I swear, I'll scream next time some headline mentions what Sam Altman "thinks" or what Dario Amodei "believes".

Please stop anthropomorphizing AI company executives.

They're not sentient and they can't actually think. They just predict token sequences using statistical patterns scraped from LinkedIn, X and the Financial Times. The apparent "understanding" is simply a parlor trick: They produce text strings that *sound* plausible, but they don't actually have any understanding of the world.

I'll grant that they became a lot more technically impressive when Reinforcement Learning from Investor Sentiment pipelines were introduced, but fundamentally they're still just stochastic bullshit generators. Giving them access to the internet will end up being the most expensive mistake in the history of technology.

This is a bit of a long shot, I guess, but if there's *anywhere* it might hit, it's fedi.

Does anyone have access to an early-00s era word processor? An ancient copy of MS Word is fine.

I need a couple of screenshots with some text pasted in.

before 2025:
I'm a broken disabled fuckup and a pretty good programmer.

after 2025:
I'm a broken disabled fuckup

this makes me unreasonably sad.

i can't remember anything in my entire life that got both economically *and* culturally devalued to zero so rapidly and so completely as programming.

(which, uh, happens to be the only thing i've ever been any good at. so, uh, that sucks.)

a coworker of mine went to a demoparty this weekend.

all the demos were coded by Claude.

Note: I'm not interested in LLM hater forums. They may not be *for* LLMs, but they're still *about* LLMs.

I just want to nerd out with programming.

Do you know any programming forum / news site / aggregator / whatever that *isn't* all about LLMs? I'd be very happy with one where LLM discussion is explicitly considered offtopic.

I can get my LLM news from Lobsters, HN, or - increasingly - the national public service newsfeed here. Or the lunch break at work. Or bus chatter during my commute. Or family get-togethers. Probably the local dive bar.

(Outside of this little bubble, the actually-correct answer is "a symptom of peripheral artery disease". It's when your muscles cramp up or hurt during exertion, because gunked-up arteries can't bring sufficient oxygen to them.

But it *sounds* like what Linus is doing to the kernel, and a RHCP song.)

The entirety of Wirth's Oberon System - a multitasking OS, compiler, runtime and TUI library - would fit in the Pi 4's L2 cache. And there'd be room enough left over for...

~4 more copies of the entire Oberon System.

("very likely", because industrial-grade microSD cards actually solve many of the problems of consumer ones. Some of them will handily outlast whatever device you put them in.

They're terribly expensive, though - and still physically fragile, small and fiddly.)

Something I occasionally think about, and then proceed to be horrified to my core, is this:

A Raspberry Pi 4 *vastly* outperforms an Amiga 4000. Or a Symbolics XL1200. Or an SGI Octane. A typical microSD card is *much* faster than a Seagate Cheetah Ultra320 SCSI HDD you might have found in a high-end Unix workstation back in the day.

But the Pi 4 is barely able to run modern-day office software or browse the mainstream web. The microSD card is mostly considered a slow piece of junk (which it very likely is, though for other reasons than its performance).

What the fuck are we even doing here?

But this perspective is actually precisely why I've stubbornly kept calling myself a "programmer" rather than a "software engineer" (also, I don't have an engineering degree).

To some extent, and for exactly the reasons given here, I have *more* pretentious motivations behind feeling more comfortable with "programmer" - but it feels like a less pretentious title.

(There are some contexts where I use "developer" - which I dislike - or sometimes "computer scientist" (usually in Danish, "datalog"), because that is the title I actually earned - and is concerned with quite a lot of things outside of programming proper. But I prefer "programmer"; always did.)

This is probably one of the reasons why I can no longer animate myself to do the things I love and am good at, in the middle of the ongoing LLM onslaught.

I don't really have the language to stand firm. Or I suppose I do, but I can't bring myself to permit myself to use it.

If I, personally, were to say that the thing I've spent my entire life doing was a "higher calling" or aligned with the "emancipatory aims of the enlightenment", then an alarm would go off in the back of my head. It would shout "WARNING: YOU ARE PROBABLY BEING A PRETENTIOUS ASS" and "USE HUMBLER LANGUAGE" and "THOU SHALT NOT THINK THOU ART ANYTHING SPECIAL", in large part because of my cultural background. But also just because I'm a depressive nerd who isn't very happy about who he is.

But I actually agree with it, all the same. I just wouldn't ever be able to say something like this.

Here is a comment on lobste.rs which made me sit a bit and think. https://lobste.rs/s/qvomvk/why_are_we_even_doing_all_this#c_wbfsf7

It says some things I've been thinking myself, but that I probably would never be able to properly put into words (for self-deprecatory reasons).

The full quote:

"What I would propose instead is that the practice of programming is about improving and formalizing our understanding of processes and systems, for the benefit of our shared humanity and all the life of this planet. This is neither "just" craft, nor mere production, it is a calling in alignment with the entire history of philosophy that contributed to the discovery of computability and of the ideals of the enlightenment. This view positions programming as a calling alongside the sciences (wherein we also have applications in industry that are fundamentally connected to research in academia).

The function of "software" as a concept has been do commoditize one material result of the practice of programming (executable programs) and to segment IT labor. Since LLMs can automate the production of many executable programs, it is indeed poised to destroy the industry oriented around software production, so defined. But programming is a higher calling, with a much longer history, that includes the cybernetics efforts of the mid 20th century, the formalization and mechanization of computability, developments of formal reasoning, of mathematics, of economic planning and analysis, of metaphysics, of the emancipatory aims of the enlightenment: it draws from and continue sall of these essential activities, and the fact that LLMs can perform inscruitable, referentially opaque, probabilistic computations and (unreliably) produce executable programs does nothing to undermine or threaten the meaning of the practice -- not, that is, unless we surrender the meaning and purpose of our work to the misapplication of LLMs by those seeking to seize control of our rational use and ownership of our own means of computation."

"Claudication" is...

"but you'll be left behind!". yes. i probably will. so go ahead and leave me behind.

When a bunch of weird Christians 20 years ago kept telling us all that we'd be staying here on Earth while they all got raptured away to heaven, i felt much the same way: if *you lot* are going to heaven, then please, by all means, go ahead without me.

go ahead. leave me behind. you keep saying i'll be left behind, fuckin' do it already.

on the subject of old, dead, German philosophers:

I've read a lot of Schopenhauer. There's a lot to disagree with, but I morbidly enjoy the radical pessimism - and how he manages to wrest a deeply humane, and compassionate ethics from his conviction that we live in the worst possible world and that the universe is a penal colony where we are punished for being born. He was way ahead of his time on animal rights (he was perhaps the first European philosopher to even take the subject seriously); animals are our fellow inmates - if they have a somewhat dimmer awareness of the nature of their punishment than we do, then it is still only right to treat them with compassion.

But if I ever reference or recommend him, I always add a caveat: He was rather badly misogynist.

Why do I single out the misogyny, given that he was also a bit of a racist and an antisemite? Mostly because the time he lived in was quite different from ours, and he wasn't any more racist or antisemitic than the cultural baseline (if anything he was *less* racist in practice; he was fiercely opposed to transatlantic slavery and European colonialism). But even for his own time, he was a misogynistic troglodyte. He *really* hated women, and actively fought against the advances of the women's suffrage movement. You could dig up 2000-year-older dead Greek philosophers and *still* find Schopenhauer to be a regressive throwback in comparison.

Sometimes I think about what historical philosophers would have been like if they'd grown up in the modern day, but still had the same foundational guiding values or ideas as they did. Eg. nu-Plato wouldn't have had kooky physics, but he'd still have been an idealist and an authoritarian. And I think if we did that to Schopenhauer, we'd get a nu-Schopenhauer who probably wasn't racist or antisemitic at all, but who'd probably be posting angry rants on manosphere forums.