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Hacker News
I met and drank with him once. Brutal punk poet of a guy.
by bsenftner
The takeaway message is you can be more on the beach and don’t have to ship 40k LoC everyday with your GStack. I like that.
by neuropacabra
I enjoy the fact that you were able to wedge Bukowski into this clusterfuck of technobabble , but the parallel being drawn between quality-writing and hitting buttons on the magic-elaboration-device ["ai"] is just... not there. Quality writing requires actual lived-experience, emotions, adventures, and a keen ability to grasp and clasp ends of an event-sequence like a beaded necklace or rosary; to present something cohesive and well-lived to someone who can imagine , provided ... the imagery and order-of-events are resonant.
Stylistically, I find Bukowski's "I know it / will" linebreak to be offensive to my aesthetic sensibilities as an excellent writer.
by summarybot
Some of it is fun and new, I'm spending a lot of time just making stuff I wanna make.
But regarding work produced for the marketplace, I think it is naive to think any productivity gains will ever produce more time on the beach for workers. The market is competitive. Some gains will be seized by capital, and others realized in the production of some combination of more stuff, cheaper stuff, or better stuff.
> If I had access [to AI] back then, I'd probably just spend more time on the beach.
If AI were marketed like this it would not be appealing to employers. So of course AI marketing is wrapped in hustle culture. Gotta keep the worker bees busy.
by MisterTea
>Why aren't we spending more time on the beach.
I think this comes down to getting paid per effort invested (measured in time) vs getting paid for the result.
If the average person were self-employed and received income proportional to their economic output, then they would be rewarded for working faster, instead of punished.
If they increased their productivity, by means of technology, they could then simply choose to work fewer hours.[0]
I noticed this before AI. If someone does the same job twice as fast, do they deserve half as much compensation?
What if they find a way to automate an entire process? What if they replace months of "manual labor" (tedious refactoring) with a perl script that produces the same result, deterministically?
A friend of mine once automated a woman's entire job away. He thought he was doing her a favour, freeing her from the drudgery, so she could focus on the other parts of the job. She wasn't so happy, when she revealed to him, that there weren't any.
---
[0] But most people aren't in such a position, and have to stay the required number of hours regardless of how much has been achieved. And I'm increasingly hearing reports of some kind of burnout resulting from being expected to keep up with machines that work a thousand times faster than you.
And that's now... Just wait until the big providers switch to Cerebras in a week or two!
(Though at that token speed, the silver lining is the work becomes interactive again, so if you use it correctly, your mental model does not desynchronize from the codebase, i.e. you don't need to spend extra time later catching up. But that deserves its own thread, I think :)
by andai
All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. plumbers don't get plumbers block, and doctors don't get doctors block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working and then expects sympathy for it?
—Philip Pullman
by andai
This is why there is growing anti-AI sentiment. It is always extractive. You can never just enjoy a poem, you need to use it. You need to extract its value for shareholders. Get a life.
by drunken_thor
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- Hacker News
- I met and drank with him once. Brutal punk poet of a guy.by bsenftner
- The takeaway message is you can be more on the beach and don’t have to ship 40k LoC everyday with your GStack. I like that.by neuropacabra
- I enjoy the fact that you were able to wedge Bukowski into this clusterfuck of technobabble , but the parallel being drawn between quality-writing and hitting buttons on the magic-elaboration-device ["ai"] is just... not there. Quality writing requires actual lived-experience, emotions, adventures, and a keen ability to grasp and clasp ends of an event-sequence like a beaded necklace or rosary; to present something cohesive and well-lived to someone who can imagine , provided ... the imagery and order-of-events are resonant.
Stylistically, I find Bukowski's "I know it / will" linebreak to be offensive to my aesthetic sensibilities as an excellent writer.
by summarybot - Some of it is fun and new, I'm spending a lot of time just making stuff I wanna make.
But regarding work produced for the marketplace, I think it is naive to think any productivity gains will ever produce more time on the beach for workers. The market is competitive. Some gains will be seized by capital, and others realized in the production of some combination of more stuff, cheaper stuff, or better stuff.
- > If I had access [to AI] back then, I'd probably just spend more time on the beach.
If AI were marketed like this it would not be appealing to employers. So of course AI marketing is wrapped in hustle culture. Gotta keep the worker bees busy.
by MisterTea - >Why aren't we spending more time on the beach.
I think this comes down to getting paid per effort invested (measured in time) vs getting paid for the result.
If the average person were self-employed and received income proportional to their economic output, then they would be rewarded for working faster, instead of punished.
If they increased their productivity, by means of technology, they could then simply choose to work fewer hours.[0]
I noticed this before AI. If someone does the same job twice as fast, do they deserve half as much compensation?
What if they find a way to automate an entire process? What if they replace months of "manual labor" (tedious refactoring) with a perl script that produces the same result, deterministically?
A friend of mine once automated a woman's entire job away. He thought he was doing her a favour, freeing her from the drudgery, so she could focus on the other parts of the job. She wasn't so happy, when she revealed to him, that there weren't any.
---
[0] But most people aren't in such a position, and have to stay the required number of hours regardless of how much has been achieved. And I'm increasingly hearing reports of some kind of burnout resulting from being expected to keep up with machines that work a thousand times faster than you.
And that's now... Just wait until the big providers switch to Cerebras in a week or two!
(Though at that token speed, the silver lining is the work becomes interactive again, so if you use it correctly, your mental model does not desynchronize from the codebase, i.e. you don't need to spend extra time later catching up. But that deserves its own thread, I think :)
by andai - All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. plumbers don't get plumbers block, and doctors don't get doctors block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working and then expects sympathy for it?
—Philip Pullman
by andai - This is why there is growing anti-AI sentiment. It is always extractive. You can never just enjoy a poem, you need to use it. You need to extract its value for shareholders. Get a life.by drunken_thor