The story is not a linguistic/rhetorical trick. The "trick" is the point, and the real trick/delusion is in your brain. You and many others have put the idea of consciousness on a pedestal and think it's so special that is must be conceptually profound.
It is not. That is why the "trick" can be performed on anything. That is the point. To show you that consciousness only needs to be a set of weights, not that far off from a toaster. It trivializes what it is to be human and it's also extremely true. Consciousness is a trivial thing, we make it out to be big/important/profound and that is the delusion.
HNers have strong incentive to feel the opposite. Humanity in general has strong incentive to feel the opposite.
AI is not only replacing programmers, but art and the meaning of being human itself. It's showing us how trivial all of human creation is as it's just patterns from an algorithm.
And you stand to lose your job and your identity as a programmer.
He makes billions but he already is a billionaire. Gaining billions more doesn't mean shit. The guy really has nothing to lose and the utility of what he gains contribute little to his life style.
I will tell you this. HN has been comically wrong about everything related to AI. They said driverless cars have no chance of becoming useable. Now Tesla FSD is almost there and I sleep in waymo cars. HN said AI will never code, now everyone uses it to code.
It's fucking stupid. This is one of the smartest forums on the internet but HN becomes next to stupid when predicting AI. Why? Because humans can't face the truth. When the victim of attack is yourself, it doesn't matter how smart you are... you have to scaffold a rationalization to spare yourself as the victim. You have to lie to yourself and tell yourself that you matter.
The truth of it is, while LLMs are not the end game, AI in general is on a trajectory to take over. It shows us how meaningless our skills are... not only as programmers but as artists. That beautiful song you felt had greater meaning? It's all reproducible via an algorithm because it never really had a greater meaning. It was just a pattern.
> Gaining billions more doesn't mean shit. The guy really has nothing to lose and the utility of what he gains contribute little to his life style.
You don’t become a billionaire because you aren’t committed to making a number go up far after you no longer have any significant unmet needs. He’s spending his life focused on business deals because that’s what he cares most about — if his true love was science, philanthropy, etc. he’d have been able to do that full time a couple decades ago.
I mean in the end this is still theft. Someone spent time and effort working on this. And you took a shit on that effort because it was inconvenient not to. Like the creators of said content you stole would not approve of what you did.
I totally get it. I'm a thief as well. But I guess the difference is, I don't need to rationalize everything into some sort of twisted sense justice. I steal because I don't care what the creator thinks.
I truly feel old when we are rehashing the same thing that happened when TPB, Limewire etc were taking off.
Down to the arguments being made why this is “theft”. I also can’t believe that the arguments by the general pop have shifted to support multi billion dollar companies and their narrative.
There is nothing to negate because there was never a theft in the first place. Consult the laws of your country before making wild assertions and ask a lawyer if you cannot understand them yourself.
It’s like saying the death penalty isn’t murder because the law says it’s not.
I guess in your mind hitler isn’t a mass murderer because what he was doing was technically legal under his regime. To each their own if that’s how you want to logically frame your moral logic.
Personally imo, if I create something and that something is MY work of art and what I put my own blood sweat and tears into, and I want it to be inconvenient to watch because that’s my prerogative, that doesn’t give you the fucking right to watch it. I don’t want someone like you watching it.
Wow. Bringing up murder and hitler when talking about piracy. Some parts of the internet are truly eternal.
None of this is new. None of your ideas are unique. Stop attempting to draw moral equivalency to theft or anything else.
Back in the glory days of piracy, profits from entertainment kept going up? You know why? Those pirates were almost certainly not going to pay in the first place. No one lost money. It was university students, high schoolers, plain old poor people that were pirating.
Making it hard to watch your movie didn’t raise revenue, we all just did something else. Because we had no money.
Seems like the opposite to me. We don't like theft because the victim loses something. If stealing a car spawned a new car for you while the "victim" kept his, would it be a problem? So I don't really get the murder analogy. It's more like if the government had defined some act as murder even though nobody died.
Claiming you have 4k resolution when you upscale (damn, those DS9 episodes looked really terrible on Netflix) and claiming sound quality when you have none, is still theft.
it is. It's like if you're son or daughter was really just a piece of shit human being and I murdered your child.... It's still murder. No amount of excuses can justify it.
“The hard part of writing software has never been the writing.”
I’m tired of these endless articles on HN about software engineers trying to reinvent their identity while trying not to lose touch with reality.
One way of dealing with LLMs is to deny the skill level of LLMs. Claim they can’t code as well as you. This excuse works to a certain extent but it also fails because not only are their multitudes of cases where the LLM IS intrinsically worse than me… but there are multitudes of cases where it is better. So this excuse cannot be universally true.
The other way is to claim software engineering was never the hard part of engineering and that other things were harder and that was always where your primary skill was located. This excuse is also idiotic. First, Software engineering is hard. It is genuinely not something that anyone can pick up very quickly. Second, all those other “skills” like “domain expertise” are STILL targets for the LLM. It’s not like the LLM exclusively is only good at software.
Just face the goddamn truth. AI is on a trajectory to dominate. That’s what all the trendlines say. It’s not currently dominating, but it’s close, and the trajectory points to an endgame where it is fundamentally better. The trendline could be wrong but the trendline is the best quantitative predictor we have and it’s been trumping all the half baked theories on HN where people were claiming self driving cars would never happen and AI could never code. HN was historically wrong… the trendlines and the VCs who made those bets have been right. So who’s the bigger idiot? Those VCs creating the AI bubble or HNers who have been continuously wrong about everything? (Minus crypto, HNers were right about crypto).
If the trendline is true our skills as engineers not just the software part is on track to being dominated by an artificial intelligence. The tools trivialize your skills until all the moats are gone. Not only that… AI is becoming better at art. Poetry, writing, paintings, music… AI shows us how trivially reproduceable all of it is. That is the truth. We aren’t not unique and all the meaning behind being human is just an algorithm. It’s all reproducible. Even your self delusional attempt to deny and delude yourself away from these truths is predictable. I can see someone formulating a retort right now.
Have you considered becoming a residential electrician? Good job, pays well, lots of problem solving, and it won’t be replaced with an AI. I’m serious!
If a real AI job apocalypse hits there will be no escaping it for anyone.
Even people whose job can't be done by AI will be impacted because there will be far less demand for their services (everyone whose job IS directly AI replaceable will be a brokie) and there will also be far more supply of people moving into their field to escape all the jobs AI does directly replace.
"Join the trades" is the new "learn to code" in terms of seeming like good advice but having a very short shelf life.
A lot of the trades involve physical work, can be seasonal, and ride the construction cycle up and down. The employers tend to be small, and many are family owned, so they are "off the radar" of OSHA and EEOC. You may be at the mercy of bias and nepotism.
The trades are great, but not a panacea. Maybe emigrate to a country with better conditions for the working class.
I’d go with physical therapy! Or something else that’s closer to humans and health. “Problem solving” becomes that much more tangible and directly meaningful to another person
chatgpt can already do a big part of this job since most of the "therapy" needs to be self directed. So consult the AI and have it tell you what you need to do.
Why do you think people get trained by a PT in person? Its not simply training - it actually goes well beyond into the realm of 'wellness'. man you are a certified bozo.
Only about 10% to 20% of PT genuinely sessions need to be in person. It's similar to going to a doctors office, not every appointment technically needs to happen in person. That makes most PT sessions basically AI-able.
It takes a lot of balls to call me a bozo when it's obvious you're the one who's an idiot.
Good comment but I think the timelines are not clear. Humans are an algorithm. This was true before AI. In certain domains (playing chess e.g.) machines have already surpassed humans. Humans still play chess though and chess is more popular than ever.
I still drive my car and self driving cars have yet to displace human drivers. I think the sentiment on HN and other places when Google started talking self driving cars circa 2009 is that it's harder than it looks. Typically the first 80% of progress is easy and the rest isn't as easy. We're almost 20 years after a "pretty good self driving car" and we're still not at "self driving cars outperform humans under all situations".
Today humans use AI. You can't fire up Claude and ask it "what do you want to work on today". The amount of context we have as humans is vastly larger than the context LLMs have. If you give LLMs vague context they're completely lost. They are mind blowing in many ways but they are not anywhere close to AGI. They're also not close to being able to build complex software only guided by someone who has no idea what software is and how computers work. They can do some of that but I've yet to see any major successful piece of software built that way. They also consume vast physical resources to get the job done.
Before LLMs I think it was a given that at some point we would have AGI that's smarter than us. Machines we build aren't constrained by the biological constraints we are subject to and can evolve faster than we have. But when that's gonna happen, whether that's actually LLM-like in architecture, and what things will look like once that happens, are fairly open questions at this point. In the mean time LLMs can certainly generate a lot of code and we can use them to build more stuff.
>Good comment but I think the timelines are not clear. Humans are an algorithm. This was true before AI. In certain domains (playing chess e.g.) machines have already surpassed humans. Humans still play chess though and chess is more popular than ever.
It was always true even before AI, AI just makes it more evident since Transformers are LITERALLY an algorithm that produces content nearly identical to content humans produce.
ELIZA also produced something similar to what humans produce. Transformers are pretty amazing but they're not at s/human/transformer/. They're limited in context, learning and long term performance in ways that are pretty significant and not trivial to overcome. You can see that as you increase the complexity of the work you're asking them to do in different dimensions.
It is premature to conclude that someone is wrong and will ultimately be replaced, as the final verdict on LLMs is not yet in. In fact, recent trends show rather negative outcomes. Multiple analyses continuously indicate that recent layoffs are driven by the normalization of the post-pandemic bubble and economic recession due to wars, not LLMs. Companies are merely using LLMs as a convenient excuse to frame hiring freezes as innovation. Furthermore, many companies are reconsidering LLM adoption due to cost and efficiency issues.
You claim to be rational and logical, but your argument completely lacks substance and is just full of highly subjective claims. Your 'prediction' is closer to astrology than actual forecasting. Sure, prophecies hit the mark by chance every now and then, but that doesn’t prove the person has any predictive ability. That is precisely what your argument looks like: completely confident without a single piece of evidence. To top it off, you totally abandoned reason and logic in your last sentence. Saying that anyone who disagrees with you is just deluding themselves and that you already know what people will say to snap back is exactly the kind of stuff a cult leader would say.
You're completely giving up based on some strange delusion. I don't even blame you for that. But it's genuinely ridiculous how you use it as an excuse to attack others and act all smug while pushing your defeatist arguments.
"Just face the goddamn truth. AI is on a trajectory to dominate. That’s what all the trendlines say. It’s not currently dominating, but it’s close, and the trajectory points to an endgame where it is fundamentally better. The trendline could be wrong but the trendline is the best quantitative predictor we have and it’s been trumping all the half baked theories on HN where people were claiming self driving cars would never happen and AI could never code. "
This is what I wrote. ^ Please respond to that, rather then not addressing the nuance in my argument.
There's certainly a whole lot of "it was never the coding that was our value" articles about right now. I agree that they represent a degree of self delusion to an extent. But it's also a useful examination of where your value might lie in this new AI age. I think there will be a role for humans in it - where exactly it lies is obviously up in the air.
It’s a black box in the sense that we know the process used by LLMs to “reason” is very different than how humans reason and make decisions.
The whole point of “jury of your peers” is that your guilt or innocence is being decided by people with common life experience to you and thus the possibility of empathy and judging you fairly.
We only know it’s different. But we don’t know how it reasons or how humans reason. Just because it is different doesn’t make his black box argument valid. It remains invalid despite your new irrelevant point.
Ignore the fluff. Focus on the logic and stay rational. The black box argument is not at all valid.
We know other humans reason something like us because we know how we ourselves reason through the most direct experience possible and know that our fellow humans are very similar to us.
We know the LLM can be similar because we train it on data from us as well. We also know the LLM can be different, but we also know humans are different too.
Examples like psychopaths tells us how different humans can be. It’s all black boxes.
Right so you prefer psychopaths over LLMs to make the decision? Be real. How similar it is, is irrelevant.
You're STILL wrong on the black box argument. Humans are still black boxes. And btw, you said this is "dumb" what you're really implying is that * I * am dumb. But look very hard at the logic in your argument. I think it's categorically factual that the only dumbass here is actually you. I'm not gonna hide this behind some "This is dumb" passive aggressive bullshit. YOU are dumb.
No, your reasoning is flawed: a judge or a jury is voted, appointed or selected through a process which is the result of centuries civilization, norms and legislation. As corrupt it might be in some cases, it is expression of mankind.
They are not a black box, they passed rigourous examinations and they stick to principles enshrined in constitutions and laws.
Technology, or better, the productization of it, is instead the result of the interest of very few powerful individuals or corporations and aggressive product market fit iterations.
The bullish discourse around the PMF loop says that this is good because it is better at solving people's problems. But after a few decades it is obvious there's a gigantic risk the process actually exploits people's problems instead of actually solving them.
The system doesn't stick to principles enshrined in the constitution and law. Often or usually it does. Certainly not always. Theoretically there are other humans to force them to when they stray but that's gated behind 10s of thousands to appeal and is up against a system designed first to protect itself.
It also ignores the reality of going to a jury. Yes you have the right to trial by jury. But the price to exercise that right is to risk an much much more severe punishment, a lot of money, and a lot of time.
There's also tremendous upside here. Think getting a letter from your landlord withholding $2,000. Upload it to JudgeGPT for your jurisdiction and instantaneously find out it's legal.
Your argument is just additional validations upon a stated fact that a jury and a judge is still a black box. Your retort is factual but illogical because it does not invalidate my point.
All humans are black boxes and the black box argument is completely invalid just like your statement. In fact your statement illustrates the downfall of human intuition. You could not logically invalidate my point so you descended into side channels that’s not far off from “hallucinations.”
Unless you can read minds they are a black box. They are only expressions of society because the inputs and outputs into these people are from society and similar to society. But the same can be said of LLMs. Your reasoning is irrational.
Because the objective truth is that what the LLM or author outputted was CLEARLY only using furniture as a metaphor. The metaphor wasn't good but HNers are taking it completely out of context. There's nothing mean here. Just objective facts.
This is exactly what I was trying to say, but kindly. The metaphor wasn't great, and I dodnt want to he unkind to the author. Enough people were doing that.
I found the fact that people couldn't identify it as a metaphor was much more alarming.
Well here's the million dollar question. It's a maintenance dead end for humans to read and edit. But for an LLM, is it a maintenance deadend? Could the LLM iterate on that same code base and be highly effective on it?
Yes it is a maintenance deadend for LLMs it's notorious codebases start accumulating enormous amount of tech debt and that it gets almost impossible to unravel it even with the best agent
I've never seen it happen. You say this and it's likely one anecdotal claim. At the same time there's counter points like Bun getting rewritten in rust.
This is talk and talk is cheap. Prove it, otherwise it's still a million dollar question... unanswered.
HN is notoriously mentally deficient when it comes to AI. They were wrong about self driving cars (I sit in AI cars daily), they were wrong about AI getting used for coding (I don't use an IDE or type code anymore as a SWE). So I have to say unless there's something evidence based or substantial here it's likely given HN track record that most people here will end up being another wrong, baseless and over confident answer.
I'm looking for legit answers not confidently biased statements with no evidence.
Bun getting rewritten in Rust is not really the counter point you think it is. The rust version hasn't shipped yet, so there hasn't even been a chance to see if the code can be maintained. It's an impressive feat no doubt, but until they've maintained it on a months to years timeline, it's also just talk with no evidence.
Sigh. I'm sorry you're scared of AI. I hope you find happiness in your life and something else to replace your identity with once AI completely eclipses your utility in society as a coder.
Right, it's still a datapoint. There's blurry and not completely substantiated datapoints from both sides. We don't have a full picture... we have a blurry picture.
The issue is a lot of people form definitive conclusions from blurry data. I'm challenging that type of bias. For example: How the hell do we know LLMs produce code that LLMs can't maintain? Like did you actually try it? And what about the instances where it worked? I don't think the answer is as clean/cut as yes/no. Even if we had data, most likely the data will be contradictory data in the sense that some AI projects worked, some descended into slop.
> So I have to say unless there's something evidence based or substantial here it's likely given HN track record that most people here will end up being another wrong, baseless and over confident answer.
Again only in the bubble you live in. You want evidence? There are zero killer app products out there. Not even one, the ones that seems impressive like bun zig to rust, it's just an experiment and will see how bad it will unravel.
And the existing products? They get shittier day by day at rate not seen before.
Or are u building one via codex inside the ai car while u eat a burrito?
Oh you mean the USA bubble? sorry i didn't consider somalia or wherever backwater place you live.
>Again only in the bubble you live in. You want evidence? There are zero killer app products out there. Not even one, the ones that seems impressive like bun zig to rust, it's just an experiment and will see how bad it will unravel.
It's called claude code and bun and practically every company building a SAAS app. that's evidence.
>And the existing products? They get shittier day by day at rate not seen before.
That's your opinion. Obviously people who make more money than you and are smarter than you and are more powerful than you think otherwise.
>Or are u building one via codex inside the ai car while u eat a burrito?
When you insult someone like this. It's a sign that you got nothing substantial to say. It's a cowardly move and you're a coward. I'm not trying to insult you here. Just stating a fact plain and simple fact: You're a little coward. You're afraid to face reality.
Still not a substantial answer. Why not? Because you don't have one. Only insults.
You're truly a little coward, and this is not an insult, I'm just objectively stating who you are. You're afraid to face the fact that AI is on a trajectory to be a better programmer than you.
It is not. That is why the "trick" can be performed on anything. That is the point. To show you that consciousness only needs to be a set of weights, not that far off from a toaster. It trivializes what it is to be human and it's also extremely true. Consciousness is a trivial thing, we make it out to be big/important/profound and that is the delusion.
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