With a bunch of new faces around I’m going to plug the shit I’m most proud of. Just one post I promise. It’s an animation, made in Blender, that tells a story within the #SpaceStation13 universe.
And this is being done with such reckless, breathless abandon, and with so much money, with so little concern about actual human beings that even the contrarians in Hacker News are in bootlicking mode, comparing human intelligence to Markov chains and lamenting that engineers at tech companies are too greedy to be interested in building businesses which is why they need to be sacked and replaced with a text remixer.
And this was accomplished by taking the shared collective output of the world, all of the visual art and imagery, all of the photography, all of the prose, poetry, all of the source code and open source repositories available to them, with no regard to license, copyright, intellectual property, or consent of the countless people who created all of the content and material available on the modern internet, and selling it back to everyone for 50 dollars every 1,000 API tokens or whatever the fuck.
...while an algorithm only slightly more convincing than a Markov chain generator is crowned the heir apparent, galvanizing the push to lower engineering salaries, “coincidentally” alongside a significant uptick in discussion among programmers of unionizing and ethical software engineering.
Then, the microsecond it seemed even remotely plausible that programmers could be replaced by the systems they built, the largest software companies on the planet shedded tens of thousands of engineers—people who, as per these companies, were the best of the best of the programming world, highly esteemed coders ostensibly privileged to work at the most uncompromising tech companies possible...
So let me get this straight.
For about two decades software engineers were an invaluable resource, worth paying six digit salaries, touting unheard of employee benefits and amenities in order to reinforce that the work of engineers was worth every penny and to advertise that tech companies only deigned to hire the best of the best.
It’s weird and honestly a little cultish how quickly 90% of hacker news has decided that people and LLMs are equivalent
Every single thread is filled with people responding to criticisms of AI with “you could say the same thing about PEOPLE” and “what is intelligence REALLY”
I’m not exactly a huge fan of the species but this kind of language really grosses me out and I hope we can get to the root of what is motivating them to act like this
AI is exciting to Hacker News, conference circuit Twitter, and the half dozen or so people in the back room at the start of it all who stand to make infinite money
The rest of us knows how this goes.
Only in a broken society does the promise of obviating manual labor—a nominally good thing!—fill people with dread, cause them to worry about healthcare or paying their mortgage or raising a family
Only here is “we’re going to automate your job away” a threat
Lost cause. I have never been cool. #software, #gaming, #python, #linguistics, #history.
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