> "But it booted straight into BASIC. That’s all it did. I was, like, 8 years old. I wasn’t about to learn BASIC. What I learned instead: computers were not as awesome as I’d imagined."
You were the exception. Most kids felt awe. We started learning BASIC and creating "dumb games". That's the origin story of most people my age who ended up in this doomed industry.
There's nothing to be excited for. Even if AI works as well as people say (and to be clear: it very much doesn't), that future sucks ass. No more fun making things, no fun solving problems, just hand it off to the machine that does things for you. That's an awful future where every shred of joy is gone from computing.
It might genuinely suck for you. It's amazing for people who couldn't build anything before, but now can. And there's more of them than you.
It sucks that most of those people are going to be entirely dependent on a proprietary service to build things for them and they will never actually bother learning or improving their skills, even though the tools to do so have never been more freely and widely available.
It also sucks that so many people in tech think that the widespread loss of education, knowledge and freedom is a good thing.
I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems. To me this is like how the HAM radio people used to be required to learn Morse code.
I get that it might suck for people like us, who took the time to learn those languages! Oh well.
>I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems. To me this is like how the HAM radio people used to be required to learn Morse code.
No one is saying that anyone has to, but being able to is the whole thesis of the hacker ethos. Knowing how to do things yourself versus being a consumer dependent on corporations.
And children are learning how to program nowadays... although that won't be the case for long. My nephew is taking programming classes in school and making games in Roblox. But soon the only thing they'll teach is how to prompt Claude. We were almost at a point where programming could become general knowledge and that might have enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism. Now we're burning it all down and a depressing number of people like yourself on this erstwhile forum of programmers and hackers are actually dancing on the ashes.
Using a service to generate software for you is not "building programs to solve your problems." You aren't building anything, and you certainly aren't learning anything that would give you any real control over it or let you exercise freedom relative to it. AI is just proprietary software and data theft with more steps and a lot more fascism.
It doesn't just suck for us, it sucks for everyone.
It could well be devastating for "the hacker ethos". You can lament that all you want. But there are more important things than "the hacker ethos".
Sure, lots of things are more important than "the hacker ethos". Like critical thinking and independent thought, self-reliance, the joy of actually creating something yourself (which AI is a hollow, artificial substitute for).
Why shouldn't one lament sacrificing individuality and creativity, and increasing our reliance on corporations, all for the sake of convenience?
I think you just wrote "lots of things are more important than the hacker ethos, like [axiomatic rederivation of the hacker ethos]". That's not a persuasive argument.
I think it's just easy to dismiss "the hacker ethos" without considering the qualities it actually consists of. Maybe you'd disagree, but I think those qualities are very important and worth protecting.
I'm not saying it's not important, just that you can't reasonably expect to orient all of society around it. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about how computing is going to work for ordinary people.
I'm not expecting to orient all of society around it, but I do believe that it's harmful to remove or replace it where it does exist.
Ease and convenience are not worth the cost of giving up bits and pieces of our humanity here and there until there's nothing left; Pre-AI computing has already taken enough of it.
When you suggest that ordinary people should not use personal applications that they've built with AI because it robs them of the hacker spirit, that's what you're doing: orienting all of society around your aesthetic preference.
The point is that this should not be a good place to sell us a vision incompatible with that ethos.
Some of us actually like making things, especially including the design step. Some of us were eight years old with access to a computer that booted into BASIC, and wanted to reckon with that, and eventually learn the missing steps towards a real project. Some of us take a joy in seeing someone else use our creations, greater than any hardship that was involved. Some of us value the idea that we won't have to start from scratch next time, on principle, even if it would be trivial to start from scratch anyway.
And some of us see that no, high level language to English is fundamentally not the same kind of step as low level language to high level language.
Statements like
> It could well be devastating for "the hacker ethos". You can lament that all you want. But there are more important things than "the hacker ethos".
come across as dismissive of, and not empathetic to, that point of view.
I am dismissive of that point of view, and I'm a "hacker". Not everybody here agrees on everything. I feel like I'm... pretty in tune with HN. Like, I think I could present concrete evidence on that claim.
>We were almost at a point where programming could become general knowledge
Lol. Not only was this not true but we weren't even close. Genuinely bizarre that you could think this.
>enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism.
Ironically, the only reality where this is remotely feasible is one where frontier llms can be run locally on phone like hardware and it becomes popular to do so.
meredithbloom · · focus · HN ↗
You were the exception. Most kids felt awe. We started learning BASIC and creating "dumb games". That's the origin story of most people my age who ended up in this doomed industry.
sublinear · · focus · HN ↗
echelon · · focus · HN ↗
Adopters feel the future is brighter than ever.
Article author is excited. I am too.
bigstrat2003 · · focus · HN ↗
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
krapp · · focus · HN ↗
It also sucks that so many people in tech think that the widespread loss of education, knowledge and freedom is a good thing.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
I get that it might suck for people like us, who took the time to learn those languages! Oh well.
krapp · · focus · HN ↗
No one is saying that anyone has to, but being able to is the whole thesis of the hacker ethos. Knowing how to do things yourself versus being a consumer dependent on corporations.
And children are learning how to program nowadays... although that won't be the case for long. My nephew is taking programming classes in school and making games in Roblox. But soon the only thing they'll teach is how to prompt Claude. We were almost at a point where programming could become general knowledge and that might have enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism. Now we're burning it all down and a depressing number of people like yourself on this erstwhile forum of programmers and hackers are actually dancing on the ashes.
Using a service to generate software for you is not "building programs to solve your problems." You aren't building anything, and you certainly aren't learning anything that would give you any real control over it or let you exercise freedom relative to it. AI is just proprietary software and data theft with more steps and a lot more fascism.
It doesn't just suck for us, it sucks for everyone.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
ejj28 · · focus · HN ↗
Why shouldn't one lament sacrificing individuality and creativity, and increasing our reliance on corporations, all for the sake of convenience?
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
ejj28 · · focus · HN ↗
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
ejj28 · · focus · HN ↗
Ease and convenience are not worth the cost of giving up bits and pieces of our humanity here and there until there's nothing left; Pre-AI computing has already taken enough of it.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
ejj28 · · focus · HN ↗
> I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems.
Is this not also "orienting all of society around your aesthetic preference"?
krapp · · focus · HN ↗
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
Some of us actually like making things, especially including the design step. Some of us were eight years old with access to a computer that booted into BASIC, and wanted to reckon with that, and eventually learn the missing steps towards a real project. Some of us take a joy in seeing someone else use our creations, greater than any hardship that was involved. Some of us value the idea that we won't have to start from scratch next time, on principle, even if it would be trivial to start from scratch anyway.
And some of us see that no, high level language to English is fundamentally not the same kind of step as low level language to high level language.
Statements like
> It could well be devastating for "the hacker ethos". You can lament that all you want. But there are more important things than "the hacker ethos".
come across as dismissive of, and not empathetic to, that point of view.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
famouswaffles · · focus · HN ↗
Lol. Not only was this not true but we weren't even close. Genuinely bizarre that you could think this.
>enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism.
Ironically, the only reality where this is remotely feasible is one where frontier llms can be run locally on phone like hardware and it becomes popular to do so.