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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

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"

10/1/26, 7:52 pm0 reposts26 likes

Grace (Schrödinger's Canadian)

What if we could automate humanity, so you had more time to labor

@gaudynight78.bsky.social

THIS. It doesn't automate away the drudgery. It automates away everything else.

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

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

"eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will" is a slogan about workers capturing the benefit of increased productivity of their labor

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

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.

my actual grievance (in this thread at least) is with the framing so i did get a bit sidetracked there yes i suppose the bridge here is that generative AI is slippery for the same reason i object to calling it automation: the output is always a one-off, so the problems are always one-offs, too

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

11 Jan

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

11 Jan

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