I know I have already written a (long!) piece on this, so I don't want to expand too much here -- but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM. More than anything, it reinforced something that I think many of us believe: the future is especially uncertain right now, and will contain many surprises!
> I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids.
Bryan Cantrill is a tech CTO.
The last time I saw his name was talking with Simon W. about how LLM companies need an Obama figure. (Not necessarily saying it as in, I hope they get an Obama figure. But if they knew what was good for them.)
> Now, surely many generations have looked back at the three decades since their undergraduate years with a mix of nostalgia for the past and apprehension for the future, so it’s hard to know if 2026 is truly exceptional in this regard. And certainly, you can’t argue that today’s anxiety for the future is unrivaled: my mother graduated in 1968, and is quick to remind that many of her classmates faced a loss of their college deferments and (depending on their lottery number) being drafted to fight in an unpopular war.
Is Cantrill the Vietnam war hawk in this comparison?
> It is no exaggeration to say that this was brought to us
Wait for it.
> by Claude. Yes, we of course could have gotten BattleTris working without Claude’s help (but the preceding two decades tells us pretty clearly that we wouldn’t have!). The reasons that we wouldn’t have done it (didn’t do it!) on our own are myriad: yes, the work involved is tedious (and time-consuming), but also because it is so indeterminate as to be speculative: when porting something (which is what this amounted to, even if porting into modernity and with as light a touch as possible), it is very difficult to have forward visibility as to progress. That is, you can feel deceptively close to your goal (only to discover some major piece that needs to be rethought) — and you can also be deceptively far (what feels like smoldering wreckage is sometimes but a single fix away from functional software).
Why use Claude then?
So for regular programmers I would question being afraid of AI taking my job and then also using AI. Not for work. But for thrills. Why help train this thing? Well anyway.
Just one more thing. You might become unemployed. The craft you once knew might become destroyed. But! You did get to revive that zany game from fiften years ago. Okay I’m done.
> So paradoxically, this profoundly human, joyful moment was indisputably brought to us by the very thing that we are worried is going to strip us of our humanity.
> Where does that juxtaposition leave us? As I have outlined in Oxide RFD 576, I believe that LLMs are but a tool, albeit an exceedingly powerful one. When we cease to believe this — when we think of it not as a tool, but as dehumanizing mechanistic overlord — we subject ourselves unnecessarily to it. Yes, LLMs mean a lot of changes to domains that may be unaccustomed to technological change, and yes, some of those changes will leave us wistful for a bygone era — but I also believe that there will be many more BattleTris-like experiences in our collective future: delightfully human moments that remind us why we build stuff in the first place.
We have to have the right mindset. We must imagine Claude as happy...
No, it is clear that The Machine is not what is forcing anything down our throats; it’s just a tool, wielded by the powerful.
I have to admit I feel similarly conflicted after a few recent REAL WORLD experiences. The first is that Gemini and Claude taught me a whole bunch of things about beer that I feel like I should have known, or a friend should have told me in the last few decades :-) (I'm in my mid 40's)
As background, I am a simple man, and I like one type of beer (pale ale), and drink 1 beer a day. But it has to be fresh, crisp, bitter, and not make me want to fall asleep (lower alcohol)
So here is some color on what I learned:
- I worked in SF / the bay area for nearly 2 decades, and I'm now in Philly. I have been wondering for like FOUR YEARS why when I buy pale ale, it is somehow OFF. Well Claude told me that east coast pale ale is actually more like "English Ale" (e.g. Yards brewing), and west coast pale ale is its own thing (e.g. Lagunitas)
Apparently west coast is what I developed a taste for -- it is more bitter. And this totally tracks for me. So the same term is used for 2 slightly different things, and AI cleared that up for me
- I walked into a beer store today in Philly, and there are 5 IPAs for every Pale Ale, which annoys me because I prefer the latter. (That happened in San Francisco too, and I'm sure many people here have had that experience)
And Gemini taught me that "session IPA" is actually a marketing term for Pale Ale. I always choose things labeled "pale ale", but many people want something labeled "IPA". So they came up with the term "session IPA" -- an IPA with lower alcohol, aka Pale Ale.
I use Gemini anonymously, so it doesn't remember things about me. And after I described my beer preferences and the fact that I'm in Philly, it specifically brought up Tonewood Brewing in NJ, which is in fact the beer I've drank the most in the last 3 years!
---
So yeah I find it eerie that the LLMs are helping me with words versus reality.
- the same term "pale ale" referring to slightly different things on the east coast and west coast -- this was tripping me up for years
- the term "session IPA" being a marketing term for Pale Ale -- also something I didn't know for years
- based on simple verbal descriptions, they are able to recommend the beers that I actually drank and liked (even though I use Gemini anonymously, and that was my first time asking Claude about beer)
I've been drinking something slightly "wrong" quite often, because of a confusion over words on the label. I guess I simply don't know anyone who I can ask dumb questions about beer to.
I feel like the last 30 years are significantly less distinctive than the prior 30 (actually 70+) years. The 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s all had iconic and partitioned cultures that are instantly recognizable. I feel like that started to fade a bit in the 90s (what I call the Pottery Barn decade). The 2000s have felt more "alive" to me than the 90s but they're also significantly more post-modern and less distinctive. I consider the 1980s "peak humanity", prior to mega capitalism and data driven marketing enabled by the rise of computing power. I don't think we could ever go back to an iconic and focused cultural decade like say, the 1960s.
With time I am starting to think that "decades" are defined with around 10 year delay. When you are inside them or a little later, you see too much of nuance and are too much in your everyday concerns away from the culture. For example, to the common young consumer today the 1980s may be about synth and maybe hair metal in music, where it was infinitely more happening. They also probably have an exaggerated view of importance of tech for an average person back then. The 1960s are often seen through the culture of teens to maybe 30 year olds, while also there was much separate adult culture and concerns.
By now, I think people have well formed esthetic of 1990s and truth be told even 2000s (roughly around it being an electro, futuristic, MP3 players, Windows XP era). One can also more or less predict how 2010s will be about stereotypical hipster culture and the bronze age[1] of social media, maybe with some mixture of increasing culture wars. Though because we're still fighting them, they may be harder to estheticize.
I have my own views and am far from the cheap trick of accusing others of nostalgia, or the fallacy that culture never declines. But to discuss value, we have to have criteria. To me, being pluralistic, rich and free is probably more important than distinctiveness. Living in a cool decade is far lower in my list of priorities than having a good life and accomplishing things. Not saying which times I'd favor. Anyway, always by living later at least we can be wiser, however sad prize it may be.
[1] Evoking more dirt and less shine than the golden age, but still some mercenary glamor.
How distinct was 1940s US culture from the 1930s? To me, a European born much later, the 1940s are the decade of 20th-century American aesthetics that blends the most into the previous. The changes I see are all related to WWII. Civilian everyday life captured in film and press photos seems the same as in the 1930s.
While partitioning these cultural attitudes and artifacts by decades is a useful heuristic, I often feel like the actual cutoff point is around mid-decade. The late '80s feels closer the the early '90s than it does the early '80s.
Re: the anxiety of parents about the future: the people who best handle rapidly changing circumstances are the ones who are comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. I think it's far less important to teach young people specific skills in technology X, and far more important to teach them how to regulate their emotions, how to make plans and effectively execute on them, and how to be objective about their own strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be something that a standard education focuses on, so whether or not you pick up these skills depends on whether your parents explicitly taught them to you or you happened to get lucky enough to develop them on your own.
On the topic of tetris conflicts with weapons. There's also Tetrinet, for win32 over ip; up to six players IIRC?. Or Tetris Battle Gaiden on Super Famicom for single screen gaming.
Yeah I mean people are talking about 'the eternal Sloptember' but the other side of that is - you know how everyone is nostalgic for 90s/early 2000s websites and all the silliness and creativity? Well that is happening now in programs and apps. Any fool can make a terribly-architected game/app to scratch his itch. Most of them are bad, and most won't last, but there's also a lot of fun.
Nobody criticizes people making AI slop for their own amusement. Nobody said anything for DALL-E generated random stuff. Similarly nobody cared about people's GeoCities pages.
People care about when AI is forced in production workloads with very little care. Those productions could be the government, insurance and healthcare systems. Getting prosecuted or denied for treatment by a black box is what makes them angry. People care when their bosses brag about and threaten them with layoffs.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 33.8 ms ] threadBryan Cantrill is a tech CTO.
The last time I saw his name was talking with Simon W. about how LLM companies need an Obama figure. (Not necessarily saying it as in, I hope they get an Obama figure. But if they knew what was good for them.)
> Now, surely many generations have looked back at the three decades since their undergraduate years with a mix of nostalgia for the past and apprehension for the future, so it’s hard to know if 2026 is truly exceptional in this regard. And certainly, you can’t argue that today’s anxiety for the future is unrivaled: my mother graduated in 1968, and is quick to remind that many of her classmates faced a loss of their college deferments and (depending on their lottery number) being drafted to fight in an unpopular war.
Is Cantrill the Vietnam war hawk in this comparison?
> It is no exaggeration to say that this was brought to us
Wait for it.
> by Claude. Yes, we of course could have gotten BattleTris working without Claude’s help (but the preceding two decades tells us pretty clearly that we wouldn’t have!). The reasons that we wouldn’t have done it (didn’t do it!) on our own are myriad: yes, the work involved is tedious (and time-consuming), but also because it is so indeterminate as to be speculative: when porting something (which is what this amounted to, even if porting into modernity and with as light a touch as possible), it is very difficult to have forward visibility as to progress. That is, you can feel deceptively close to your goal (only to discover some major piece that needs to be rethought) — and you can also be deceptively far (what feels like smoldering wreckage is sometimes but a single fix away from functional software).
Why use Claude then?
So for regular programmers I would question being afraid of AI taking my job and then also using AI. Not for work. But for thrills. Why help train this thing? Well anyway.
Just one more thing. You might become unemployed. The craft you once knew might become destroyed. But! You did get to revive that zany game from fiften years ago. Okay I’m done.
> So paradoxically, this profoundly human, joyful moment was indisputably brought to us by the very thing that we are worried is going to strip us of our humanity.
> Where does that juxtaposition leave us? As I have outlined in Oxide RFD 576, I believe that LLMs are but a tool, albeit an exceedingly powerful one. When we cease to believe this — when we think of it not as a tool, but as dehumanizing mechanistic overlord — we subject ourselves unnecessarily to it. Yes, LLMs mean a lot of changes to domains that may be unaccustomed to technological change, and yes, some of those changes will leave us wistful for a bygone era — but I also believe that there will be many more BattleTris-like experiences in our collective future: delightfully human moments that remind us why we build stuff in the first place.
We have to have the right mindset. We must imagine Claude as happy...
No, it is clear that The Machine is not what is forcing anything down our throats; it’s just a tool, wielded by the powerful.
I have to admit I feel similarly conflicted after a few recent REAL WORLD experiences. The first is that Gemini and Claude taught me a whole bunch of things about beer that I feel like I should have known, or a friend should have told me in the last few decades :-) (I'm in my mid 40's)
As background, I am a simple man, and I like one type of beer (pale ale), and drink 1 beer a day. But it has to be fresh, crisp, bitter, and not make me want to fall asleep (lower alcohol)
So here is some color on what I learned:
- I worked in SF / the bay area for nearly 2 decades, and I'm now in Philly. I have been wondering for like FOUR YEARS why when I buy pale ale, it is somehow OFF. Well Claude told me that east coast pale ale is actually more like "English Ale" (e.g. Yards brewing), and west coast pale ale is its own thing (e.g. Lagunitas)
Apparently west coast is what I developed a taste for -- it is more bitter. And this totally tracks for me. So the same term is used for 2 slightly different things, and AI cleared that up for me
- I walked into a beer store today in Philly, and there are 5 IPAs for every Pale Ale, which annoys me because I prefer the latter. (That happened in San Francisco too, and I'm sure many people here have had that experience)
And Gemini taught me that "session IPA" is actually a marketing term for Pale Ale. I always choose things labeled "pale ale", but many people want something labeled "IPA". So they came up with the term "session IPA" -- an IPA with lower alcohol, aka Pale Ale.
I use Gemini anonymously, so it doesn't remember things about me. And after I described my beer preferences and the fact that I'm in Philly, it specifically brought up Tonewood Brewing in NJ, which is in fact the beer I've drank the most in the last 3 years!
---
So yeah I find it eerie that the LLMs are helping me with words versus reality.
- the same term "pale ale" referring to slightly different things on the east coast and west coast -- this was tripping me up for years
- the term "session IPA" being a marketing term for Pale Ale -- also something I didn't know for years
- based on simple verbal descriptions, they are able to recommend the beers that I actually drank and liked (even though I use Gemini anonymously, and that was my first time asking Claude about beer)
I've been drinking something slightly "wrong" quite often, because of a confusion over words on the label. I guess I simply don't know anyone who I can ask dumb questions about beer to.
By now, I think people have well formed esthetic of 1990s and truth be told even 2000s (roughly around it being an electro, futuristic, MP3 players, Windows XP era). One can also more or less predict how 2010s will be about stereotypical hipster culture and the bronze age[1] of social media, maybe with some mixture of increasing culture wars. Though because we're still fighting them, they may be harder to estheticize.
I have my own views and am far from the cheap trick of accusing others of nostalgia, or the fallacy that culture never declines. But to discuss value, we have to have criteria. To me, being pluralistic, rich and free is probably more important than distinctiveness. Living in a cool decade is far lower in my list of priorities than having a good life and accomplishing things. Not saying which times I'd favor. Anyway, always by living later at least we can be wiser, however sad prize it may be.
[1] Evoking more dirt and less shine than the golden age, but still some mercenary glamor.
People care about when AI is forced in production workloads with very little care. Those productions could be the government, insurance and healthcare systems. Getting prosecuted or denied for treatment by a black box is what makes them angry. People care when their bosses brag about and threaten them with layoffs.