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Good. AI is a game changer. It's like having an expert sitting next to you at all times. It's understandable why all these experts who want to gatekeep don't li

Good. AI is a game changer. It's like having an expert sitting next to you at all times. It's understandable why all these experts who want to gatekeep don't like AI, but ultimately, AI will win out, it's just too good.

nixpulvis 21d ago
The issue with AI is not its obvious value, it's our dependence on it. I worry what will happen to me when I am cut off for some reason. Local models are going to be really important and hopefully computing costs don't make it too prohibitive.
- swingandamiss 21d ago
  Hard agree. I've felt it already during outages or when I was traveling and didn't have internet on a flight, I couldn't function at the same level. I've been writing code for over 25 years, worked at the top big tech companies (still do) and it's remarkable how quickly I became dependent on AI.
  - jaggederest 21d ago
    Take a week or two off a quarter to do it manually. I did it a couple weeks ago and it took about a day or two to get back into the swing of it and knock the rust off, no pun since it was TS, YMMV, but I didn't find that it was that difficult. Even in languages I don't really write routinely, as long as you use the deterministic tools (lsp, linter, etc) Now, is my code better than the AI's equivalent implementation? No shot. It's nicer for people, artisanal hand crafted, but... there's a reason I use AI.
    - nixpulvis 20d ago
      It's not even that I'm slower at manual coding anymore, though I very well could be, it's that my expectation of my own progress has shifted. I'll be frustrated to only get a fraction of what I could have done.
      - jaggederest 20d ago
        Oh, fair enough, my goal was just to preserve "if Anthropic and OpenAI are having a bad day, and the local model on my laptop is too dumb to pour water out of a pot with the instructions on the bottom, how do I fix a bug", I accepted a long time ago that my productivity is going to be 0.1x if I have to go back.
- timcobb 21d ago
  It's my understanding that this same debate raged when writing became a thing. Many viewed it with suspicious, or derision, as memorization was the big intellectual thing. So writing and reading back to remember was terrible. It's true it was a dependence, but the value was too high. With reading and writing a person could work on and synthesize from a far wider range of concurrent materials than one could with just memorization and recitation. Yeah, it's lame cheating, but writing enables a lot and so it won out.
  - nixpulvis 20d ago
    Big difference though, once you know how to read and write, nobody can take that away from you.
    - DaSHacka 20d ago
      Nobody can take local models away from you, either
      - nixpulvis 20d ago
        Yea, that's sorta my point. We're not, or at least I'm not to the point I have a local model as good as Opus yet though.
        timcobb 20d ago
        We're only a few years into this whole thing... In any case you can say the exact same thing about reading. Take the book away and bam, you know nothing. A person who memorized the book is not dependent on an expensive, heavy thing like a book.
      - selimthegrim 20d ago
        Is the local model that emits rebuses in the room with us now?
    - deleted 20d ago
      [deleted]
- a2ff6eeb0 20d ago
  If you're cut off for some reason, you won't code -- but if you're cut off from a power plant, you also won't code. We're reaching the end of scalability for human brains, so we're offloading it. Sure, it means that selling intellectual labor is reaching the end of the line, and the value of learning will drop, but there's a lot more wealth that will be generated.
  - selimthegrim 20d ago
    But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
dgellow 21d ago
If you’re dismissing the opposition as gatekeepers you clearly don’t understand their positions
0xpgm 21d ago
Experts don't want to 'gatekeep'. Experts have been producing FOSS for the benefits of everyone, and liberally answering questions on mailing lists, stack overflow etc for free. Experts have been badly bitten by poorly written and badly architected software, lost their hairs trying to figure out bugs and poor design. They recognize the first version of a piece of software is only a miniscule percentage of the work and majority of effort goes into maintenaning it for its lifetime. They are viscerally horrified at a thousands of LoC codebase generated at the speed of GPU inference they are to be responsible for.
- swingandamiss 20d ago
  Yeah but only those experts could do that. Now average people can do what experts were doing, and the experts don't like that. They want to be unique. Same concept as "I knew that song before it was popular on the radio"
throwaway613746 21d ago
[dead]
fantasizr 20d ago
it's not gatekeeping when people are submitting PRs they don't understand and make it someone else's problem.

nixpulvis 21d ago

The issue with AI is not its obvious value, it's our dependence on it. I worry what will happen to me when I am cut off for some reason. Local models are going to be really important and hopefully computing costs don't make it too prohibitive.

swingandamiss 21d ago
Hard agree. I've felt it already during outages or when I was traveling and didn't have internet on a flight, I couldn't function at the same level. I've been writing code for over 25 years, worked at the top big tech companies (still do) and it's remarkable how quickly I became dependent on AI.
- jaggederest 21d ago
  Take a week or two off a quarter to do it manually. I did it a couple weeks ago and it took about a day or two to get back into the swing of it and knock the rust off, no pun since it was TS, YMMV, but I didn't find that it was that difficult. Even in languages I don't really write routinely, as long as you use the deterministic tools (lsp, linter, etc) Now, is my code better than the AI's equivalent implementation? No shot. It's nicer for people, artisanal hand crafted, but... there's a reason I use AI.
  - nixpulvis 20d ago
    It's not even that I'm slower at manual coding anymore, though I very well could be, it's that my expectation of my own progress has shifted. I'll be frustrated to only get a fraction of what I could have done.
    - jaggederest 20d ago
      Oh, fair enough, my goal was just to preserve "if Anthropic and OpenAI are having a bad day, and the local model on my laptop is too dumb to pour water out of a pot with the instructions on the bottom, how do I fix a bug", I accepted a long time ago that my productivity is going to be 0.1x if I have to go back.
timcobb 21d ago
It's my understanding that this same debate raged when writing became a thing. Many viewed it with suspicious, or derision, as memorization was the big intellectual thing. So writing and reading back to remember was terrible. It's true it was a dependence, but the value was too high. With reading and writing a person could work on and synthesize from a far wider range of concurrent materials than one could with just memorization and recitation. Yeah, it's lame cheating, but writing enables a lot and so it won out.
- nixpulvis 20d ago
  Big difference though, once you know how to read and write, nobody can take that away from you.
  - DaSHacka 20d ago
    Nobody can take local models away from you, either
    - nixpulvis 20d ago
      Yea, that's sorta my point. We're not, or at least I'm not to the point I have a local model as good as Opus yet though.
      - timcobb 20d ago
        We're only a few years into this whole thing... In any case you can say the exact same thing about reading. Take the book away and bam, you know nothing. A person who memorized the book is not dependent on an expensive, heavy thing like a book.
    - selimthegrim 20d ago
      Is the local model that emits rebuses in the room with us now?
  - deleted 20d ago
    [deleted]
a2ff6eeb0 20d ago
If you're cut off for some reason, you won't code -- but if you're cut off from a power plant, you also won't code. We're reaching the end of scalability for human brains, so we're offloading it. Sure, it means that selling intellectual labor is reaching the end of the line, and the value of learning will drop, but there's a lot more wealth that will be generated.
- selimthegrim 20d ago
  But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

dgellow 21d ago

If you’re dismissing the opposition as gatekeepers you clearly don’t understand their positions

0xpgm 21d ago

Experts don't want to 'gatekeep'. Experts have been producing FOSS for the benefits of everyone, and liberally answering questions on mailing lists, stack overflow etc for free. Experts have been badly bitten by poorly written and badly architected software, lost their hairs trying to figure out bugs and poor design. They recognize the first version of a piece of software is only a miniscule percentage of the work and majority of effort goes into maintenaning it for its lifetime. They are viscerally horrified at a thousands of LoC codebase generated at the speed of GPU inference they are to be responsible for.

swingandamiss 20d ago
Yeah but only those experts could do that. Now average people can do what experts were doing, and the experts don't like that. They want to be unique. Same concept as "I knew that song before it was popular on the radio"

throwaway613746 21d ago

[dead]

fantasizr 20d ago

it's not gatekeeping when people are submitting PRs they don't understand and make it someone else's problem.