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It could just be me expecting a Sheets or Excel-like interface (I would bet Sheets UI was made specifically to be an easy transfer from Excel), and my brain being stupid when asked to learn a new one (or expecting to learn a new interface too quickly… but then again I don’t usually have trouble with new software and interfaces, so maybe it really is bad UI), but thank you for the reassurance!

Sad for others who might not see improvements because of the macOS focus but still thrilled for myself, because I use LibreOffice on my Mac. This will only bite me too when my Mac kicks the bucket and I have to get a new laptop which I have already decided will run Linux.

Thrilled. I recently started trying LibreOffice thanks to a friend of mine and I admit that as someone used to Microsoft Office or Google Workspace, I feel like a total idiot always searching up “how to [do something] libreoffice” for things I know how to do already in Office/Workspace (or am confident I could figure out by fooling around in them for a few minutes).

I have been specifically thinking about how big tech keeps manufacturing consent for AI, having it on by default and counting accidental undesired uses for “95% of people adopted our AI features!” and all this… glad to see an article that has a title reflecting my thoughts. Looking up manufactured consent for AI usually brings things on how people can use AI to manufacture consent or change narratives, not on “consent to AI” being manufactured itself.

Social proof is a hell of a drug. Getting off Instagram was always a “yeah they suck, I barely use the app, but I do not really want to spend the energy” for me; then I saw a real life friend do a post about how they were getting off Instagram. I promptly did the same.

That’s always the problem when deciding whether to post something you did you think is good and that you want others to do more. How much would I possibly influence others to do the same (because my nobody ass followed my nobody friend in getting off Insta, we clearly do not have to be mega celebrities to put our small drop of influence in the proverbial bucket), vs how much backlash will I get in the vein of “why do you have to announce it and have a public privacy tantrum, you’re not that special boo” and “humblebrag much? nobody cares”. (I’m special to the group of people that cares about me, as I am sure everyone is to the group of people that care about them! And social media makes it easier to announce it to them instead of texting everyone individually, and if you don’t have a giant group chat… I do wonder what standards you have to meet before you can post online without being told “nobody cares”.)

I think as long as there are 2 people on earth who do not have perfect trust in each other, there will be politics.

Except, how do you convince all the other engineers the tech stack is both shitty and that switching off is worth the switching costs? That your data is empirical and also not the “lies, damned lies and statistics” thing where you cherry pick data in your favor so you can look empirical when you are actually just going off your own vibes and ego? Even if your intentions are pure, others might not think so (whether because they have ulterior motives of their own or not).

Unfortunately, that is politics.

A bit off-topic, but:

Knowing about these cognitive distortions always makes it so hard to self-evaluate too! Am I actually better than I think and I am just aware of how much I do not know, causing me to evaluate myself too lowly? Or am I an arrogant asshole, “knowing about the Dunning-Kruger effect does not make you special, especially with how often it’s cited everywhere online now,” and I should keep evaluating myself lowly? Imposter syndrome exists, but some people really are faking it and do not know anything, so am I underevaluating myself and feeling like an impostor when I should not be?

However, I also know if I state things with confidence or say I’m good at something, I’m more likely (at least online) to receive challenges and arguments about why I’m a puffed-up blowhard who actually knows nothing about anything, so I always trend towards “actually I’m just stupid” to avoid being whacked with the “ARROGANT FUCKHEAD” stick. (This is in general, not just about the tech topics this forum is for.)

I’ve read another article on his site that I have to be able to just at least appear to confidently make a decision and live with the consequences that maybe my guess is wrong instead of presenting the whole pro-and-con list, instead of hemming and hawing about how my judgment is imperfect and I’m afraid of thinking I’m competent but actually being someone the internet would tear apart for gross incompetence and the audacity to assume I’m not. (I went through a lot of his articles on a rabbit hole from another of his articles posted on programming.dev.) But luckily I’m not in the decision-making-advise-non-tech-folks-on-big-decisions-most-qualified-person-in-the-room position that this advice is geared towards and do not bear that responsibility.

I think it’s both.

It sits at the fast and cheap end of “pick three: fast, good, and cheap” and society is trending towards “fast and cheap” to the exclusion of “good” to the point it is getting harder and harder to find “good” at all sometimes.

People who care about the “good” bit are upset, people who want to see stock line go up in the short term without caring about long term consequences keep riding the “always pick fast and cheap” and are impressed by the prototypes LLMs can pump out. So devs get fired because LLMs are faster and cheaper, even if they hallucinate and cause tons of tech debt. Move fast and break things.

Some devs that keep their jobs might use LLMs. Maybe they accurately assessed what they are trying to outsource to LLMs is so low-skill that even something that does not hit “good” could do it right (and that when it screws up they could verify the mistake and fix it quickly); so they only have to care about “fast and cheap”. Maybe they just want the convenience and are prioritizing “fast and cheap” when they really do need to consider “good”. Bad devs exist too and I am sure we have all seen incompetent people stay employed despite the trouble they cause for others.

So as much as this looked at first, to me, like the thing where fascists simultaneously portray opponents as weak (pathetic! we deserve to triumph over them and beat their faces in for their weakness) and strong (big threat, must defeat!), I think that’s not exactly what anti-AI folks are doing here. Not doublethink but just seeing everyone pick “fast and cheap” and noticing its consequences. Which does easily map onto portraying AI as weak, pointing out all the mistakes it makes and not replacing humans well; while also portraying it as strong, pointing out that people keep trying to replace humans with AI and that it’s being aggressively pushed at us. There are other things in real life that map onto a simultaneous portrayal as weak and strong: the roach. A baby taking its first steps can accidentally crush a roach, hell if the baby fell on many roaches the roaches all die (weak), but it’s also super hard to end an infestation of them (strong). It is worth checking for doublethink when you see the pattern of “simultaneously weak and strong,” but that is also just how an honest evaluation of a particular situation can end up.

Responding just to the “Why all the vitriol?” portion:

Most people do not like the idea of getting fired and replaced by a machine they think cannot do their job well, but that can produce a prototype that fools upper management into thinking it can do everything the people can but better and cheaper. Especially if they liked their job (8 hours doing something you like vs losing that job and having to do 8 hours on something you don’t like daily, yes many people do that already but if you did not have to deal with that shittiness it’s tough to swallow) or got into it because they thought it would be a secure bet as opposed to art or something, only to have that security taken away (yes, you can still code at home for free with whatever tools you like and without the ones you do not, but most people need a job to live, and most people here probably prefer having a dev job that pays, even if there is crunch, than working retail or other low-status low-paying high-shittiness jobs that deal with the public).

And if you do not want the upper management to fire you, you definitely don’t want to give any credit towards the idea of using this at work, and want to make any amount of warmth for it something unpopular to engage in, hoping the popular sentiment sways the minds of upper management just like they think pro-AI hype has.

As much as I’m anti-AI I can also acknowledge my own biases:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

I’d also imagine most of us find generating our own code by our own hand fun, but reviewing others’ boring, and most devs probably do not want to stop being code writers and start being AI’s QA. Or to be kicked out of tech unless they rely on this technology they don’t trust. I trust deterministic outputs and know if it fucks up there is probably a bug I can go back and fix; with generative outputs determined by a machine (as opposed to human-generated things that have also been filtered by their real-life experience and not just what they saw written online) I really don’t, so I’d never use LLMs for anything I need to trust.

People are absolutely going to get heated over this because if it gets Big and the flaws ironed out, it’ll probably be used not to help us little people have more efficient and cheaper things, less time on drudgery and more time on things we like, but at least to try to put us the devs on programming.dev out of a job and eventually the rest of us the working people out of a job too because we’re an expensive line item, and we have little faith that the current system will adjust with (the hypothetical future) rising unemployment-due-to-AI to help us keep a non-dystopian standard of living. Poor peoples’ situation getting worse, previously-comfortable people starting to slide towards poverty… automation that threatens jobs that seems to be being pushed by big companies and rich people with lots of resources during a time of rising class tension is sure to invite civilized discussions with zero vitriol for people who have anything positive to say about that form of automation.

The people who legitimately hold the view that it’s just a word might be a little frustrated at the small bit of extra work of needing to change their scripts or code that uses those words to the new words, but otherwise no big deal. But a lot of “it’s just a word bro” folks actually do care and just like to pretend they do not for clout, because caring is for lame losers and being able to falsely present yourself as a previously-neutral party now moved to care by how stupid something is can hold a lot of weight when convincing others and make you feel cool.

It always mildly annoyed that we call them “black people” and “white people” because “black people” are more brown than black, and “white people” are more tan than white. And brown can be viewed as a shade of tan. Not very descriptive.

I also want to do people the courtesy of explaining my disagreement but I also do not want to be that “reasons I downvoted you” Reddit copypasta

Also I just realized I am replying to a 2-year-old thread! I got here via searching for a new search engine, left it in my open tabs, came back to it, and totally forgot it was an old thread. Thanks for engaging with me anyways!

I only ever downvote rudeness, active spam, or something I think is off-topic. I explain off-topic downvotes but don’t feel DOWNLOAD MY SCAM APP TODAY http://wwe.scamlink.fakesite.com/ deserves an explanation and just needs to be pushed down in visibility + reported. I am too wary of getting into an online fight with the person I downvoted and reported for hurling slurs or being a snarky sarcastic namecalling ass to someone being genuine lest they start coming after me too, so I don’t reply to them and explain “I downvoted you because I think you’re being unnecessarily unkind.” Half the time I do actually try to reply in a way that I think gently calls them out and tries to defuse, only to delete immediately after replying in fear of conflict—that’s like 75% of my deleted comments.

Of course caveats apply, I remember but cannot find this image with an angry person capslocking in understandable disagreement with Hitler saying “but that’s just my civil opinion that we should gas all the jews, i do not get why you’re so emotional,” and sealioning is a thing, but I see way more snark towards people engaging in good faith than I see sealions or awful people who actually deserve it. (And part of why I delete, in case I think it’s unnecessary rudeness but it is actually a Hitler tone policing the anti-Hitler guy type situation and I just don’t realize it.)

Hey, congratulations on the employment!

I feel devs should push major bug fixes for free—something something games released with more bugs not just because of increasing complexity but because they just ship immediately due to easier distribution of an update instead of testing before shipping. That’s all we’re entitled to. If you want content updates you should probably pay for continued development costs, which is where DLC and subscription comes in. Those also have potential for abuse and unfair pricing, though, so that’s a whole other minefield.

I feel like there’s a difference between cosmetic microtransactions, game-balance altering ones, and the predatory ones most gamers including me dislike. The ones where you only have 10 energy for actions and every action depletes your energy, so you wait 10 hours or PAY 10 IN GEMS, DON’T HAVE ENOUGH GEMS? BUY 55 FOR $2.99! Which are acquired quickly as you learn the game and then you get a very slow dripfeed of them once you have completed all tutorial/onboarding tasks, and which you are forced to spend in the tutorial. Or the lootbox gambling ones. I’m all for cosmetics to support the dev, but take a dim view of the game-balance altering ones and outright predatory ones.

Although I do wonder how much whatever-dollar-horse-armor opened the floodgates to this.

!hare@programming.dev

Okay, everyone knows guns are literal weapons. Not everyone has the time to look into things and develop an anticorporate opinion to the point simply using a service is a loaded weapon and simply using it is cause enough for “no sympathy, sucks to be you!” when they have trouble with it. Maybe this might make them change their minds eventually, but even if it doesn’t… this seems a bit more blaming the victim. Get angry at the corporation, not the person who wasn’t born believing corporations bad. If I fail to lock my door, that is probably unwise of me, but everyone should be more mad at the thief for stealing from me in the first place.

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