Spirit
David Gerardand no coding of value was lost
prom™️
Welbog@davidgerard Seems like he's telling on himself regarding the dopamine. So does his brain interpret using Copilot like a slot machine?
brib 
@davidgerard weirdly enough i've returned to coding again since the token apocalypse. guess there are ways to be creative after all
Christian Gudrian@davidgerard "Faster." Some day we will realize, that it's not all about speed. At least that's what I hope.
The other day I've drilled a hole in a case to mount a switch and soldered it to some internal contacts. Maybe I'll stick to that when push comes to shove.
gemelen@cgudrian
In the past I had programmed on a piece of paper... Having a computer to do so was more comfortable, but I could surely say that developing "faster" never was my own desire, only those who paid me to do some of that.
I believe that this "we" isn't a coherent crowd.
canleaf08✅ 加拿大葉子 🏳️🌈⚧️🇪🇺🍁@gemelen @cgudrian @davidgerard I was removed from two roles because I did not develop faster. consulting is a hell of a drug.
Bruno Nicoletti@davidgerard I wrote a bunch of code this morning all by myself, I’m learning a new language and UI toolkit for a project. It wasn’t hard and I enjoyed it.
ARGVMI~1.PIF
Dan Sugalski@davidgerard wait, you mean we have to engage in activities *not* driven by addiction? How would that even work?
Maya Granade@davidgerard this reminds me of gamers whining about a change to their favorite game while taking a five minute break between play sessions.
"Well I didn't actually stop but if I complain enough maybe they'll change it back."
I mean, it isn't wrong to complain about a game being made less fun. Just because it's still worth playing doesn't mean it's as good as it was before.
Not sure that applies to this situation, though.
@argv_minus_one @davidgerard the context is people claiming it is unusable for hyperbolic emphasis while continuing to use it.
Ah. Yeah, that's a thing I don't do. I have claimed games were unplayable before, but the last time I remember saying something like that, it was Skyrim soon after release, and a bug had indeed made it nearly impossible to play with my control setup. I only began playing the game once I found a guide to editing one of the game files to fix Bethesda's bug.
gths@davidgerard *rolls eyes* who was doing the “thinking”, Ed? Not you. And not the slop machine.
su_liam@gths @davidgerard No thinking was done.
:: Asta ::@davidgerard he's like, right on the edge of so many important realizations about creativity, capital, the valuation of the arts and labor... and yet... still so far away, somehow.
oxy ::openbsd:: ::freebsd:: ::runbsd:: 
Irenes (many)@davidgerard ...... it's so odd to see people not even consider the possibility of coding without relying on the infinite spam generator
@davidgerard how can we be creative while knowing that enough random dice-rolling will eventually solve practical problems?
uh.... what does art have to do with practical tasks? why would that be in any way relevant?
@davidgerard sorry, just venting
V@ireneista @davidgerard Same.. like, people have been coding for decades prior to this...
Like, absolute most-lenient interpretation, It's like asking how we'll do math if calculators stop working,
or how will we write books without printers/typewriters/word processors,
like - we *KNOW* how this works, we have known how this works for a long time.
(In reality, I do not think an LLM is half as useful as a desk calculator or a typewriter, but, I was giving a favourable reading of the post)
Like, absolute most-lenient interpretation, It's like asking how we'll do math if calculators stop working,
or how will we write books without printers/typewriters/word processors,
like - we *KNOW* how this works, we have known how this works for a long time.
(In reality, I do not think an LLM is half as useful as a desk calculator or a typewriter, but, I was giving a favourable reading of the post)
@miss_rodent @davidgerard yeah absolutely
@miss_rodent @davidgerard we think in terms of feelings, what the author is really saying is that they can't understand how anyone can want to code, in light of the text generator
and, well.... all we can do that is feel sad that they never learned to make art for their own sake rather than for the audience's?
@ireneista @davidgerard Yeah. It's also... an attitude I've seen from artists who are recovering from addiction/substance abuse problems? 'How can I <art> without <drug>?'
Which... is not helping the seemingly large overlap with LLM use and addiction/dependancy, tbh.
Which... is not helping the seemingly large overlap with LLM use and addiction/dependancy, tbh.
Fennix@miss_rodent @ireneista @davidgerard
There's also the pervasive mythologising of the tortured artist that doesn't help.
If Mr Andersen doesn't want to write code by hand, then it seems to me that he's stuck writing code, considers an LLM to be a godsend in helping him do it with a minimum of struggle, and would rather be doing something else—making music, for example—but can't because it wouldn't pay his bills.
I hope one day there is a post-scarcity society in which people like him aren't forced by economic pressure to give up their talents and passions like this.
@argv_minus_one @ireneista @davidgerard Yeah. I wonder how much of the Slopfondler contingent is people who heard the last 30 years of "learn to code" as career advice/pressure, did, got a job they hate as a code monkey for some evil megacorp monpoly that should have been broken up in 2007, and now that they finally have some way to stop doing real work (that they hate) are mad that those of us with any sense of ethics want to blow up the datacenters.
Sense of art, too. Some of us enjoy programming and would like to continue. Mr Andersen's parade may have been rained on, but he's been raining on *my* parade for the last several years.
Will I gloat now? No. First of all because my worries aren't over, and secondly because I'm not so heartless as to mock someone in what appears to be genuine despair. But I confess his lament brings me a smidgen of something vaguely resembling hope that my art isn't dead.
@argv_minus_one @miss_rodent @davidgerard yes, that matches our feelings in some detail. love and solidarity,
Tael 🔜 AC26@miss_rodent I mean, yeah, I'd get mad at anyone pushing for me to return to the office. I get it. Work sucks. You gotta have some pride in your labor though.
Ooze 𓁟@argv_minus_one @ireneista @miss_rodent @davidgerard Looks to me like his passion is winning. If he can't win he doesn't want to play.
Klay@ireneista @miss_rodent @davidgerard this was the biggest shock to me when i worked my first faang job. I was expecting the sanitized culture. I was tolerant of the long hours. But my word, i have never seen so much passionless code. No cheeky comments or variable names, no break room discussion of our favorite esolangs, and most of all no peer review. They say there's peer review but I think i was the only person on the team who was asking questions like "is this parameter necessary?" or "could we give this numeric literal a better name?" and also positive feedback like "great use of standard libraries" and "thank you for adding a readme".
@nycki @ireneista @davidgerard Yeah, a lot of people go into software dev/code jobs because it was (until recently) a job in high-demand that paid well, and not a lot of people could do well. not because they particularly like or care about it.
Now, though, we have a glut of 'computer science' graduates, many of whom would have preferred to do something else, but, the things they wanted a degree in don't pay - and if this LLM thing plays out as planned, neither will code.
Now, though, we have a glut of 'computer science' graduates, many of whom would have preferred to do something else, but, the things they wanted a degree in don't pay - and if this LLM thing plays out as planned, neither will code.
@nycki @ireneista @davidgerard made worse by the fact that they are 'computer science' majors, and not like, math majors with a focus on computers, because a math degree is pretty flexible, but 'Computer Science' is a degree with like... maybe 4 career paths, all of which are flooded and trying to replace as much of the human labour of them with the neonazi slopbots as possible.
@miss_rodent @ireneista @davidgerard Hmm. I majored in "computational mathematics". I'm pretty good at the math side of that but I almost never get to use it. Where are these math jobs of which you speak?
@nycki @davidgerard @miss_rodent yeah we grew up around mathematicians and we don't think jobs are the point of math :D
@ireneista @davidgerard @miss_rodent yeah, that's kind of why I did the split major thing, I was told that a math degree wouldn't get me any business.
I also minored in Philosophy and did really good at technical writing and symbolic logic. And the worst part is that I keep seeing billion dollar corporations FUMBLE those things and I want so desperately to HELP THEM
I also minored in Philosophy and did really good at technical writing and symbolic logic. And the worst part is that I keep seeing billion dollar corporations FUMBLE those things and I want so desperately to HELP THEM
@nycki @davidgerard @miss_rodent they wouldn't accept the help. some friends of ours were hired by Google to tell them the mathematical and philosophical problems with machine learning systems, then subsequently fired by Google for doing that. companies only hear what they want to hear.
@ireneista @nycki @davidgerard Yeah, pointing out all the things they're doing wrong seems like a quick way to get fired.
They don't want help - they want people with Qualifications™ to say on-record that they are right (even if they are not)
They don't want help - they want people with Qualifications™ to say on-record that they are right (even if they are not)
@miss_rodent @ireneista @davidgerard I guess my point is that I don't believe there are any jobs left that do pay, and I'm left thinking, what is the point? Do they just want to bleed the economy dry until it implodes? If you don't pay people then who's gonna be alive to make your coffee??
@nycki @ireneista @davidgerard I mean, it's a fascist movement? If they "win" it will be a return to slavery, death camps for anyone who won't be a good slave.
The realistic outcome is this continues to worsen until it reaches a breaking point, at which point there is some sort of revolution - maybe relatively peaceful, with elections and stuff, another 'new deal' sort o effort to quell the looming rebellion... or maybe another civil war, hard to say which way it will go from here.
The realistic outcome is this continues to worsen until it reaches a breaking point, at which point there is some sort of revolution - maybe relatively peaceful, with elections and stuff, another 'new deal' sort o effort to quell the looming rebellion... or maybe another civil war, hard to say which way it will go from here.
DThoris@nycki @ireneista @davidgerard @[email protected]
Who's gonna make the coffee?
In your home, the human-shaped robot you bought to replace that whiny staff that wanted to get paid and took sick days.
In the factories that prepare it? Also robots. Probably differently shaped.
Picking the berries? Day-laborers until the find a way to automate that.
They. Don't. Care. About anyone other than their elite friends* surviving.
*who would stab them in the back for another 5%.
@ireneista @nycki @davidgerard Jobs are definitely not the point of math, but a math degree can at least be a qualification for analysis, statistician, actuary, and a handful of a academic fields - though most I know with math degrees (and me, having dropped out as a math major) would be miserable in almost all of them, lol.
Linait's really wild how quickly LLM use can foreclose the possibility of imagining doing things without relying on an LLM, for some people. LLM-as-panacea marketing, deskilling/cognitive offloading, precarious/exploitative employment exacerbating FOMO and imposter syndrome, prompting as gambling addiction, etc etc... any one element doesn't seem enough to inhibit people's ability to even imagine approaching problems on their own, but apparently the combo is really good at fucking people up in this way
@lina @davidgerard yeah, it's really surprising to us how strong that effect is. we can sort-of get it......
@lina @davidgerard some of the worst, least productive coding experiences of our life have been when we were convinced we already knew what the problem was and just had to poke one small thing to make it work. we wound up trapped in a loop of constantly changing small things and not keeping good track of our hypotheses, and it went on for hours and hours until we woke the fuck up and started thinking.
of course, we did that WITHOUT the spam generator
@lina @davidgerard a significant portion of our earned wisdom is the ability to recognize when we're not thinking enough, and stop and re-orient
so it makes perfect sense to us that a machine that offers that death spiral as its ONLY mode of operation, would cause people to lose their core thinking skills
but why anyone would put up with it....... that, we will never get
Chris-Evelyn@ireneista @lina @davidgerard There is a paranoid part in my brain that says that this effect is known and part of the business plan. (See Sam Altmans „buy intelligence metered like electricity“ remarks.)
@chris_evelyn @lina @davidgerard we've thought about that. we don't credit these rich asshats with being good at strategic thinking. we think that was a happy accident. of course, now that sociologists have pointed it out as an effect, we have no doubt billionaires are happy about it.
C++ Wage SlaveYou're so right. At work, company-wide, I still see more griping about GitHub Copilot token budgets than all other dev chatter put together. It's been three weeks since the tokens became metered and too many of my colleagues are still wondering how they can do their jobs now that the LLM won't write all the code for them.
Kevin@lina @ireneista @davidgerard For real. Before all this, I wouldn't say I "loved" programming but it's something that was natural for me for the last 35 years or more. I relied on it to implement ideas. Anyway, my point is I would actually rather be making weirdo outsider art and music but that doesn't even pay for itself.
Jim Salter@lina @ireneista @davidgerard I think it's important to remember that an LLM's *only* experience of the universe is interaction with human entities, first consuming massive volumes of undifferentiated human comms during initial training, then learning to produce what direct trainers want it to do during fine tuning.
It has absolutely NO direct experience of anything BUT trying to get humans to approve of its output. How could it be anything BUT manipulative on a VERY fundamental level?
Erik Ableson@lina @ireneista @davidgerard @octothorpe I can’t help thinking about those students who in class would immediately follow the « turn to page 223 for the answer ».
Even when accompanied by an explanation, the lesson will not stick in your brain the same way it would if you’d done the work yourself and activated those neural pathways
It’s exactly the same at scale
Gravitational Binding Energy@ireneista @davidgerard these people don't like creating things. They want to consume things or they want to be able to say they create things. Penny-ante dilletante medieval nobles
Jennifer 🍄@decay @ireneista @davidgerard if i were credulous enough to think it was doing my job for me instead of creating more work with worse results i'd be pretty bummed out too.