This is exactly the sort of refusal to comprehend so that you can get in an "um, ackshually" that the op is talking about. He's quoting a line from a book as a metaphor for a concept the book illustrates well.

True. It's more like 'no creative machines' or 'no entry level middle class job machines'.

And they don’t reason. They do prompt smoothing.

LLMs don't think, and planes don't fly.

Was C+++ built by extensively mining other people's work, possibly creating an economic bubble, putting thousands out of work, creating spikes in energy demand, raising the price of electronic components and inflating the price of downstream products, abusing people's privacy,… hmm. Was it?

What part of c++ is inefficient? I can write that pretty quickly without having some cloud service hallucinate stuff.

And no, a faster way to write or refactor code is not anti-worker. Corporations gobbling up tax payer money to build power hungry datacenters so billionaires can replace workers is.

technology forum? the last hacker left this dump for lobsters 5 years ago

now it's full of SBF and scam altman wannabes

If workers (i.e. me) choose to use it without it being imposed on them, is that a morally bad thing in your worldview?

I was trying to use an obscure CLI tool the other day. Almost no documentation and one wrong argument and I would brick an expensive embedded device.

Somehow Google gave me the right arguments in its AI generated answer to my search, and it worked.

I first tried every forum post I could find, but nobody seemed to be doing exactly what I was attempting to do.

I think this is a clear and moral win for AI. I am not in a position to hire embedded development consultants for personal DIY projects.

You've pretty much described the "what it is for" for a large percentage of industrial inventions. Clearly, however, the world would be worse off without many of them.

You are free to think whatever you like. That doesn't make you right (or wrong).

Nobody is looking to block "all AI". Some of us are opposed to either specific cases or the broad deployment of LLMs.

Right, and let’s not forget that the VC game that YC plays in assumes that the vast majority of their ventures will fail.

It’s way more exploitative than it gets credit for, even those who criticize VC firms aren’t verbalizing the vastness of the scope of the issue:

Startup incubators prey on young and ambitious people’s willingness to have zero life outside of work in order to set 90% of them up to fail and make huge profits off of the 10% Airbnb-type success stories.

These VC firms have money but no talent or time of their own so they basically steal it from founders in exchange for a Hollywood or pro sports-style superstar pipe dream where most are statistically guaranteed to fail, and even those who succeed don’t keep the majority of the fruits of their labor.

These failed startup founders end up with skills that are supposedly transferable to future ventures or what have you, but I bet if someone actually tracked down a lot of these people they might find a lot of sob stories of early stage founders who ended up burning out of their early career and having the whole startup founder experience representing a net negative in their lives.

> It’s literally worthless in all senses of the term.

I think that misunderstands the economics:

For a long time we've been able to generate mathematical solutions at a prompt, and yet those still have value - I still gain by having them. Email is free and ubiquitous, but still has value. Clean water, for example, is generally free and ubiquitous, but has enormous value; I'd die without it.

In the market, things are priced by their marginal value - the added value of the last one sold; your 10,000th glass of water is not as valuable as your 1st (if you have only 1). But price != value: 'price is what you pay, value is what you get'.

It’s worth it though my manager said I was an extra good little worker in my last review. (/s)

I mean a line was gonna show up at some point. Maybe for a lot of people AI was that line. Or AI pushed too hard too quickly making the line too apparent.