Except one shoe is made by children in a fire-trap sweatshop with no breaks, and the other was made by a well paid adult in good working conditions.
The ends don’t justify the means. The process of making impacts the output in ways that are subtle and important, but even holding the output as a fixed thing - the process of making still matters, at least to the people making it.
If you are a “programmer” you are going to be the kids in the sweatshop. On the enterprise dev side where most developers work, it’s been headed in that direction for at least a decade where it was easy enough to become a “good enough” generic full stack/mobile/web etc dev.
Even on the BigTech side being able to reverse a btree on the whiteboard and having on your resume that you were a mid level developer isn’t enough either anymore
If you look at the comp on that side, it’s also stagnated for decade. AI has just accelerated that trend.
While my job has been at various percentages to produce code for 30 years, it’s been well over a decade since I had to sell myself on “I codez real gud”. I sell myself as a “software engineer” who can go from ambiguous business and technical requirements, deal with politics, XYProblems, etc
Exactly. I work in a consulting company as a customer facing staff consultant - highest level - specializing in cloud + app dev. We don’t hire anyone less than staff in the US. Anything lower is hired out of the country.
That’s exactly my point. “Programming” was clearly becoming commoditized a decade ago.
I worked with developers from 6 other countries (the “america first” slogan of the ruling part is missing a fine print that should read “americans last”) and not only are they not in sweatshop conditions, most of them live like kings on salaries they are making and are more “white collar” in their country than most SWEs here
Out of bounds behavior is sometimes a known unknown, but in the era of generated code is exclusively unknown unknowns.
Good luck speccing out all the unanticipated side effects and undefined behaviors. Perhaps you can prompt the agent in a loop a bnumber of times but it's hard to believe that the brute-force throw-more-tokens-at-it approach has the same level of return as a more attentive audit by human eyeballs.
Are you as a developer 100% able to trust that you didn’t miss anything? Your team if you are a team lead who delegates tasks to other developers? If you outsource non business things like Salesforce integrations etc do you know all of the code they wrote? Your library dependencies? Your infrastructure providers?
I don’t know. I’m making a point that the only people whose sole responsibility is code that they personally write are mid level ticket takers.
I don’t review every line of code by everyone whose output I’m responsible for, I ask them to explain how they did things and care about their testing, the functional and non functional requirements and hotspots like concurrency, data access patterns, architectural issues etc.
For instance, I haven’t done web development since 2002 except for a little copy and paste work. I completely vibe coded three internal web admin sites for separate projects and used Amazon Cognito for authentication. I didn’t look at a line of code that AI generated any more than I would have looked at a line of code for a website I delegated to the web developer. I cared about functionality and UX.
The difference is that you have theory of mind of your human counterparts -- you can trust that their reasoned explanations are consistent with what you know about them.
I have not encountered an agent yet that I can trust in the same way.
Sure. People go for the cheapest option that fits their requirements, mostly.
But we’re the shoemakers, not the consumers. It’s actually our job to preserve our own and our peers quality of life.
Cheapest good option possible doesn’t have to be the sweatshop - tho the shareholders of nike or zara would have you believe that - the labor movements of the 19th century proved that’s not the case.
It is our job to keep our job, or leave if we don't agree with management, assuming to be lucky when there is an option to walk out and start anew right on the other side of the street.
This is what is sometimes called a “crabs in a bucket” mentality. It’s how you go from a middle class weaver, to an impoverished sweatshop worker in a generation.
It does not have non-destructive editing layers, color correction layers, indexed palette, posterization, as in Gimp or Krita,
it does not have the ability to draw with higher resolution brushes for subsequent resolution reduction, etc.;
it does not have shader graphs, as in Blender, Pixel Composer, PixelOver;
it is difficult to draw in an indexed palette, unlike PixiEditor,
you can't take 3D renderers and transform them into pixel art, like in PixelOver or Blender,
and there's no bone animation for 2D, like in Spine.
Aseprite is a good editor if you like to paint pixel by pixel every frame without using the advancements and workflows that other style designers and artists use, but calling it the best would be an exaggeration.
It depends on what you are doing. I really like it for creating animated characters. Resprite has some nice feature for creating tilesets. Standard raster editing software might be better for big static scenes.
Facebook rightly retired their facial recognition system in 2021 over concerns about user privacy. Facebook is a social media site, they are not the government or police.
The range of attitudes in there is interesting. There are a lot of people who take a fairly sensible "this is interactive fiction" kind of attitude, and there are others who bristle at any claim or reminder that these relationships are fictitious. There are even people with human partners who have "married" one or more AIs.
Yes. My experience is that it doesn't require scolding, mocking, or criticizing anyone to get permabanned. Just being up front about the fact that you have concerns about the use case is enough for a permaban, even if you only bring that up in order to demonstrate that such a position does not stem from contempt for LLM-as-companion users. :-\
do you think they know they're just one context reset away from the llm not recognizing them at all and being treated like a stranger off the street? For someone mentally ill and somehow emotionally attached to the context it would be... jarring to say the least.
Many of them are very aware of how LLMs work, they regularly interact with context limits and there have been threads about thoughtfully pruning context vs letting the LLM compact, making backups, etc.
Generally yes, they experience that routinely and complain and joke about it. Some of them do also describe such jarring experiences as making them cry for a long time.
If you can be respectful and act like a guest, it's worth reading a little there. You'll see the worrisome aspects in more detail but also a level of savvy that sometimes seems quite strange given the level of attachment. It's definitely interesting.
And it's a pity that this highly prevalent phenomenon (to exaggerate a bit, probably the way tech in general will become the most influential in the next couple years) is barely mentioned on HN.
- a large number of incredibly fragile users
- extremely "protective" mods
- a regular stream of drive-by posts that regulars there see as derogatory or insulting
- a fair amount of internal diversity and disagreement
I think discussion on forums larger than it, like HN or popular subreddits, is likely to drive traffic that will ultimately fuel a backfiring effect for the members. It's inevitable, and it's already happening, but I'm not sure it needs to increase.
I do think the phenomenon is a matter of legitimate public concern, but idk how that can best be addressed. Maybe high-quality, long form journalism? But probably not just cross-posting the sub in larger fora.
Part of me thinks maybe I erred bringing this up, but there's discussions worth having in terms of continued access to software that's working for people regardless of what it is, and on if this is healthy. I'm probably on a live and let live on this but there's been cases of suicide and murder where chatbots were involved, and these people are potentially vulnerable to manipulation from the company.
The percentage I mentioned was an example of how a very small prevalence can result in a reasonable number of people, like enough to fill a subreddit, because ChatGPT has a user count that exceeds all but 3 countries of the world.
Again, do you have anything behind this "highly prevalent phenomenon" claim?
Any sub that is based on storytelling or reposting memes, videos etc. are karma farms and lies.
Most subs that are based on politics or current events are at best biased, at worst completely astroturf.
The only subs that I think still have mostly legit users are municipal subs (which still get targeted by bots when anything political comes up) and hobby subs where people show their works or discuss things.
It's a growing market, although it might be because of shifting goal posts. I had a friend whose son was placed in French immersion (a language he doesn't speak at all). From what I was understanding, he was getting up and walking around in kindergarten and was labelled as mentally divergent; his teachers apparently suggested to his mother that he see a doctor.
(Strangely these "mental illnesses" and school problems went away after he switched to an English language school, must be a miracle)
I assume the loneliness epidemic is producing similar cases.
> I had a friend whose son was placed in French immersion (a language he doesn't speak at all).
In my entire french immersion Kindergarden class, there was a total of one child who already spoke French. I don't think the fact that he didn't speak the language is the concern.
There is/was an interesting period where "normies" were joining twitter en-masse, and adopted many of the denizens ideas as normal widespread ideas. Kinda like going on a camping trip at "the lake" because you heard it's fun and not realizing that everyone else on the trip is part of a semi-deranged cult.
The outsized effect of this was journalists thinking these people on twitter were accurate representations of what society on the whole was thinking.
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