This post is aimed at developers and hackernews is a technically focused forum. So I care as a developer.

If language doesn’t matter then why not go build something in fortran or brainfuck?

I really don't understand the disdain for Fortran on HN. While it's not the most well-defined or portable programming language in the world, it does its job pretty well for those who need it, and has more actively maintained implementations than any language I can think of apart from C.

I've sometimes wondered if consciousness is something like a continuous internal narrative that naturally arises when an intelligent system experiences the world through a single source (like a body). That sounds similar to what you're saying.

Regardless, I think people tend to take consciousness a bit too seriously and my intuition is consciousness is going to have a similar fate to the heliocentric model of the universe. In other words, we'll discover that consciousness isn't really "special" just like we found out that the earth is just another planet among trillions and trillions.

I've wondered if LLMs are infact conscious as per some underwhelming definition as you mentioned. Just for the brief moment they operate on a prompt. They wake up, they perceive their world through tokens, do a few thinking loops then sleep until the next prompt.

So what? Should we feel bad for spawning them and effectively killing them? I think not.

I’m the opposite. I’d rather spend more time in a flow-like state where I’m dreaming of possibilities and my thoughts come to life quickly and effortlessly.

I often find tools frustrating because they are imperfect and even with the best tools you inevitably have to break from your flow sometimes to do stuff in a more manual way.

If a tool could take care of building while I remain in flow I’d be in heaven.

That’s interesting because i love computers and parts of programming. Algorithms are fascinating and I get a deep sense of satisfaction when my program works.

But at the same time I find programming to be a frustrating experience because I want to spend as much time as possible thinking about what I’m trying to build.

In other words I’d rather spend time in the dream-like space of possibilities, and iterating on my thoughts quickly than “dropping down” to reality and thinking through how I’m actually going to build it, what algorithms to use, how to organize code, etc.

Because of that I’ve found vibe coding to be enjoyable even if it’s not perfect.

Love of the process vs the product

These are intertwined, though, and rather tightly in some cases. Game dev is an excellent example of this.

Perhaps you're confusing enjoyment with necessity. Iteration is necessary to build a good game, but I want to minimize iteration time as much as possible so I can finish the game.

In that sense, the process is the enemy. A long, laborious process kills games.

Not the person you replied to, but I'm a programmer and up until ~3 weeks ago I really only used AI for auto-complete, looking up API information, and constructing arcane CLI commands.

I decided to take a leap and use AI as much as possible to complete a ticket at work. Now, 3 weeks later AI is writing 90% of my code.

Granted, I'm not sitting back sipping on a latte while AI does my job. It's a very interactive process, I spend more time reviewing code and going back and forth with the AI to get the result I want. But it's become surprisingly good.

I wouldn't say I'm anywhere close to 10x more productive, but perhaps 50%.

It definitely has its amazing moments, but sometimes I get caught in a loop of expecting it to do the thing, it not working, and spinning my wheels a lot instead of just solving it myself. I think I’m still learning how to use the tools effectively, but the random nature of it makes it difficult.

Yeah, nobody believes your made up numbers buddy. You're a stonk pumper, we know it.

Rust doesn’t have a BDFL so there’s nobody with the power to push things through when they’re good enough.

And since Rust basically sells itself on high standards (zero-cost abstractions, etc.) the devs go back and forth until it feels like the solution is handed down from the heavens.

And somehow it has ended up feeling more pleasant and consistent than most languages with a BDFL, even though it was designed by committee. I don't really understand how that happened, but I appreciate the cautious and conservative approach they've taken

It’s why leaders often speak in certainties. X is bad, Y is good type messaging.

It’s also why some people gravitate towards overly-confident narcissists. They feel a sense of comfort when someone seems to have all the answers, even if they don’t.

I don’t understand the issue with the word “hallucination”.

If a model hallucinates it did do something wrong, something that we would ideally like to minimize.

The fact that it’s impossible to completely get rid of hallucinations is separate.

An electric car uses electricity, it’s a fundamental part of its design. But we’d still like to minimize electricity usage.

Entertainment is becoming increasingly customizable and personalized. It’ll get to the point, like you said, that we’re not watching the same movie, playing the same game, etc.

It feels like we’re losing something, a shared experience, in favor of an increasingly narcissistic attitude that everything needs to shapeable to individual preferences instead of accepting things as they are.

I dunno. Entertainment is sort of inherently selfish, right? It is an unproductive thing we engage in to make us happy.

I’d be somewhat interested in something like a git that generates movies, that my friends can push to.

Extremely widespread mass media fiction broadcast are sort of an aberration of the last 75 years or so. I mean, you’d have works in ancient times—the Odyssey—that are shared across a culture. But, that was still a story customize by each teller, and those sorts of stories were rare. Canon was mainly a concern of religions.

It’s just for fun, we give it far too much weight nowadays.

The idea that entertainment is selfish because it doesn’t produce anything is offensive to the core.

Why are you fixated on laziness and shame when it comes to tedious household tasks?

Why is it so important to you that people fold their own clothes and wash their own dishes?

Why do you idolize a life of increased drudgery?

because it affects other people; it's not just shame for shame's sake, it's learning what effect we have on the people around us and how to navigate that. Guy who has lived with a lot of people here.

Daily live is living.

There is not a magic portal opening up when you are able to optimize ever aspect away of living and you will gain access to enlightment and everything is different.

And don't get me wrong, I have no clue how our society would look like if everything is done by ai and robots because we as a society don't talk about it and don't give everyone the resources they want or need if they have suddenly no 'drugdgery' anymore.

Give me a million today and i will spend the next 10 years rebuiling an old castle and I will have A LOT of fun doing this. Let me check, my bank balance is not at one million.

Instead i have to pay for a lot of things and then I have to work for 40 hours. Suddenly i'm great at my job, get valued but this is just Drudgery even if its complex work. Its work for someone else which doesn't matter to me.