Peritract

I would agree with that, but Dawkins made a career of not doing so, and only modulated his position when it gave him new targets to rail against.

It's been clear for a long time now that Dawkins was never actually very skeptical; he likes taking contrary positions based on spite more than reason, as can be seen from his increasing adoption of the religion he used to rail against [1].

At this point, 'person who is popularly thought to be intelligent thinks AI is conscious' should make you question the first part, not endorse the second.

[1] https://ewtn.co.uk/article-famous-atheist-richard-dawkins-sa...

You can get better results faster by just doing step 1.

> Programming was a domain that filtered out those people because they found it hard to succeed at it.

I think this is a very rosy view of programmers, not borne out by history. The people leading the vibe coding charge are programmers, rather than an external group.

I know it's popular to divide the world into the technically-literate and the credulous, but in this case the technical camp is also the one going all in.

That's not a good faith, or even vaguely accurate, reading of the parent comment.

I'm honestly not sure how much more I can break this down for you. I'm not trying to be difficult here, but you keep on misreading and objecting to things I have not said.

The Lord of the Rings is about lots of things. Some of those things are orcs. When I say that The Lord of the Rings is about orcs, I'm not saying it's made by orcs, or that orcs were used to distribute it, but that orcs are something discussed within the text.

Similarly, when I say that The Lord of the Rings is partially about authenticity, I'm not talking about the way in which it was written, but the contents of the work. Authenticity is a theme in the books, discussed within the text.

The use of "steal" for non-physical things pre-dates the use of "data" in the modern sense [1]. Policing language incorrectly is not reasonable.

[0] https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view....

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/data

Sure, but it's not relevant to the discussion or as a reply to me.

Again, I think you've misread the parent comment here. The Lord of the Rings--the actual books, the content of the work--is partially about authenticity, in the same way that Spiderman is about power and responsibility.

I'm not talking about the provenance of the work, but the content of it.

We're still not talking about provenance. Where something comes from is not the same as what it is.

The people who want LotR merchandise do so because they care about LotR.

> At some point, a significant increase in resource efficiency improves certain aspects of many things, even art.

I'll agree with that incredibly-hedged claim, sure. I'm not against efficiency at all.

As before though, it's not the only consideration. It would have been even more efficient to give all the people with a copy of Girl with a Pearl Earring a blank canvas, or even nothing at all, but that would be missing the point.

I think you've misunderstood me. The Lord of the Rings has authenticity as one of its main themes. This is part of the work itself, not to do with its provenance.

> it’ll get most of the job done in most of the cases

This is not a very high standard for art.

Particularly not in this case, when the current art is a reference to, and for fans of, art that was all about authenticity. It's also art on a product that is very much not aiming for the 'just get it done' market.

If all I care about is the destination, then sure: use the most resource-efficient method. In this and in every other situation where there are other considerations, reducing everything to efficiency is absurdly reductionist.

We've had LLMs for far longer than a quarter now; even if you think that only the recent ones have led to any improvement, you'd still expect to see something.

> It's regularly writing systems-level code that would take me months to write by hand in hours, with minimal babysitting

Has your output kept pace with the code? Because months in hours means, even pushing those ratios quite far, to be years in days.

Has your roadmap accelerated multiple years in the last few months in terms of verifiable results?

I'll grant that there's evidence of more low-level activity, but I'm not sure that equates to meaningful change particularly. "Released an app" is a neutral signal on its own, in much the same way that the Unity asset store led to an increase in game releases, but 'more asset flips' isn't really a major change to the gaming industry.

If software development speed has doubled, then we should be seeing not just an increase in apps being released, but an increase in product output from the big players too.

> I get that it's tedious to sit on tech forums listening to an endless stream of people insisting that suchandsuch technology is world-changing.

It's tedious because the insistence doesn't seem to be matched by much observable change.

None of that is concrete though; it's all alleged speed-ups with no discernable (though a lot of claimed) impact.

> This whole "Yeah, well let me see the proof!" ostrich-head-in-the-sand thing works about as long as it takes for everyone to make you eat their dust.

People will stop asking for the proof when the dust-eating commences.

That's not the justification for the current war; the White House [0] claims that Iran's nuclear capabilities were 'obliterated' last year.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/experts-agree-ir...

Given what the US has been doing/threatening to do recently, it's hard to see this as a problem.

Is Meta innovative?

They make products, sure, but output isn't the same as innovation.

> To surrender to the rhetoric is the entire point of the obscenities.

No, this is what I am complaining about. The obscenities are the point, the rhetoric is cover. Ignoring the rhetoric does not stop the obscenities, and treating the problem as 'they are using the wrong name' rather than 'they are doing the wrong thing' dismisses the real harm being done.

If you claim to be the pope, rejecting your constructed reality is the way to help you out of your delusion. If you do so while leading a crusade to sack Jerusalem, it's not the priority.

As a non-American, I think that Americans treating concrete problems as less important than linguistic games does an awful lot more to legitimise the violence.

I'd agree in principle, but they're already killing people. The worst-case scenario has been happening for a while; treating this as a procedural stance rather than a description of reality is blinkered.

If it's what they call themselves and what they're currently doing, how much does it matter what the official name is?

You're on a site where the commenters read AI-generated articles about how they can generate new images to include in their generated websites that they themselves generate more articles about.

Sure, the weird cat-people adverts aren't aimed at HN's commentariat, but every 'democratise art and build that game you've dreamt of' pitch is. Every breathless paean to AI assistants/companions/partners is targeted at the users here.

Usage is a form of consumption; thinking of yourself as a creator while you consume doesn't mean you consume less.

Non-tech users are being fed fake images when they browse idly. Tech users are restructuring their entire lives around these tools.

That's not a good-faith argument; obviously we're talking about relevant thought, rather than distraction (which, in context, would be less thought).

> It's very western of us to always be tracking the conseqentiality of our actions even when we're just the cog in a wheel

An awful lot of Eastern philosophy would disagree with you.

That's still less thinking overall that someone who thought about all of that and thought about the scripting would have done.

> Sometimes I feel we ignore some good pieces because of LLMification!

As a heuristic for attention, "does the claimed author care about, understand, or even know what they're writing about?" is not a bad start.