Dude said "Adapt" and you really pulled out Hitler.
Oi. Discussion on this site gets more difficult each day. Instead of pointing out where you disagreed you just pulled out the most egregious appeal to authority and said, "oH yEaH?"
Yes, you've shown yourself quite ambivalent to any notion of truth. You'd just as soon call someone Hitler and be on with it rather than try to understand another human's perspective. Pat yourself on the back, friend.
I don't think that's a reasonable read; you can't dismiss a specific criticism on the (unsupported) ground that the person making it would totally have dismissed anything at all.
wartywhoa expresses an opinion that I find intellectually lazy and spiritually prideful. Refusing to engage with an idea because it was dimly echoed in a statement made by an evil man is just intellectually lazy.
It's a spectacular bit of pride in oneself to try to silence someone's opinion because you found an abstractly-similar statement made by an evil man. Why probe the idea when you could just assign Hitler's evil intentions directly to them?
It's gross. It's tired. I wish people cared more to engage in good faith.
Re-read what I said, specifically, I'm addressing the reflexive hand-wave of fascism as an all-too-common way to suppress thoughts we find distasteful rather than actually engaging.
That's what wartywhoa did to a commenter who was in no way suggesting a fascist view.
That's not worse faith, that's simply pointing out that aligning your ideological opponents with Hitler is intellectually dishonest.
In this you and I agree: "dismissing all criticism because it draws a parallel you don't like isn't reasonable."
I must again point out that we're not even certain yet that we're "losing" any programming capability, and we're not certain the tradeoff isn't worth it.
All of these arguments presuppose we're losing something that's not worth losing.
I want someone to start one square earlier and argue to me why that matters. I've read enough of these "your skills are atrophying!" arguments; I'm also making like 10x as much revenue as I did through a business that delights my clients. Why should I care about my "skills" if I'm still able to make money, pursue hobbies, and enjoy life?
I think there's a key difference of perspective hidden in your response. You're a business owner; you sell outcomes to your customers. Even if we suppose that skill atrophy is real, it's easy to see how that tradeoff would be worth it to you, and not to someone who is an individual contributor in a corporate environment. For an IC in a corporate environment, the accumulation of portable skills is an important part of what makes the job worthwhile.
For what it's worth: I went freelance right around the time that agents were starting to become extremely capable, and I've never enjoyed my work more. I'd believe the claim that my hands-on coding skills are atrophying to some degree, but I'm also developing other skills that have much higher leverage in my new setting.
> "hands-on coding skills are atrophying to some degree"
It really depends on how you define "coding", right? Throughout my career coding meant many different things. In the beginning, coding was really Assembly. Then it became C. Then C++/OOP. Then Java/C# and managed memory languages. Then Python etc.
These languages aren't the same thing with different syntax. The details that matter in the act of "coding" changed dramatically. It really went from "bit thinking" in the assembly era to stitching open source libraries in the Python era. Many would excel in one paradigm but not the other.
Coding with AI requires a different set of skills. I see the proper command of AIs through prompts and human-made specs as hand coding as much as building line-by-line micro algorithms in Assembly.
I think the noise in this discussion comes from putting vibe coding and AI-assisted coding in the same bucket. I'd argue that pure vibe coding is perhaps the one thing that doesn't resemble traditional coding as much. But the AI coding approach where people gradually build applications through the accumulation of components and layers built with heavy AI assistance is hand coding.
I can see that relying on AI assistance for too long could atrophy the skill of manual line-by-line mental model transcription, but I never really cared too much for this skill. Once I have the right data structures and algorithms in my head, actually entering the if, else, class, struct, for, etc statements are a giant annoyance.
For some of us, "enjoy life" necessitates having some care and craftsmanship in the work we're doing 40 hours per week. People liked this job. Now it's becoming just a job.
Imagine a Michelin chef who previously invented delicious menus but whose boss has declared he now can only serve microwaved Sysco food. The revenue for some reason hasn't decreased. Why should he care about his "skills" if he's still able to make money, pursue hobbies, and enjoy life? I think that should be obvious here.
I thought this was a joke at first. I do not understand the demand for such a device at all.
It's not pretty, it doesn't look very functional. The selling point is "a bigger screen", but never once in my life have I looked at my phone and thought "Make it bigger."
It’s perfectly fine to acknowledge that you are not the target audience without coming across like a child complaining about pepperonis on their cheese pizza.
I'd levy the same critique at other foldable phones. I don't know a single person, personally, that owns one. Compared to the hundreds of people I know with an iPhone it's crazy to me that the market is supposedly big enough for Apple to put this much R&D into a device like this.
IMO, price is the problem. I can afford a folding phone, but I can't justify the cost for a tertiary computing device. Whenever possible I'd rather use a desktop, followed by a laptop. If I was more dependent on my phone it might be different.
> if anything Apple is catching up
That's been Apple MO for a long time. They may not be the first to market on a new tech, but when they do deliver, it's more advanced and higher quality than the competitors. It's a good strategy IMO.
- A phone that fits in the hand for those who have long desired a smaller iPhone. This isn't me, but I know a lot of people who bemoaned the death of the smaller line of iPhones and many have held onto their old phones longer than they otherwise would have (not a bad thing, just a data point...)
- A versatile device that allows switching of modes as required. Great for commutes, travel, etc.
It's not for everyone and I'm normally a Pro Max user so definitely don't fit into the first category, but I'm really tempted on this one
Being able to read the smaller text on smartwatches and smaller phones, for many of us was a luxury of youth. I'd rather carry a larger phone than a smaller phone and a pair of reading glasses.
> The spectrum of rich person crank behavior has got a lot worse these days, going all the way up to "buying Twitter".
And even that pales in comparison to running for President thrice and winning it twice just to settle an imagined score with Barack Obama for a well-deserved roast [1] and rip apart everything bearing his name.
If the people who cry about the rich spent 15% of their time minding their own business and focusing on their own success, they'd actually be successful.
Somehow those who cry nonstop about the rich are even more insufferable than the rich.
This may be hard to remember but in 2005 (when I joined Google), everyone pretty much universally loved them and thought they were making the world better. I left in 2013, in part because the company was gradually turning into something different.
Ahh yes. The old "because they were within 10 feet of evil, they are evil." He didn't single-handedly stop Google, so he's guilty of perpetrating the evil himself, right?
Go on, next you'll tell me about how your hands are clean. You've never so much as touched a product that made someone's life worse.
Being complicit in feeding a malicious whale is often just as bad as being the malicious whale. When 1000 people all thing "I'm not doing that many objectively bad things at this company," that's 1000 workers under 1 tiny group's control deciding the destinies and "luck" of millions. It's obfuscation of power and responsibility, and I think people "in tech" need to realize this and accept it more than they do right now.
If you work for Google, for Apple, for Amazon - if you derive a payment from The Whale and in turn the whale continues to thrive in some way because of your work, you are complicit. Whether or not you or society is ok with it is the problem to discuss.
The word "complicit" is sneaking in a lot of philosophical baggage into your statement. Surely you cannot mean that being witness to a murder (while failing to prevent it) and committing the murder are the same sin? Or that they should be held to the same degree of judgement?
While we may say the cowardly bystander has less moral character than the one who would risk their life to attempt to stop the murder, surely you cannot mean the witness is as guilty of judgement as the murderer? You cannot mean they deserve the same sentence.
I will, for the sake of my own sanity, assume you mean that the witness is a coward. You are indicting their moral character. There is a degree of self-sacrifice that you might personally find more or less agreeable in a man. Fine.
But merely witnessing the murder is not complicity, just as merely working at Google is not complicity. Whether society is "ok" with the cowardly bystander not preventing murder is not, in my eyes, what this discussion is about.
What next? Will we compel all men to live to our standard?
No, my word choice is not sneaking in any philosophy.
> complicit
/kəm-plĭs′ĭt/
adjective
Associated with or participating in an activity, especially one of a questionable nature.
--
A witness is not participating in a murder and by only a stretch of the word is associated with it by means of them recording a version of the events in their brain.
I have to say you clearly write effectively, but surely you see that you're the one "sneaking in" philosophy here?
Pretending that slow, oppressive, plodding, calculated, rising control of a population of workers by means of wage control, obfuscation of responsibility, and simple lying to a public about goods or services is somehow murder is completely intellectually dishonest.
It is possible and necessary to recognize that there is more than one category of crime, and that each category of crime deserves its own social understanding and justice.
If I worked for a "defense" company a year or two before while they sold a gun toting robot dog, I would be complicit in its usage to kill people; if I stay there, I continue to be. I did not have to touch a single human being to be morally judged that I participated or was associated with a questionable activity.
If I worked for Facebook while they actively experimented on teenagers and children and adults to influence their minds and choices to determine their levels of suicidal tendencies without regard to their safety, I would be complicit in their actions.
I take no pleasure in saying this, because I don't know who you are, where you come from, or what you do or don't believe. What I can point as is you have tried to take a word "complicit" as a perfectly accurate word, stretch it to an invalid comparison, and then from that comparison, create a meaningless argument unrelated to my point.
That is the type of action, thinking, and wordplay I do not trust.
Yes. Working for Google is complicity in all their affairs. Witnessing a murder is not complicity in its timeline. Association by external sensory intake is not the same thing as association by direct participation, and direct participation or association with a murder is very obviously something we can morally judge.
For the sake of my own sanity, I'll assume you're simply not understanding the word choice of complicity, or are assuming that being complicit is somehow a binary judgement of quantitative punitive punishment.
He didn't have to stop Google from doing evil, but he could've refused to have his fortune coming from there.
> Go on, next you'll tell me about how your hands are clean.
They are as clean as they can be, which is a lot more that can be said from anyone who works at any FAANG (or Wall Street, or Big Oil...)
No one has been forced to work for Big Tech. No one ever said "I only took those $300k/year salary with those huge RSUs from Facebook because I couldn't find any other way to provide for my family" or "It was either working for OpenAI or washing dishes at an Olive Garden".
"Only slightly dirty" and "much dirtier than mine" are fine judgements to console yourself of your involvement, but if you intend to indict a man, you'll need much stricter standards than this.
To be completely clear: I agree with your moral assessment. I too would not work for Facebook due to my moral qualms with the company. However, it is a terribly dangerous game to begin judging a man's choices when you know nothing about him.
Before long you'll convince yourself that you're the only decent man around and the rest are less-than-human.
> but if you intend to indict a man, you'll need much stricter standards than this.
I don't want to indict anyone. I am not a judge or prosecutor. I am saying that my own moral shortcomings do not justify his.
> Before long you'll convince yourself that you're the only decent man around and the rest are less-than-human.
There is this kinda old book that has some stories in it. I never got to read the whole thing back-to-back, but the Cliff's Notes of it is pretty much that we all are imperfect beings, that we are not able to fix everything on our own and that the best we can do is to recognize and forgive the mistakes we all made.
> it is a terribly dangerous game to begin judging a man's choices when you know nothing about him.
Love the sinner, hate the sin.
I don't need to know anything about a person working for Facebook to know that the product of their labor is bad for society. Saying "this thing you are doing is evil" is NOT the same as saying "you are an evil person". People will end up creating all sorts of rationalizations for their actions, especially when their identities are attached to it. If we don't call out on evil, then it becomes accepted.
I just can't agree with this. Social media has a noticeable, damaging effect on those who consume it constantly.
If you haven't had the distinct displeasure of being around an iPad kid, I envy you.
There's anecdote that aligns with experience, that aligns with studies. And frankly, it seems silly to me that we need science to empirically prove something we can all witness with our own brains. That said, whichever method you submit to: they all bear witness to the same conclusion:
Social media (especially the brainless forms like TikTok) is incredibly damaging.
The anecdata I'm seeing is that people whose identity was "I am a good coder" are experiencing an (understandable) disorientation and even identity loss.
That appears to be the crux of it. There are still fun problems to be tackled. In fact, I'm having a ton of fun figuring out how to use AI to build subtractive solutions: solutions that remove, or reduce to enhance what is left.
The principle of KISS keeps coming to mind when I consider local computing. I'm looking forward to the day we can just run Opus-level models at 100 tok/sec on consumer hardware.
But currently it's really hard to beat anything offered by the cloud companies. And the cost and complexity of setting it all up, just to barely (if at all) touch on Opus-level intelligence makes it seem like we're not quite there for the common man (enthusiasts are a different story.)
I am very excited for open source local models, and we're nearly there, but it's still too complex and expensive to be my daily driver (yet).
Oi. Discussion on this site gets more difficult each day. Instead of pointing out where you disagreed you just pulled out the most egregious appeal to authority and said, "oH yEaH?"
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