labeling
        - vertical line in center breaks box-drag
            - nope, not line in middle... IDK why, but the drag pretty frequently snaps back to original position in middle of drag... lets me keep dragging, but have to start back from there
            - happens with "draw stamp box" too
                - forces me to re-click the button to start over
        - add zoomed view of text in bottom right corner of video
        - add ability to restrict OCR
            - current job is 0 1 2 3 4 X 6 7 8 9
                - 5 is an X, for some reason
            - is detecting full alphanumeric
        - add ctrl+z undo for modifications to drawn box
        - deleting character in middle of "your label" text box jumps cursor to end

3 years ago, these things became useful. Every year, they're drastically better. Most juniors are already dead weight. Most of the rest of us are next.

IDK how it could be otherwise. It's moving too fast and gone too far already.

I've always been either entirely self-directed, choosing my own goals, or almost entirely self-directed, being given high-level goals, and getting to choose my own means to accomplish them. So my opinions are probably different from somebody who was a smaller part in a chain.

You say that you liked learning how things worked inside out, whether it was Postgres or whatever. You can still do that. You can learn it at a high level, and then it becomes like a magic word in your arsenal. You don't have to know or remember the details of implementation, but only the nature of its costs, benefits, and synergies with other systems. You just have to remember that high-level abstraction, maybe just a single vocabulary word, of a low-level reality - the exact syntax is really no longer a concern.

The better the agents get, the less there is playing manager. Really your job now is to have and execute vision. Execution is largely a function of having a map of the high level vision and low-level realities in your head, or just having in-the-moment intuition about these things... then just speaking it.

Also, there is developing personal libraries. You may find that in your business you repeatedly tackle similar problems. You develop and refine a library that your future agents can utilize. You develop prompts that make your work more automatic and more robust. And when I say you, I mean, you direct your agents to do it.

It's not so different from what it always was, except that years get compressed into months. What was slow and tedious is now... less so.

I don't know how much advantage I have in this new world, having programmed (sometimes more, sometimes less) for 30 years. My brother has never written a line of code in his life. He's been heavy into AI for a while, and he has developed some really incredible stuff. I think he may have already outpaced me. His $1500/mo+ in subscriptions definitely help.

Uncle Ted warned us about this.

From one perspective, the 5% estimation is near-infinite orders of magnitude off, since they've trained on something approaching the sum-total of human knowledge.

Interestingly, the Amish shape their lives around this sort of thing. With any technology, they ask themselves, "Does this make us dependent?" If the answer is yes, they refuse it.

It can replace all work, IMO. I'm doing intellectual work that replaces manual labor with machinery and computer vision systems. It's massively sped up by AI.

Can you not seek mastery with the new tools, though?

It does feel a bit like building on quicksand, but coding has always been that way for me. Well, less so with embedded than webdev, but still.

Bugs have existed since before AI, though. It's remarkable how bad a lot of very successful software has always been.

I feel like usage of AI alone should be enough to uncap it, so long as AI companies do the predictable thing and steal everything from everyone.

There are thousands of people figuring out how to make AI better for their particular thing. Way more than that walking the AI through taking things from problem to solution.

For many, it's about water.

There's an 11 gigawatt cluster going in near Pantex. If they use evaporative cooling, they could use hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day... sucking it from an aquifer that gets replenished at the rate of millimeters per year, and was already being massively depleted. Without that aquifer's water, this region is dead.

They claim they won't use evaporative cooling, but... they'd save a lot of money if they did... until the water ran out.

Texan Republican statesmen are fighting it. Oil money, farm/ranch money, etc., are all fighting it. People who have historically been ride-or-die for Trump. These are the people he's threatening to treat as traitors.

I'm as pro-AI as a person can be... you can read my comments here. But, this build-out is wildly irresponsible - incredibly poor civic engineering.

Yeah, wherever there's curiosity, dive in. I feel like curiosity-driven education is probably the best kind. Well, curiosity, or necessity.

"If I should really WANT to answer the foolish question you have just asked, or any of the other questions you have been asking me, let me remind you that I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk, and by pushing the right button, I can summon to my aid men who can answer ANY question I desire to ask concerning the business to which I am devoting most of my efforts. Now, will you kindly tell me, WHY I should clutter up my mind with general knowledge, for the purpose of being able to answer questions, when I have men about me who can supply any knowledge I require?"

- Henry Ford

This is roughly my point. The moment the AI was able to do things for me, those things which it could do became trivia. I never had a taste for trivia. I still fill my days with learning and knowledge... the things I must learn and know to do my work and run my business well. I am growing faster with AI than I could without - it's allowed me to expand my purview while narrowing my focus. No less learning, just a different shape of it.

So, to me, the argument that "AI doesn't help you learn" completely misses the point. AI can help you learn, if you use it to and apply yourself, but also, AI can allow you to accomplish without filling your mind with "general knowledge" - not the high value stuff that is your business, but the low level stuff that was incidental.

I looked (*asked AI), and AI data centers are projected to hit 850-920 TWh by 2027, if you count the energy required to produce all of the buildings and equipment. This is about 3% of global electricity consumption, or 0.5% of global energy (counting fuels, etc., outside of electricity).

So, yeah, that's a lot.

Also, there are at least a few data centers popping up around me (11 GW Fermi, > 1 GW Crusoe). I live in a desert, and water is scarce, and what's used is mostly non-renewable (pumped from an aquifer), and these data centers evaporate water at an alarming rate.

So... yeah, that's pretty significant... much more so locally than globally, but globally, too.

Global electricity consumption is up about 600% since 1970. So, that 2027 projection of 3% of global in 2027 is equivalent to about 20% of all electricity consumed in 1970. A fair amount, for sure.

IDK if it's worth 3% of global electricity consumption. I know I'd be happy to spend that percentage of my own home's electricity on it, for what it does for me, and I think the world would be better for it. The alternative is accomplishing far less... easily halving my productive output (10x is my honest estimation of productivity boost from AI). I do not believe in the value of my labor, I believe in the value of the product thereof. So, IDK... hopefully it's not a zero sum game, and AI (or motivated people with AI) can help it all pan out.

For me, the primary mechanism for learning is doing projects.

And, doing projects in domains I'm unfamiliar with (and those I am) is massively sped up by AI.

I learn to do these projects with AI - it's different than learning to do it without AI, and I don't learn some steps I otherwise would, because AI can do those.

But, I start and finish and use and polish so many more projects in so many more domains, with AI, than I could without.

And, starting and finishing projects is the point for me, not learning obscure stuff that doesn't help there, so, I don't feel like I've missed out on much. You might look down on it, but, if I have AI and you don't, I will bet on me to finish a project before you, better than you, in almost any field where we have similar levels of experience.

IDK about frontier-pushing-pursuits, though. I've written algorithms by hand that I doubt AI ever would have, in its current state... but, then, at least a few of those I'd given up on, for lack of time, and when AI came along, I was able to go back and have it finish them. But, for me, the work wasn't the goal, or even my own accomplishment therein - I just wanted the result. If your motivations differ, you might not find AI as fucking awesome as I do.

It does, though. Whether or not they take advantage of it... "You can lead a horse to water..."

You've got to admit, it feels different when you think it's grass roots, but was funded.

But then, even if it's them in their own skin, you think it's the algorithm showing that for you, when it's showing stuff for them to you.

It's weasels all the way down.

Never tried them, myself, beyond being handed a few over the years. Had a pipe for long enough to go through a few bags of tobacco. I've got an addictive personality, so I appreciated that there was a lengthy ritual just to get started. Also, I liked the feeling of the warmth in my hand, and that it smelled amazing. I don't get that from cigars, they smell terrible.

Apparently, though, you can figure out pipes well enough to just have no trouble. I've known a few old men that always seemed to have one going.

Is it any more surprising than other forms of marketing, like commercials that force themselves in between you and what you actually want to watch?

Easy. Both would be protected* from mean words under this law, if they were in same jurisdiction.

* not that you couldn't say them, but you could get fined if you do

Honestly, a lot of people could stand to be a lot more informed about what they're getting into. People could use a lot more skepticism when interacting with AI, social media, news feeds, and basically every other form of media, especially those originating at the top of some pyramid or another.

I don't tend to like controls or regulations, though. Not that they aren't needed, but I don't trust the people responsible for writing and enforcing them. More often than not, they are just the top of the pyramid squashing everything beneath it.

Same.

Reminds me of this cartoon: https://imgur.com/life-before-google-q0eP1Rg

__

"Life Before Google: A Short Story"

dog: I just thought of something I'd like to know more about.

rabbit: That's a damn shame.

THE END

Do data centers compare to the human population going from 2 billion to 8 billion over the past 100 years? Or, are they just a drop in the ocean?

> It has literally contributed to suicide and murders

So have many pharmaceuticals that are generally regarded as beneficial. Suicide is a side effect of more than a few, but doctors disregard that, believing that the results are worth the risk.

It gave my grandmother strokes. She never smoked again, and was still around, but never quite the same. She told me once, "I miss smoking every day. I loved it so much."

Pipes?

Doesn't strike me as Randian. She idolized builders and doers, not exploiters.

So... Musk, perhaps... but not this PE enshittification.