Clojurians Log v2

In honesty, I find the use of words like meatware (or often used meat proxy) a bit similar to sheeple. It feels like a dismissive insult. You may make some good points in your post, but I don't feel particularly welcome or compelled to respond to the actual argument.

That's interesting! What kind of person do you imagine would be insulted by the way I use the term “meatware” in this context?

Or are you saying that you were personally insulted by my word choices?

I'm suggesting that there are real people using these tools. Some of them because they want to, some because they have to, some because they are forced to, it doesn't really matter.

Well, insofar as you are using the tool automation against your will and best judgement, the "cattle" metaphor is accurate. I would implore anyone who is offended by this observation to redirect the offense from those calling the situation out to those causing it.

It seems no matter what you say, there will always be some number of people who take offense for whatever reason. I rarely, if ever, try to insult or offend people intentionally. However, if someone is offended by what I say, as long as I'm being sincere and focus on the issue as opposed to any particular individual, I can't do much about how others interpret things and react to their own interpretations. Any expressed opinion of value is likely to offend someone. If it didn't, then it probably wasn't worth expressing in the first place.

@soltanzadehramin I have friends in companies that have to use them. These friends need the job to be able to make a living. Not complying has real consequences. I feel it isn't fair to describe them as meat proxy or whatever. That's all.

@leif.eric.fredheim See my response above. I wanted to add to that that it rarely serves a purpose to generalise groups like that. It is just how I feel. I'll leave it at that.

And that makes sense! It reminds me of https://clergyproject.org. An organization of religions leaders who no longer believe in God, but don't have any other skills to fall back on, so they would lose their livelihoods and maybe even their families if they “came out.” So they keep doing the only job they know.

I wasn't trying to “generalize a group.” I was trying to illustrate the scenario where humans are positioning themselves to act as intermediaries for “AI” agents.

A society with fewer meaningful human interactions.

I'm not saying your feelings aren't valid. I just don't see what you're seeing.

Your "A society with fewer meaningful human interactions." feels a whole lot better than "meatware as a service".

Did you read the actual article, or just the title?

I’ll admit to being hyperbolic and a bit edgy. That's just my style. I like to be provocative.

So it’s entirely possible that someone will take offense. I'm not too bothered about that.

I rather feel it isn't fair to force them to be meat proxies. Describing them as meat proxies is a criticism against their situation, not them. Think of the Amazon workers that Stu mentioned in his presentation. If one of them speaks up and says "We are tired of being slaves!", I would find it inappropriate to berate the person for referring to himself and his colleagues with a negative term. The whole point is for the term to be negative, as it describes a negative situation. The late George Carlin made a great point regarding the modern obsession with euphemisms. If we continue, we might eventually all be forced to use HR speech.

I'm in that position myself. Not only am I expected to use “AI,” but I'm also expected to help other teams adopt it. I'm trying to keep things balanced and somewhat responsible in that context, as one of the few skeptics with a lot of experience using “AI” in anger. But nobody is forcing me to stay. I can always and find a new job if I want. I find it quite interesting and rewarding to be at the point of contention, with a mandate to make a difference.

@soltanzadehramin The situation yes, the person, well I feel different about that. Anyways, I can't add anything else to this. I just wanted to express how I felt, no need to agree.

“I was just doing my job” also comes to mind, i.e., the Nuremberg defense and the idea of personal responsibility in the face of dire consequences. Do we stay employed and “follow orders,” or do we walk away? Do we stay and try to influence the situation from the inside? How will we have the greatest possible impact, and at what personal expense?

One of the great dilemmas that I think about very often. I still fail to have a good answer.

It's a tricky because where one is the most effective depends on one’s personal aptitude, predisposition and resources in a given context. And there's so much uncertainty.

re: the controversy of naming. I totally see how some people using (or forced to use) LLMs may feel slighted. I've used the term "clanker", but there I literally mean dealing with agents (https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-ai-agent-emailed-hundreds-researchers-help-it-told-us-why), not humans. I do wonder if people feel slighted at the terms I've heard pro-LLM people use to describe people who code by hand: loser, luddite, decel, etc... While there are sometimes good exceptions, it's probably a good rule of thumb not to other-izing our fellow engineers.

@alexander.vanelsas I sincerely appreciate your input in any case. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and feelings. It led to some interesting discourse and made me think of things I hadn't thought about.

And for context, I'm in an environment where businesspeople feed AI-generated stuff to sales and marketing, who feed AI-generated stuff to product, who feed AI-generated stuff to engineering, and so on. AI all the way down. I wasn't necessarily thinking of engineers in isolation when I wrote than article.

We are effectively becoming communication tools for LLMs. That's how it feels to me.

And I'm also a part of that.

To respond directly to the post: • when I see LLM generated code: I usually feel annoyed because it's often quite large and is quirky. In the terms of open source, I wonder if any slow contribution I have to make would be useful against the speed of an LLM. Maybe that's on me? • When I see AI generated images in a presentation, I feel like they're a slightly worse version of the stock photos that HR in a large company would use. It implicitly tells me that this presenation isn't worth my time. • As Stuart Halloway mentioned, when I see LLM-generated text, I'm concerned that there's no there there. There's no authorship. It appears plausible, but I don't know if a human cares (the proof of work, say for a recommendation letter), or if a human has reviewed it for accuracy (often not).

Yup. And there's reams of perfectly indented code, variables named with more than one letter, and some comments from folks that couldn't do that before. The code is better in the small, but often not in the large.

Thankfully, lazy slop posters still remain too lazy to instruct their LLM to disguise the default tone and verbosity.

@soltanzadehramin You have to know that "writing harnesses" are going to come that will ask you to pick a tone and writing style. I've already seen Strunk and White, etc... skills. IMHO, used appropriately this might be good. But I'm concerned that we'll have a lot more writing that's just an LLM prompt response masquerading as people's writing.

I already made https://github.com/leifericf/style-modeler 😅 (It was part of https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leif-eric-fredheim_what-ive-implemented-with-ai-agents-over-activity-7506261061591887873-kQEJ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAALFP-4Bl-a675uNbZgi76EiBpXS8Djvahs a while back, so it's discontinued now.)

Quick! Sell it to Anthropic before someone project-snipes it! (I want a cut for giving you the business idea though 🙂 )

It’s garbage. I don't mind if someone wants to steal it 😅

Reads like slop

And yet, I empathize with the guy, even if he used AI to write the post. If his story is real, then it's sad, but he contributed to this — how can people not see that policy can't possibly keep up with this tech? The only fix is mass unionization — government isn't going to help us. It's been paid for by the oligarchs.

I have sympathy for him. I know several people who have been looking for over a year. I know management who seem to have given up. And the corporate consultants seem to have taken it worst. At the same time, the writing smells like an LLM. And including a venmo might be a plea for help. Or a hope that he'd get the attention of a whale. Or... Is this the same guy who was hyping crypto?

On the content: Microsoft had a profitable quarter but they are offering 60k a buyout. Is that due to AI? Or is it because they are building out datacenters and want to bring operating expenses down? Or is it because selling Office and Windows is no longer a growth business, and cloud hosting is (and requires many fewer employees)?

@john.t.richardson.dev Some guess it is related to AI, they want to spend more on AI so they are downsizing Another thing is, one time the investor praise employment so companies over employing , now investor praise layoffs, so they layoff even if it is no neccessary

If you made 500k/y and find yourself homeless after getting laid off, you made some very poor financial decisions

I'm assuming incompetence, not malice. Which doesn't engender sympathy from me either.

These stories are part of the hype narrative unfortunately. Same with the safety and hacking stuff.

People see that video thumbnail and are like maybe I should repeat the headline to all my friends

and buy some anthropic stock?

yes, it could be marketing for ai!

Dang. I hate I was manipulated by it

I'm sure real people are losing their jobs because of the bad choices of execs. But, they aren't posting videos like this, they are busy looking for a job.

video?

If he weren't hyping crypto not long ago, he'd be more believable and elicit more sympathy.

The guy does have video channel, I didn't see this there yet though.

why don't you just ask me to remove it first? (I also happen to be an admin, but that's beside the point here, we can just talk like normal people to each other?)

@U0BHKM127SQ It's bad, but I think you're going a little too far here. What in particular about this is so much worse than other aspects around the issues of LLMs/agents?

I think it is interesting as a cautionary tale.

Not the author's tale, but one about pulling on heartstrings

He is a liar.

Maybe I'm used to this sort of grift now?

@U0BHKM127SQ I get your anger. I'm not sure I'd direct it at @borkdude though. And now we have a record of how we explored it. It's also possible that the story has a kernel of truth to it. I wouldn't bet much on that, but we're (or I'm) kinda just reading the tea leaves

I put warning signs on the original post now. hope you're happy. have a good one

I remember this guy was a self appointed JavaScript thought leader about a decade ago. His blog posts were generally misleading.