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Steve Klabnik
@steveklabnik.com

i think a core beef that i have with a lot of this "automation is bad" sentiment lately is that there is no inherent moral good in laboring the story of humanity is one of invention, where we improve our conditions by building things that help us do more things more easily

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eevee
@eev.ee

tbh i find it deeply irritating and disingenuous to call this "automation", as if we'd just invented the dishwasher. it's not a contraption that performs a rote task; it's a box that spits out Whatever

1 repost35 likes

eevee
@eev.ee

the story of humanity is one of telling stories, and now i am constantly advertised the box as "What if you didn't have to tell stories. What if you could automate talking to your children. What if there were a TikTok nobody had to make. Just endless banal sludge, forever"

Steve Klabnik
@steveklabnik.com

that's this part: bsky.app/profile/stev...

Steve Klabnik@steveklabnik.com

sort of along my recent repost, the issue at hand has been the same since the dawn of capitalism: when automation increases productivity, who gets to capture the value of that productivity increase? the beef is not with the productivity. it's with the value capture

eevee
@eev.ee

not sure it is — "productivity" has not generally been used to describe the "spending time with people you care about" bit before

Jake Lazaroff
@jakelazaroff.com

i don't think this actually contradicts what steve is saying? automating away human creativity and connection is bad, automating away merge conflicts and meeting notes is fine. yes the most powerful people are sociopaths but that's always been the case

eevee
@eev.ee

the same box does both and he is funding it. i don't find "the spam machine may be destroying the internet and chewing at the edges of what makes life worth living, but it helps me resolve a merge conflict ten seconds faster, so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not" especially compelling

Jake Lazaroff
@jakelazaroff.com

in the mid 20th century i could have said "sure, IBM sold computers to nazis to help them slaughter my entire family but they also are helpful for corporate accounting, who can say whether they're bad". i promise i am not trying to be obtuse, i just don't see why being reductive about AI is helpful.

Steve Klabnik
@steveklabnik.com

i think that this is a *little* bit of a waffles situation. i don't disagree that, for example, Sora is boring, bad sludge. but i wasn't talking about that in this thread i have a lot of beefs and concerns with llms! they just aren't what i was talking about here

eevee
@eev.ee

you opened by characterizing the feelings of other programmers as "waffles are bad"

Steve Klabnik
@steveklabnik.com

No, I was speaking about one specific dimension of LLMs. There’s a ton of shit here and I agree that a lot of it is bad. But in this thread I’m talking about one specific disagreement I have with a lot of people