No shade on wgrep, mind you—I used that for a long time and it's been one of my favorite tools. But now I just… don't need it. It's so nice being able to do consult-ripgrep -> export results to a buffer -> change to edit mode -> search-and-replace project-wide.
Ironically, some of the AI 'trustism'[1] is very much driven by anxiety the fear of being left behind if one does not jump on the train.
I agree that it shifts the notion of what is expertise, but for the worst. It's very hard to tell who is actually an expert, and who is mimicking the expert.
The consequences vary from annoyance to downright catastrophe.
e.g.: a confidently wrong medical advice
On the other side, sometimes the expertise is not a requirement for the user: "If it works and does what it says on the box, that's all I care".
I like the fact that you use the word "some", awesome to see some nuance. It's a tricky situation.
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[1] I am being an idiot on purpose, I think the word skepticism was completely derailed from its origin and meaning.
A minimum amount of skepticism is very healthy, especially for software engineering.
Most software engineers, and science-based professions for that matter, are skeptics at heart. And it's a good thing.
Skepticism is the base of science; science thrived when we admitted ignorance and became skeptic towards our own knowledge.
Hm, Andros I do have my doubts - I know that you are a proponent of generative AI. We had a discussion over your outspoken opposition to https://human-emacs.org/.
I also know that you are an excellent writer/thinker, even prior to the advent of generative AI.
I'm in two minds here, and don't want to insinuate that you are outright lying, but I do believe your workflow relies on generative AI.
> NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.
If you do use generative AI, it feels hypocritical to use this licence while using a technology that essentially tries to circumvent the copyright issue by remixing, transforming and building upon the material it has ingested.
> This kind of comment loses a lot of its weight by being posted here on HN instead of sent privately. If this were really a good-faith question, a DM would have done it.
I'm sorry if it came across as a personal attack, it wasn't the intention.
It felt like the right place to comment. The article is public, the accusations are public, the licence is public and you made your position on generative AI public on the human-emacs project.
You expressed your position on the human-emacs publicly and we had a good discussion over it, in public. To me, this was on the same level.
I don't think that half of a conversation should be done via DM, while the other is made public.
> This is the real damage this kind of thing does. It breaks the quiet deal that used to exist between a writer and a reader: you put out content, and got at least some minimal credit for the work behind it. Now there's none of that left. No credit, no gratitude, not even the confidence that a human read it. That's exactly why there's less and less original content being written.
I agree, but you have to blame the right entity here. It's not the readers' fault that a deluge of AI generated content flooded the internet.
Generative AI broke that "quiet deal", not the readers. The readers are as much a victim as is the author who writes the content.
Generative AI came with a ton of negative side effects for the entire population. This is one of them.
Interestingly enough I read your article in elfeed, and came here for the comments as I was getting suspicious of the use of generative AI, which I refuse to read.
blog now disclose: "AI is one more tool. I use it for mechanical tasks: polishing the wording, catching typos, suggesting synonyms, improving or adapting code blocks and translating the article between Spanish and English."
I'm the author of Datastar and I find this response hilarious given you didn't reach out to me about correctness in public or private. Your content is full of incorrect statements. I even posted in the comments of the video to try to correct the FUD. You didn't do real effort and it shows
At large scale, it probably adds up.
Remember that they also need to ensure backup, etc.
Whether or not your code is being "used" or not, it has a cost.
Even GitHub has been struggling last year with the ramping amount of LLM produced code. I can imagine that it is a real issue.
They already encourage users to use 'agit' instead of doing 'physical' forks.
I imagine that the costs are sufficient enough to motivate them to follow through on this; on top of the ethical and legal concerns.
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Why don't you host your own git for those dormant projects?
It's really easy, you don't even need a forge. Just a bare git repo on server via ssh and you off to the races.
I think their stance is fine; there are other providers if you don't agree with this.
They aren't doing anything "at large scale" that would matter as such. It's not like they're working with MBs of storage, and even then a single 1.44MB diskette can still store a heck of a lot of text (yes, I used to use those).
I won't pretend to fully understand the paper, but I did try to read it.
A few notes:
1. This assumes that there is notable ROI on 'AI labor'. That is still up for debate.
2. This assumes that the interests are currently falling, unless I misread the paper.
3. This affirms that we are in an over valuated, speculative bubble which will inevitably correct; but it needs to "correct" at the exact right time defined by multiple factors.
First, "correction" can be an euphemism for a disastrous financial crisis. It could take years and years for most people to see the end of the tunnel.
I don't know if the end justify the means.
Do we really need to engineer a financial crisis to build more energy facilities? And will they be built the 'right way', using renewable energy for example? What if we invested half of those trillions directly in socially impactful measures, instead of having the money flow through a speculative bubble first?
Finally, I am not an economist, but I wonder how accurate a mathematical model is to the real world - i.e. what happens to the model when Donald keep changing the opening hours of the Hormuz?
It does feel a bit like trying to read tea leaves to me.
This reminds me of Hari Seldon's psychohistory:
> In Foundation (1951), famed mathematician and psychologist Hari Seldon has developed the science of psychohistory, which uses sophisticated mathematics and statistical analysis to predict future trends on a galactic scale. He has predicted the unavoidable and relatively imminent fall of the Galactic Empire, and intends to establish the Foundation, "a repository of crucial, civilization-preserving knowledge" that will enable society to revive itself more quickly and efficiently [...] [1]
> What if we invested half of those trillions directly in socially impactful measures
There’s no real “we” in this case. The money is coming from private coffers, people looking for ROI on their hard-earned money. The money isn’t coming from a central planning process.
As noted elsewhere in these comments, it was that long ago before the biggest thing propping up capital investment in the USA were the assets backing union workers' retirement funds. That very much wasn't "people looking for ROI on their hard earned money" and was very much closer to a "central planning process" (though admittedly, not all the way there).
There is a we though. Society might not act collectively or via central planning but culture can function as such to a degree. The culture in the US is currently that it is ethical to seek returns on your capital regardless the source. This didn’t always used to be the case and it doesn’t have to be the case.
not OP, but i believe the commenter is referring to how GFC in '07 had wide ranging negative effects for a lot of people who had nothing to do with investments in mortgage backed securities
> GFC in '07 had wide ranging negative effects for a lot of people who had nothing to do with investments in mortgage backed securities
GHC '07 can be directly traced to a (in retrospect) failure of regulations AKA the government AKA "we".
Our democratically elected government has the ability to strike, what they think, is the right balance.
The companies and investors cannot be expected to take the broad view, so it is the WE who are responsible in a way, are we not? In a way, "the people" have, on balance, decided what level of regulations.
We would be tempted to complain that the lag and fidelity of choices by "the people" cannot be faithfully represented by the government. However, there's no better solution than what we currently have that I can think of, but I would love to hear about a scalable approach that caters to more individuals' specific wishes on a very very long list of policy decisions and that has short turnaround time.
TIL! I might be able to remove my wgrep too. I love those highly crafted starter kits, they are full of gems.
Thank you!
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