A quarter of the answers Gemini gives me are made up. What would be the purpose of such, uh, “instruction”?

I wish there was a way to graffiti a website.

> We should all be getting dividends from them and they should be collectively owned. But instead we're seeing them explicitly marketed as tools for capital centralization.

Well-said. You'll notice that people with jobs that are on paper most synergetic with LLM use, such as folks in the C-suite[1], are not worried at all. Why? Because they are part of the owner class and are not at risk of getting replaced. To them, it's all upside: a chance to put their feet up on the table a bit more often.

Would be nice if that also applied to the rest of us.

[1] "Mark Zuckerberg Is Building an AI Agent to Help Him Be CEO" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47491355

All this skips the fundamental question: can this job be done by a machine? Or does the job just have a vaguely machine-doable look, particularly to those outside the trenches?

Because the latter is how you get the software engineering equivalent of collapsing bridges, en masse.

Almost nothing is fully automated yet. So the answer is tricky.

In the beginning, they are irrelevant, but at some point, edge cases are everything you have to deal with.

A table saw does not make decisions for you.

I don’t let AI either, I tell it what I want and it builds it to my exact specs. Not vibing, I specify the interface and what the functionality should be then I verify it. I just don’t have to press the keyboard. The result is what I’d have built, but it’s easier to polish because there’s a difference between thinking about code and thinking about architecture and functionality.

You guys are really not understanding the difference between a professional using AI tools properly and vibe coding.

Goodbye doodling and tapping into the power of childhood imagination. A horrid crutch.

That's a little curmudgeonly. 99% of our story time doesn't involve computers at all, it is just something we do sometimes too. Lots of doodling and imagination to go around.

Because the rich can do it and we can’t.

I do it literally all the time.

You pirate other people’s works for profit all the time?

Since when has Meta profited off of this shit? I don't know why their stock price hasn't cratered yet, but it's not because they're raking in the big cash training LLMs on 40 yr old cookbooks.

The Metaverse wasn’t a great success either, but do you think the motive wasn’t profit? Do you think Meta is a public benefit corporation?

We could have a conversation about that. Or rather, I could have a conversation about it with someone intelligent, who can actually appreciate nuance and detail. You've got some sort of mental caricature of mustache-twirling billionaires, where everything is "profit".

It's pretty clear that Meta wasn't about profit, given that no amount of "sunk cost" could explain what happened. That had more to do with self-aggrandizement and his belief that he was some sort of digital messiah that would get to usher humanity into another world.

Surely the board and shareholders were lead to believe it was for a profit motive. Nobody puts billions of dollars of stock positions into a worse version of Second Life because they think it’s a world changer. They do it to make more money than putting their investments elsewhere. The company said repeatedly that the Metaverse was where trade and business would increasingly happen in the future.

A bad bet doesn’t mean the motive wasn’t to win the bet.

"As the CEO responsible for the asinine decisions that got us here, I am stepping down immediately, without severance."

Not to forget. "I am also returning all of my pay to company."

I feel like this would just select for business leaders that take zero risk.

I don’t think I’ve heard of a single tech CEO resigning for massively fucking up. They only “take responsibility” to the extent of saying those magic words.

Well there's the several billion of severance expense. I mean do we want to hang someone every time there are layoffs?

When tech workers finally unionize.