matheusmoreira

Think of the children, won't you?

> I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing

We're doing other things.

I've got projects that I really care about. Every line of code is written deliberately. It's great.

However, I can't afford to pay so much attention to everything that I do. There are only 24 hours in a day, and my mind has its limits as well. I've found that I can't reliably care deeply about more than two projects at once, and one is the ideal.

The point of AI, at least for me, is to do the other things that I've always wanted to do but never cared enough to. I just put the AI on the task and it gets done at some point, and I don't care if the code is "slop" because it wouldn't even exist to begin with were it not for AI.

While the AI is working on the things I've always wanted but never quite cared enough to do, I'm personally working on the projects I actually care about, or enjoying life in general when I get burned out. For example, a couple weeks ago I was playing video games while the AI was reverse engineering my laptop's BIOS.

I wouldn't call it ragebait. Trying to optimize things only to end up with worse performance seems to be a rather common outcome. Understanding why that happened is key to overcoming it.

I agree that it should have been a single article though.

Hopefully... If it doesn't, mere mortals like us consumers are going to be priced out of computers altogether. It'll be the end of the personal computing era and a return to big iron mainframes.

Right? And people say assembling a PC is just like LEGO!

Delimited continuations are quite useful. They are essentially resumable exceptions. Lots of things can be implemented elegantly in terms of them.

It's Scheme's default undelimited continations that are bad to the point of uselessness.

Felony contempt of business model.

Hopefully some sort of Delamain will show up and start replacing these exquisitely paid CEOs was well.

There are many things I consider to be deeply immoral that I nevertheless cannot change. My political activism is merely performative.

Power and wealth are already so entrenched I think we have little chance of effecting any lasting change without violence. So either I become a literal terrorist, or I enable Daniel Plainview mode. It seems to me like the rational move is to try to get rich by any means necessary so I can fuck off to somewhere isolated and never have to deal with the rotten society I hate ever again.

Yeah, it's so disgusting. Mass Effect Legendary Edition comes to mind, it's filled with mandatory EA bullshit.

I think I'm just gonna ask Astra to hack this nonsense out of the games I have.

> the point of life is to explore and have fun and have human to human experiences

To do all those things, I need money.

That's exactly what No Man's Sky is though. There are entire communities centered around colonizing entire regions of the procedurally generated space. People build some seriously intricate bases and it really makes the worlds feel lived in.

> That sounds like an argument for anarchism.

Fundamentally impossible. Power structures are inherent to all human social activity. Even if we instantaneously abolished all governments and all power structures, new ones would spontaneously form immediately after.

> I am very unimpressed by political philosophies that take arguments to their logical conclusion.

People's inability or unwillingness to take things to their logical conclusion is why mainstream political philosophy is doomed to fail. If you want to test principles, then you must assign extreme values to all variables and see how the system copes. Everybody breaks under this simple test.

> we should carefully design laws and processes to constrain it

Those already exist and are routinely ignored. The US government routinely disregards the rights of its own citizens, and nothing happens, all it has to do is say the magic words "national security" and it all goes away. Every once in a while, evidence of abuses somehow surface and they are so egregious that they have no choice but to do something about it, but due to survivorship bias you must assume the abuse is far more prevalent than what you're actually seeing.

Only structural solutions meaningfully change this calculus. It must be impossible for the government to abuse you in any way. Anything short of that will fail.

> draft good legislation to curb potential abuses

No such thing. Unless it is mathematically impossible for the government to abuse you, then you will be abused.

> The moment code gets written and read back, the decisions made are often treated as gospel by frontier LLMs, even if it was just something that the LLM optimistically created itself.

In my experience, it's even worse than that: the LLMs constantly assume that all existing code was created entirely by me.

They generate code, then suddenly start talking about that exact same code as if I had manually and deliberately written all of it. They assume every single technical decision was made by me. They don't just treat it as gospel, they assume it's my gospel.

It's surreal.

> Keep enough friends over the years

Honestly this is the best part and even more notable than the awesome house.

LAN parties? Wealth's not really required, it's possible to have those with laptops and a router. High school friends that not only kept in touch but continued to game together for over a decade? That's rare.

> One would almost expect the computer to cost millions of dollars

By 2030 they probably will...

> ultra-long HDMI and USB extenders

No extra latency from these?

I create and refine my own skills and commit them to my dotfiles repository.

> You just write with some personality.

I used to do that, then someone on HN basically said I had mental problems because of the way I wrote the article. Best part is Claude told me to tone it down a bit, and I completely ignored its advice. Wouldn't have happened if I had listened to the AI.

I've also been called a schizophrenic on a GNU mailing list because of my idea and the working code I submitted. Caused me to literally quit the list on the spot. Best part is the maintainer eventually implemented his own version of it.

Since then, others have encouraged me to keep it up, but I just don't feel comfortable anymore with this "just be yourself" nonsense.

I've been doing that. It helps that I have a substantial human writing corpus to draw from. Results are still mixed. Models simply can't resist adding some LLMisms. Pangram still detects some of it but not others, and also misdetects some of my actual writing as AI generated.

Honestly, I'd rather the shame and hate just went away instead. It's seriously exhausting and I'm starting to feel tempted to just give up and either start using AI more heavily or stop writing altogether.

Your rhetoric can and has been used to justify all kinds of prejudice, including racism.

Why not Unexpected Keyboard?

I used to sympathize with those on the "receiving end" but I'm becoming extremely desensitized to their plight.

The sheer amount of hatred they level towards anyone who's using AI or is even just positive towards it is something to behold. They've got racism-tier slurs for us now.

The negativity and stigma are so strong I've stopped caring. I don't feel like putting in human effort for the benefit of these hateful people anymore.

For the record, I was able to sign up using my matheusmoreira.com domain.

> Or, better yet, consider doing what generations of writers have done before you, and treating that prompt as a skeleton that you use to write your piece yourself!

Pangram complains about "paraphrased" content though. Sigh...

> Do you think they would recognize us as their children?

  Latex
  And steel
  Zeros and ones
  Make up my son.

  This world
  Gave me
  No child
  So I built one.

https://youtu.be/vgJ48-Xj4Kc

  I made you in my image!

Yeah. I've been using AI a lot in my projects but I still write code and especially the documentation and articles for my website. It's slowing me down a lot compared to just letting the AI rip through projects but I think it's worth it. I see it as distillation of the AI's weights into my own brain.

> the most scary part is knowing this is the fear we all have, and the one they want us to have

Yes. It's such a terrible and oppressive feeling. I wish things were different...

Distributed monero mining, anyone?