> There is a reason why we have consumer protection. Life doesn't need to be hard by default :D
i dunno if you've been paying attention but the erosion of consumer protections is very on the nose in that companies are.. just kind of getting away with a lot of things now. it would seem meaningful accountability is rather absent as of late.
so, do your thing i suppose. but i genuinely hope you don't have to learn any important lessons the hard way. we can all disagree on the net but i dont wish terrible stuff to happen to anyone here so instead i will say good luck
i had to have been like 3 years old when i played this game. didnt even know it had a name. just seeing it visually made me realize i still have memories there, i literally wouldve never thought of it again for the rest of my life if it wasn't for this wow.
> If I was more “productive”, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with what I was producing. My attention and cognitive broadband is the bottleneck.
this is so damn important. none of this shit matters at all if your headspace is destroyed.
I have a coworker who is not yielding to these feelings and i swear to god he just isn't the same person anymore and i legitimately worry about the guy. He's one of those that saw AI as an opportunity to do the "massive, grand no-finish-line" type projects: super DUPER knowledge bases/wikis or for his personal projects some super grand encyclopedia of his family history and profiles on each person and it's just like exhausting to hear about, it's even more exhausting to see how exhausted he looks all the time. The only thing that gives him dopamine is stuff he's done with AI, and I have really tried a few times now to say hey man this stuff is.. addicting. And with all things addicting, moderation is key. He's seriously anxious all the time now.
I just took a 1.5 month break from work, and in that time I haven't touched Claude. It's been great I can't lie. I'm so much happier and ironically busier, away from my computer. Feels like I got a nice dose of life and I'm reminded what's important and that really isn't omega-maxing my productivity.
This tech can help ya do more with less effort, sure. But everyone's kneejerk reaction is to fill it with doing bigger, grander, and .. more. Seems a lot of people have lost sight of how much should one human brain feasibly manage, even if it's simplified through prompting there is assuredly a mental toll with the amount of things and the size of things people are now taking on.
The problem is that some people go searching for content that they disapprove of, then complain loudly for engagement. They find it even if the “algorithm” doesn’t show them the content that they want. This then creates trolls who farm their own engagement off of the offended.
This particular site was doomed because it tried to control those people while failing to explicitly identify the problem. They mistook it for a one-sided political issue, then they found themselves with a bunch of politically aligned people who were (shock) still arguing about what content was “appropriate,” and still provoking each other to farm engagement.
"There is a market for everything, man
There is a market for pet psychologists, n**
There is a market for twisted shit fetish videos
For nipple rings, for river dancing, for chocolate covered roaches
But you can't find one for (furry porn)?"
my brain ejects out of my skull when i see the EM dash. it's sort of insane to me people are willing to use LLM's to make stuff, but they can't even take the time to write why they think it's a valuable contribution. the shortcutting is off the charts, and this and a sea of other things shall go into the no thanks bin
that's a shame! there's a lot of english authors, even before LLMs, who made generous use of em-dashes. You're really locking yourself out of a lot of nice literature! This blog post too~
I agree with your general point but I really hate that the em dash has become so hated because it’s something I use commonly and have done before GPTs.
it doesn't worry me too much tbh. This is really just cutting corners and going this route leaves you with some kind of additive ship of theseus piece of software you don't understand and require your frontier model to work with, which just... becomes more additive and gross.
right now we're in some proverbial heyday of everyone seeing how absolutely grand of a thing they can make with frontier models.
over time i expect some old design philosophies to take hold with people who use LLM's successfully and find a place again paired with developers who understand why such layered methodologies are important... because this whole AI thing wasn't the silver bullet CEO's and crazy execs thought it was. They will eventually get sick of the support burden of badly designed stuff. i anticipate a bit of pendulum swinging back towards "still using AI, but we need smart people to do it because it's expensive and we want it done right". Right now a lot of companies are being extremely reckless imo and they haven't fully realized/felt the cost implications of trainwreck software yet.
Asking the LLM to 'just' fix 'it', or whatever, is going to get you lost in the woods.
You're car will have spun off the road and you'll find it harder and harder to control it and keep it on the road because you have less and less visibility into the vehicle, nor will you be able to clearly see out your windscreen to use the car and road metaphor. You'll be driving blind eventually, unless your working on some simple closed toy problems and/or other small systems.
Building large systems means understanding the system. Without understanding the system, you lose control of it.
The LLM can probably help you understand the system to gain/regain some control of it again, but now you're becoming a system specialist rather than someone who's repeating, "fix it" and "make it good" or whatever.
There are a whooooole lot of people writing software who, despite spending years on the craft, never really get any further than McGuyver mode.
Self-trained people (like me) are particularly susceptible to it and we're heavily represented in the software world. A lot of us either recognise that (or are coached) and invest the time learning the benefits, and limitations of, software architecture. And, importantly, keep reflecting, learning and updating our practise.
I keep going back to the YOLO mode every other year and try out new languages to see if we still need the structure and abstractions. Then VMs came along and all I can say is they're both even more important and now we have an army of virtual "ADHD idiot juniors developers" at our finger tips it's even easier to tell the good and bad abstractions from each other.
In a way, that’s the situation today. You can pay an experienced developer $$$$ to do it right, or you can outsource it and pay $$ but pay extra for more layers of review, have lots of unfixed bugs and more tech debt.
You are proposing that instead we pay the frontier model to clean it up. If it can, I expect it to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of an experienced dev because that’s the alternative. That’s the way the frontier AI companies will extracting the value of the work from you.
> I expect it to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of an experienced dev because that’s the alternative.
That's only true if a single company owns the frontier, otherwise the alternative is "a rival frontier model" and the cost will be the marginal price of the compute + amortized training costs.
I can not rely on Opus 5.5+ to "fix" whatever crops up. Claude is great but should it find a security related bug one too many times, it gets the Anthropic Shock Collar [cyber]! and I have to pick Opus 4.8 or older to continue and they try to up-sell Mythos which I am not permitted to use without going through their verification program that they will not offer to me. Thankfully for most of my hobby tasks (thats all I do now) Opus 4.8 is usually mostly good enough. In my opinion their newer models are powerful but not something I can rely on. Maybe I am one of the few running into this.
IMO the fundamental principles and "conflicts" are still the same, but many have forgotten about them with all the hype and sense of speed. The industry will slowly rediscover them.
> haven't fully realized/felt the cost implications of trainwreck software yet
As long as the API is private or not dependent on by automated systems and you have good test coverage, you can get away with bad code IMO since you can always refactor. If it looks stupid but it works (and can be refactored/fixed/improved later if needed) it aint stupid.
Buggy slop products will burn buyers and then people will buy less. The very-early-80s video game companies shoveled out slop, including a few games that wouldn't even launch. Which led to the Great Video Game Crash of 1983.
I can't be sure but I vaguely recall it being associated with the big Microsoft antitrust court case? Along with the delightful phrase "knifing the baby"
i feel like i have to shower after using windows. a decade ago when i left the only OS id ever known and grew up on behind, i was scared my computing experience would pale in comparison. boy was i wrong, windows just kind of ... sucks.
once i finally outgrew the tribalism that came with having used windows for the first couple decades of my life, i feel like i just have little to no reverence for that OS anymore that is made by a company that has been downright hostile to computing in general.
yikes
> There is a reason why we have consumer protection. Life doesn't need to be hard by default :D
i dunno if you've been paying attention but the erosion of consumer protections is very on the nose in that companies are.. just kind of getting away with a lot of things now. it would seem meaningful accountability is rather absent as of late.
so, do your thing i suppose. but i genuinely hope you don't have to learn any important lessons the hard way. we can all disagree on the net but i dont wish terrible stuff to happen to anyone here so instead i will say good luck
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