SequoiaHope

The thing here for me is not that I’m unable to solve problems with my brain, it’s that I value the automation in labor provided by coding agents. I do not want future advancements to be locked behind proprietary doors.

Same! First learned of these maybe one year ago. Need a spare microwave for experiments…

“…climate breakdown, growing inequality, technological disruption, war, political instability and the weakening of democratic institutions, these are no longer separate problems…”

Very weak opening. These were never separate problems. If the author is just beginning to notice, it doesn’t bode well for what insights they have to share.

I’m constantly learning from LLMs. Claude Opus is like a Wikipedia I can talk to while I am riding my bike. I can learn all about optics, point spread function and FWHM, and more. My mechanical engineer coworkers are using the tools to learn how our software system works.

Sure you don’t need to learn coding syntax anymore. I mean some knowledge is helpful but the machine can explain it. I never learned assembly language - compilers were doing a great job with that by the time I started. Not to say it isn’t useful, but I learned a lot about higher level concepts instead.

Sure but it also means these companies nvidia buys don’t work with AMD and other competitors anymore. There are myriad motivations and it’s not all one or the other but this is a classic component of Silicon Valley acquisition strategies.

I am certainly experiencing what seems like some mania or computer addiction from these technologies. I’ve never been able to produce such results as I can today. I lose sleep staying up late working on it (though to be fair this has always been an issue). But the volume of work is so hard to audit. It makes it difficult to make flawless results. That doesn’t excuse the mode of publication. They could have had humility in their announcement. “We are seeing some interesting results and seeking community validation.” Maybe they did, I did not read their full announcement. But that would have been the right move if they can’t verify something fully.

It sounds like part of the problem is that AI tools are machine generated content acting like humans in a comment forum designed for humans. GitHub already has a variety of CI tools which generate huge volumes of machine generated text, and that text is appropriately buries for those that want it without spewing all of it in a developer’s discussion forum.

While it is more challenging to stop genuine imposters, we could also add new features to places like GitHub so that maintainers who do run automated tools can make automated analysis available to PR creators without drowning out human discussion threads. It sounds like part of the problem is that new tools have popped up so fast that we haven’t figured out how to integrate them properly yet.

I have coworkers who report learning a lot about some system by using Claude to do things they would not be able to do on their own, and subsequently seeing more about how the system works.

I suspect that literacy will not go down, but what we become literate in will change. Just as compilers reduced literacy in assembly language, automatic code generation will reduce literacy in code syntax. But then, other forms of literacy will replace that. High level system design, etc.

I agree with others this is reductive. Eg a person is “just some molecules” and this simple fact has no bearing on their moral standing.

This concept is discussed at length in the article. I encourage you to read it. I honestly don’t read many full articles here but this one was good.

Ya the article covers this concept in depth. Doesn’t seem like that commenter got that far…

Same lol. You can email HN and they will change your username if you ask. They did it for me!

It used to be but in my circles defaulting to he/him for everyone is considered bad form and foolish.

Very irritating tendency of people here to assume everyone on the internet is “he”.