> I try to keep myself sharp by still manually doing a fair amount of things in my life.
This is an absolute larp. No doubt you use a washing machine and not a washboard. Hand coding in a few years will be like using the washboard when there's a washing machine.
Like using a calculator. I use one, but I still use paper math too, and calculate manageable sums/multiplications in my head. I'd feel dull otherwise.
GPS. I use one, but I still pay attention to the route and keep a sense of direction. “Why bother knowing where you are when the machine can tell you?” isn't really an argument for outsourcing your own brain.
Or more generally: it’s perhaps not the best idea to make the entirety of your reasoning ability dependant on something external to you. Doubly so if that’s a tool with a subscription model.
The reason I do maths in my head is that the interface to anything else is still not good enough, or at least my handling of it isn't. Looking and handling a phone takes me out of the situation in a way that feels worse than doing the thing in my head.
If it didn't, if the neural computer interface was real and seamless, I would use that for sure. Come to think of it, I probably wouldn't even notice.
Washing machine suppliers don't charge per wash, per month nor are at the risk of disappearing off the planet due to trillions of dollars of fraudulent circular investment. Thus I don't think I need to worry about the washboard at the moment.
> Washing machine suppliers don't charge per wash, per month
Even ignoring the ongoing electricity and maintenance costs of using a washing machine, plenty of people around the country choose every week to use a pay per wash laundromat rather than a bucket and a washboard. Heck I used to rent a washer and dryer in an apartment, paying per month for the convenience of not using the pay per wash on site laundromat.
> This is an absolute larp. No doubt you use a washing machine and not a washboard. Hand coding in a few years will be like using the washboard when there's a washing machine.
Stop with these terrible comparisons. Code is (mostly) expected to keep working and be maintainable for lots of time following its inception. If your clothes are clean and not destroyed, the task is complete.
The man is surrounded by technologys of convenience.... Is he manually communicating or using a computer and the internet? How does he get everywhere? What about Aircon, heating? I'm guessing he has a fridge, oven, telephone, various white goods. As he doesn't live like the Amish, how does he get his gas, water, electricity... pull then from the ground himself?
So yes, he's larping if he thinks not using an llm is the humble life
I can't make any sense of what you're saying. The only parse that comes out is "if you enjoy technological conveniences in life you must be larping if you think using LLMs for a lot of things is a bad idea".
When you hand code you build an incremental understanding of how the code works. This can be very valuable in cases where precision is needed and change is costly.
The skill of using LLMs for code generation is in recognising these scenarios; knowing when to use it and when to not.
Using a washing machine and a washboard have the same end goal. "I need to wash these clothes, this is a tool that I can use to do that".
If your end goal is "get this piece of software out the door as quickly as possible" then yea - drop the ticket into Jira, that's what the business probably wants anyway.
If you want to garner a deeper understanding of a system, exercise your critical thinking / creative problem solving abilities, improve pattern recognition and memorization abilities... You probably aren't going to get that from "fix ticket-1485, no mistakes"
To me, writing code manually really digs into those "critical thinking skills" at a low level - logic bugs, tracing complex code paths, hell even troubleshooting a syntax issue exercises pattern recognition skills.
It's the same reason I don't use LLMs for communicating with other humans. I think that understanding LLM output, crafting a sentence, highlighting the critical points, and using proper terminology in my OWN writing style requires good language skills and keeps me sharp.
To each their own, but it takes 15-20 minutes a day to rock a leetcode problem and is a great way to get the brain moving.
Not sure I get the "you're a dinosaur" approach. Let people handcode if they want, if they're not performing at work they will be put on PIP or fired, or we'll all be out of a job because AI is so good.
you can practice "critical thinking" at any levels. I bet you don't practice "critical thinking" in ASM or raw binary.
So instead of asking the clanker "fix ticket 1734", you can ask it to write the function that input x and output y, in that file. You still, in some way, "practice critical thinking", while not manually writing code.
Meal? Washing machine wash clothes, dishwashers wash dishes, so something may have been lost in translation.
And even so, the energy efficiency of modern dishwashers with turbidity sensors is very good, and actually can be more efficient than hand-washing, especially if that requires multiple bowls full of water.
Obviously there are limits, but if you stack during the day and stick it on overnight, then it's pretty efficient, even for a single person.
It was, a misunderstandment on my part, however if someone needs multiple bowls full of water for a single person meal, I wonder what kind of exquisite cuisine they are doing for so many pans, plates and cutlery.
Regardless of how efficient a dishwasher might be.
Both views feel extreme to me. When I was single, sometimes I used the dishwasher, and sometimes I washed by hand. In either case I wasn't wasting water, because I didn't run the dishwasher until it was full, which was roughly biweekly.
When washing by hand, I did what you imply you do, which is use much, much less than bowlfulls of water for my meal. I get what parent is saying though, because of the numerous roommates I'd had while single, some of them would use gallons of water to wash a single meals worth of dishes, i.e. the plate, cutlery, and maybe a cup. Much more if they had cooked their meal instead of microwaved it
Modern dishwasher machines are ridiculously efficient. On a normal automatic cycle, my machine will use between 3.4-6.4 gallons of water total. An average kitchen faucet is between 1.5-1.8 gallons / minute based on some spot checking of specs online. Which means it only takes running your faucet for 2-3 minutes before you're into the low side of the washing machine and just 4.5 minutes before you're using more than a fully loaded cycle in the washing machine would use. I recently had a month where we couldn't use the dishwasher and washed by hand every night. Our water usage for the month was noticeably higher for that month than it has been in any month before or since. It's really kind of crazy how good a modern dishwasher is.
I think this can be extended. Wasting time playing music or drawing or writing by hand would also be like using the washboard when there's a washing machine.
There is so many things that AIs can do just as well and much faster. Not just coding but all other kinds of things in art and craft. Like why sculpt anything by hand when you can just get AI do model and then 3d print it.
> Like why sculpt anything by hand when you can just get AI do model and then 3d print it.
Recreation is different, you're doing it for the fun of it, to learn.
This is a common misdirection. Nobody is charting with an AI song. Nobody cares about AI pop music. People are however using ai for jingles, interstitials, elevator music etc because nobody cares if some failed musician has poured his heart and soul into a theme tune for the menu of an educational dvd, they just want the end product... Nobody cares if formulaic crap is soulless, because it already was.
Washing by hand, both dishes and clothes, as well as drying them "old school" are all skills I found very practical to keep even if rarely used (hand washing dishes is pretty common when for me though if I only have one or two items...)
Not really a good comparison, sometimes I still quickly use the washboard than load up the washing machine when all is needed is a quick rinse, or when the washing machine is running and I don't want to leave a mess.
I get what you're going for, but it's not a good comparison.
I guarantee trying to save dying species is just an emotional reaction with very little logic behind it. I know it feels sad to see them go, but that's life. We like nothing to suffer, but somebody's gotta be eaten alive from head to toe, right? THATS LIFE
There's plenty of logic to it, but it depends on your values. What do you value? If you care about your descendants or humanity in general, then undoing some of our destruction of habitats and the outsized impact of our predation/invasive species introduction is a benefit.
This is an illogical comment. If you value nothing then you have nothing to gain by logic anyway. What's the logic in eating if you don't value your life?
If the species are dying because of us then it's not just life, it's our behavior driving their extinction. Logic doesn't tell you what to value. You value whatever, then you reason about what you value, how to preserve it, etc.
Isn't an ecosystem an arbitrary area somewhere on the planet? Weather is a massive effect on these so called ecosystems and it is global. You might say there is only one single global ecosystem
The earth isn't split up into separate "ecosystems" split by continent and land mass you realise? It's one big system that isn't even sealed off from outer space. And in terms of a truly barren planet, the Sahara is teeming with life
The earth is a system of many systems, individual systems within it can collapse and desertification is one of the ways it happens. Runaway collapse of smaller systems can lead to primary system collapse.
The Sahara is teeming with life compared to Mars, but we also know it once hosted significantly more life before it was a desert. That old system collapsed.
You're reading past most of what I'm saying. I was speaking in relative terms and more or less said that literally. The Sahara in its current state is much more barren in terms of ecological diversity than it once was.
you can't answer that question without also specifying who benefits from the diversity, and if it's "for humans" then the sahara currently doesn't contain enough to support the surrounding population on its own
additionally, humans are currently contributing to desertification in a way most other species can not
if your point is that "deserts would have existed anyway" that's fine, but it's still the collapse of a localized system due to external factors (in this case, a system collapse caused by earth's orbit/axial changes)
> The planet is then left to cook in this manner for some centuries.
Such destruction went on to create humanity and all we've achieved. Maybe there is an even smarter species waiting in the wings for the demise of homo sapiens. Your logic is very human centred
Yes, I am describing a tragic outcome that I hope we can be wise enough to steer away from. Also, as a human, I can't help but keep our interests close at heart.
Most straightforwardly: literally taking control over the electricity generation facilities. Less straightforwardly: bitcoin (and other cryptocurrency) miners. Even less straightforwardly: the same way the OpenAI et al. pay for their electricity, by selling the capabilities of its AI for interested parties to use.
With crypto.. that it makes on Polymarket-like ways, or creates its own content? Or blackmail humans? :-) I'm not entirely serious with my comment and do agree with you that there are lots of more immediate safety topics we should address before worrying about the AI becoming self-aware. That said, finding ways of accumulating valuable resources could be intermediate activities the AIs will attempt to do to complete it's 'goals' even when they're human-set!
Can it perform valuable services in exchange for currency? Hack poorly secured accounts to obtain control oftheir money? Start a GoFundMe pretending to be a noble cause? Make some well-timed investments? Run a viral YouTube channel? Elevator-pitch a gullible VC?
There's lots of ways to pay for electricity, and many of them don't even require a body.
This is an absolute larp. No doubt you use a washing machine and not a washboard. Hand coding in a few years will be like using the washboard when there's a washing machine.