ragequittah

If the main effort is trawling through forums or poorly written documentation the main thing you've learned is how to trawl through these things. I'm of the opinion these should've never been useful skills to begin with.

I just heard the giantbomb guys describe how to block Claude code on Github so you don't have to play any filthy AI helped decompilations. It's a new kind of social benchmark among some people to be the most against AI.

I have a feeling detaching your dignity and sense of purpose from something an AI can easily steal might be a net good for most people.

This I agree with. But it goes for people's attention spans due to social media, hopelessness because of the insane top-heavy economy and climate change, and a whole load of other stuff piled on top of it all. I feel really bad for the kids these days. There are of course ways to prevent kids from using AI but I bet it'd work as well as preventing kids using social media (they'll just find a way around the rules).

I push back on this idea hard. There's some things I consider not worth my time since an LLM will always be available to do it for me. But a whole lot of things you can learn far better with a LLM than almost anywhere else.

Been learning Linux, how to build a homelab, and quite a few other related topics since about chatgpt 3.5. If the LLM went away tomorrow I'd still know how to do most things in Linux, set up my opnsense router, reinstall xcp-ng, do everything in docker, and a boatload of other things that would've been so much more tedious to learn before an LLM. Simplicity of access to knowledge doesn't mean you don't learn it. A google search didn't make us learn slower than when we had to scour for books at the library, it increased the pace dramatically. Same goes for LLMs.

You can use LLMs and learn nothing. People who like to learn won't ever use it that way.

They seem more marginal because the models are already capable of so much. But there was a turning point about November of last year if I recall where software developers I know went from "lol look at how this thing codes, my job is safe" to "oh no". And the models back then were actually pretty bad at many things compared to Astra or Opus 5.5.

You're right that many of the less capable / open weights models are very good themselves, but that's part of showing how much more capable the frontier models are becoming. Cheaper (smaller) models are able to do the same things, in many cases better, as the way larger models were able to do a year ago. The efficiency is getting way better alongside the 'intelligence'. That'll also cause the models to become much faster over time which is the real improvement I'm waiting for.

I think a part of why many people aren't seeing big deltas if they're using it for code and they're actually coders is we actually sit down and reason out the project with the LLM. Someone who knows nothing about coding ~1 year ago wouldn't come even close to the kind of app they'd get now with the same instructions. If you just give it a task like "help me decompile this game" without knowing a whole lot about decompiling suddenly in the last 3 or so months you start to get some half-decent results.

The sea-change I see lately is about lifting up the people who couldn't do these things before more than the people who could. And I actually see problems coming from that already as people I've met think they can make enterprise grade software if they just tell their LLM to make it safe.

My guess is you're barely holding it at all if you haven't seen several more uses for it in the last year or so.

Maybe more like an architect saying "I built" when actually construction workers did all the building. Even that's stretching it though because construction workers tend to follow the plans fairly well. AI has you constantly tweaking the beams and cement yourself mid-construction to get a usable product.

Or is it more like creating machine code but using a tool called a compiler? If you've ever made anything with AI you know it by default generates things that aren't ideal. You still have to go in and debug, make the UI better, think of more elegant ways to present things. The fact that you're focused on those issues instead of tediously finding the block of code and maybe tediously looking up ways to fix / make it better is probably an overall good thing in the long run. We've lost the ability to code in assembly I'm not sure that's made software or life worse even if coders as a group are in all likelihood less intelligent these days.

In your analogy maybe it's more like creating a pizza except you didn't have to make the cheese, grind up the flour, go find the water in a stream somewhere, grow the tomatoes yourself, butcher the animal for the meat, etc.

If you haven't seen the (massive) increases in utility I'd wager you haven't been using the tools much.

Which brings us to the other decentralization issue we're running into: a 16GB stick of RAM might be $1500 by then.

I mostly learn about my passions / hobbies so interesting conversations w/ others that share them come up pretty much daily. That said I find there's a group of people who will shun me like I kicked their dog for having any interest in using AI, which I find unfortunate.

If it had no other function than a better than Google search engine that is able to teach me topics I'm interested in at exactly my speed it would be the most interesting technology to come along in a while. The fact that it does all the other stuff it's doing is hard to even come to grips with in the time it's been around.

Notable that when it couldn't count the "r"s in strawberry the LLMs were already solving problems most of the people laughing at it for not being able to count "r"s wouldn't be able to come close to figuring out with weeks of research. People have had a myopic view of this technology for a long time. Many still do.

I always try to parse this "Mozilla is doing bad" as I've been using Firefox for years and other than features I want (vertical tabs, firefox relay, and a few other minor things) I couldn't tell you the difference of Firefox now vs 5 years ago vs 10 years ago. And the "shooting yourself in the foot" things talked about are always something that pretty much all other browser companies do but 10 times worse.

I think the last major scandal was AI additions (cuz who is using AI these days? What an awful idea!) that you can now turn off with one click? Personally never saw the AI features presented to me once. Then the one before that I can remember was the Mr. Robot thing that was so long ago it's hard to remember what even happened. I think they installed a add-on that wasn't enabled and did absolutely nothing unless you went looking for it and specifically wanted it to do something? And then they removed it very soon after when nerds overreacted so hard that we're still talking about it 10+ years later?

Chrome: inability to block ads, new "cookie free" (nope they didn't get rid of cookies) ad tracking, monitoring people in incognito mode, the list would goes on for a long while. Brave: Crypto nonsense, all kinds of advertising for their crap everywhere unless you go through many hoops to turn it off. Firefox is one of the few pieces of software I can say hasn't enshitified itself to the point of using something else.

I feel like if the doomers are correct and AGI happens research can't say anything about it. We won't be able to predict the outcome of something more intelligent than us or that can disrupt society so thoroughly. It's already causing major problems.

I follow AI quite closely and I have yet to see any hostility towards artists or mathematicians from anybody worth talking about (maybe some forum dwellers?). Nor have I ever seen any marketing or implications from big AI companies that says creative work or math is in any way useless or obsolete. The fact that AI can solve long unsolved math problems isn't hostility towards mathematicians.

I'm very envious of your workplace if the stuff before AI was somehow well written. If I had AI 10 years ago I would've been mostly using it to interpret most of the corporate speak e-mails and poorly written technical briefs.

I just wonder how many people smugly cry 'slop' and then immediately go ask chatgpt about something they want to know about. I suspect it's a surprisinly large amount.

More like an alarm that deters (though not always) the robbers. You can still very easily sideload apps.

What about an entire family of people who have no interest in learning technology they just want the shady ad-free youtube on their phone? I find it perplexing you've never met people like this. I'd wager it's more common than not in our world.

But that's just a completely different discussion that we could've had a long time ago when they introduced it as a on/off security setting ~15-20 years ago too (and I bet people did). IMO nothing has changed except I bet more people will take going into developer options, being sternly warned, then having to wait 24 hours as a sign this is something maybe they shouldn't be doing. And I'd argue if you come to that conclusion and don't look into it further you're probably right,

Given that google is now forced to have competing app stores due to Epic v. Google and the ninth circuit courts went into long and arduous detail in that anti-trust case about sideloading restrictions I don't think they have a leg to stand on if they get rid of sideloading completely. Oddly Apple continues to get away with it no problem.

You do understand we've broadly come to the conclusion that this isn't how society should work though, correct? It's why there's warning labels on everything, liability for not warning people for even the dumbest of things they might do with your product or in your establishment, extremely strict laws for things like driving a car, flying an airplane, or using any kind of heavy machinery, responsibility of servers to cut people off if they've had too much alcohol, the list goes on. I find intelligent people often have this mindset that all "real adults" are just as responsible as they are. It's just not the case.

And I generally wouldn't care "have at it" if their phone/computer being compromised only harmed them. But a bulk amount of compromised devices harms us all.

"Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize half of them are stupider than that!" -George Carlin

>so ultimately I think some default level of "guardrail" is appropriate, but it should have a not too burdensome escape hatch

Which is really exactly what google is implementing here and why I'm so perplexed so many people are upset. You or I or smart parents (my mother has never used a computer in her life and wouldn't want to) will have absolutely no issue sideloading apps after the proposed changes.

Have you ever tried to educate a 70+ year old person on this kind of stuff? Their eyes gloss over and they don't care. I've told my mother not to install random apps on her phone several times yet she still does it. I could probably send her a phishing e-mail right now that 'looks like' it's from me (so long as my name is in the from: field that's enough) and she'd follow the instructions to install a malicious apk too.

"Everyone should just be smarter/more educated" is what I used to think as well. I now fully understand some people have no desire to be educated in any way and it's a net good for society to not have a large % of devices compromised.

Surely you see how installing unvetted software on a device that holds your entire life, bank info, photos, etc. probably shouldn't be part of the "happy path" for most people. You shouldn't even install software you haven't fully vetted from the google play store. This should be drilled into non-technical people.

Those of us who want to can easily bypass it. My mom who doesn't know what she's doing and gets a phishing email with a fancy apk attached should probably have a hard time using it.

I'm not sure I understand this argument. If I go to the library every day for 10 years and learn everything there is to know about subject x I shouldn't be able to sell my skills to the world about it later because I didn't give the creators of the books I read any money?

Arguably LLM companies could have made large-scale deals with libraries and got the exact same knowledge (much, much more slowly). I wonder if people would have the same issues then? My guess is probably. Goes back to the meme that if libraries were proposed today there's no way they would ever be allowed.

My bet: it's less than a 2% loss in customers that are just very loud on the internet.

Alternatively: if you're wasting a bunch of your time on the minor details how do you have enough time for the major ones? I'd much rather my restaurant owner worry about sourcing ingredients, keeping the kitchen clean, improving the taste of the food than anything else.

This is something I've thought about as people complain about things like restaurant photos being AI and such. You know what kind of customer this pushes away? The kind that complain about minor details that don't really matter. Might be a net good for many businesses.