alt Hacker NewsYeah, I think AI could well destroy this community. There’s a lot of personal identity tied up in being a hacker (broadly defined), and only some aspects of that identity will be strengthened by AI.
Similar to Go and Chess, AI might make “programming for beauty” more accessible and popular. However it will almost certainly make the act of writing “code for money” much less valuable, which means many people will stop getting paid exorbitant sums to do what they love.
Personally what I loved was never the typing characters or optimizing algorithms; building is better than ever. But I really empathize with those who loved the craft of code golf, algorithms, literate programming, the elegance of micro structure of programs, etc. and who see their world under threat.
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>I really empathize with those who loved the craft of code golf, algorithms, literate programming, the elegance of micro structure of programs, etc. and who see their world under threat.
I love all of those things but don't feel threatened by AI. I do weird microcontroller things, I have dweets on https://beta.dwitter.net I have a website for making animations using 50 characters of a custom stack expression code. Algorithms, code golf, asm, inventing instruction sets, working on my own 8 bit cpu design, all that stuff is what I choose to do with my time.
I don't feel like it is in conflict with AI generated code. There's still plenty of uninteresting code that it can do.
I see some people disliking AI because they like solving problems, which I also don't really relate to, because AI presents entirely new classes of problems.
I'm not sure how much of this is just dependent on what kind of person you are, I find it quite amusing to see the ways in which LLMs get the wrong end of the stick and find it fascinating to analyse and counter the things that lead it to go off the rails. Some people seem to have the same experiences but completely different emotional responses.
I have made things with AI that I could not have made without using it, but at the same time AI could absolutely not have produced it without me directing what needed to be done.
I think the animosity to AI is more complex. There's combinations of anger about wealth disparity, a loss of trust, another of Sagan's great demotions, and this weird anticapitalist embracing of a hypercapitalist notion of Intellectual property.
Adding to this is, I suspect a few actors spending money to muddy the waters, from the Russian government, to the discovery institute, to people who just seem to like the sound of their own voice.
Keep responding kindly, respectfully, without assuming you know the internal thoughts of others, and you can influence things in a healthier direction.
> However it will almost certainly make the act of writing “code for money” much less valuable, which means many people will stop getting paid exorbitant sums to do what they love.
Most programmers are not being paid "exorbitant sums". Maybe if you can put up with working at Meta or something. I hate how VC culture is pretending that paying skilled people a fair wage is some horrible imposition on the poor millionaires and billionaires.