aevaI've been thinking a lot lately about the art education I got 20 years ago, and the importance that was placed upon learning how to really see what is in front of you, how to deconstruct the technical aspects of other works, looking at a lot of art, collecting good reference images, and talking about art.
This process is really important for developing and maintaining the technical skills of working in traditional media, because if you are not able to establish cultural and observational reference points you lose the ability to "see" as you work. Like, after you have been working on something for several hours everything sorta looks correct and wrong at the same time, and if you don't have something to ground it you'll drift in ways you don't want to.
It is also a really important set of skills for learning, because you can go to an art museum and look at works that inspire you and figure out (or make an educated guess at) the technical processes that their author used to make them, and then you can apply your learnings to making something new. You don't go to the museum to find things to copy without understanding.
One of my peers from that art program once remarked to me that she's seen interesting things happen in the works of artists that either don't have this training or only reference art made by other amateurs - work that is not anchored in either a cultural tradition or naturalistic observation or both tends to drift in strange ways
the example she gave was a self taught artist who only referenced manga, but was not familiar with the techniques or anchors the mangaka they were copying themselves knew, and so said artist's style ended up exaggerating all of the stylistic elements of the manga they were referencing
my point to all of this is, I don't at all believe you can look at / watch / read / listen to something and not be changed by it even in a small way. the human brain is a hungry for patterns to learn from, and everything you learn is eventually pruned or mutated through continuous re-encoding. you need to keep absorbing high quality examples and information throughout your career to preserve your skills. I think this applies generally.
this is why I think slop is so damaging, especially so as it gets harder to spot, because you're feeding yourself with vacuous garbage that superficially resembles information. if you accept it as valid, every related skill that you've worked hard to sharpen up to that point is fundamentally at risk because as they get re-encoded they will be adapted to accommodate the miscategorized noise.
now, not everything you see in the world is going to help your career as an artist, and I think it's true that there's plenty of things you can internalize that are destructive to your ability to make the things you want to make. that sounds pretentious, but I don't think it is: a simple example is internalizing the idea that you shouldn't make art because you don't already have the skills to do it with perfection is effective at preventing many from ever developing those skills.
anyways, my conclusion from this right now is it may be a good idea as a professional programmer who wishes to retain her hard earned skills, to make a regular habit of going to the museum as it were~~regularly reading the source code of successful projects that have non-superficial high standards, understanding how it works, why it works, why it is the way it is, and also looking at the history of how it grew over time.
I say "non-superficial" because strict adherence to a random grab bag of engineering best practices is not holding yourself to high standards if you don't understand any of them. That's just posturing.
Fabian Giesen@aeva These last few years have broken something deep within me and I have no idea what to do with myself now.
It's not about the generative whatever particularly, that's certainly not helped but it's mostly yet another manifestation of something that's been eating at me for way longer.
@aeva I want to understand, and to be understood.
That's not the only thing about me, but it's a core tenet about my personality and my construction of identity.
Almost everything I do flows from that in one way or another.
That's why I default to these long, rambling info-dumps, for example.
@aeva Probably my most formative single childhood experience is, over and over and over again, running into and beyond the limits of what my parents were able to explain to me (they really tried, but especially pre-internet, which this was, you run into a wall of how many difficult research-requiring questions of a precocious child you can actually answer in any given day), and likewise, my continuing inability to explain what's in my head.
@aeva My parents were gracious about this, other adults in my life, less so.
Shout-out to the teachers at my nursery school who decided that a 4yo couldn't possibly actually want to know how a differential transmission worked and that therefore I must be some attention-whoring little bitch who loves to pick up words I don't understand and who should really shut the fuck up. (Not in those words, mind - this was a CATHOLIC pre-school! - but the sentiment was there.)
@aeva er, lots more to unpack there I guess (not for here!) but suffice it to say that the preemptive infodumping is a tic I picked up right around that time (I was verbal pretty early, but the infodumping started then - there's "video evidence" from my uncle, who had a camcorder. Very clear diff between me before/after entering nursery school).
So, er, yeah. Some damage there. Anyway, the over-explaining/desperately wanting to be understood has _deep_ roots.
@aeva More to the actual point, like it or not, this has just turned into a schema of what I look for in personal relationships.
(It's just been really hard all my life to find anyone who can actually follow along when I get going.)
Anyway. What does this have to do with the current mess? I'm getting there, but first another, much more recent episode.
@aeva This was a few years ago, on Twitter.
A mutual, who I'd met in person, replied to me posting a link to a new blog post with something to the effect of "Oh great! Always love your posts. Usually don't understand a word though."
They thought they were giving me a compliment, what they actually gave me were the seeds of an existential crisis.
And I know it was hyperbole, but the "don't understand a word" has been living rent-free in my head ever since.
@aeva It's one thing if at some point two thirds through a post I go off on some tangent that matters to me but that 95% of readers don't care about.
But "don't understand a word"? I really, _really_ try to make my technical writing as clear as I know how to and if the end result is, apparently, incomprehensible gobbledygook, then what the fuck is the point of writing any of it in the first place?
@aeva So that's _that_ light-hearted tangent.
Now, finally, on to my actual point.
As alluded to in both of these digressions, I deeply care both about understanding what I am doing, and about being understood.
Often to my detriment. I shouldn't care as much as I do. It's not something I can turn off. And like it or not, it's directly intertwined with my need for human connection.
@aeva Figuring out a solution to a problem, having a seed of understanding within it, and getting to share that seed with others is, not to mince words, the only reason I put up with any of this shit.
A friend mentioned his pet theory a while back that shepherding LLMs sucks for people who like programming because that means now they have to be managers and that's a different skill set.
@aeva That's not _entirely_ wrong but it's missing the point by a mile if you ask me.
It _is_ a different kind of activity, but it's not "management" either.
You get to play-act as the world's worst micro-manager constantly telling your "agents", who never learn a damn thing, to try again.
Mentoring or managing somebody (hopefully!) involves some kind of development where they learn something and grow into their position.
@aeva That's not what's happening here.
You're in a groundhog day loop with an intern with infinite stamina, ADHD and hopped up on 3 cans of Monster Energy cranking out piles of code between bouts of tachycardia, and every hour they hit the neuralyzer and need everything explained all over again.
I don't know what ring of hell exactly this is, but it _is_ a ring of hell, and it's not "management" by any sane definition of the term.
@aeva Mind, I'm not actually doing any of this stuff. But. BUT.
There are _so many_ people around me who are, apparently, dead set on treating the scenario I just described like it's a desirable outcome instead of a dystopian nightmare, and actively working towards it.
I guess if you treat programs as some necessary evil that's a speed barrier between you and all your glorious plans working out, there's some sense to that.
@aeva It just so happens to be that if you're some misguided rube like me, apparently, who cares about how programs can be some concrete embodiment of entirely abstract ideas that you could otherwise never communicate to anyone, this is just casually shitting on your life's work and going "yeah who needs THAT".
And I _hate_ how this sounds melodramatic and petty but I have no other words for it.
@aeva This is not about the tools themselves. There's _so many_ problems there, and much has been written about it, but that's not what I'm getting at.
The thing that's _really_ getting to me is just how much of the SW world, including so many people around me, is going "oh yes, finally" about this.
I've always felt pretty alone in my caring about things the way I do but was telling myself that I did find my people who care about things the same way in the end. Evidently, no.
Daniel Fortes@rygorous @aeva I just want to say this: Thank you for these words. I have always followed the stuff you write. I am not an extremely accomplished developer or anything, and it has been rough lately. I'm getting tired of being disappointed, seeing people I had only respect for joyfully hoping on the hype train (that will end who knows where), so it gives me some solace when I see technically talented people like you that still have their heart in the right place
Kraftwerk-Das Model Collapse@dfortes @rygorous my new normal: someone posts about their flashy new software project that sounds interesting. I go to their git repo and check - open source, no LLM config files. Great. continue watching intro video "... Like anyone dipping their toes into agentic codi—"
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