Quite. I understand the general argument made: textiles factories meant the end of the weaver and tailor except as specialisms, livestock farming meant the end of the hunter except as a specialism, so these models will end up doing our thinking for us except as a specialism.
Even putting aside the fact that the models don't do any thinking: that doesn't help the weaver in 1850 to keep from starving, and it doesn't help those of us who've yet to surrender their cognition to keep from starving now.
This seems like a great time to have that fundamental transformation of society to one where work and the economy is explicitly used to meet human needs and preserve the environment. We seem to keep putting it off!
Even if one assumes that GenAI will become so "smart" that this is the case, we can band together against it. We are the humans on this planet and we can collectively decide what we want and what we don't want.
GenAI is squarely in the "don't want" category, and so should be fought against.
I'm increasingly resigned to spending the coming years working very hard to rebuild slop-free alternatives to rotting open-source projects, pouring energy into community-building and education, and in general thanklessly contributing a few threads of a safety net for the gigantic mess our civilization's demented oligarchs have made and are hungrily expanding.
I will never forget the people who chose to side with the oligarchs instead of humanity, who chose to torch the slow-built commons for fleeting personal convenience, attention, and enrichment. I am incandescent with anger over everything that has been pointlessly ruined, and all the lifetimes of effort it will take to clean up the oil spill.
I'll still do my part to help clean it up. There will be many of us helping.
I feel we need to take this even further, we need to make alternative, ethical and sustainable ecosystems. We need a new kind of free software, one with of course the 4 essential freedoms, but also with strong communities around them that are inclusive and celebrate diversity, oppose GenAI, fascism and other similar bs, and care about the wider world.
Community is the most important thing of a software project. We need to foster strong communities with strong ethical stances.
we can band together against it. We are the humans on this planet and we can collectively decide what we want and what we don't want.
Just don't complain when not everyone agrees to "decide" the same way, and not everyone wants to band together with you. When you declare a war and pick a side, don't lament the loss of unity, or something like that.
programming may become a hobby (as much as it pains me to say and as low quality as LLM output is). But programming is not the highest form of thinking, come on. I'm so sick of hearing this at this point.
I'm disappointed to read such a bleak and ill-reasoned take from someone I learned important things from. His book Code Reading made a great impression on me when it came out and greatly raised my respect for NetBSD. I hope he is able to take a deep breath and find a way out of the AI echo chamber.
I on the other hand particularly welcome the perspective of an eminent author. The views of those who have lived through and experienced how it used to be, and can in turn give an informed opinion on todays circumstances, are specially valuable.
I think it did? Gyms are everywhere. Could there be a purer expression of physical labour as a hobby than going somewhere to lift something up, just to put it down again, repeatedly?
There’s also folks tilling the earth in community gardens, for example.
Yeah. I’m in Barcelona on holiday and have just today visited two luthiers, a pottery studio, and a wool studio teaching knitting and selling hand-coloured yarns.
From the early 2022 fumbling release of ChatGPT, which couldn’t correctly count the number of a’s in my name (it claimed two), we reached OpenAI’s release of math papers where an internal AI model solved many hundreds of previously open math problems.
It does occur to me this is a false dichotomy: the two problems are different classes of problems. The number of times a letter occurs in a word is problem of tokenisation, lossy input, a problem of the lack of symbolic reasoning that exists with these machines, a problem of a lack of actual thought, a lack of articulation. Solving maths problems is a word game, a language problem, something LLMs are well-suited to do (especially with code to solve the symbolic thinking they can't do).
Other than that I generally agree, we're fucked to be ideas guys and doing stuff will be as unproductive as a twang off the wrist. Total human extinction will seem like the benevolent choice.
aaronm04 | a day ago
Thinking can't become a hobby if you can't buy food because AI took your job.
Two9A | a day ago
Quite. I understand the general argument made: textiles factories meant the end of the weaver and tailor except as specialisms, livestock farming meant the end of the hunter except as a specialism, so these models will end up doing our thinking for us except as a specialism.
Even putting aside the fact that the models don't do any thinking: that doesn't help the weaver in 1850 to keep from starving, and it doesn't help those of us who've yet to surrender their cognition to keep from starving now.
aaronm04 | a day ago
This seems like a great time to have that fundamental transformation of society to one where work and the economy is explicitly used to meet human needs and preserve the environment. We seem to keep putting it off!
hawski | a day ago
Not everyone can afford to have a hobby.
lumi | a day ago
Even if one assumes that GenAI will become so "smart" that this is the case, we can band together against it. We are the humans on this planet and we can collectively decide what we want and what we don't want.
GenAI is squarely in the "don't want" category, and so should be fought against.
Internet_Janitor | a day ago
I'm increasingly resigned to spending the coming years working very hard to rebuild slop-free alternatives to rotting open-source projects, pouring energy into community-building and education, and in general thanklessly contributing a few threads of a safety net for the gigantic mess our civilization's demented oligarchs have made and are hungrily expanding.
I will never forget the people who chose to side with the oligarchs instead of humanity, who chose to torch the slow-built commons for fleeting personal convenience, attention, and enrichment. I am incandescent with anger over everything that has been pointlessly ruined, and all the lifetimes of effort it will take to clean up the oil spill.
I'll still do my part to help clean it up. There will be many of us helping.
lumi | a day ago
I feel we need to take this even further, we need to make alternative, ethical and sustainable ecosystems. We need a new kind of free software, one with of course the 4 essential freedoms, but also with strong communities around them that are inclusive and celebrate diversity, oppose GenAI, fascism and other similar bs, and care about the wider world.
Community is the most important thing of a software project. We need to foster strong communities with strong ethical stances.
tclancy | 23 hours ago
Feels like nominative determinism at work.
aae | 10 hours ago
This feels like what horse owners might have said about the automobile.
intelfx | 9 hours ago
Just don't complain when not everyone agrees to "decide" the same way, and not everyone wants to band together with you. When you declare a war and pick a side, don't lament the loss of unity, or something like that.
khairo | a day ago
programming may become a hobby (as much as it pains me to say and as low quality as LLM output is). But programming is not the highest form of thinking, come on. I'm so sick of hearing this at this point.
dkl | a day ago
I'm disappointed to read such a bleak and ill-reasoned take from someone I learned important things from. His book Code Reading made a great impression on me when it came out and greatly raised my respect for NetBSD. I hope he is able to take a deep breath and find a way out of the AI echo chamber.
aaronm04 | a day ago
aryeh | 16 hours ago
I on the other hand particularly welcome the perspective of an eminent author. The views of those who have lived through and experienced how it used to be, and can in turn give an informed opinion on todays circumstances, are specially valuable.
ploum | a day ago
LOL!
The exact same things was said during the whole industrial era: "physical labour will be done by machines"
Well, labour was transformed but never became a hobby.
stig | 12 hours ago
I think it did? Gyms are everywhere. Could there be a purer expression of physical labour as a hobby than going somewhere to lift something up, just to put it down again, repeatedly?
There’s also folks tilling the earth in community gardens, for example.
intelfx | 9 hours ago
Last I checked, artisans exist (and are quite valued, even).
stig | 3 hours ago
Yeah. I’m in Barcelona on holiday and have just today visited two luthiers, a pottery studio, and a wool studio teaching knitting and selling hand-coloured yarns.
WilhelmVonWeiner | a day ago
It does occur to me this is a false dichotomy: the two problems are different classes of problems. The number of times a letter occurs in a word is problem of tokenisation, lossy input, a problem of the lack of symbolic reasoning that exists with these machines, a problem of a lack of actual thought, a lack of articulation. Solving maths problems is a word game, a language problem, something LLMs are well-suited to do (especially with code to solve the symbolic thinking they can't do).
Other than that I generally agree, we're fucked to be ideas guys and doing stuff will be as unproductive as a twang off the wrist. Total human extinction will seem like the benevolent choice.