David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)
SHAPIRO: Ok, so you’ve spent your career television without AI, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had that tool to solve those thorny problems…
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: … Or saying…
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: … Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don’t think AI can challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you’re trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you’re stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I’d rather put a gun in my mouth.
I’ve had this exact conversation in real life.
I do IT work. Someone who was a heavy AI user asked me ‘how was I integrating AI into my workflow’ as if it was a foregone conclusion that I AM integrating AI. I told him I wasn’t, that AI may be useful for finding answers to some things or photoshopping funny pictures but most of what I do is intellectual, specific to certain situations and requirements, which AI generally doesn’t understand. That I can’t risk AI making actual changes to my environments, so if I let AI write a plan and then I proof it myself and then do it, it’s easier just to do the work myself. So that leaves the only thing AI could do for me is writing, and I’m good at writing, so I overall have little or no use for AI.
Dude looked at me like I was an alien. Like he legitimately could not understand why an intelligent person would voluntarily reject AI. Like I said I rejected cars and I ride a horse to work. Does not compute. Here’s this supposedly smart person who knows more about tech than the next 2-3 people in the office combined, and this person is completely rejecting the holy grail.
BTW rejecting cars is also something that intelligent and rational people can/should do.
Depends on the situation. Not every place to live is walkable, or should be.
Past a certain level of population density- ABSOLUTELY. EVERYTHING should be designed with walkability in mind.
Below that though, cars can often make more sense. If you live in a suburb, there’s too much distance to walk usually, and too few people on any given route to justify regular mass transit.
Personally I’m a real big fan of ‘third mode’ transportation- bikes, scooters, powered skateboards, hoverboards, segways, etc. Things that go faster than walking, slower than cars, and (crucially) take up almost no pavement space. Get enough people on those and things can get better fast.
It’s tough not to form a superiority complex these days when you hear of people who can’t compose emails by themselves.
AI cured me of imposter syndrome but led to the realization that everyone is dumber than I thought.
Yeah, and I think it’s a symptom of a cultural problem where people think prosperity means essentially not having to do anything. The ideal is to sit on your ass and consume, while never having to create.
But when you don’t do anything for yourself and have AI or hired help do it so that you can go back to scrolling the dopamine treadmill, you eventually don’t know how to do it even if you wanted to. Losing knowledge, skills, and attention span means getting more stupid, kinda by definition.
This negative feedback loop is a form of conditioning, and it is not in our best interests. It is in the interests of advertisers, psychological manipulators, tech barons, and others who are generally the worst.
In my case, the more I have consciously decided to take care of my own shit – in various aspects of life – the better I have felt. It’s not the one secret to a fulfilling life, but it’s an important one. And yes damn it, I sometimes use dashes.
My boss had three of us on a Teams call for nearly an hour and a half yesterday because he needed our help to make one Power Point slide.
To be fair, power point - if you don’t regularly use it and especially if you’re using a ‘template’ someone made - is a miserable experience.
Add four words to a sentence - why did the fucking font size change and why did an unrelated text box shrink?!?!? I just need to add ‘this has been approved’ to my status deck.
Why can’t I update a blob of text? Oh, it’s in the Slide Master, which has exactly one instance of this slide type in the deck.
/rant. I haven’t lowered myself to using copilot to make these changes, though.
I think everyone should think of AI as that you have random access to the knowledge of reddit. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s a troll, and sometimes no one will answer. You also have to have knowledge to understand what it’s saying most of the time.
But, you have to specify it isn’t actually redditors seeing the question and posting an answer. AI doesn’t actually understand questions.
It’s more that it sees your question and generates text near that question that wouldn’t look out of place on Reddit. Sometimes what it generates is good, sometimes it’s what a troll would say, the key thing is that it’s believable but not accurate.
Right, I think we’re agreeing. That is exactly like reddit.
at least reddit doesn’t (well, didn’t) consume a nonillion jiggawatts just to produce a half-shitty answer
Devils advocate only:
But you’d have to include the electric consumption of all reddit commenters and posters as well since they are creating the content.
All those people are still around consuming food, water, and electricity though. For now.
You’d think that last sentence would make people understand HOW you got that knowledge…
If you have more than 3 brain cells to rub together maybe. But that requires recognition of the knowledge chain challenge -> experience -> learning -> knowledge. Hell even the last two (learning -> knowledge) seems beyond a lot of people.
Personally I blame our educational system. It does a shit job of teaching people to learn. It does a great job of teaching people that learning isn’t fun and should be avoided.
Combine that with ‘stranger danger’ and helicopter parenting keeping kids indoors and keeping them from unstructured unsupervised activities that lead to organic learning through experience, and you get 18yo’s graduating high school with virtually all of their learning being in school settings and virtually none of it fun. So they do it when necessary or when they don’t realize they’re doing it, and otherwise avoid it. It’s really sad.
I got lucky or maybe I just had really good parents. But somewhere along the line I figured out that learning could be a ton of fun if it’s on a subject you’re interested in and if the instruction matches your learning style. So I taught myself all kinds of shit, usually by diving face first into projects I had no idea how to finish and by the time I was done I was good at it.
Like in the early days of VoIP- ‘I’m bored so let’s download some sketchy open source bullshit and route all my phone calls through a random free provider in Washington State. Oh it only runs on Linux? Guess I gotta figure out how to make Linux work then.’ Add a bunch of evenings and weekends of fucking around and without realizing it I’ve now got a marketable skill. And that ‘sketchy open source bullshit’ became Asterisk, one of the most common open source PBX systems around today.
Thing is- if Claude had been around, and I used it, I’d just have said ‘Claude, I need to install CentOS linux, download the latest snapshot of Asterisk out of SVN, compile it, and set up an IP PBX. Write me a script’.
It’d think for 30 seconds and then give me the entire answer. And I’d learn fucking nothing other than how to copy and paste from Claude.
It’s like all the companies that are firing their junior engineers in favor of AI… they are shooting themselves in the foot. Where you do think senior engineers come from? Do you think they hatch from eggs, fully trained and experienced and ready for a technical leadership position? No you moron they start as interns or junior engineers and they gain knowledge through experience. Get rid of the junior engineers and wait a generation or two and there will be no senior engineers to direct Claude.
Meanwhile I just plugged Claude into a production cluster to perform analysis and I accepted its suggestions for an immediate fix, while it also made those changes to my Ansible setup and committed them to git.
I think AI is great for some things, but imo it should NOT be wasted generating funny pictures or videos.
I think you’re one un-caught hallucination away from having claude eat the production database. I get that you think you’re approving suggestions, but there are many examples already of “<llm> ignored my directive of don’t make changes and then said sorry” out there.
If a prompt can make changes, then at some point a prompt will make bad changes. It hasn’t happened to you yet, apparently, but you’re playing Russian Roulette with the business.
I do agree it has some use cases, but shouldn’t be used to make pictures, video or writing text a human claims as something they produced.
We’ll see, I like to live life dangerously, especially when my org is pushing AI down our throats
That is absolutely a sentiment I can get behind. I just am afraid it’ll backfire and I’ve been lucky enough to not have to have that battle yet.
“You demanded I put AI here. This is *your* fault.”
Yes sir. Honestly I’m amazed by the work Gemini and Claude does for me, and according to my best judgment, I should never allow access to my local SSH client, but the bastards asked for this.
Hooking a random number generator up to production is a bold move.
Totally clueless about how LLMs work
They work fucking fantastic, until they don’t.
NO WAY DUDE THAT’S SO CRAZY
Same. Planning-with-files has saved my ass more times than I can count.