Comment by allenu
5 days ago
Well, some hobbies are fun because you're doing something no one else has done before, or which is challenging to accomplish without a lot of investment in time and growing in personal skill. A lot of hobbies are fun because of the competition and because you get to be at the forefront of something. It's fun because we're all limited in our time and energy and choosing to spend time on something means you can do things that someone else who doesn't spend time on it can't. That feels good.
People who were in the demoscene took joy in learning how to make a computer do things no one had done before and push the hardware to its limits. That's not as meaningful if someone can achieve the same thing by prompting an LLM.
A lot of hobbies are fun because of the human challenge in creating the output and knowing it was only achievable because someone had to take time to create it. Having an LLM accomplish the same thing absolutely devalues the fun in the hobby. Hobbies aren't 100% just about accomplishing something for yourself, even though if you sway to much into doing it for validation or to compete with others it can lead to burnout and lack of enjoyment.
I can lift weights on a barbell that are pretty good for a person my age, as a result of several years of regular training.
A person with a forklift can lift a lot more weight. Why does that change how I feel about what I can do unassisted?
That's true but the point of working out for regular people is to benefit their body, look good, feel good and have that strength vs. the average person who doesn't work out, not so much to be useful lifting heavy objects.
To your point, a lot of hobbies are about creating something that wasn't possible before without the investment of time, which is one reason it's rewarding. If people could just take a pill to get muscles to skip all the training, I'm sure a lot of people who put in time to train regularly would feel cheated out of their accomplishment, especially if nobody could tell if they did it manually or with a pill and if everybody started to have the same musculature with no effort.
Well as it would so happen, they sort of can. There are lifters and bodybuilders in any gym that are taking steroids. Do they still have to do work, yes, but they can achieve results that are not possible for a "natty" lifter. Doesn't affect how I feel about what I can do, nor do I feel cheated, because I really am only competing with myself.
you weren’t competitive or pushing the limits of anything if llms arrived and suddenly you weren’t pushing the limits with it