keybored

Andrea.

B.o.t.h.

I’ve seen all the examples of Silicon Valley Tech democratizing things. Is this yet another example? If so I’ll take a pass.

> Everyone else keeps coding manually, although the nerdiest of us catch up with Codex/Claude/whatever on our own time, same as it ever was.

Technologists uncritically doing the bidding of Silicon Valley billionaires. Same as it ever was. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50274456

> But in the agentic era, when developers are no longer typing code by hand and are thus less constrained by DX, I still see vibes ruling the day (and not just in the sense of “vibe-coding”). Frontends are rewritten because some framework or another is “better for agents.” (Did anyone think to ask the agents?) The resulting code is “faster,” the agents make “fewer mistakes,” etc. Once again, these claims are often made without evidence. Whenever I read one of these accounts, I think to myself, “Where are the benchmarks?”

Again the law is laid down. Developers no longer X. They Y.

Feign dismissal over vibes all you want. Same old inevitability posting.

Enlightenment will be achieved when agents set up the benchmarks for what JS frameworks are good for agents. Other agents will interpret the results. Modern, peer-reviewed science.

We’re supposed to fluff up AI companies with cheap words here, not actions.

Good fiction instils children with rolemodels. Then they can try to live up to those rolemodels as adults while the whole world runs on cynical and self-serving rules.

What a movie. Act like religious whackjobs (A) who want to consume the world. In secret you have a bag of world-changing causes. The setback in the middle of the plot is the supercomputer answering something mundane to a serious question. Everyone feels defeated. But one underling is chatting with his pal subagent 3495. And he mentions the mundane answer. Then the subagent makes a critical connection; the answer is not mundane, it just needs a proper interpretation. Then they send the answer out (15 minutes later) cancer is cured. They use the patents to pay off the debts and then give them away to the public. The CEO moves to a shed on Más a Tierra with a talking parrot companion.

AI might ruin all white collar labor power and drown the world in useless work via things like expand-message-with-AI --> summarize-message-with-AI. Meanwhile with cryptomemes you can remain unaffected unless someone manages to ransomware you.

Technologists as a professional group are beyond weird. You usually expect rational critique (either positive or negative) from professionals, but the good technologists are supposed to just uncritically accept whatever supposed technological progress as an unalloyed good. Employer or Silicon Valley says it’s good, therefore think it is good. No, that’s a bit on the nose: Silicon Valley says it is good which means that it would be “good for my career”, therefore it is good. But are there any ill effects for society? Those are Luddite questions.[1]

But in this case Amish is not really an insult of course. I guess they are a hard-working people. Self-sufficient. And allow their young to take a sabbatical from the primitive life to see if it’s really something that they want to dedicate their life to.

On the other hand, of course there won’t be some Amish split. You can’t just pick and choose modernity. You can’t form a subculture of No AI. That’s why people are critical of AI; we live in a society.

[1] Being ahistorical and using Luddite as an insult also helps.

> I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.

Ah, the shut up it’s too late gambit.

That was a rhetorical question kind of response to you saying that they don’t work, except dock/port workers. By extension I have no trouble believing that those dock worker unions work.

Unions still work? They exist and do real work for their members. They can also coordinate and cooperate which is, I think, how some unions managed to put pressure on Israel. Was it maybe Italian dock workers?

That globalism has made unions not-work is just Capitalist Inevitabilism. Yeah okay I’ll give up when the billionaires have fully autonomous robot brigades. But not over globalism.

> capital

* capitol

There is a spectrum. On the far left or right is the claim that someone who criticizes society somewhat can go live in a cabin somewhere. That is very convenient, since that would remove everyone who is critical from society itself, meaning that nothing could be ever done to improve it.

Far to the other side are are FU Money/assets CEOs and what have you that could quit what they are doing. Not terribly far from them are well-paid software engineers who could just demote themselves to a regular-paid job and be fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50255234

Notably with a regular, not-terribly-evil job they wouldn’t disappear from society at all. They would still be a part of society.

I have heard about a few things that the 300K a year SC proletariat have done. I can’t remember offhand right now, but they did apparently force management to go back on some unethical stuff.

But on the whole we see the world that we live in. I guess it would be ten times worse without their quiet protests?

What I do know is that SC is the capital of Effective Altruism, which contains the idea that the best way to do good in the world is to earn a lot of money and then give it to “effective causes”. And I expect no holistic or systemic action from those of such convenient, myopic beliefs.

Big Tech can offer a high salary for non-managers, for people who cannot impact the organization other than through extra-hierarchical means (organizing). Wy would they leave?

They have options. People here spend enough time glazing each others’ 200,000 lumen minds and abilities. And judging by extra-curricular activities, no lies are told as far as I can see. That means that they can just find other employment.[1] There is enough IT that the rest of us work on, IT that doesn’t want to become a global Panopticon. None of it is perfect. You might have to work on software that just makes some previously flexible and okay procedure into a rigid, somewhat buggy, but streamlined and legible to management kind of procedure. You might earn more than the cleaning personell who have unalloyed-good jobs, just removing dirt.[2] But it’s better for the soul.

And you can earn a normal wage. Not a bad wage.

But the horde of luminous minds in Silicon Valley and I guess the Seattle Area (and maybe urban Texas and I dunno) have showed us what they can do with all the demand for their labor, their high salaries, and the pliable management who know that they have to put up with the nerds.

[1] Yes. Some workers have many options. Many have some options, many have few. Most people can’t make principled employment choices.

[2] Now someone with 30 years of experience managing cleaning personell will tell me all the dirt on what cleaning personell get up to.

You have a 25K rig.[1] What can a gaming rig do by comparison? One agentic project at a time while yours does twenty? Okay, in that case regular people can do regular serial work (unlike the most agentic setups or whatever is going on).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238816

Nah, it wouldn’t even make them uncomfortable. But there are enough underlings that need to believe this in order to comfortably perpetuate the system.

> Capitalism emerged when people began discovering that wealth could be created rather than merely captured, and that ordinary people could be sources of demand and initiative rather than merely labor to be commanded as a factor of production.

A worker under capitalism is exactly just another commodity commanded by capital. Only competing power centers like unions makes it not one-sided.

I dunno about “demand and initiative”. Is this how capitalism started, or are we jumping ahead to the post-WWII USA where the socialists and capitalists had won concessions from the bougies so that a “middle class” came about?

> The early capitalist worker voluntarily increased annual working days from 250 to 300 because a new universe of desirable goods had become accessible.

The weekly working hours increased for many who moved to the factories of the cities. Labor organizing is what lead to the two-day weekend.

> We are moving toward a world in which an ordinary person can command quantities and varieties of intelligence that would previously have required teams of highly trained specialists. Just as I can enjoy food without knowing how to farm, I can increasingly enjoy the products of intelligence without knowing how to produce them myself.

Some people are incapable of seeing power dynamics. An ordinary person might fear AI because of the explicit threats against his or her job.

How does power work? In this case it works by concentrating compute and access to the vaunted frontier models.

Another thing is the part about “hoarding”. AI is exactly about hoarding. Labor built the intelligence of centuries. Now AI wants to close that off.

HN’s love for the Platonic autodidact meets HN’s agreement with whatever tech SC is shoving down our throats (mudulo “sad but true” or whatever value judgements which still agree with the investor trajectory).

I’m to take for granted the BASELESS ASSUMPTION that it is more than just marketing and that they care?

> Sometimes I amuse myself a little. They call me, personally. Asking for a session.

To be clear. I amuse myself with this scenario in my head.

I would have said the same thing to someone I wanted to personally insult but couldn’t due to moderation policies. That was ten months ago. Now everyone and myself are seeing the same thing. All of us who are on a $300+/month subscription can just use the AI as a mental health professional. And it actually helps you. It is actually not incompetent. It doesn’t get bogged down in personality disorders and abandonment issues. It’s more like a personal coach. Five of my friends have experienced egodeath. I’m one of them. I’m not “me” any more, just another friend.

But the therapists are struggling. Honestly, serves them right. Who are they do diagnose me with Narcissistic Personality Disorder? It was time that they were taken down a peg. Sometimes I amuse myself a little. They call me, personally. Asking for a session. Please sir. I know that the bots are superior. But I just need a few weekly sessions. I will have to sell my house in Mountain View and move to San Jose if this goes on for another eight years. I smile, the kind of faint smile that you see on Buddha statues. Learn to vibe.

A lot of my professional-pride and satisfaction kind of complaints with AI is that it uses space age technology for the stupidest and most primitive target: generating code. I’ve called this Flintstone Engineering. You have a remarkable technology but everything around it does not fit in. So you should definitely be more ambitious. You should think about formal verification and “super human” levels of testing and verification. You should consider making a very readable but maybe not performant oracle library to test alongside your really-used and maybe performance-tuned library. You should think of every avenue that before was too costly in terms of time and money—something that not even an independently wealthy OSS would think to do—and consider if the new kind of budget can accommodate it.

And these ideas were always plenty of. The problem for me is that the incentives, so to speak, is to wow people with the Old World software but with “see, no brain”. And in turn you get two-hundred projects like that for every piece about rethinking software. And those pieces might just be at the zygote idea level. Could it be done? Yeah maybe.

But the biggest problem is that this is not what GenAI or agentic AI is for. I don’t think it’s even debatable, even if you think the AI Cretins that a few years ago said that they will take everyone’s jobs out in public just changed their minds. Because the valuations and capital invested is to the point that they have to, really, make it possible to slash entire payrolls across sectors. If not they simply don’t get enough money back and the whole thing crashes.[1] And if you need these frontier models at subsidized electricity costs and not just the ones that can run on your desktop, either there is crash and no more frontier models or you are out of a job.

And then where are the people that care so much about software?

They are no where to be seen. All that are left are business people. To see business people software just open up any program from Established Tech, or any program from non-Tech but where they want to sell you something. There is apparently (let’s use revealed preference here) no business need to software that is good, stable, conforms to anything, or is nice to use. Because that cares so much about software person might want to make legible the prices on offer, the exact specifications, discovery—all things that business people want to frustrate in order to maintain information asymmetry.[2]

As for compilers and interpreters and such. Okay, for who? Sure. Some people believe that they are in the 999‰ of developers. And now AI can finally vanquish those mediocre developers and productivity-boost 999‰ developers so that they get to sit at the right-hand side of the other worthy and hard-working cohort, uh, the people who had money and dumped it into AI. And they might even double their pay because thinking and making connections at that level would just boil all the lakes if they tried to build an AI to do that. And what will they do with that power? Hmm, follow orders and keep making business software? Just looking at history here.

[1] Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI

[2] ibid

The koolaid drinking coupled with the impotence or indifference in this place towards all those societal implications makes my head spin, sometimes. It’s just three years, but the AI Overlords have “policy recommendations” (this is PR, it’s marketing) for the proles, and what would even be the point? I mean, judging by the track record of billionaires who want to be trillionaires and who have no reason or personality trait left in them to care about anything but their immediate reality (cf. the reality they are inventing for the world)?

(Robots. Social unrest can be solved with robots.)

This is the next iteration of: but without consumers those billionaires have no one to sell stuff to. So surely this will work out.

Good point, and I see where you are coming from. The difference compared to UBI would be that UBI is unconditional while “terminal state benefits” can require means testing. Where they might intersect or not is that they are poor. Having time is one precondition for political engagement but having money also helps.

Overall I’m not a fan of UBI. Especially if it would create people who you indirectly describe in the way you do. I don’t want a society of the haves and the merely can-survivs.

But this feels disconnected. The “terminal state benefits” group have been viewed that way long before algorithmic feeds and before the socializing less part got really obvious. So which is it? Both, all of the above?

reply

> This is a meaningless example but

And the details are made up, but it is funny if we pretend it’s true.

People change what they do when they go from full-time work to UBI teaters. You could either argue that they will go further into the feeds or something else, but to assume statis is suspect. So you actively have to argue that.

Joe Beergut sits in front of the television (scene from 1995). Is it relevant that he worked hard from eight to five prior to that? Probably.

All capitalism is bad.

> And then the policy you want is simple: Tax the bad capitalism, don’t tax the good capitalism.

Tax isn’t punishment. Imagine a company which has a thousand trucks. The trucks themselves are ethically pure EVs. They pay the land value tax for the parking lot and the auto shop. But they don’t indirectly pay taxes for the use of the roads? That’s a massive wear on the road infrastructure.