| ▲ | keybored 15 hours ago | |
Every little minor dispute can be split into some arbitrary dichotomy which is vaguely defensible. Not interesting. Twelve years ago I would have the bright idea of why not make a little, just a tiny little (what I would call now) preprocessor for Java which does the same thing in less characters and is clearer. Everyone would love it. Of course no one loved it. Well, I never implemented it. Because I got some sense: you can’t just make tiny little preprocessors, a little code generation here and there, just code-generate this and tweak after the fact. Right? It’s not principled. You can cook up a dichotomy. Good for you. I think the approach is just space age technology meets Stone Age mindset. It’s Flintstone Engineering. It’s barely even serious. I am not offended that you took my craft. I am offended that you smear paint on the wall with three hundred parallel walls and painters and pick the best one. Or whatever Rube Setup is the thing that will take over the world as of thirty minutes ago. Make something rock solid like formal verification with LLM assist (or LLM with formal verification assist?). Something that a “human” can understand (at this point maybe only the CEO is left). Something that is understandable, deterministic. I might be out of a job. But I will not be offended. And I will respect it. | ||
| ▲ | keybored 5 hours ago | parent [-] | |
Now about the grief angle. This is AI Inevitability Soothsaying.[1] It’s all just a backdrop for hammering home the same inevitabilism: GenAI, GenAI, GenAI. Just slap on whatever excuse to hammer this over, and over, and over. Grief, self-identity, some other pseudo-humanistic angle. Now is the time that programmers talk about their feelings. Give me a break. Because the AI hype machine isn’t content with just eventually taking your job or your craft. It can’t just quietly get exponentially better until it sweeps your legs effortlessly. No, because there’s also a market out there, and a hype needs to be built. So now you need to see it all day in your tech news aggregator. Just push all the interesting stuff out. Replace with autopilot. No, really. Even if AI worked perfectly right now you would still need to have a constant churn of content about how to babysit this thing that speaks English already and is more capable than you. I guess it’s kind of paradoxical. | ||