peepee1982
In a world where all wealth accumulates at the top and leaves the bottom in precarious conditions, perversions like these are inevitable and could be resolved by treating human needs as priorities and make sure everyone has their needs met, which with todays productivity we could easily accomplish if we all worked together instead of against each other.
People have a series of rationalizations. People say for example that science
and technology have their own logic, that they are in fact autonomous. This
particular rationalization is profoundly false. It is not true that science
marches on in defiance of human will, independent of human will, that just is
not the case. But it is comfortable, as I said: it leads to the position that
"if I don't do it, someone else will."
Of course if one takes that as an ethical principle then obviously it can serve
as a license to do anything at all. "People will be murdered; if I don't do it,
someone else will." "Women will be raped; if I don't do it, someone else will."
That is just a license for violence.
Other people say, and I think this is a widely used rationalization, that
fundamentally the tools we work on are "mere" tools; This means that whether
they get use for good or evil depends on the person who ultimately buys them
and so on.
There's nothing bad about working in computer vision, for example. Computer
vision may very well some day be used to heal people who would otherwise die.
Of course, it could also be used to guide missiles, cruise missiles for
example, to their destination, and all that. You see, the technology itself is
neutral and value-free and it just depends how one uses it. And besides --
consistent with that -- we can't know, we scientists cannot know how it is
going to be used. So therefore we have no responsibility.
Well, that is false. It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for
good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can
also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises
of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal
society, then one might very well say one cannot know.
But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical
circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious
that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted
will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which
we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an
abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.
If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed
in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and
coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that
every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not
reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not
know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.
ChatGPT didn't care and just gave advice.
I've set up my own SearXNG instance on my VPS and integrated it into Pi alongside the webfetch tool, and GLM 5.2 has so far been great at finding things. I asked it to give me the current news from an Austrian online newspaper that's difficult to parse because of its aggressive ad overlays. Both ChatGPT and Claude failed in their native chat apps. GLM 5.2 in Pi was clever enough to search for the RSS feed and gave me a detailed overview.
The lack of vision is a real shame, though. I've implemented workarounds in Pi that are okay, but they're not as good and the whole experience feels awkward.
If commits written by AI wouldn't be substantially different, there would be no need to reject them.
So I agree with you that it won't discourage AI-based coding. But that's not even the intent.
Also feels much better than pure vibe-coding (which I still do for personal projects that aren't mission critical for anyone).
OTOH: I am convinced I can't snap my fingers with my right hand and never will because my specific mix of handed-ness makes it impossible for me to do so, no matter how hard I try and practice. No problem at all with my left hand.
┌───────────────────────────┬───────────┐
│ Activity │ Hand │
├───────────────────────────┼───────────┤
│ Baseball (Bat/Catch) │ Left │
│ Hold Spoon │ Left │
│ Soccer │ Left │
│ Tennis │ Left │
│ Throw Ball │ Left │
│ Darts │ Left │
│ Write │ Left │
├───────────────────────────┼───────────┤
│ Bow and Arrow │ Right │
│ Hold Fork/Knife │ Right │
│ Play Drums │ Right │
│ Scissor │ Right │
│ Shoot Rifle (Nerf Gun) │ Right │
│ Skateboard/Snowboard │ Right │
│ Use Mouse │ Right │
└───────────────────────────┴───────────┘
It's kind of sad. But on the other hand, I am glad I don't have to write every little line of code myself *on top* of having to do all the other stuff.
Writing the actual code is a significant part of that, but the codebase is so complex that even Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 struggle with it without being fed a *lot* of context and constraints. And even then, they need a *lot* of steering due to making bad decisions that only someone with an intimate knowledge of the theory behind our software is able to catch.
I can only assume that people who think coding agents can completely replace an actual developer mostly deal with trivial software regarding both scope and the type of customers they serve (individuals instead of big companies in industry).
I have written code myself that I deem beautiful and expressive. But I'm also a musician, and making music (and listening to it deeply) has given me such intense, mystic experiences, that they dwarf anything I've ever experienced writing code. It's also much harder to make good music because it requires a kind of courage and psychological constitution that is simply not required for writing code.
I'm not trying to be pretentious or precious about art. But I consider the process of creation to be as much a fundamental part of art as the resulting artefact. If I can't contextualize a work of art to a human's inner life - be it implicitly or through knowing about the artist - it's not really art to me.
Artistic code can be a work of art. But only if created by a human (in a way that humans make art), and I think the same principles should apply to it as any other medium of art. But that kind of code is so rare and insignificant compared to all other code being written and published, that I don't think it's worth watering down the discussion with it.
I would only consider AI generated output art, if the way to get there were a substantial artistic expression.
So I think visual arts and music fall in a different category because it's much more artistic, unconstrained, and personal by nature than code. Even if that difference sits on a spectrum. But on that spectrum they're worlds apart.
I struggle explaining my point of view better and hope I manage to get my point across at least to some extent.
Having said all that, I do consider training LLMs on other people's code without compensation wrong as well. Just not as wrong as I do with other stuff.
Art can't be generated. We can only generate artefacts mimicking art styles. So far we have no AI generated images that are considered actual Art, because Art's purpose is to express the artist's intent. And when there is no artist, there is no intent.
I have to stop now, but I guess you can see where I'm going with this.
I don't care about getting a millionth of a cent as an artist (which btw is a number *you* just pulled out of your imagination). I care about them paying a fair share instead of pocketing it, so the money stays in circulation instead of creating a new class of technofeudal lords.
I'm not trying to be glib. The thing that seemed magic to me at that time was all the scaffolding that Rails provided with a few simple commands, making it possible to quickly build something that let the user authenticate and enter and display data. Sure, Ruby itself and the culture around it back then was also great and will always have a place in my heart. But the whole convention-over-configuration and scaffolding thing, that was what I liked so much about it, and I never found that in any other language/framework combo in a way that felt as smooth.
But now, I use AI for scaffolding, and for my side-projects often never have to touch code.
So why would I choose something for a CRUD application that might give me headaches down the road, when there's a possibility that the app might morph into something less conventional, when I could use *any* language/framework that's not as rigid and have the scaffold be built by AI?
I get it if you enjoy actually writing code. But I don't quite get the benefits if the goal is to have something working quickly and be able to potentially build it out to something that is not served that well by RoR.
What is it, man?
His blog posts and general opinions voiced in his streams in any other field than what he's working in are so incredibly stupid and put forward with so much misguided confidence that they make me cringe in pain.