> AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all are.

No, no we are not.

> the leverage you have to build and ship today is higher than it was five years ago.

I don’t want more “leverage to build and ship”, I want to live in a world where people aren’t so disconnected from reality and so lonely they have romantic relationships with a chat window; where they don’t turn off their brains and accept any wrong information because it comes from a machine; where propaganda, mass manipulation, and surveillance aren’t at the ready hands of any two-bit despot; where people aren’t so myopic that they only look at their own belly button and use case for a tool that they are incapable of recognising all the societal harms around them.

> We aren't losing code; we are making the ability to code a universal human "literacy."

No, no we are not. What we are, however, is making ever increasingly bad comparisons.

Literacy implies understanding. To be able to read and write, you need to be able to understand how to do both. LLMs just spit text which you don’t need to understand at all, and increasingly people are not even caring to try to understand it. LLM generated code in the hands of someone who doesn’t read it is the opposite of literacy.

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mulr00ney 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

>I don’t want more “leverage to build and ship”, I want to live in a world where people aren’t so disconnected from reality and so lonely they have romantic relationships with a chat window; where they don’t turn off their brains and accept any wrong information because it comes from a machine; where propaganda, mass manipulation, and surveillance aren’t at the ready hands of any two-bit despot; where people aren’t so myopic that they only look at their own belly button and use case for a tool that they are incapable of recognising all the societal harms around them.

Preach. Every time I read people doing this weird LARP on this website of "you have so much more leverage, great time to be a founder" I want to put my head through the drywall.

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627467 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> literacy implies understanding

Agree. Do we not understand how LLMs work? Some of us understand better than others, just like literacy is also not guaranteed just because you learned the alphabet.

Accepting the output of an LLM is really materially not different from accepting books, newspapers, opinion makers, academics at face value. Maybe different only in speed of access?

> LLM generated code in the hands of someone who doesn’t read it is the opposite of literacy.

"A popsi article title or paper abstract/conclusion in the mind of someone who doesn't read is the opposite of literacy."

	▲	latexr 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I’m not sure I understand your point. Mind clarifying? It seems you might be trying to contradict what I said but are in fact only adding to it. > just like literacy is also not guaranteed just because you learned the alphabet. I didn’t claim learning the alphabet equals literacy, you did. Your argument comes down to “you’re not literate if you’re not literate”. Which, yes, of course. > Accepting the output of an LLM is really materially not different from (…) Multiple things can be true at once. If someone says “angry stupid people with machine guns are dangerous”, responding “angry stupid people with explosives are dangerous” does nothing to the original point. The angry stupid people are part of the problem, sure, but so are the tool which are enabling them to be dangerous. If poison is being dumped in a river and slowly killing the ecosystem, then someone else comes along wanting to dump even more of a different poison, the correct response is to stop both, not shrug it off and stop none.

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dzhiurgis 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I am left a victim

> I want to live in a world where people aren’t so disconnected from reality

It looks like you are the problem, not the world. Hope you find happiness!

	▲	latexr a day ago \| parent [-]
		What the bloody heck are you on about? That first quote is completely fabricated. I’d also like to live in a world where people don’t argue in bad faith, but since I have no pretence that will happen, at least I’m thankful when bad faith actors do such a poor job of concealing it.

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pegasus 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

But LLMs can also explain code, in fact they're fantastic at that. They can also be used to build anti-censorship, surveillance-avoidance and fact-checking tools. We are all empowered by them, it's just up to us to employ them so as to nudge society towards where we'd like it to go. Instead of giving up prematurely.

	▲	simonask 2 days ago \| parent [-]
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