vouwfietsman

That's nice but none of that is what I said.

Do you change your worldview daily, on the level of opting in or out of religions? Do you think most people do? Do you think we can expect them to?

Not really, that's not how worldviews work. On top of that, religions and cults are very good at embedding themselves into your social/family life marrying leaving the religion with leaving or estranging a large part of social life.

At this point, it is indeed still a choice, but hardly a daily or conscious choice.

Renouncing/converting exists but is rare, life changing, and sometimes dangerous.

Only a tourist would call Helmond and Zwolle closeby, that's like half the Netherlands!

Although I support the idea that Rutte likely possesses a brain, I don't think he's a sensible example as an 'outside view' that tolerates Trump.

Put differently, I don't think a NATO can exist where the Sec. Gen. disagrees fundamentally with Trump. If that were to happen, NATO would simply cease to exist.

This is why its a bad example.

Rutte being NATO Secretary General says more about that position than it does about Rutte. He is a serial liar, lacks any conviction or personal moral compass, and sees politics mostly as a professional career meta-game detached from society.

I think there's a couple things going on:

1. the metrics you mention are hard to measure and usually lag 2. the metrics might not be moving yet, because AI accelerates everything a little bit, and most of the hype is still the promise rather than the actuality 3. people are using the gained productivity to speed up secondary tasks / do different work, because applying it to their main work is still complex or not of sufficient quality

No idea how effective this is, but it sure looks a lot more like engineering than most of the 'prompt engineering' things I've seen in the past years. Kudos to the author for writing this concisely without aggrandizing his work.

your loss

Perfectly describes Australia, indeed. Note how I'm not saying that taxes should be higher and should be "squandered on bureaucracy and monetary black holes", so I'm not sure if I really am one of those.

The world is not black and white, contrary to popular belief.

> The record for highest number of bureaucrats per capita in the world is owned by Australia

You have been convinced by fake news, please recheck this claim, its false.

> wealthy people

*rich people

> All they know how to do is tax people

Oh god you're one of those. People who complain about taxes have historically been on the wrong side of arguments.

These are the same thing. Youth has been able to effortlessly do math by using calculators in the past decades, yet we expect and succeed in them learning math. The main thing we need to do is ban llm use somehow for education, as we have with calculators. Then, piecemeal, bring it back when it makes sense.

True, I hate windows like most people. I just also hate being unrealistic about it. Good thing about AI is you no longer really have to care about really understanding the OS, unless you are an admin.

No I'm arguing that many developments that simplify work while not undermining understanding exist, and we have dealt with them. In the narrow scope of understanding engineering, the fact that AI can also engineer does not prevent us from proper education or gaining understanding.

Indeed it is, so it would be bad to just "resist ai"

You are providing nuance to the authors stance, my reaction is to the authors stance. I don't disagree with you but this is no longer about the actual content of the blog post.

> but having no ability to work in a world with worsening quality of life

If unemployment leads to death, there are many more things wrong than just AI. Why get mad at AI instead of at capitalism. This is nonsensical.

> Tobacco/Soda Industry Playbook

Except both of those succeeded in destroying health for decades, whereas AI had like a 2 year run before all the datacenter madness came to light.

> My current stance is not undoing things to zero,

This does not at all answer my question, my question is about the past not the present. The author is arguing to resist AI, what if resisting cars had worked? This is my question.

Depends on what you mean by correct. Do you think the world would be better if those anti-technology people succeeded and the technologies did not come to be?

A world without steam engines, cars, computers, printing presses.

> For example, for every React app whistled up in five hours, there's a high schooler or college student out there sleepwalking through their foundational courses and being set up to catastrophically fail upon trying to enter the job market.

Oh man how did we ever survive calculators.

No, what he says is not right. Parts of it are, but broadly (as I pointed out) he conflates a lot of things together that have no business being in the same sentence.

1. Reducing/replacing/automating highly complex work is fundamentally a good thing, it might be the case that society is not ready for the consequences of it, those are two separate things. Concluding that millions of people will die, is simply hyperbole.

2. Saying that AI is not intelligent is at best a non-sequitur but more likely intended misrepresentation and goalpost moving

3. The environmental harm of AI, however significant, is ultimately public knowledge and 100% clear in the public discourse around the current implementation of AI. This says nothing about AI in the general sense, only how we produce it today. This is like preventing cars from becoming a thing because they produce CO2. Do you think the world would be better off if cars were never invented?

None of this is about the 'artistic properties of their words', it is precisely about the core content being objectionable.

Bad blog.

> I do not come to you with clean hands. > I am not here to dictate morality

These two things contradict eachother.

> My primary focus here will be software development > Environmental Harm > Stanley Tucci

These three things also contradict eachother.

> If we lived in a post-scarcity

Maybe this is your real problem, and you're just confusing cause and effect.

> We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die

Hyperbole.

> Look up the “Eliza effect”. Even the weakest conceivable program like this was seductive. These new ones are masters of seduction.

Sounds like software development alright.

This person has a familiar name, I'm sure he is amazing at something. This blog is not the peak of his work.

EDIT:

> I quote “AI” to emphasize that these things are not intelligent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

As mentioned: gaming, most of enterprise dev, graphics/gpu/cad, desktop, certain classes of embedded. Broadly speaking, outside of hacker/web/creative culture, the default is windows.

Regardless of how evil gigantic companies can be, or what the ideal world should look like: from a pure usability perspective, windows is top of the list.

If I got 5$ every time a linux/mac enthousiasts has to tell me they just cannot run something, and proposing a myriad of workarounds to stick to their ideology, I could buy an apple vision pro and let it collect dust in the corner of my basement.

This kind of stuff is why its hard to have good conversations about tooling. Windows is the best place for many kinds of software dev, but perhaps not the kind you are doing.

No, you're missing the point. I'm not saying software quality is relative, I'm saying that most current debate on what people think is quality software, is subjective nonsense.

I've also never claimed that "you can't question the quality of AI output because quality of software is [partly] subjective". I'm not sure how you got there. I am simply saying that "quality" is an ill defined term and this is why we might see so much divergence when discussing AI code "quality".

You can absolutely evaluate code quality objectively, e.g performance, bugs, crashes.

I see what you mean.

You could read it as quality in the operational correctness sense, but just as well in the software architectural design sense. My comment indeed applies to only one of those.

However, why judge correctness as a "cringe on quality", rather than just objectively saying its producing errors. This is why my response is in the software direction.

> I cringe at the quality of what it generates.

Besides all the other mentioned points, I think a good remaining less-discussed point is that quality in software has always been in the eye of the beholder. You may very well see the AI output as low quality, I may not, and its not necessarily clear who is right or wrong, because there was always little precedent in objectively evaluating code quality.

This is a long standing issue, and was never resolved before AI happened, and the coming of AI has not really changed things, except that AI is under a magnifying glass obviously. How do we objectively measure the quality of code? There's some general consensus on things, but surprisingly little is true professional agreed upon consensus.

If I can make up a figure, I would guess 95% of software engineering quality rhetoric, and craftmanship advice, is just strongly held opinions.

This is not something I can prove, but if I look at the (still ongoing.....) debates on very basic ideas like clean code, and the reactions from also-great programmers like Carmack, Blow & Muratori, it is clear to me that there is little consensus on even the fundamentals of software design.

If all these people can produce excellent working software while disagreeing on these fundamentals (of quality), it means we do not yet understand what the fundamentals are.

> Representatives are merely messengers

No, that is not how representation works. The representative represents, i.e they act in the absence of the citizen. They are not the human equivalent of an email broker.

> representatives are only consumers themselves

No, they are informed experts, or have informed experts at their disposal, to deeply understand the subject matter at hand so they can weigh it against the broad wishes of whom they represent. Furthermore, they have the time and responsibility to use their knowledge wisely.

> but dictators who step up and act for the people

I'm not sure why you keep bringing up dictators. Dictators don't step up and act for the people, that's what representatives do in a democracy. Are you from the US by chance? In that case I can understand why this concept is new.

> consumers love nothing more than protecting market incumbents

This is like saying: consumers sure did love dying from polio before the vaccine was invented.

> In a democracy, consumers and the government are the exact same thing.

This is a straw man. Consumers are represented by representatives who should have their interests in mind, e.g the consumer votes for someone who in turn votes for outcomes. This means that there can absolutely be a difference in knowledge between the government and its citizens, and so no, they are not the exact same thing. One group is trying to do their job of being a citizen, while the other group should be doing their job of representing the interests of the citizens that voted on them in whatever is relevant. One job clearly should not involve making sure your privacy isn't constantly and covertly violated by foreign nationals, and one job clearly should. Which is which is an exercise for the reader.

> but in a functioning market

Great! Where can I find me one of those?

No, this is not the way to go. Consumers cannot possibly understand all potential ways in which they can be screwed over, and even if they could, it is entirely likely that there are no good choices because consumers will have to choose between e.g privacy violation or environmental destruction, or privacy violation of some degree vs another degree.

This is why governments exist.

> You are moving the goalpost here if you think the chess AI was AGI

Indeed I would be, but I don't, so I'm not.

What I'm saying is that nobody understands either creativity or intelligence, and people keep listing behavior that they think can only be displayed by something that has those qualities. Yet, whenever we build a system that displays this behavior, all of a sudden, those qualities are NOT attributed because we now understand how to achieve this, the curtain has fallen, the magic is gone, and we do not assign the qualities we believe are human to something that is not magic, lest we reduce ourselves to the machines in front of us, losing the things that make us unique.

That is the shifting of goalposts, its not me who's doing it. There's a wiki page for it, its called "the AI effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

> Why do you think that?

From (highly upvoted) parent:

> LLMs are text-prediction engines. They are not Artificial Intelligence, and shouldn’t not be treated in any form or fashion as if they possess intelligence > LLM-based “AI” ....

Hardly neutral statements, hardly accurate statements, yet highly upvoted. LLMs are AI, there is nothing to gain by pretending it isn't because of some secondary motive or opinion someone has.

> LLM has solved enough problems that almost nobody has the view you ridicule here

I think I have just shown you the parent literally claims LLMs are not AI, and do not possess intelligence.

> but there are still many who think LLM are thinking just like humans and that you can trust them just like humans.

I don't think many people think that, especially on HN, for two reasons:

1. Most high profile AI tools have immediately visible disclaimers saying, more or less, "AI makes mistakes". 2. People don't trust humans either, if anything people trust the AI more because it is not human.

People may be incorrectly worshipping LLMs, but they are doing it precisely because it is not human. If you put chatgpt behind a believable chatbox so people would actually think it was human, they would be much more skeptical.