… most of us are incredibly well compensated as software engineers, at least in the US. And now a technology comes out that lets you do your very well paid job for a fraction of the effort…
Human beings like to feel that the work they do makes a positive difference. That’s why health care jobs can be incredibly stressful, but people still do them because they get to experience the difference they make in people’s lives in a pretty direct way.
Human beings also tend to live in the future. Our brains tend to focus on the difference we’re going to make, the things that we’re going to do.
LLM coding tools have collapsed both of these. It’s clear that our skills no longer matter, and our ability to make a difference is dwindling. Future employment seems dependent on the use of LLM coding tools, and many people perceive these to have enormous negative externalities.
Sure, in an animal sense, a lot of programmers are pretty comfortable right now. And I’ll happily admit that there are plenty of jobs that are meaningless and pay badly, assuming you can find employment at all. But I don’t think it’s strange that people experience a profound loss of meaning.
This is largely where I’m at. I still cling to my job as best I can, but I’m well aware that it will soon be gone. I hope a social safety net of some sort will survive when there is no longer a taxpaying middle class to fund it, and American AI companies have taken all the money. There probably won’t be, though.
The first thing I did when the LLM wave started picking up steam and it was evident where this was heading was to destroy all the various work-in-progress “passion projects” I’d been working on. I deleted an approx. 25-year-old accumulated pile of code, (bad) art and short fiction, precisely because I was well aware that there was no longer any point. There is nothing I can do that will ever have any value to anyone anymore in an AI world.
You seem to be in a hard place right now. I can sympathize and say that the feeling that others are less likely to have need of my particular hobby software project or article or whatever - this feeling is real, and it can be overwhelming at times. It has been very off-putting to me particularly in the context of mainstream social media, where attention spans grow ever shorter and any kind of nuance is ground to dust. Exhibiting anything to the public used to be a leap of faith: an act that’s full of apprehension and hope; now it’s mostly dread mixed with the helplessness knowing that the bots will just slurp it and process it into weights in some vast matrix that’s used for producing slop.
What helped me is this: I no longer care about popular validation for projects of passion. If I build it, I do it for myself and the people that I personally know and care about. I don’t want the opinions of strangers. It has value to me, and also, it can be genuinely fun to just make something.
I’m currently working on empowering my local community via tech (at least, that’s what I call my get-everybody-off-Facebook project). It’s boring tech, but at least it won’t profile my users and show them ads. I do think it’s possible to find meaning in the things that I do, but these days, it is intrinsic first.
i’m “okay” in the sense that i’m physically safe, though I fully expect that this will change within the forseeable future, when i am eliminated from the economy and the social safety net breaks down.
i’ve abandoned all creative and technical projects except for work, because there’s no point anymore. as i said; a few years ago I deleted all my code, art, short fiction etc. from the last 25ish years, in recognition that AI has made it all worthless
There is nothing I can do that will ever have any value to anyone anymore in an AI world.
Some of us value humans simply for being humans. Some of us value human creativity simply for being an expression of that human’s soul. As hard as I know it is to believe, some of us still care! You still matter.
Do I, though? I bet you wouldn’t notice if I died tomorrow.
I live a largely solitary life, for various mostly disability-related reasons, and all I’ve ever really had to offer was now-worthless technical skills.
Whether or not I notice has no bearing on whether you matter. I do not personally know the VAST majority of human beings on this planet, yet that doesn’t stop them from having intrinsic value. Nor would I want to live in a world where my personal knowledge of someone was what determined their worth.
I believe all human beings have equal worth and deserve dignity. You are a human being, therefore you have the same worth as any carpenter, plumber, software developer, billionaire, rock singer, etc.
I’m just another voice on the Internet, but please know there are other humans in the world who see value in you.
I deleted an approx. 25-year-old accumulated pile of code, (bad) art and short fiction, precisely because I was well aware that there was no longer any point. There is nothing I can do that will ever have any value to anyone anymore in an AI world.
This just hurts to read dude. I know all too well how hard it is to change a mind steeped in depression, but even if nothing else, all that code and art, all that passion and effort, had value precisely because it was made by someone. A computer will never make art or anything of any kind of value except monetary. It simply does not possess the will to do so. AI cannot replace you.
To a large extent, AI has already replaced me. It didn’t just destroy the monetary value of said creative projects (which was zero, because I never intended to monetize anything), it made it culturally irrelevant. Who gives a fuck that I can make a game when you can get Unity Spark or Google Playground to shit one out with no effort? Sitting down and pixelling a pixelart work now only gets you ridiculed, as does writing programs.
I am completely literal in that AI has eliminated all value my life could ever have had. I’m a disabled weirdo who lives a largely solitary life, my technical skills were largely all I had to offer.
I’ve wasted my entire life, and the years I spent teaching CS are now a source of deep shame and guilt for me, because all I did was trick young people into wasting years of their lives too.
Who gives a fuck that I can make a game when you can get Unity Spark or Google Playground to shit one out with no effort?
Unless you were planning on exclusively making piss-stained temu Ghibli videogames, I don’t think this is any competition, and I think all the game developers who are still making things would agree.
(I still find it somewhat morbidly amusing to think back to the time people saw the Lovecraftian Will Smith eating spaghetti and clearly thought, “wow! I bet this can do my job better than me!”)
Sitting down and pixelling a pixelart work now only gets you ridiculed, as does writing programs.
Who is ridiculing you? Nobody here, that’s for sure. Are you still on twitter for some reason? Maybe you need to tend to your garden of online social spaces.
the years I spent teaching CS are now a source of deep shame and guilt
I’ve been thinking about the CNC machining analogy since it came up (again) the other day, so I’ll belabour it further here. So here’s the thing. CAM programs can figure out for you the most efficient way to program a certain type of cut into a certain type of material. But that won’t teach you anything. Nothing will better get you to actually understand what you’re doing, physically, how the material actually cuts, how blunt the tool is, all the actual stuff involved – than rocking up to a manual machine, grabbing the handwheels, and feeling how the machine responds, snapping six endmills, smelling the coolant, tweezing the chips out of your skin… so no, I don’t see how teaching CS could have been a waste of time. Unless everything I learnt $several years ago that wasn’t grabbing me by the jowls and screaming in my face, “this will help you in your future job in this precise way” was also a waste of time, which would be news to me.
Current-day models seem to have solved the “regression to piss-yellow ghibli” problem.
I’ve been rather badly made fun of in an offline community I used to frequent because i could spend an afternoon pixelling only to have someone get a diffusion model to spit out something in a couple seconds. and the same with the coding projects i used to do.
I agree that a lot of AI-“assisted” work doesn’t teach anything - but isn’t the entire point that nobody needs to teach or learn anymore? I know that I have former students who feel like they got tricked into a dead field by people who ought to have known better (though I don’t think any of them blames me personally).
Current-day models seem to have solved the “regression to piss-yellow ghibli” problem.
I know. Not the point. Substitute whatever uninspired “style” the things spit out at the time. Your competition is only computers if you completely lack thought.
I’ve been rather badly made fun of in an offline community […]
Being made fun of is awful, but why would the lesson there be “these people don’t respect me, they must surely have the correct opinion” and not “these people don’t respect me, time to find better ones?” There are as many people who celebrate effort and passion as there are consumers who only care about the end product.
but isn’t the entire point that nobody needs to teach or learn anymore?
I get the feeling you’re being told certain things by people with a vested interest and then simply believing them without stopping to critically assess this new information in the context of your own judgment and worldview. Stop that! Clearly my analogy wasn’t good enough vis-a-vis pressing a button and have the machine do all the “thinking”, but I opened my laptop to work on my project (thought-coded, of course, and I’m still fucking doing it despite all the money being thrown into trying to tell me it’s pointless, because I know there are people who care about more than just money), so you’re going to have to settle for these assertions instead.
Also like, we need to teach and learn and think and be challenged. It’s fundamental to our health, like exercise. A future where we have been successfully convinced we do not need to learn would certainly be a Brave New World.™
Human beings like to feel that the work they do makes a positive difference. That’s why health care jobs can be incredibly stressful, but people still do them because they get to experience the difference they make in people’s lives in a pretty direct way.
Human beings also tend to live in the future. Our brains tend to focus on the difference we’re going to make, the things that we’re going to do.
LLM coding tools have collapsed both of these. It’s clear that our skills no longer matter, and our ability to make a difference is dwindling. Future employment seems dependent on the use of LLM coding tools, and many people perceive these to have enormous negative externalities.
Sure, in an animal sense, a lot of programmers are pretty comfortable right now. And I’ll happily admit that there are plenty of jobs that are meaningless and pay badly, assuming you can find employment at all. But I don’t think it’s strange that people experience a profound loss of meaning.
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This is largely where I’m at. I still cling to my job as best I can, but I’m well aware that it will soon be gone. I hope a social safety net of some sort will survive when there is no longer a taxpaying middle class to fund it, and American AI companies have taken all the money. There probably won’t be, though.
The first thing I did when the LLM wave started picking up steam and it was evident where this was heading was to destroy all the various work-in-progress “passion projects” I’d been working on. I deleted an approx. 25-year-old accumulated pile of code, (bad) art and short fiction, precisely because I was well aware that there was no longer any point. There is nothing I can do that will ever have any value to anyone anymore in an AI world.
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You seem to be in a hard place right now. I can sympathize and say that the feeling that others are less likely to have need of my particular hobby software project or article or whatever - this feeling is real, and it can be overwhelming at times. It has been very off-putting to me particularly in the context of mainstream social media, where attention spans grow ever shorter and any kind of nuance is ground to dust. Exhibiting anything to the public used to be a leap of faith: an act that’s full of apprehension and hope; now it’s mostly dread mixed with the helplessness knowing that the bots will just slurp it and process it into weights in some vast matrix that’s used for producing slop.
What helped me is this: I no longer care about popular validation for projects of passion. If I build it, I do it for myself and the people that I personally know and care about. I don’t want the opinions of strangers. It has value to me, and also, it can be genuinely fun to just make something.
I’m currently working on empowering my local community via tech (at least, that’s what I call my get-everybody-off-Facebook project). It’s boring tech, but at least it won’t profile my users and show them ads. I do think it’s possible to find meaning in the things that I do, but these days, it is intrinsic first.
I hope you’re still okay, whoever you are.
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i’m “okay” in the sense that i’m physically safe, though I fully expect that this will change within the forseeable future, when i am eliminated from the economy and the social safety net breaks down.
i’ve abandoned all creative and technical projects except for work, because there’s no point anymore. as i said; a few years ago I deleted all my code, art, short fiction etc. from the last 25ish years, in recognition that AI has made it all worthless
score 1 · canonical
Some of us value humans simply for being humans. Some of us value human creativity simply for being an expression of that human’s soul. As hard as I know it is to believe, some of us still care! You still matter.
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Do I, though? I bet you wouldn’t notice if I died tomorrow.
I live a largely solitary life, for various mostly disability-related reasons, and all I’ve ever really had to offer was now-worthless technical skills.
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Whether or not I notice has no bearing on whether you matter. I do not personally know the VAST majority of human beings on this planet, yet that doesn’t stop them from having intrinsic value. Nor would I want to live in a world where my personal knowledge of someone was what determined their worth.
I believe all human beings have equal worth and deserve dignity. You are a human being, therefore you have the same worth as any carpenter, plumber, software developer, billionaire, rock singer, etc.
I’m just another voice on the Internet, but please know there are other humans in the world who see value in you.
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This just hurts to read dude. I know all too well how hard it is to change a mind steeped in depression, but even if nothing else, all that code and art, all that passion and effort, had value precisely because it was made by someone. A computer will never make art or anything of any kind of value except monetary. It simply does not possess the will to do so. AI cannot replace you.
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To a large extent, AI has already replaced me. It didn’t just destroy the monetary value of said creative projects (which was zero, because I never intended to monetize anything), it made it culturally irrelevant. Who gives a fuck that I can make a game when you can get Unity Spark or Google Playground to shit one out with no effort? Sitting down and pixelling a pixelart work now only gets you ridiculed, as does writing programs.
I am completely literal in that AI has eliminated all value my life could ever have had. I’m a disabled weirdo who lives a largely solitary life, my technical skills were largely all I had to offer.
I’ve wasted my entire life, and the years I spent teaching CS are now a source of deep shame and guilt for me, because all I did was trick young people into wasting years of their lives too.
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Unless you were planning on exclusively making piss-stained temu Ghibli videogames, I don’t think this is any competition, and I think all the game developers who are still making things would agree. (I still find it somewhat morbidly amusing to think back to the time people saw the Lovecraftian Will Smith eating spaghetti and clearly thought, “wow! I bet this can do my job better than me!”)
Who is ridiculing you? Nobody here, that’s for sure. Are you still on twitter for some reason? Maybe you need to tend to your garden of online social spaces.
I’ve been thinking about the CNC machining analogy since it came up (again) the other day, so I’ll belabour it further here. So here’s the thing. CAM programs can figure out for you the most efficient way to program a certain type of cut into a certain type of material. But that won’t teach you anything. Nothing will better get you to actually understand what you’re doing, physically, how the material actually cuts, how blunt the tool is, all the actual stuff involved – than rocking up to a manual machine, grabbing the handwheels, and feeling how the machine responds, snapping six endmills, smelling the coolant, tweezing the chips out of your skin… so no, I don’t see how teaching CS could have been a waste of time. Unless everything I learnt $several years ago that wasn’t grabbing me by the jowls and screaming in my face, “this will help you in your future job in this precise way” was also a waste of time, which would be news to me.
score 1 · canonical
Current-day models seem to have solved the “regression to piss-yellow ghibli” problem.
I’ve been rather badly made fun of in an offline community I used to frequent because i could spend an afternoon pixelling only to have someone get a diffusion model to spit out something in a couple seconds. and the same with the coding projects i used to do.
I agree that a lot of AI-“assisted” work doesn’t teach anything - but isn’t the entire point that nobody needs to teach or learn anymore? I know that I have former students who feel like they got tricked into a dead field by people who ought to have known better (though I don’t think any of them blames me personally).
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I know. Not the point. Substitute whatever uninspired “style” the things spit out at the time. Your competition is only computers if you completely lack thought.
Being made fun of is awful, but why would the lesson there be “these people don’t respect me, they must surely have the correct opinion” and not “these people don’t respect me, time to find better ones?” There are as many people who celebrate effort and passion as there are consumers who only care about the end product.
I get the feeling you’re being told certain things by people with a vested interest and then simply believing them without stopping to critically assess this new information in the context of your own judgment and worldview. Stop that! Clearly my analogy wasn’t good enough vis-a-vis pressing a button and have the machine do all the “thinking”, but I opened my laptop to work on my project (thought-coded, of course, and I’m still fucking doing it despite all the money being thrown into trying to tell me it’s pointless, because I know there are people who care about more than just money), so you’re going to have to settle for these assertions instead.
Also like, we need to teach and learn and think and be challenged. It’s fundamental to our health, like exercise. A future where we have been successfully convinced we do not need to learn would certainly be a Brave New World.™
score 1 · canonical