Companies are groups of people behaving a certain way, and jobs are behaving that way. As an outsider, you don't know what the job is. If the interview is a bunch of questions you think is stupid, then the job is probably doing a bunch of stuff you think is stupid. If you want the money and prestige anyway, then learn to do the stupid stuff.

Which is why, as mentioned, unless I am desperate for a job, I walk out.

Or maybe the job is about actually carrying golf balls into planes.

I bet it is about solving the daily brain teaser of working with unmaintainable code!

I thought we had Fable for that now.

So if somebody tried to solve the brainteaser with an impossibly high likelihood of being completely wrong. You get the signal that their values match yours, they are open minded and that they are good at writing great programs?

I do understand that these are stupid ways to achieve that goal.

That whole paragraph is clever :)

Just saying: those are also carbon-based lifeforms :D

I disagree. I think you absolutely have a moral obligation to consider the impacts of your product.

> Who are you to say you know better than the market?

You really don't think the scientists & engineers making these tools know some things better than the market?

Good point - folks should stop teaching them that. If your kid is really in a sea of dangerous adults their phone won't save them anyway.

Being on "social media" is a fundamentally unsocial activity: you do it alone, it makes you lonely, and it separates you from others. Some people manage to bootstrap a social layer on top of the base medium, but most are being driven apart for profit.

I call it _anti_social media.

This is kind of like saying a kid can never become a better programmer than the average of his teachers.

IMHO, the reasons not to use AI are social, not logical.

The kid can learn and become better over time, while "AI" can only be retrained using better training data.

I'm not against using AI by any means, but I know what to use it for: for stuff where I can only do a worse than half the population because I can't be bothered to learn it properly. I don't want to toot my own horn, but I'd say I'm definitely better at my niche than 50% of the people. There are plenty of other niches where I'm not.

Yeah, but it's been trained on the boring, repetitive stuff, and A LOT of code that needs to be written is just boring, repetitive stuff.

By leaving the busywork for the drones, this frees up time for the mind to solve the interesting and unsolved problems.

The AI doesn't know what good or bad code is. It doesn't know what surpassing someone means. It's been trained to generate text similar to its training data, and that's what it does.

If you feed it only good code, we'd expect a better result, but currently we're feeding it average code. The cost to evaluate code quality for the huge data set is too high.

The training data includes plenty of examples of labelled good and bad code. And comparisons between two implementations plus trade-offs and costs and benefits. I think it absolutely does "know" good code, in the sense that it can know anything at all.

There does exist some text making comparisons like that, but compared to the raw quantity of totally unlabeled code out there, it's tiny.

You can do some basic checks like "does it actually compile", but for the most part you'd really need to go out and do manual categorization, which would be brutally expensive.

Ditto. AI has the power to make you believe stuff without you noticing, why would they bother with garish ads when they could make you think it was YOUR idea to buy Chlorox?

I guess maybe the garish colors could increase your suggestibility indirectly maybe?

> The environment wins (less tokens burned = less energy consumed)

This is understandable logic, but at a systemic level it's not how things always go. Increasing efficiency can lead to increased consumption overall. You might save 50% in energy for your workload, but maybe now you can run it 3 times as much, or maybe 3 times more people will use it, because it's cheaper. The result might be a 50% INCREASE in energy consumed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

This is the standing reason that is always given for why we must all sit in freeway traffic clogs, and I think it's B.S., because it assumes that there are viable alternatives available in near-medium term, but that isn't always the case. The alternative to freeways that are supposed to compensate is a joint combination of denser housing and mass transit, which in California, is not happening at all...zoning laws and the slow pace of building mass transit due to regulation slow-down and the need to service urban sprawl, prevent that solution from relieving traffic pressure. Don't speak of busses, because taking two hours to get to work is not better than one hour. So..the freeways stay the same number of lanes and my commute time continues to grow, and I am tired of hearing it is for the best.

So yes, lower LLM costs would probably lead even more LLM usage and greater energy expenditures, but then again, so does having a moving economy, and all that comes with that.

Yeah, probably. I wonder where speed-running fixing all the low-hanging fruit for AI-related efficiency improvements will leave us? It still seems worth doing. Maybe combined with a carbon tax.

What I want is for THIS to stop. "Listen, no one wants to hear about your moral issues, just stfu."

Don't give up so easily. Let the discomfort in and try & figure out why people keep saying "omg LLMs" until you can hear what they are actually saying.