We probably don't want to head down the path of creating new competitions for people that meet arbitrary criteria. White-straight-man only olympics anyone?
I'm guessing you wouldn't say this if you attended the paraolympics, or perhaps it would enforce your already held views, I'm not sure. But there are already 64 different classes of impairment that compete as far as I can tell. Frankly I found it a bit fascinating.
I think the point is that regardless of what benefits LLMs are bringing to the table, there are a list of downsides that Drew views as non-negotiables. It doesn't matter what other people are seeing, because he sees a fundamental issue underlying the entire premise.
It does seem like most people completely ignore the obvious harms caused by AI when talking about using LLMs for programming, as though somehow it is disconnected from the other deployments of the technology.
> It does seem like most people completely ignore the obvious harms caused by AI when talking about using LLMs for programming, as though somehow it is disconnected from the other deployments of the technology.
I feel that the people who are completely ignoring the harms are the ones who need and/or benefit from it and do whatever it takes to justify their use of it. The rest are people who understand the harms and minimize interaction followed by the blissfully ignorant.
I was just talking to a content creator who uses AI at work social media platforms to display her personal projects. She talked about how she is fully aware of the harm social media platforms bring while acknowledging they empower her to present her work to the world without gatekeeping. AI allows her to power through boring office tasks but she loathes their use in the art world and replacing people in general.
> It does seem like most people completely ignore the obvious harms caused by AI when talking about using LLMs for programming, as though somehow it is disconnected from the other deployments of the technology.
I would insist that the deployments of a technology should be disconnected from the technology itself - I criticize AI too, and I get a lot of downvotes for it, but I try to separate the science of AI from its economics and politics.
The harms of AI and other technologies come from two sources 1. Capital destroying market bubbles and 2. Deployments motivated and enabled by political and moral corruption.
Both of these are in turn enabled and sustained by legislation. That is, we have to talk politics, not technology and not AI. AI has a great potential - both for improving human life and for making it a lot worse and which way it goes depends entirely on politics.
If we fail to cleanly separate these issues and keep moralizing about technology, we will be chasing red herrings and bumping heads in the dark all the while the tech is being deployed against us.
> there are a list of downsides that Drew views as non-negotiables
Which is all fine and dandy. But why play the "You simply don't understand it as well as I do" rather than something more investigative and curious? Just fuels the whole "holier than thou" vibe Drew been trying to increase seemingly every day.
It's a disagreement of opinion, not some "I'm the only smart person who can realize this", which is why it kind of sours the entire piece.
> Which is all fine and dandy. But why play the "You simply don't understand it as well as I do"
I'll say this from the perspective of a person who publishes content online: because people's revealed preference is for content written this way. You can spend weeks polishing thoughtful, original content that will get few clicks, or you can crank out throwaway op-eds about AI and get thousands of likes and upvotes from people who just wanted to hear their own beliefs explained back to them.
My stuff appeared on HN a couple of times over the years and the less effort I put into it, the better it fared. The temptation to change your writing style and to offer increasingly more provocative and shallow opinions is difficult to resist.
My point is probably this: if you want to see better stuff, I think you gotta stop engaging with articles like this. Patrol /newest and upvote cool in-depth stuff.
> But why play the "You simply don't understand it as well as I do" rather than something more investigative and curious?
That's not the tone of the article; he uses the word "pretending". That tells me that he thinks that people do understand, but they don't want to admit that they understand because that would reveal their values.
In fairness he pretty explicitly states that he thinks people do understand it, but are pretending not to to wash their hands of the consequences. I'm definitely not reading it in the same way you are.
It's a difference in values, not understanding. I understand that AI burns tons of power, and I don't care. Drew understands it the same as I, but he does care. The difference is in what people value, and relative to what.
It makes sense that those with huge libraries may never want to move. But there are many existing and future PC gamers who do not have particularly large libraries on Steam, who would likely be much easier to lure if Epic actually made their launcher worth it.
Very disappointing honestly. Vercel's leadership has shown itself to be aligned with some murderous characters.
Despite the fact I have contributed only a small number of PRs and bug reports to Ghostty, and I don't think my absence would be notable to the maintainers, I still feel compelled to boycott the product unless Mitchell clarifies his stance on Vercel's alignment with the Israeli government.
I'd always hoped that Mitchell would be the odd exception to the disagreeable politics of the billionaire class. I'd previously hoped his ongoing association with DHH (and his abhorrent views[1]) was just a result of prior friendship and not an indication that he'd aligned himself with the ruling class. Alas, this is certainly not a good look.
[1]: I was going to link a specific blog post here but upon investigation I was blown away by how awful his entire blog is. The titles of posts are bad but please read past each one to discover a whole new level of awful. https://world.hey.com/dhh
This really is a fantastic video. I don't think I'd considered many of the ideas behind dithering before seeing how it could be extrapolated to this degree.
The video ends in a place where I suspect even further advances could still be made.
The point I was replying to used the existence of a Wikipedia article as proof that there is a problem in the UK regarding surveillance. By providing an example of similar articles about other locations I was showing that this alone is not particularly strong evidence. It certainly wasn't whataboutism, I don't even think the user I was replying to is from the US.
If only one country has an article about something you'd probably think it's an outlier. If every country has the article then you'd more likely think it's just part of life. I didn't make an assertion, I'm not providing evidence.
I don't even disagree with the post, I just don't like seeing shallow dismissals where someone could've actually put effort in to make a point. So I did the same.
Are you sure? Just because you feel that way doesn't mean you can just make up a statistic that supports your viewpoint.
In my experience, ergonomics in Zig means something other than ergonomics in many other languages. In plenty of languages, ergonomic code is basically just writing as few characters as possible and being able to achieve complex logic with little boilerplate. In Zig, it feels good to be able to compose the conceptually simple language features into an optimal solution to your problem, even if it results in code that is maybe not aesthetically pleasing on first glance.
I'm not going to declare that this solution is ergonomic or not, you can't always tell just by looking at Zig code whether using it is ergonomic, but by that same logic we shouldn't dismiss it off hand.
As a daily user of both a first gen framework 13 and a M1 MacBook Pro, the MacBook touchpad is like 5-10% better. And I suspect that's all software because I did something recently that absolutely fucked the response and feel of my framework touchpad that I haven't figured out how to undo so there's clearly a lot of room for manoeuvre in software.
He apparently pretended to not have written it despite its DNS pointing to his servers, and Certificate Transparency logs and Internet Archive all attributing the page to his domain. Compare the top comment thread in the first link above to his reply there:
Which part of the second link? Some of it is very accurately sourced, he 100% operates a loli bot which targetted subreddits banned by reddit for illegal content. Theres no walking around that. Near the end they also point out that Drew changes his TOS for SourceHut to align with banning projects he disagrees with, which makes GitHub look like paradise.
> the incident is that he wrote a document detailing repeated bad behaviour from a well known community figure? And this is a bad thing?
He collected all Stallman statements about Epstein and related subjects (this is perfectly ok) and then wrote his own summaries which completely misrepresent the things which were actually said. So what happened was that a lot of people just skimmed the summaries and concluded that Stallman molests children, or says that it's ok to do so etc etc.
If fact I have taken to link the Stallman report and add "don't read the summaries, read only the things that Stallman actually said". This only works if I believe the person is in good faith, of course. I would suggest the same to you.
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