"No AI" right above a robot voice playback button.
Mixed messages fr
Hot take, folks packing it in because of AI probably were not difference makers before AI, and wouldn't be difference makers after it either.
I agree with the author, keep writing. It helps hone your ability to communicate effectively which we all need for some time to come (at least until we become batteries).
Picking out my favorite idea out of many: we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one. I also recommend stimulating human conversations and long-form reading.
More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.
Another one is: Don't use GPS in your own city. Try to learn where you live. Read the map in advance if you are going somewhere new and memorise the turns.
A shocking number of my coworkers plot every single trip (even to work!) and claim this helps with traffic or undercover cameras or some other cope. But the traffic will be there regardless, and they shouldnt need Google Maps to remind them not to speed. They'd rather be glued to the screen than pay attention to their surroundings or learn any landmarks.
In my experience, if you are trying to dodge congestion at a peak time, so is everybody else. Excepting in the first 15-20 mins after a major incident, the alternate routes end up congested and settle to an equilbrium time because everyone is trying to do the same thing.
> need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one.
I have never typed and expressed myself so much before I started talking to clankers. Telling them what to do, teaching them skills, giving them architecture decisions and yanking their chain when they weer off course. I type in plain English maybe more than 60 hours a week now.
One problem writing does have: we grew up in a massive changing and progressing software writing area. A golden area.
Now i still show clean code videos from bob and other old things to new hires and young collegues.
Java got more features, given but the golden area of discovery is over.
The new big thing is ai and i'm curious to see how it will feel to write real agents for my company specific use cases.
But i'm also seeing people so bad in their daily jobs, that I wish to get their salary as tokens to use. It will change and it changes our field.
Btw. "Is there anything, in the entire recorded history of human creation, that could have possibly mattered less than the flatulence Sora produced? NFTs had more value." i disagree, video generation has a massive impact on the industry for a lot of people. Don't down play this. NFTs btw. never had any impact besides moving money from a to b
"Generative AI is art. It’s irredeemably shit art; end of conversation."
I think most people cannot destinguish between "genuine" creativity and an artificial almalgamation of training data and human provided context. For one, I do not know what already exsists. Some work created by AI may be an obvious rip off of the style of a particular artist, but I wouldnt know. To me it might look awesome and fresh.
I think many of the more human centric thinkers will be disappointed at how many people just wont care.
> The AI industry is 99% hype; a billion dollar industrial complex to put a price tag on creation. At this point if you believe AI is ‘just a tool’ you’re wilfully ignoring the harm.
> (Regardless, why do I keep being told it’s an ‘extreme’ stance if I decide not to buy something?)
> The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates.
This sort of reasoning is why you might have been called extreme.
It's less extreme to say "many people see and/or get lots of benefit, but it's wrong to use the tool due to the harms it has".
There's nothing wrong with extreme, but since you asked.
rants about AI from people who have already decided up front to never actually attempt to use the tools (which seems to be the case here from the post and the other one it links) are not really providing any value to the discourse.
There is nothing new about using machinery to automate boring / repetitive tasks, including the wall of resistance that comes up. But it should be clear that genuinely useful tooling and automation tends to become a normal part of life, from the plow, to the printing press, to the dishwasher, to digital video editing, to autocorrect, and now to large language models.
There's a lot that has to be worked out with LLMs in particular as they are now encroaching heavily upon human creativity and thought. This is an extremely important topic. But rants like these with terms like "the plagarism machine" and "the solution is that we all must vow to never use AI in any shape or form" are not really contributing.
We're starting to rethink what an over reliance on plow based tilling has done for soil health. The point being that technologies are tradeoffs and it's helpful to understand the tradeoffs we are making.
You have to write for yourself. People have said this for years, decades, millennia even - but nobody really believes that writing to an audience of zero (or one, if Mom is still around) is worth it.
Everyone wants to be a famous author, or at least a published/somewhat acknowledged one; few are willing to write their novel and be satisfied with zero or near-zero sales/readings.
But that is exactly what you need to do, especially in the age of AI. Everyone who was "in it to win it" (think linkedinslop which existed before AI) is going to certainly use AI - because they do not give a shit about the quality of themselves - they just want the result.
And you can only become a writer (unpublished, unread, or no) by doing the writing - it takes time (10,000 hours?) that cannot be replaced by AI, just like you can't have the body of a marathon runner without running (yes, yes, the joke). You may be able to get 26 miles and change away, even very fast, but unless you personally do the running of that distance without cheating, you will not get the inherent benefits.
And if you instruct an AI, or another human even, to write for you, you may get some of the results you want, but you won't have changed to become a writer.
We shouldn't celebrate the successful blogs; they're already rewarded enough. It's celebrating the unsuccessful blogs that is needed - even if, frankly, the vast majority of them are sub-AI levels of crap it is still a human changing and progressing behind them.
Babies fall over a lot but unless you take them out of the stroller and let them do so, they'll never progress to crawling, walking, running.
Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably a smart one.
Adoption of AI at a FOMO corporate pace doesn't seem to include this consideration. They largely want your skills to atrophy as you instead beep boop the AI machine to do the job (arguably) faster. I think they're wrong and silly and any time they try to justify it, the words don't reconcile into a rational series of statements. But they're the boss and they can do the thing if they want to. At work I either do what they want in exchange for money or I say no thank you and walk away.
Which led me to the conclusion I'm currently at: I think I'm mostly just mourning the fact that I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. I can still code at home.
There's a catch. Do not break customer trust. Many people are just tinkering with solving the problem but the indirect effects have not been tackled either by the tool, processes or just some human thinking.
> I think I'm mostly just mourning the fact that I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. I can still code at home.
It could hardly have been a hobby if people were willing to pay you for it (and good rates too)?
I will rephrase it like this - the market has shifted away from providing value to the customers of said companies to pumping itself instead and it does not need to employ people for that. Simple as.
> Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem.
Doesn't credentialism kinda throw a spanner in that - where it's not enough to have people with a good track record of solving issues, but then someone along the way says "Yeah, we'd also like the devs who'll work on the project to have Java certs." (I've done those certs, they're orthogonal to one's ability to produce good software)
Might just be govt. projects or particular orgs where such requirements are drawn up by dinosaurs, go figure (as much as I'd love software development to be "real" engineering with best practices spanning decades, it's still the Wild West in many respects). Then again, the same thing more or less applies to security, a lot of it seems like posturing and checklists (how some years back the status quo was that you'll change your password every 30-90 days because IT said so) instead of the stuff that actually matters.
Not to detract from the point too much, but I've very much seen people not care about solving problems and shipping fast as stuff like that, or covering their own asses by paying for Oracle support or whatever (even when it gets in the way of actually shipping, like ADF and WebLogic and the horror that is JDeveloper).
But yeah, I think many companies out there don't care that much about the individual growth of their employees that much, unless they have the ability to actually look further into the future - which most don't, given how they prefer not to train junior devs into mid/senior ones over years.
I agree with the sentiment, but I think the problem is much wider.
Managers at companies are just doing what they've optimized their careers for: maintaining some edge over some competition, at some cost. What is pure FOMO to you or me, is good strategy to anyone trying to win [1]. In other words, FOMO was always the strategy.
This self-reinforcing loop is also not going away. There hasn't been any real evidence that any part of knowledge work, including coding, cannot be automated [2]. Even if human-level quality or cost-effectiveness takes 10 more years, all tasks are functionally solved or about to be. I don't like it, but it's true.
The big problem is that the people who are removed from this loop, who have the time to understand its effects and the power to make changes, are doing fuck-all.
So, whether the loop stops for a while or speeds up even more, we're fucked until we figure out how to detach full-time employment from survival.
[1] I believe this is called meta in PvP games; even if you want to subvert the meta, you gotta know it well first.
[2] Although it could just be my impression, and I'd be happy to be proven otherwise.
Pour yourself a drink, as I have a longish story that might be a useful metaphor.
Back in the day, there were more or less two consumer flight sims: MS Flight Simulator and XPlane. MSFS was and has always been the much prettier one, much easier to work with; xplane is kludgy, very old-school *NIX, and chonky in terms of resource usage. I was doing some work integrating flight systems data (FDAU/FDR outputs) into a cheaper flight re-creation tool, since the aircraft OEM's tool cost more than my annual salary. Hmm, actually, ten years of my salary.
So why use xplane at all, then?
The difference was that MSFS flight dynamics was driven from a model using table-based lookup that reproduced performance characteristics for a given airframe, whereas xplane (as you might be able to tell from the company name, Laminar Research) does fluid and gas simulation over the actual skin of the airframe, and then does the physics for the forces and masses and such.
I caught some flack for going with xplane: "Why not MSFS!? It's so much prettier!"
Unless the airframe is in a state that is near-equivalent with tabular lookup model, the actual flight is not going to be actually re-created. A plane in distress is very often in a boundary state- at best. OR you might be flying a plane that doesn't really have a model, like, say, a brand new planform (like the company was trying to develop). Without the aerodynamic fundamentals, the further away you get from the model represented by the tabular lookups, the greater the risk gets.
And how does this relate?
Those fundamentals- aerodynamic or mathematical or electrical- will be able to deal with a much broader range than models trained on existing data, regardless of whether or not they are LLMs or tabular lookups. If we rely on LLMs for aerodynamics, for chemistry, for electrical engineering, we are setting ourselves up for something like the 2008 Econopalypse except now it affects ALL the physical sciences; a Black Swan event that breaks reality.
I am genuinely worried we're working outselves into just such an event, where the fundamentals are all but forgotten, and a new phenomenon simply breaks the nuts and bolts of the applied sciences.
As for my xplane selection, it helped in other ways. Because often the FDR data is just plain wrong, but with xplane you could actually tell, because a control surface sticking out one way, while the flight instruments say another, lights up a "YOU GOT PROBLEMS" light in the cockpit as the aircraft inexplicably lurches to the right.
I do find it hard to tolerate the feeling of being watched online. The second-most trending dataset on huggingface right now is a snapshot of HN updating at a 5 minute interval. It makes me not want to really comment at all, just like how I don’t really publish any software I write anymore.
Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, now it’s a bunch of omniscient robots and maybe half of those original people are using the robots instead.
This is really interesting to me, because it never occurred to me to feel this way. Why would I care whether my comments are ending up in some dataset somewhere that's being used to train some model? My comments are boring and mostly uninformed. Have at it.
I'm curious: would you say the feeling of being watched online is making you afraid of some repercussion, or is it something else?
HN comments have always been public, I don't really understand this thought process. The robots also aren't going to care about some individual user, it'd be more of an agglomeration of everyone's comments.
I laugh jollily in the face of AI. I know the coming shit pile, its nature isn't going to be surprising, only the speed and utter surrender of the vast majority of humanity to mediocrity.
What AI represents to me is a teacher! I have so long lacked a music teacher and musical tools. I spent my entire career doing invisible software at the lowest levels and now I can finally build cool tools that help me learn and practice and enjoy playing music! Screw all the haters; if you're curious about a wide range of topics and already have some knowledge, you can galavant across a vast space and learn a lot along the way.
AI is a bit of a bullshitter but don't take its bullshit as truth, like you should never take anything your teacher says as gospel. How do we know what's true? The truth of the universe and the world is that underneath it all, it is self consistent, and we keep making measurement errors. The AI is an enormous pot of magic that it's up to you to organize with...your own skills.
You have to actively resist deskilling by doing things. AI should challenge you and reward you, not make you passive.
Use AI to teach yourself by asking lots of questions and constantly testing the results against reality.
Old web stuff is still around. RSS feeds are out there. Some parts of masto are generally chill and filled with people having interesting convos.
You don't have to give up on everything to participate, but it can be a space to go to if you're tired of every social interaction being mediated by (I'm being glib) hustlers
Can’t we just sabotage AI? We have the means for sure (speed light communication across the globe). Like, at least for once in the history of software engineering we should get together like other professionals do. Sadly our high salaries and perks won’t make the task easy for many
- spend tons of tokens on useless stuff at work (so your boss knows it’s not worth it)
- be very picky about AI generated PRs: add tons of comments, slow down the merge, etc.
It really is the albatross around the neck of software and software adjacent professionals... How you don't see the value of collective action is wild to me. Most of you are still working class, you can't survive that many years unemployed...
But the Kool aid has been drunk, and the philosophy of silicon valley cemented in your field. It will take a lot of pain or work to get it to change.
> The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms.
Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all?
Yes, code is cheap now. That's the new reality. Your value lies elsewhere.
You can lament the loss of your usefulness as a horse buggy mechanic, or you can adapt your knowledge and experience and use it towards those newfangled automobiles.
> Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all?
But this is not that. The current situations is closer to "what's yours is mine and what's mine is mine".
I have been releasing my writings under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license which requires attribution and that anything built upon the material to be distributed "under the same license as the original". And yet I have no access to OpenAI's built-upon material (I know for a fact they scrape my posts) while they get my data for free. This is so far legal, but it's probably not ethical and definitely not what the free software movement wanted.
i can say with a pretty high confidence level that few people in the free software movement want the closed off black boxes these companies are locking away.
they’re not free in any sense of the word. from price to openness of the models. would openai cry if every bit of their models were wide open for us to use however we see fit? if so, then it’s not free, again, in any definition of the word.
Alas I think tech crowd have collectively painted humanity into a corner where not playing is not an option anymore.
The combination of having subverted copyright and enabled cheap machine replication kills large swaths of creativity. At least as a viable living. One can still do many things on an artisanal level certainly and as excited as I am about AI it’s hard not to see it as a big L for humanity’s creative output
Interestingly, Ireland just launched a Basic Income for the Arts scheme. Many caveats (I think it's only like 300 euros a month, for a small group of people, etc.) but an interesting development nonetheless.
The problem is worse than that though, yes you can do most things on an artisanal level... But who is going to pay for that? What happens when head count drops, you get less capital in the hands of working class... And no matter your opinions on the wealthy, they don't have the need or desire for 5% of the population doing artisanal level work for them at a living wage.
102 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 84.0 ms ] threadFor the article it was nice, but the font is really what got me.
Mixed messages fr
Hot take, folks packing it in because of AI probably were not difference makers before AI, and wouldn't be difference makers after it either.
I agree with the author, keep writing. It helps hone your ability to communicate effectively which we all need for some time to come (at least until we become batteries).
More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.
A shocking number of my coworkers plot every single trip (even to work!) and claim this helps with traffic or undercover cameras or some other cope. But the traffic will be there regardless, and they shouldnt need Google Maps to remind them not to speed. They'd rather be glued to the screen than pay attention to their surroundings or learn any landmarks.
Isn't the point to use the GPS to avoid the traffic? In my experience, it's pretty effective a lot of times for that.
In my experience, if you are trying to dodge congestion at a peak time, so is everybody else. Excepting in the first 15-20 mins after a major incident, the alternate routes end up congested and settle to an equilbrium time because everyone is trying to do the same thing.
I have never typed and expressed myself so much before I started talking to clankers. Telling them what to do, teaching them skills, giving them architecture decisions and yanking their chain when they weer off course. I type in plain English maybe more than 60 hours a week now.
Now i still show clean code videos from bob and other old things to new hires and young collegues.
Java got more features, given but the golden area of discovery is over.
The new big thing is ai and i'm curious to see how it will feel to write real agents for my company specific use cases.
But i'm also seeing people so bad in their daily jobs, that I wish to get their salary as tokens to use. It will change and it changes our field.
Btw. "Is there anything, in the entire recorded history of human creation, that could have possibly mattered less than the flatulence Sora produced? NFTs had more value." i disagree, video generation has a massive impact on the industry for a lot of people. Don't down play this. NFTs btw. never had any impact besides moving money from a to b
I think most people cannot destinguish between "genuine" creativity and an artificial almalgamation of training data and human provided context. For one, I do not know what already exsists. Some work created by AI may be an obvious rip off of the style of a particular artist, but I wouldnt know. To me it might look awesome and fresh.
I think many of the more human centric thinkers will be disappointed at how many people just wont care.
> (Regardless, why do I keep being told it’s an ‘extreme’ stance if I decide not to buy something?)
> The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates.
This sort of reasoning is why you might have been called extreme.
It's less extreme to say "many people see and/or get lots of benefit, but it's wrong to use the tool due to the harms it has".
There's nothing wrong with extreme, but since you asked.
There is nothing new about using machinery to automate boring / repetitive tasks, including the wall of resistance that comes up. But it should be clear that genuinely useful tooling and automation tends to become a normal part of life, from the plow, to the printing press, to the dishwasher, to digital video editing, to autocorrect, and now to large language models.
There's a lot that has to be worked out with LLMs in particular as they are now encroaching heavily upon human creativity and thought. This is an extremely important topic. But rants like these with terms like "the plagarism machine" and "the solution is that we all must vow to never use AI in any shape or form" are not really contributing.
Everyone wants to be a famous author, or at least a published/somewhat acknowledged one; few are willing to write their novel and be satisfied with zero or near-zero sales/readings.
But that is exactly what you need to do, especially in the age of AI. Everyone who was "in it to win it" (think linkedinslop which existed before AI) is going to certainly use AI - because they do not give a shit about the quality of themselves - they just want the result.
And you can only become a writer (unpublished, unread, or no) by doing the writing - it takes time (10,000 hours?) that cannot be replaced by AI, just like you can't have the body of a marathon runner without running (yes, yes, the joke). You may be able to get 26 miles and change away, even very fast, but unless you personally do the running of that distance without cheating, you will not get the inherent benefits.
And if you instruct an AI, or another human even, to write for you, you may get some of the results you want, but you won't have changed to become a writer.
We shouldn't celebrate the successful blogs; they're already rewarded enough. It's celebrating the unsuccessful blogs that is needed - even if, frankly, the vast majority of them are sub-AI levels of crap it is still a human changing and progressing behind them.
Babies fall over a lot but unless you take them out of the stroller and let them do so, they'll never progress to crawling, walking, running.
Adoption of AI at a FOMO corporate pace doesn't seem to include this consideration. They largely want your skills to atrophy as you instead beep boop the AI machine to do the job (arguably) faster. I think they're wrong and silly and any time they try to justify it, the words don't reconcile into a rational series of statements. But they're the boss and they can do the thing if they want to. At work I either do what they want in exchange for money or I say no thank you and walk away.
Which led me to the conclusion I'm currently at: I think I'm mostly just mourning the fact that I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. I can still code at home.
What's valuable to a company is not necessarily what's valuable to the customers or even more so, to a civilization at large.
It could hardly have been a hobby if people were willing to pay you for it (and good rates too)?
I will rephrase it like this - the market has shifted away from providing value to the customers of said companies to pumping itself instead and it does not need to employ people for that. Simple as.
Doesn't credentialism kinda throw a spanner in that - where it's not enough to have people with a good track record of solving issues, but then someone along the way says "Yeah, we'd also like the devs who'll work on the project to have Java certs." (I've done those certs, they're orthogonal to one's ability to produce good software)
Might just be govt. projects or particular orgs where such requirements are drawn up by dinosaurs, go figure (as much as I'd love software development to be "real" engineering with best practices spanning decades, it's still the Wild West in many respects). Then again, the same thing more or less applies to security, a lot of it seems like posturing and checklists (how some years back the status quo was that you'll change your password every 30-90 days because IT said so) instead of the stuff that actually matters.
Not to detract from the point too much, but I've very much seen people not care about solving problems and shipping fast as stuff like that, or covering their own asses by paying for Oracle support or whatever (even when it gets in the way of actually shipping, like ADF and WebLogic and the horror that is JDeveloper).
But yeah, I think many companies out there don't care that much about the individual growth of their employees that much, unless they have the ability to actually look further into the future - which most don't, given how they prefer not to train junior devs into mid/senior ones over years.
Managers at companies are just doing what they've optimized their careers for: maintaining some edge over some competition, at some cost. What is pure FOMO to you or me, is good strategy to anyone trying to win [1]. In other words, FOMO was always the strategy.
This self-reinforcing loop is also not going away. There hasn't been any real evidence that any part of knowledge work, including coding, cannot be automated [2]. Even if human-level quality or cost-effectiveness takes 10 more years, all tasks are functionally solved or about to be. I don't like it, but it's true.
The big problem is that the people who are removed from this loop, who have the time to understand its effects and the power to make changes, are doing fuck-all.
So, whether the loop stops for a while or speeds up even more, we're fucked until we figure out how to detach full-time employment from survival.
[1] I believe this is called meta in PvP games; even if you want to subvert the meta, you gotta know it well first.
[2] Although it could just be my impression, and I'd be happy to be proven otherwise.
Back in the day, there were more or less two consumer flight sims: MS Flight Simulator and XPlane. MSFS was and has always been the much prettier one, much easier to work with; xplane is kludgy, very old-school *NIX, and chonky in terms of resource usage. I was doing some work integrating flight systems data (FDAU/FDR outputs) into a cheaper flight re-creation tool, since the aircraft OEM's tool cost more than my annual salary. Hmm, actually, ten years of my salary.
So why use xplane at all, then?
The difference was that MSFS flight dynamics was driven from a model using table-based lookup that reproduced performance characteristics for a given airframe, whereas xplane (as you might be able to tell from the company name, Laminar Research) does fluid and gas simulation over the actual skin of the airframe, and then does the physics for the forces and masses and such.
I caught some flack for going with xplane: "Why not MSFS!? It's so much prettier!"
Unless the airframe is in a state that is near-equivalent with tabular lookup model, the actual flight is not going to be actually re-created. A plane in distress is very often in a boundary state- at best. OR you might be flying a plane that doesn't really have a model, like, say, a brand new planform (like the company was trying to develop). Without the aerodynamic fundamentals, the further away you get from the model represented by the tabular lookups, the greater the risk gets.
And how does this relate?
Those fundamentals- aerodynamic or mathematical or electrical- will be able to deal with a much broader range than models trained on existing data, regardless of whether or not they are LLMs or tabular lookups. If we rely on LLMs for aerodynamics, for chemistry, for electrical engineering, we are setting ourselves up for something like the 2008 Econopalypse except now it affects ALL the physical sciences; a Black Swan event that breaks reality.
I am genuinely worried we're working outselves into just such an event, where the fundamentals are all but forgotten, and a new phenomenon simply breaks the nuts and bolts of the applied sciences.
As for my xplane selection, it helped in other ways. Because often the FDR data is just plain wrong, but with xplane you could actually tell, because a control surface sticking out one way, while the flight instruments say another, lights up a "YOU GOT PROBLEMS" light in the cockpit as the aircraft inexplicably lurches to the right.
Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, now it’s a bunch of omniscient robots and maybe half of those original people are using the robots instead.
I'm curious: would you say the feeling of being watched online is making you afraid of some repercussion, or is it something else?
Obviously that's a false dichotomy and a pretty defeatist attitude. But it does have a point.
What AI represents to me is a teacher! I have so long lacked a music teacher and musical tools. I spent my entire career doing invisible software at the lowest levels and now I can finally build cool tools that help me learn and practice and enjoy playing music! Screw all the haters; if you're curious about a wide range of topics and already have some knowledge, you can galavant across a vast space and learn a lot along the way.
AI is a bit of a bullshitter but don't take its bullshit as truth, like you should never take anything your teacher says as gospel. How do we know what's true? The truth of the universe and the world is that underneath it all, it is self consistent, and we keep making measurement errors. The AI is an enormous pot of magic that it's up to you to organize with...your own skills.
You have to actively resist deskilling by doing things. AI should challenge you and reward you, not make you passive.
Use AI to teach yourself by asking lots of questions and constantly testing the results against reality.
For me right now, that's the fretboard.
You don't have to give up on everything to participate, but it can be a space to go to if you're tired of every social interaction being mediated by (I'm being glib) hustlers
- spend tons of tokens on useless stuff at work (so your boss knows it’s not worth it)
- be very picky about AI generated PRs: add tons of comments, slow down the merge, etc.
But the Kool aid has been drunk, and the philosophy of silicon valley cemented in your field. It will take a lot of pain or work to get it to change.
Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all?
Yes, code is cheap now. That's the new reality. Your value lies elsewhere.
You can lament the loss of your usefulness as a horse buggy mechanic, or you can adapt your knowledge and experience and use it towards those newfangled automobiles.
But this is not that. The current situations is closer to "what's yours is mine and what's mine is mine".
I have been releasing my writings under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license which requires attribution and that anything built upon the material to be distributed "under the same license as the original". And yet I have no access to OpenAI's built-upon material (I know for a fact they scrape my posts) while they get my data for free. This is so far legal, but it's probably not ethical and definitely not what the free software movement wanted.
they’re not free in any sense of the word. from price to openness of the models. would openai cry if every bit of their models were wide open for us to use however we see fit? if so, then it’s not free, again, in any definition of the word.
Alas I think tech crowd have collectively painted humanity into a corner where not playing is not an option anymore.
The combination of having subverted copyright and enabled cheap machine replication kills large swaths of creativity. At least as a viable living. One can still do many things on an artisanal level certainly and as excited as I am about AI it’s hard not to see it as a big L for humanity’s creative output