You say that there's no skill in using AI, and then go on to explain how you used AI in an unskilled way to produce something that neither worked correctly nor taught you anything.
It strikes me that if you developed your skill set around using AI more effectively, you could have both developed a deep understanding and gotten what you wanted, and done it in less time and at higher quality than you could have done solo.
That said, the fact that you can use AI in an unskilled way to produce something kinda cool... is itself kinda cool! It means there's an on-ramp to using AI! People with no skills can get started, same day, and make stuff. And over time, can learn to make even better stuff! That's pretty cool to me.
In a lot of ways, I'm thankful that LLMs are letting us hear the thoughts of people who usually wouldn't share them.
There are skilled writers. Very skilled, unique writers. And I'm both exceedingly impressed by them as well as keenly aware that they are a rare breed.
But there's so many people with interesting ideas locked in their heads that aren't skilled writers. I have a deep suspicion that many great ideas have gone unshared because the thinker couldn't quite figure out how to express it.
In that way, perhaps we now have a monotexture of writing, but also perhaps more interesting ideas being shared.
Of course, I love a good, unique voice. It's a pleasure to parse patio11's straussian technocratic musings. Or pg's as-simple-as-possible form.
And I hope we don't lose those. But somehow I suspect we may see more of them as creative thinkers find new ways to express themselves. I hope!
> In a lot of ways, I'm thankful that LLMs are letting us hear the thoughts of people who usually wouldn't share them.
I could agree with you in theory, but do you see the technology used that way? Because I definitely don't. The thought process behind the vast majority of LLM-generated content is "how do I get more clicks with less effort", not "here's a unique, personal perspective of mine, let's use a chatbot to express it more eloquently".
We might get twice as many original ideas but hundred times as much filler. Neither of those aspects erases the other. Both the absolute number of ideas and the ratio matter.
I seriously doubt people didn't write blog posts or articles before LLMs because they didn't know how to write.
It's not some magic roadblock. They just didn't want to spend the effort to get better at writing; you get better at writing by writing (like good old Steve says in "On Writing"). It's how we all learnt.
I'm also not sure everyone should be writing articles and blog posts just because. More is not better. Maybe if you feel unmotivated about making the effort, just don't do it?
Almost everyone will cut novice writers and non-native $LANGUAGE speakers some slack. Making mistakes is not a sin.
Finally, my own bias: if you cannot be bothered to write something, I cannot be bothered to read it. This applies to AI slop 100%.
I hate when people hijack progressive language - like in your case the language of accessibility - for cheap marketing and hype.
Writing is one of the most accessible forms of expression. We were living in a world where even publishing was as easy as imaginable - sure, not actually selling/profiting, but here’s a secret, even most bestselling authors have either at least one other job, or intense support from their close social circle.
What you do to write good is you start by writing bad. And you do it for ages. LLMs not only don’t help here, they ruin it. And they don’t help people write because they’re still not writing. It just derails people who might, otherwise, maybe start actually writing.
Framing your expensive toy that ruins everything as an accessibility device is absurd.
I'm anon, but also the farthest thing from a progressive, so I find this post amusing.
I don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying but I also have a different frame.
Even if we take your claim that LLMs don't make people better writers as true (which I think there's plenty to argue with), that's not the point at all.
What I'm saying is people are communicating better. For most ideas, writing is just a transport vessel for ideas. And people now have tools to communicate better than they would have been.
Most people aren't trying to become good writers. That's true before, and true now.
On the other hand, this argument probably isn't worth having. If your frame is that LLMs are expensive toys that ruin everything -- well, that's quite an aggressive posture to start with and is both unlikely to bear a useful conversation or a particularly delightful future for you.
> What I'm saying is people are communicating better. For most ideas, writing is just a transport vessel for ideas. And people now have tools to communicate better than they would have been.
Of course you are. As the original poster mentioned, it allows lousy writers to get their ideas out in the world. Shitty writing is much more likely to be ignored than LLM writing.
It basically boils down to "I want the external validation of being seen as a good writer, without any of the internal growth and struggle needed to get there."
I mean, kinda, but also: not only are someone’s meandering ramblings a part of a process that leads to less meandering ramblings, they’re also infinitely more interesting than LLM slop.
Are they your ideas if they go through a heavy-handed editor? If you've had lots of conversations with others to refine them?
I dunno. There's ways to use LLMs that produces writing that is substantially not-your-ideas. But there's also definitely ways to use it to express things that the model would not have otherwise outputted without your unique input.
As the saying goes, "If you're not a liberal when you're 2.5, you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative by the time you're 4.5, you have no brain"
I think this one is popular in various forms, Goodreads ascribes it to G.B. Shaw: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11546984-if-at-age-20-you-a... - but I believe it's fake, also it's not on his wikiquotes page. "If at age 20 you are not a Communist" gives many results but it's really hard to track back the source.
Sorry, didn't mean to come off critical at all. I know, but I've been hearing that stereotype for at least three decades, and I've actually seen the opposite.
Folks I know who were middle of the road, would now never consider voting for a GOP candidate in national elections. It wasn't the individuals I have in mind who changed.
I think that saying was already obsolete in the beginning of this century, at least in my experience.
Completely agree. On the autism spectrum, I'm almost certainly very low. But going through the simulator felt like... yeah this all sucks but is very much in the realm of things that I experience and feel on any given day. It didn't feel enlightening, it felt deeply familiar.
It's definitely the case that some people have a much larger magnitude of experience or persistence of experience. And for some, it's at levels that do make functioning in society quite difficult or impossible.
And yet, I think the point you are quite rightly making is that many people who are decidedly low on the spectrum are now adopting the identity of autism as a way to explain why life is hard.
I don't know why people feel inclined to adopt the label. I don't care that they do, they can call themselves whatever they want. But I do wonder if there are more productive ways of perceiving yourself, if you are indeed very much capable of functioning in society.
Yeah, with the appalling civil forfeiture concept that I hope everyone is aware of, I also feel uncomfortable with this word "suspicious."
In brief summary: If the police search your car (let's just assume probable cause exists) in a routine traffic stop and find say, $50,000 in cash in a bag, they can charge the cash with a crime and arrest it, and unlike a person, it's guilty until definitively proven innocent. I don't think that's fair. And it's a big reason that holding more than a little cash is financially risky.
On the other hand, up till now I'd argue it's more risky (just specifically in terms of potential for loss of the money) to have your BTC in Coinbase or say, FTX where mine was, than in self-custody. These notions may reverse if your crypto private keys can be seized automatically as "suspicious," and the civil forfeiture thing has proven that the police will do that.
it's already illegal. unless you keep tax records and receipts with all that money under your bed, probably cause and civil forfeiture can be broadly applied to it.
One of the ways you know if you're really practicing this is if you actively disqualify potential customers after the first call.
Not them disqualifying you, but you actively saying, "Hey, not sure we are the right solution for you. Seems like you're trying to achieve X, but we're really better fit if you're trying to achieve Y."
This is in lieu of trying to convince them that you're a good fit for X, or that they should actually really be wanting to achieve Y.
Quick disqualification is sort of a counter-intuitive idea for a lot of throughput maximizing engineers. Shouldn't we want to optimize every lead?
Perhaps, but I think the better frame is optimizing productive seller-minutes. And time spent on deals that should die (and probably will die, eventually) is definitely not optimized.
That’s antithetical to “this period’s bonus.” Who cares if it dies in three months when the bonus for that three months end up in the salesman’s pocket?
You can’t make sales people responsible for the entire company, that’s CEO- and board-level responsibility.
If you don’t give sales bonus for clients that later canceled due to engineering or tech support fuck up, do you expect regular sales people also to do engineering and tech support management in your company?
It is only a counterpoint if you claim that this compensation scheme works well. If you don't think it makes sense, then it actually proves my point that bonuses should only involve things that directly depend on employee's own performance.
Is it fair for the company to have received three months of payments from a customer but the salesperson doesn’t get commission at all? How will you retain sales staff when word gets out? What’s the period length over which if the deal dies the salesperson doesn’t get their commission? Do you roll back commission payments later when the customer stops paying?
These are all great questions which people have answered and it’s the standard solution to the problem of misaligned incentives between the company receiving recurring revenue and the sales person receiving an upfront commission.
It's optimized for the seller. The sales person that can actually determine good fit/bad fit can't also be making 100 calls a day. The BDR making 100 calls a day cannot determine good fit/bad fit on their own on the first call.
1. On one hand, walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc, are most of the internet and they decidedly use React (or similar) frameworks. So from that perspective, the statement is sorta trivially true.
2. There may well be a horde of websites that are pure HTML rendering. But, those sites are not largely being developed by developers – they are being generated by platforms (like Squarespace, etc.) so are out of the scope of "sites and apps built by developers"
It strikes me that if you developed your skill set around using AI more effectively, you could have both developed a deep understanding and gotten what you wanted, and done it in less time and at higher quality than you could have done solo.
That said, the fact that you can use AI in an unskilled way to produce something kinda cool... is itself kinda cool! It means there's an on-ramp to using AI! People with no skills can get started, same day, and make stuff. And over time, can learn to make even better stuff! That's pretty cool to me.
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