Comment by WA

5 hours ago

The author of that post Nolan is a pretty interesting guy and deep in the web tech stack. He’s really one of the last people I’d call "tribal", especially since you mention React. This guy hand-writes his web components and files bug reports to browsers and writes his own memory leak detection lib and so on.

If such a guy is slowly dipping his toes into AI and comes to the conclusion he just posted, you should take a step back and consider your position.

I really don't care what authority he's arguing from. The "just try it" pitch here is fundamentally a tribalist argument: tribes don't want another tribe to exist that's viewed as threatening to them.

  • Trying a new technology seems like what engineers do (since they have to leverage technology to solve real problems, having more tools to choose from can be good). I'm surprised it rings as tribalist.

Honestly that's what makes this all the more dangerous. He's trying to have his cake and eat it too: accept all of the hype and all of the propaganda, but then couch it in the rhetoric of "oh I'm so concerned I can remain in a sort of moderate & empathetic position and not fall prey to tribalism and flame wars."

There's no both-sides-ing of genAI. This is an issue akin to street narcotics, mass weapons of war, or forever chemicals. You're either on the side of heavy regulation or outright bans, or you're on the side of tech politics which are directly harmful to humanity. The OP is not a thoughtful moderate because that's not how any of this works.