What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?

This is why there is growing anti-AI sentiment. It is always extractive. You can never just enjoy a poem, you need to use it. You need to extract its value for shareholders. Get a life.

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. plumbers don't get plumbers block, and doctors don't get doctors block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working and then expects sympathy for it?

—Philip Pullman

> If I had access [to AI] back then, I'd probably just spend more time on the beach.

If AI were marketed like this it would not be appealing to employers. So of course AI marketing is wrapped in hustle culture. Gotta keep the worker bees busy.

>Why aren't we spending more time on the beach.

I think this comes down to getting paid per effort invested (measured in time) vs getting paid for the result.

If the average person were self-employed and received income proportional to their economic output, then they would be rewarded for working faster, instead of punished.

If they increased their productivity, by means of technology, they could then simply choose to work fewer hours.[0]

I noticed this before AI. If someone does the same job twice as fast, do they deserve half as much compensation?

What if they find a way to automate an entire process? What if they replace months of "manual labor" (tedious refactoring) with a perl script that produces the same result, deterministically?

A friend of mine once automated a woman's entire job away. He thought he was doing her a favour, freeing her from the drudgery, so she could focus on the other parts of the job. She wasn't so happy, when she revealed to him, that there weren't any.

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[0] But most people aren't in such a position, and have to stay the required number of hours regardless of how much has been achieved. And I'm increasingly hearing reports of some kind of burnout resulting from being expected to keep up with machines that work a thousand times faster than you.

And that's now... Just wait until the big providers switch to Cerebras in a week or two!

(Though at that token speed, the silver lining is the work becomes interactive again, so if you use it correctly, your mental model does not desynchronize from the codebase, i.e. you don't need to spend extra time later catching up. But that deserves its own thread, I think :)

Some of it is fun and new, I'm spending a lot of time just making stuff I wanna make.

But regarding work produced for the marketplace, I think it is naive to think any productivity gains will ever produce more time on the beach for workers. The market is competitive. Some gains will be seized by capital, and others realized in the production of some combination of more stuff, cheaper stuff, or better stuff.

I enjoy the fact that you were able to wedge Bukowski into this clusterfuck of technobabble , but the parallel being drawn between quality-writing and hitting buttons on the magic-elaboration-device ["ai"] is just... not there. Quality writing requires actual lived-experience, emotions, adventures, and a keen ability to grasp and clasp ends of an event-sequence like a beaded necklace or rosary; to present something cohesive and well-lived to someone who can imagine , provided ... the imagery and order-of-events are resonant.

Stylistically, I find Bukowski's "I know it / will" linebreak to be offensive to my aesthetic sensibilities as an excellent writer.

The takeaway message is you can be more on the beach and don’t have to ship 40k LoC everyday with your GStack. I like that.

I met and drank with him once. Brutal punk poet of a guy.

I think it boils down to most of these folks don't have anything better to do. Or worse (the bucket I find myself in) this type of work is the most mentally stimulating thing I have, so I do it willfully at the expense of my wife and cats.

I'm still building the discipline to put the important stuff first!

> If I had access [to AI] back then, I'd probably just spend more time on the beach.

This has been part of the critique of technology by primitivists for a while now; "labor saving" technology simply stops us from laboring on things we used to and we just move to laboring on other things on the newest level of abstraction with our freed up time / energy.

If society has uncurbed "greed", there can just be a constant "996 grind" on the cutting edge of whatever technological development currently exists.

> instead of forcing himself to write more slop (or ill words in his world) he stands up, moves away from his computer notebook and goes downstairs to his wife and 6 cats

or we could work on other projects, but yeah, take a break of some kind

When I was in college I took a class in modern poetry. The teacher showed us a film about Bukowski. Before the film, there was a trigger warning. "I must warn you," he said, "Charles Bukowski is an asshole."

I can't even begin to imagine how appalled Bukowski would be if he was alive to read this haha

> Why are we instead witnessing a 996 phenomenon. Why is there a sudden urge to ship 4,500 PRs per day?

This is the natural continuation of "90 hours a week and loving it!" https://www.folklore.org/90_Hours_A_Week_And_Loving_It.html

Me: I like your solution, but could you unpack all those dense one-liners to make the code easier to follow?

Cursor: Do you wanna mess me up? Do you wanna screw up the works? You wanna blow my token sales in Europe?

Not a great article

> Why aren't tech folks sipping tequilas on the beach?

Because the environment mentioned earlier in the post - Silicon Valley - has absolutely nothing to offer but value creation. The people who rise up to leadership and success in that environment aren't particularly awesome human beings. The point isn't to make it better to be a human, it's to make all of the money.

All of the discussion about open models here of late offers a backdrop for what OpenAI was supposed to be versus what it turned out to be, and that offers a pretty good demonstration of the problem. Originally OpenAI was supposed to be a public benefit corporation that offered open models with a focus on ethics and safety. Their investors could expect "only" 100x return on their buy-in.

That, of course, didn't fill up the pockets of investors in SV to their liking, so the models became closed, the focus on safety and ethics went out the window, and the company became a typical for-profit corporation. The bet is now that they can hyperscale the deployment of closed models in a way that will generate an absolutely enormous amount of revenue and pay off the training and serving costs.

Meanwhile, Chinese developers of open models are taking the role that OpenAI was supposed to fulfill, with the obvious intent of undermining OpenAI and its ilk. They'll likely succeed, at least to some extent.

AI as it is now, at least in the major US labs based in SV, is almost purely for profit. The bet is huge and there can't be room for a penny to not be earned, for that tequila on a beach. It's an all-consuming philosophy in that region. If we want to see AI in the US have a sustainable path, you'll have to toss the people from that regional echo chamber. Maybe that'll happen if the monetary losses are big enough. Maybe not.

"Fuck AI! Just drink."

Bukowski would probably want to kick the shit out of you if he saw this.

Come on, what would they need to learn that wasn't already "trained" by the LLMs ingestion of his works in the first instance??

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