uv-depression
> A recent study of actual coding practices across hundreds of firms finds that human code review forms a significant “bottleneck” for the overall efficiency of AI coding tools, resulting in “little evidence that firms increase software output or reduce employment” by using them.
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
> When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
LLM boosters always cry foul with this one because newer models exist (see next item), but the fact is this is evidence that programmers are remarkably bad at estimating their own productivity.
https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/
> For the subset of the original developers who participated in the later study, we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%. Among newly-recruited developers the estimated speedup is -4%, with a confidence interval between -15% and +9%.
With the rather large caveat:
> Unfortunately, given participant feedback and surveys, we believe that the data from our new experiment gives us an unreliable signal of the current productivity effect of AI tools. The primary reason is that we have observed a significant increase in developers choosing not to participate in the study because they do not wish to work without AI, which likely biases downwards our estimate of AI-assisted speedup. We additionally believe there have been selection effects due to a lower pay rate (we reduced the pay from $150/hr to $50/hr), and that our measurements of time-spent on each task are unreliable for the fraction of developers who use multiple AI agents concurrently.
> We're not going to ban these models, though.
How could you possibly be confident of that?
I guess let's just ignore the evidence, then.
> I can't speak to you other issues but these are here to stay and I think the only realistic way forward is to learn how to use them.
People only say this about things that they want. Ignoring the consequences of one's actions is not a neutral position. Societies are perfectly capable of banning things (yeah, you can probably sneak a local model through a hypothetical law, but it would end the industrial scale problems).
I will cede this: it indeed seems like you can throw together a shitty half-working prototype very quickly using LLMs. There's been a deluge of half-working prototypes, but years in and where are all these projects now? No study has concluded anything near a 5x improvement.
Besides, my actual opinion is that even if these actually gave a large productivity improvement, it's wouldn't be worth it. The negatives are simply too large:
- the concentration of power they are pushing for;
- the environmental effects of training;
- the disinformation they spread at scale (which in practice is their primary use-case);
- the adverse effect on a shared reality from the fact that they cannot reliably answer questions, yet are presented as doing so;
- the adverse effect on a shared reality from their sycophancy (do the rich surrounded by yes-men seem in touch with reality?);
- their anti-social nature, as they discourage engaging with other people in favour of solipsism masked by a poor simulacrum of personhood;
- their weakening of labour power because of the managerial class' belief that they will soon replace workers (whether or not they actually can is not particularly relevant);
- the large-scale plagiarism they enable;
- lastly, their weakening of already incredibly lax standards of engineering from our field.
The promise of more software does not even come close to outweighing all of that.
Related: the Rationalists display this very well (though it's certainly not unique to them). The jump from "I think my beliefs through carefully, therefore I am reasonably rational" (likely already false, or at best true in a limited domain) to "I am rational, therefore my beliefs are well-thought through" is actually very small in the human mind, despite the latter being the opposite of rationality.
Also, the existence of Gell-Mann amnesia should be taught to everyone!
> 3. I think there's a certain amount of defensiveness from AI enthusiasts.
I've encountered this as well. I think this is also a huge part of why you see so many people loudly exclaiming "every programmer uses LLMs now" despite that not being even close to true. If you criticize LLMs, it (socially, to them) counts as criticism of their users as well. As well, bosses are probably the most excited about LLMs because they hope to fire us all soon, so it can be pointlessly self-destructive to speak negatively about LLMs in a professional context right now.
That, plus AI boosters tend to be incredibly annoying about it, bringing it up at every possible opportunity, changing every technical discussion to be about them, suggesting them for the stupidest use-cases, loudly proclaiming nonsensical productivity boosts (perhaps you feel 5x as productive because you're forcing other people to spend their time fixing your shitty slop code?) etc. So as someone who does not use LLMs I avoid talking to them.
> therein lies the difference between this with an attitude of embracing new technology and those wanting to stick to the old
And as we all know, if something is new technology it must necessarily be good. Don't stop to think, just run in the rat race!
How would you know that the new paper contained the same content as the original (let alone the actual Lean code)?
How could you possibly know that? If you don't have the knowledge to understand the paper without using a chatbot, you don't have the knowledge to verify that what the chatbot said is the same thing as what's in the paper.
Not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use cars. Cars are killing tens of thousands a year while destroying the environment.
> while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.
While this is going to be city-dependent, I'm a woman who frequently travels along late at night on public transit and I've never had any issues beyond annoying drunk people. You're making this up.
> If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.
Making sure that public transit is wheelchair-accessible is vitally important, I'm glad we agree on that. How do cars do in that regard? They don't work at all unless you can afford a chauffeur. Your argument here is essentially "public transit is sometimes bad, so it's not worth it to make it better", which is nonsensical.
> only public transit
> private transport isn't allowed in
Ridiculous strawman. Nobody is arguing for the abolition of the private vehicle, just the ways in which we design our cities to prioritize only private vehicles at the expense of everything else. Plenty of people in transit-friendly cities own cars. Replacing a large majority of private car trips would save lives, help the environment, make things more accessible, and make cities more pleasant to be in.
But energy source isn't the only problem. The problem is partially that energy use is high in and of itself. Solar panels (which only generate electricity; energy use is much bigger than just electricity) require materials like cobalt, which is mined (partially using child slavery) in Africa (DRC) in ecologically devastating ways (since you clearly care so deeply, I'm sure you knew that already). The ideology of infinite growth requires ever more cobalt, and so it depends on that oppression and ecological damage. Reduce, reuse, recycle are in that order for a reason, but we are never able to do the first because of infinite growth.
I think your framing of "abstinence" is nonsense. What are we abstaining from? Economic 'growth'? Energy usage? Consumerism? If so, all we're "abstaining" from is the thing that benefits rich people to our own detriment. We must distinguish economic growth from improvements to lifestyle, which as I stated are frequently at odds.
> They're a few percent of electricity use.
Continually growing, using far more resources than just electricity, for mostly downsides to humanity, and causing significant local pollution.
> Let's say we can cut energy requirements to live a middle class life style to 1/4 the current level, which might be possible.
Sure, let's just make up numbers. Sorry, I meant let's burn methane to have 'Claude' make up numbers.
> There are about 1.4 billion people in Africa who mostly live below that level. We have no right to tell them they can't have what we have. There's also probably a billion more in Asia who are still climbing to middle class.
But you haven't dealt with the fact that the reason they're deprived is because of the very system you're supporting. I agree that all people ought to have the same access to technology and standards of living, and doing so requires that we reshape how technology works and is distributed. That will never happen under the current system, because doing so would impact profits. Infinite growth is the thing preventing us from fundamentally improving our technology and societies to be sustainable.
> telling them to stay poor isn't how you make that happen
I am arguing for the opposite, but you seem not to have read what I wrote.
> Globally, the top 10% of emitters were responsible for almost half of global energy-related CO2 emissions in 2021, compared with a mere 0.2% for the bottom 10%.
The top 10% is quite a bit more than billionaires, it's true. But you are also assuming that reducing emissions must come with a reduction in lifestyle, which is untrue. Think about the way that our computers are designed to be disposable and unrepairable, or how clothing is made worse and worse (because it's more profitable, which is only necessary because of the need for infinite growth). Or, as you pointed out, North Americans use a ton of energy for terrible reasons, and fixing that problem would improve their quality of life: walkability, bikability, and public transit so people can drive less (or even stop owning a car) while also getting improved health; replacing flights with more comfortable high speed trains; removing the need to maintain a lawn for every house (shockingly terrible for the environment); etc. Or how we ship things all around the world to be assembled in different phases in different countries because it's cheaper (and suppresses labour). What so many of the things we need to do to solve this problem have in common isn't a reduction in lifestyle (some will do the opposite!), but rather that they impact profits and therefore threaten infinite growth.
Yes, there are some things that people won't like doing, like significantly reducing the amount of meat they eat (>15% of global emissions are from meat production, and it is the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon). But pretending nothing will ever change doesn't solve the problem (and we'll be catastrophically forced to change later if we don't voluntarily do it sooner).
The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources. Take, for example, the fact that renewable energy keeps growing as a percentage of total energy generation, yet total GHG emissions keep rising. That's a result of the system of incentives set up by capital. Yes, the economy can become less coupled to resources (as it has), but there is a limit, unless you seriously want to argue that iron (for example) can be an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.
An economy is a method of allocating resources. This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs (consider that we produce many times the amount of food that's needed to feed everyone's needs, but massive amounts of it used for industrial meat production and biofuels).
> we are never returning to pre industrial times
This is an absurd strawman.
> everyone needs to become poorer
This is, in fact, the industry propaganda. What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form), rather than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.
> “Hey Africa, we know we colonized you and all but can you do us a favor and stay poor to help fix the problem we mostly caused?” There is not enough “fuck you” in the universe for that one.
This is misdirection. Getting water, food, shelter, and medicine for everyone on the planet is well within our means as a species. It is the ideology of free movement for goods but not people and infinite growth that makes it impossible to meet those needs, because it requires and underclass who can be used for cheap labour and contained in states built for that purpose.
It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich.
Accepting for the sake of argument the absurd notion that LLMs are anywhere near AGI, does this phrasing not concern you? It deeply concerns me.
(2) The standards for astrophotography and for professional astronomical measurements are somewhat different! Also, I think you meant median stacking; mean stacking doesn't handle outliers as well.
(3) Whataboutism. Besides, you'd get no argument from me about replacing the majority of air travel with high speed rail, even without considering lights.
I agree that city light pollution is probably the bigger problem, especially for the amateur/cultural angle, but these are two symptoms of the general cause of our economic system not valuing the sky (or the environment generally).
> instead of shutting down agriculture in the only marginal spot on the west coast you can grow food.
The Okanagan will be shocked to hear they can't do agriculture! Perhaps we could just turn off the greenhouse lights for a couple hours, or install retractable shields/mirorrs on top of the greenhouses.
Lunar regolith would probably be quite damaging to optics. It's nasty stuff. I have seen ideas for building liquid mirror telescopes on the moon, though.
If you've never seen truly dark skies, do yourself a favour and go see what they look like during true night. Bring binoculars if you have them, maybe get a planisphere and a (dim!) red flashlight.
The lack of respect for the night sky includes starlink and the other internet providers dumping tens of thousands of satellites in orbit instead of building municipal internet, by the way. It's been a huge hit to the field of astronomy. Before someone inevitably says "we should just be putting telescopes in orbit", orbital observatories are obviously a huge deal and I support building more of them, but you simply can't put things like the ELT (40m primary mirror, 2800 tonnes) or the Square Kilometre Array in space.