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- Hacker News
- There's something that really rubs me the wrong way when people use the language of healthy emotional regulation to spread unearned and unjustified placation.
It reminds me of (for the pedants out there, I'm not saying it's equivalent to) the consume product meme. "Don't ask questions, just complete assignment and then get excited for next industry trend."
>I don’t know what the future of this industry will look like, and I don’t know who will benefit from it and I don’t think I’m alone with that. However I can only urge anyone who feels anger and looks for a villain right to instead remain curious instead. To be curious enough to understand what is changing, excited enough to experiment with it. And then, from what we learn, earn the right to decide when resistance is warranted and where to direct it.
Sounds pleasant and vaguely inspirational. Then you read it again and notice guy thinks I don't always have the RIGHT to DECIDE to RESIST.
by dogleash - I think it's more a mix of anxiety, frustration, and exploration.
Exploration: Hey there's some cool new tech, let's see what it can do for me, for us.
Anxiety: What will happen to my craft? Will my skills still be important? Will I have a job in a year? How will I keep up? If we stop or slow hiring junior engineers, what happens when the experienced folks retire?
Frustration: This could be a time of fun and exploration with these new tools at hand. Instead we are measured by weird metrics (tokens, PR times, etc, etc), some of us are laid off, etc. There are $100bns spent on AI data centers.
The last one is the closest to anger, but it's not really the same.
by linuxhansl - I’m not the arbiter of emotions but being angry is valid and it doesn’t have to be directed. It’s not necessarily a vector. If I worked very hard to transplant a tree, and at no fault of anyone, it dies in the process, I can be angry I invested my time, money and energy into the failed effort. No one has the right to say that’s the wrong emotion to feel.by aenima4six2
- As far as I can tell, we've convinced companies and VCs to dump billions of dollars into infrastructure to support a vision where they can get more done with fewer people. They've been duped.
I think of LLMs as a labor-liberating tool. It's saving me effort so I don't have to drudge through enterprise codebases and memorize company-specific knowledge that is a dead end for my career. Instead I can run an agent while doing chores.
The beauty of the entire LLM stack is that it requires us. It is useless without a human-in-the-loop. The entire stack is designed around human intervention. We will not magically invent a way to remove the human without first removing it from training.
So rest assured, so long as there are humans in the training loop, there's nothing to worry about, because LLMs are a cybernetic enhancement, not a replacement.
by qudat - > I’m afraid we’re completely ignoring the impact this has on society at large, the climate, and the balance of the world as a whole.
Who's we? The impact this has on society at large is such an enormous, pervasive topic in my life - headlines in city newspapers, conversation at the dinner table - that I feel like you'd have to be living in a bunker to think nobody is engaging with it. This guy comes across as entirely disconnected from the world, but somehow thinks he knows how people who actually live in it should feel.
by lazyasciiart - I think right now I love my job. I can work 5 times faster and explore all the little things that I never had time for. All my side projects suddenly come to fruition!
But I have never been more anxious. I have a hard time sleeping, I constantly feel the need to keep up or fall behind. It didn’t use to be like this.
by Aeolun - I was taught that anger isn't an emotion. It's a reaction -a defensive surge of adrenaline, binary thinking, and motivation to fight. It can feel empowering and energizing. We aren't just sitting here. We're gonna do something.
The emotion is fear. Anger is just a reaction to fear. Basically, if we are angry, we are also scared; whether or not we want to admit it.
It's a long topic, and one I know well (I agree with the above summary), but I really don't think that discussing it, would be particularly welcome, here. I know that it isn't often welcome, even with folks that ask to hear it.
I've spent the majority of my adult life, learning to curb and sideline anger. In my experience, my anger has always caused problems. It has never solved a problem.
Ever. Not even one single problem.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
It's just drained my energy, stunted my reasoning, and poisoned relationships. It has caused others to strike back at me, when they didn't need to (which, of course, caused me damage), it has caused problems, where none existed before, and magnified existing ones.
We can't help getting angry, but we sure can help staying angry. That "staying" part is the corrosive agent. Anger is meant to be a temporary burst of energy, to deal with a threat. After the threat has (or has not) been dealt with, anger is supposed to dissipate. It's not supposed to be an "at rest" state (unless you're Bruce Banner).
- The record scratch for me here was the idea that people can choose to be unsure instead of angry.
People hate being unsure. Neurochemistry prefers anger to uncertainty. People get angry about being unsure. We feel anger in large part as our brain's natural salve for the discomfort of uncertainty. The suggestion he's making sort of defines away human nature.
(There's a lot of practical benefit to be gained from understanding this; for instance, skilled consultants put a price tag on certainty; you can sell determinism by itself, separate from any product or service you're more overtly offering.)
by tptacek