Comment by pj_mukh
4 hours ago
>>“I didn’t care about practicality, building useful programs, or writing code per se: all I wanted is to understand how the machine works.”
I like lifting heavy things and moving them around. In fact I like it so much it’s a massively effective buoy for my mental health. However, I don’t expect the economy to make space for me to move farm equipment around to make food and expect to get paid a living wage doing it.
Software like food is now a civilizational requirement and transient LLM crappiness notwithstanding, accessing well-built flexible plentiful software is a major unlock for humanity.
I’m happy now to go the gym and lift heavy things and let everyone have plentiful food grown by mechanized agriculture. I’m looking forward to do the same for my intellectual pursuits.
Why do you look forward to this happening to your intellectual pursuits?
If I grant you that cheap plentifull code will be a net boon to humanity, it's still normal to be unhappy that it's you specifically that will need to be ground-down in the cogs of progress. 5 years ago I also believed that the future could (and would!) be vastly better for many people, I just didn't know that betterment would be conditional on me losing the work I enjoy. In that sense LLM's are only a loss to me.
Many people feeling equanimous about this stuff are financially secure, later in their career or working at a manegerial level. That's fine, but at that point you're obviously not suffering the same pain as the author.
I think personal lament is different from organizing to stop what is good for civilization.
There is a lot of the latter happening so my comment remains relevant.
“I need to block abundance for all because I don’t feel safe with change”
is probably the most dangerous sentiment coursing through our civilization right now, and it’s coming now for me, and this is my rationalization from giving in to my baser instincts.
I’m imploring others to do the same
I completely disagree with the way you frame this.
The "abundance" is not all positive valence. It is a flood of superficial good with an unmanaged ratio of negative byproduct mixed in.
Some of the "change" is not merely doing things a bit differently. The LLM flood is effectively attacking existing feedback and control mechanisms without any attempt to establish appropriate replacements.
I think there are several more dangerous sentiments coursing through civilization these days:
1. That people bear no moral responsibility to act in good faith, and the corollary that one can enjoy the fruits of production while externalizing all the liabilities.
2. That strategies like "move fast and break things" and "fake it until you make it" are universally applicable and appropriate, rather than only in the low-stakes entertainment/media/marketing fields where they flourished in recent decades.
3. That mere acquisition of capital gives one the right to perform N=1 experiments on global civilization, the economy, and the enviromment.
How are we establishing that this is good for civilisation?
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"For all" is a bit of a stretch. Abundance for a very select few. The rest remains unclear.
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> “I need to block abundance for all because I don’t feel safe with change”
… is a pretty grotesque straw man, but sure, fight it if you want.
> Why do you look forward to this happening to your intellectual pursuits?
Because he's arrived at the final stage of grief and is ready to move on.
Programmers were all futurists, then the future came for their job.
Few years from now we'll be fighting to get a semi stable job that will pay like any other office job, and feel lucky we did.
Computer code has from its inception until today wholly been about automation and thus about taking people's jobs away.
Each individual who has ever worked as a programmer has been in the business of taking away several other people's jobs.
That's why people have little empathy for programmers specifically when their jobs are taken away now by AI.
> Computer code has from its inception until today wholly been about automation and thus about taking people's jobs away.
No it hasn't. It's been about making bomb-ass simulations and cool games and stuff.
That's a very, very narrow view of software. The firmware inside an internal combustion engine control unit did not take someone's job away. The software to assemble genomes from DNA fragments did take someone's job away. Nor did an MP3 codec, a game, or a search engine. All this stuff gave us more than we had before, it wasn't just automating existing capabilities.
Even when software has been used for automation it's been done to eliminate boring labour, not creative work. Eliminating jobs like switchboard operators or coal stokers is a good thing because those were unenjoyable and even dangerous jobs that nobody wants to do.
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That and the fact that people void of any skills, coding or engineering ones, could still find a six figure job.
I found that since LLMs can produce any code I want, I don't really feel the same drive to learn React or whatever is popular and trendy to make myself useful in a new job. Instead I feel like I have the space to play with something that I enjoy instead, like learning Z80 assembly and writing games for the Gameboy that I would have wanted as a kid. I think you're right that it feels just like going to the gym, intellectually.
Personally speaking, I started my programming journey a long time ago, building stuff for DOS - one of the first-ish things I did was build a Windows-like GUI interface, which was quite functional given the circumstances, basically writing pixel colors to the framebuffer in C.
The whole thing was quite functional, and a few thousand lines total, and built a bit naively - the framework and the app were under 10k lines combined total.
Later I tried rebuilding it for Win32, and it ended up being more code (sans bespoke UI framework), and I'm not sure it was better, though I'm certain, the whole mass of code doing the thing was an order of magnitude more.
If I were to attempt building it in Electron, I could add 2-3 orders of magnitude to that easy, all for the same basic functionality.
All I'm saying is abstraction isn't really what it's cracked up to be.
True, but the DOS version was fixed resolution and had no internationalization support.
And probably didn't support partial redraws. A lot of GUI complexity comes from handling partial redraws.
I could have done many different things as a career - I chose what I do because I love(d) it. I think many of us were raised believing that a job you love is not a job and we’re now grieving the loss of fulfillment that came along with doing something you love and getting paid for it. I spend far more time working for people I don’t know than I do with my family or my hobbies, and perhaps I was foolish enough to think I’d escaped from wasting my life doing something I despise. You are correct that we can all seek fulfillment outside of work, but for those of us that used to get it there it hurts, or maybe it’s just me.
I know things get worse before they get better - but some of us are at the point in our career where we likely won’t be around to see it get better again.
This metaphor does fall apart somewhat when you consider that farm tractors are not made from farmhand muscle fibers, whereas LLMs are in fact made out the stuff they’re rapidly replacing.
Great sentiment about reserving intellectual heavy lifting to your personal life. I've always valued keeping enough in the tank for myself (and now my family) outside of work.
It seems in our profession there might be less satisfaction from work, but if it leaves me with more space to accomplish things in my own time, I think I prefer it.
If you do intellectual things only in your free time, well, working people don't have much free time. One of the perks of software development (and other LLM-impacted professions) for nerdy types is that it allowed them to do intellectual things all day, and even get paid for it. Now all those hours at work are no longer fulfilling.
Can you show me something, that is not just a one-off or demonstration, that is well-built? Code that is a joy for humans to read? That is not a harness or anything like that, but something we wish we could have gotten made this well so easily before, and that we now have?
the problem is we refuse (americans) to let things that we need to be civilized to be in the public domained, "owned" by government and pushed into our "free" spaces.
Libraries are the last time americans agreed on basic principal that a public space with a public good is worth investing in everywhere.
aren't libraries nowadays serving as a dual purpose as day-shelters for homeless and mentally ill people?
Why is america so much against public services in general?
Honest: racism. Social services would benefit black people. Since 60s "integration" half the country has convinced themselves that cementing pools, literally, is better than letting black people integrate.
It comes in lots of flavors but it all is a facade against allowing black people benefits.
> transient LLM crappiness notwithstanding
Bold of you to assume.
>food, physical fitness, health (obesity, life expectancy, etc)
Those are unfortunate examples. The US doesn't do them very well compared to other OECD countries.
> The US doesn't do them very well compared to other OECD countries.
Are you thinking Southeast Asian countries, or European, or what?