xantronix

I am of a particular disposition that makes it difficult for me to do lie about my work, especially if I were in a firm where people are reading my chat transcripts. As much as I want to stick it to The Man, it feels a lot better for me to just say "no" and burn through my 401k until this blows over.

I'm not too proud to admit that this whole thing scares me though. I fail to see how anything will get better.

It wasn't meant to be a literal statement, more just a reflection that the situation is so bleak that I cannot imagine a better future; anybody expressing even a little bit of it seems to me like a somebody who has not been crushed into compliance through force.

Quoting the host of the recurring Quiz Broadcast sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look: "Books mention 'hope'. What was 'hope'?"

The wisdom to understand that velocity is not equal to value; and the optimism that this will all end at some point.

You seem like a person who works at a place that doesn't have an AI mandate. That sounds nice. I miss when we had nice things in the world like that. I will never take that for granted again.

I'm happy to endure HN if it means I get to see hopeful, reasonable observations like yours.

It's an old NeXTism!

A lot of responses pointing out various flaws with this question, including the fact that it can be used as a proxy for ageism, the fact that the grading scale has not been consistent over time, or that most foreigners will not have gone through the US education system. However, is it really that uncommon for Americans to never have had reason to take the SAT/ACT, such as, simply not going to uni, or going straight to work after graduating high school?

Did the entire history of computing prior to 2023 disappear? Are we really that boned?

GitHub is so close to becoming SourceForge. In order to become the scum-infested cesspool it truly longs to be, Microsoft needs to relentlessly serve ads on GitHub. Then, the cycle will once again be complete.

I can't wait to discover the next thing to be disappointed by in a decade's time.

Would you work in such a facility?

I don't really see the problem of proliferating a message one finds sufficiently important to as many places as one has reach.

One thing I've noticed is that LLMs have allowed middle managers trapped inside the role of a developer to finally self actualise.

Generative AI has and their providers have become an implicitly political subject. It shouldn't come as a surprise.

What makes an appeal to experience, subjective or otherwise, an expression of Main Character Syndrome? Just because somebody pushes back against the tides doesn't mean they fancy themself more important than others. Further, they're not saying "we should all stop using LLMs". The title of the article is literally "Leave Me Behind", an expressed desire to no longer participate in a system they believe to be harmful.

They explicitly state a position they take for themself, whereas you make an implicit value judgement of all practitioners who feel similarly. This could be read in a way as an assumption that everyone else should be as miserable as you.

A lot of this discourse is intended for a wider audience than just us technical folk, and so the vocabulary used mirrors that of news headlines. If I were to guess, I would say it distracts from the discourse of the sociopolitical and socioeconomic impacts of generative AI providers and their products.

It is understood which forms of AI are at play here when the discussion revolves around the massive companies, capital investments, datacenters PR campaigns, and mandates required to create and sustain them and their usage.

I think it should be fairly obvious by now which form of AI people refer to when they talk specifically about theft. It gets a bit old and repetitive to expand the shorthand in every conversation possible. If people are genuinely curious about other forms of AI, that information is readily available.

When Tesla FSD was in the zeitgeist, theft never entered the discussion, because it was clear that form of AI was not predicated upon theft.

Who would be payrolling this astroturfing in group #1?

> Anti-AI propaganda is false-flag.

Why would AI providers benefit from anti-AI propaganda?

One could say "that's a great point, we should take more direct ideological action to address this issue!", but expounding upon the finer details would likely get one banned here.

Because of the concerns you cite, I think working out the basic economic systems and incentives for paying people is a much more pressing concern than building magnificent machinery that we don't even own. There has been no effort on their end to demonstrate good faith nor to uphold their end of the social contract, which is why it's in our hands to demand the fundamentals to lead a life of dignity.

Ever since I was a small child it was my sincerest wish to build so much value for others by becoming a human-in-the-loop. I am so happy my wish has finally come true.

Is there any way I might be able to contact you off HN?

It's hard not to make that leap when so many layoffs are (according to PR releases anyway) attributed to AI adoption. Even if the reality on the ground is that many of these workforce reductions are to make the balance sheets look better (presumably as a bet on AI), it's impossible to ignore the accelerating wealth gap, especially in the context of the gutting of regulations and state actors leveraging world events on prediction markets. We will not be given a fair deal if we simply wait for our benefactors to provide one.

Most people in uni have compulsory humanities courses, so I imagine it's not too hard for them to attribute actions by moneyed interests to boost AI to the furtherance of capital, surveillance, and a widening of the economic gap. The fact remains, though, most of these degrees (with the obvious exception of those specific to current AI/LLM technologies) could have been attained without AI before.

Was this aided with LLMs or purely for the love of the game? I don't see an AGENTS.md or anything similar in the repo.

> One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about coding with LLMs is I have greater control over how I want the code to work and be designed.

I don't get it. Writing code yourself is the best way to control how the code functions and is designed. If LLMs were to disappear tomorrow, how would one lose control over the degree and specificity of the code produced that one could not simply compensate for with a bit more time and skill investment up front?

The author only hints at the notion that developers who do not use LLMs are like painters upon the advent of photography, but does not go on to suggest who these developers analogous to painters might be today, nor to whom their works might be valued.

If we're going to torture visual media into being a good analogy for LLM versus hand coding, I think writing code oneself is more like having a inkjet printer that one controls manually. You get a great deal of explicit control and theoretically unlimited expressiveness but at the cost of a greater time investment. Comparatively, painting might not give you that same degree of precision. Photography surrenders that control but puts a great significance on capturing fleeting moments in time.

That's a pretty good encapsulation of the parallels between the political and the technological: One necessarily thrives upon the other and are inextricable. This moment is a culmination of all the disenfranchisement the bodypolitik have suffered, looking for any possible means of escape or elevation. AI and Trumpism, for their own respective cohorts, are salvation, on offer by different frontmen but ultimately in service of the same system.

They need the hype to pay off way more than we do. So many of us who still write code directly stand to lose nothing of our capabilities if the marketing claims cannot hold water.

They're part of the circular AI finance economy, I'm sure they can figure it out.

So you're not actually writing code by hand? I'm very confused by the difference between the title and the conclusion here.

Don't you think Microsoft ought to have thought a bit more about scale? They're not just innocent bystanders here. GitHub Copilot is a first class citizen of GitHub and so of course a lot of private enterprises are going to be using the thing that's bundled with the other thing.