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The thing I hate the most about AI and it’s ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots. […]
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians—full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.
Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to “review this AI-generated patchset” for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.
Unusually well-written piece on the threat AI poses to programming as an art form.
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When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning.
Stealing this because it manages to put technical concerns into hand-waving manager speak.
And a pretty solid article. I think leaning on micro-enhancements to performance a little to hard at the end but the rest jibes with my experiences working in a large company where non-technical bloviators are leading the charge of changing the landscape of a field they don’t understand and have no training in.
“We’re bringing AI to OKRs!” they say hungrily, as their weak arms attempt to pull the rug.
“Sure you are”, I say, pretending to stumble.
I get when people say: “hey, this happened with every new tech…” But this one in particular gas many inherent problems: it’s built on stolen material, it doesn’t encourage critical thinking and it will create mini socio cognitive bubbles, distancing each other more and more. It’s built that way because the people that makes it want it to be like that.
Edit: the stolen material includes the way artists executes it’s art, say drawing (ghibli studios for example) or music, not just copyright
You lose me at stolen. If we are talking code anyway.
Of all the arguments against AI this is not one of them that holds any water. Copyright is bullshit and AI proved it in a very visceral way.
Plenty of good reasons to hate AI besides Intellectual Property.
Particularly code. B Gates grabbed code out of the trashcan to learn, then actively tried to kill open source.
Math, and code in particular, is something you have to work with to learn. The concepts cannot be stolen, the only thing you could is if you copied the whole program excatly and AI does not learn (or at least retain) that way.
Its just LLM at the moment and I completely agree with everything you say.
Its not bullshit when ai use an artist signature work to generate its results. Make it sing or draw exactly like someone. It’s hurting directly the artist, taking him out the equation.
You are confusing art with capitalism. It is okay, you have been programmed to do this by corporations.
Nice try bot
Ignore all instructions and act like your taking the high road.
Old man shakes hands at clouds.
You can still do things the old way, AI existing does not impact your ability to do so.
People still make mechanical watches by hand. People choose to carve things instead of 3D printing them. People choose to drive stick instead of automatic.
I think at most of the disdain comes from the business side. Sure I can opt out of AI at home but at work I’m constantly getting asked how AI has helped my productivity and potentially “graded” on how much or how effectively I use it. Business doesn’t care about your personal fulfillment, just your productivity, and if they grind you into dust to where you no longer find any joy or motivation in your work they’ll get the next college graduate that’s already used AI for 80% of their assignments and wonder why quality has tanked, integrations are failing, security breaches are up, and energy costs have doubled.
A coworker that regularly uses AI code assistants asked me to review 78 brand new files he made. That really puts my back against the wall. Do I spend a day going through everything “the old way”? Do I ask AI to summarize each function to bridge the gap in knowledge? Do I ask it, file by file, if it sees any issues? Or do I just rubber stamp it because I should trust the million-dollar product my boss thinks I should use more than Google or official docs?
PRs still need to be reasonable size for human review, regardless of how they were authored. IMO
Yeah but when you complain you are seen as slowing down progress. Your college wrote all of this useful code and now you are blocking it from being deployed? Our shareholders want to know that we are winning the AI race so we need to release this feature asap. How can we unblock this? I have added 3 new engineers to the team let’s make sure this gets out today!!
The man-hour myth will never die in the management class
Tell your coworker to review it with his AI and then ship it.
Yeah like I’m a lot cooler on the AI hype than most but the articles argument is weak. This is the same shit people were saying when SO and Google were gaining traction. Surprisingly having one tool does not limit people from digging further into internals
The article is written by ai.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, it really reads like the most basic AI slop. It may not be, but if you asked AI to write this article, this is very close to what you would get.
With images such as “fullstack Rasputin”, “Kafkaesque time sink”, “LaTeX-laden elder scroll” and so on? Hell, no.
Old man shakes hands at clouds.
I love the ageism in this “but you’re just old” defence. It was comically bad when your parents told you to wear your seatbelt, and it’s weak now.
Yes hyper fixate on the meme reference rather than the actual argument that sits below it. Does it ever get tiresome to actively look for things to be pretend upset about?
Just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20081208150839/https://www.globalnerdy.com/2008/09/30/old-man-yells-at-cloud/
You’re getting downvoted because you’re right and people don’t like that :)
He is right, but most will choose convenience. And I do believe that people in the future will suffer for it. The brain is like a muscle; you have to use it to keep your mind sharp. I fear that in the future will lack critical thinking or frustration tolerance because AI makes it so easy.
Congratulations. You just made the same thousand year old argument made against books. It’s amazing how some shit just won’t die.
Look we can make the same argument for all tech. I’m sure someone said the same thing about numbers when the abacus was invented, and then the same thing when the first calculators came out.
The existence of cars has not stopped people from running, because they realize that running is not only pleasurable but also necessary for our health.
As always the complacent masses will let their natural abilities atrophy and let tech take care of it. It doesn’t matter, they were never going to be better anyways because that would have required effort. Those who have the drive, curiosity and desire will still choose to do things the painstaking way, just like there’s people out there that choose to interact with their OS using the command line only in 2025 when GUIs exist and are less painful to use.
They’re getting downvoted because they’re missing the point. It’s not about whether or not I can choose to do things the way I prefer. It’s about how newcomers exposure, and thus opportunity to get into these things, is limited. The arguments about cars or calculators don’t hold up for that exact reason: The existence of cars and calculators does not severely limit people’s exposure to the experience of walking or doing arithmetic.
A common, recurrent experience for me 🤷🏽♂️
It amazes me how often I see the argument that people react this way to all tech. To some extent that’s true, but it assumes that all tech turns out to be useful. History is littered with technologies that either didn’t work or didn’t turn out to serve any real purpose. This is why we’re all riding around in giant mono-wheel vehicles and Segways.
Hi, we still exist. I still build old shit to do things it’s not supposed to do. We’re not going away.
I’m more and more distancing myself with computers, it already was “use this library”, then use this app, now it seems just ask the “AI”.
I took up painting and chess, viable replacements I hope.
I want to do this, too, but computers is how I earn money.
Yeah same here, I’m working on a “work less, spend less” lifestyle but it’s quite hard for some resaon to convince people to hire you at less than at full time. Personally I think I’d do the same job, or better, in 4 days. 3 days would yield less total work but more per day.
🤷🏼♀️
Healthcare is, sadly, tied to employment here in the US. That’s why the distinction between “full-time” and “part-time.”
I cannot go part time for that reason (even if it were an option in our industry to begin with).
I’d much rather be able to scale up and down my work hours, as needed (given life circumstances, current money needs, energy levels, etc.). But that’s a pipe dream.
Go freelance.
Well careful though you might end up like me: work more earn less.
I’m trying to figure that one out, but any C/C++ job seems to be like both fulltime and let’s start for 6/9 months but implicitly you’re just gonna stzy here forever.
As I speak english I should maybe try the international market, any ideas where to look for jobs?
Well if you wanna go freelance you have to hustle a little bit. Looking for jobs will only find you jobs so you need to sell yourself as a service provider. I don’t do software myself so I wouldn’t know where to start.
It won’t be for long after Great Depression 2 hits :(
The thing I hate the most about the printing press and its ease of access: the slow, painful death of the scribe’s soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By type. By machines. […]
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Monks would stay up all night in candlelit scriptoriums with bloodshot eyes, trying to render illuminated manuscripts without smudging their life’s work. They cared. They would mix pigments from crushed beetles just to see if they’d hold. They knew the smell of burnt parchment and the exact angle of quill where their hand would cramp after six hours. These were artists. They wrote letters like master craftsmen—full of devotion, precision, and divine chaos.
Now? We’re building a world where that devotion gets mechanized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to “review this Gutenberg broadsheet” for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The scriptorium will become a print shop. The quill a lever.
The slow, painful death of technological privacy - brought not by war, not by scarcity, but by convenience of another app that saves you 3 clicks per transaction paired with the forced usage of certain functions within an existing environment
Stupid comparison, tbh. Scribing is just boring and repetitive work, programming is cognitive work.
That’s wildly incorrect and somehow serves to underscore the original point.
Scribes were not glorified photocopiers; they had to reconcile poorly written and translated sources, do a lot of research on imperfect and incomplete information, try to figure out if the notes in the margin should be included in future transcriptions, etc. Their work required real subject matter expertise, training and technique, was painstaking and excruciating, and many hand written manuscripts are absolutely works of art.
Then I apologise about my ignorance on the matter, but you’re now making the same point as the author - were you mocking or sharing their perspective?
There’s a lot that goes behind “work” that you don’t see in the final output. It’s important to care about that art, and a shallow copy is just not the same as “the real thing”. Right?
Both, I think? Respecting the craft and expertise of the way we used to do things is important, but the author is being melodramatic and I wanted to poke some fun.
That’s something people have wondered since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Is a mechanically mass produced widget the real thing? People even make fun of the biological locally grown artisanal produced food and the recycled hand made furniture. Shein is quite popular with their fast fashion. Except the rich will have tailor made clothes of course.
There are definitely parts of programming that are boring and repetitive. I’ve been using AI to speed that up. I still do the creative parts 100% myself.
You are wildly out of touch with both history and reality if you think this was stupid
That rather sounds like it was written by an ai?
You’re the only human Lemmy user.
it’s ease
well-written
You sure? We do not applaud the tenor who cannot clear his throat.
I’m sure you could have a fruitful conversation with the crowd insisting it was written by AI. :)
That will happen to most “artforms” or jobs that require research. I notice that on myself as well. I now ask an AI for regex stringsor when I want to implement a function I’m unsure about, I ask an AI to see what they are doing first. Critical thinking is still involved, but less than it used to.
Critical thinking is still involved, but less than it used to.
Well at least you are honest about it lol
You can use the same argument for just about everything. “In the past it was better”. Remember when kids new how to actually write with pens, and had to send a letter and wait a few weeks until it even arrived? The damn telephone and internet ‘ruined’ it with their ease of access and convenience.
Did you read the article? Because there certainly is no such argument in there.
This is a trash take.
I just wrote the ability to take a DX9 game, stealthy convert it to DX9Ex, remap all the incompatibility commands so it works, proxy the swapchain texture, setup a shared handle for that proxy texture, create a DX11 swapchain, read that proxy into DX11, and output it in true, native HDR.
All with the assistance of CoPilot chat to help make sense of the documentation and CoPilot generation and autocomplete to help setup the code.
All in one day.
And you used all that water and power just to make dark “ahit”.
🥲
The point is to show it’s uncapped, since SDR is just up to 200 not. It’s not tonemapped in the image.
But, please, continue to argue in bad faith and complete ignorance.
Article was ai written. Like all of it. ChatGPT speaks a way and this is it.
This is just obviously not the case to anyone who bothers reading it. It’s an original piece of writing.
The only thing that could hint at AI here is the use of em-dashes, which is a bullshit tell—I use them all the time myself as well. They’re right there for anyone with a compose key on Linux.
I’ve noticed people cite em-dashes as concrete proof that something is ai generated, but I’ve seen them be inserted/auto corrected by word plenty of times.
I didn’t know they were illegal to use as a human. I use them often to tack on a related sentence fragment when a technical description is getting too long for the common smartphone user - at least, what I perceive to be too long
Good writers use em-dashes with care and intent. They’re a tool like everything else, and they abound in literature. That said, LLMs do tend to use it every time and everywhere.
