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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2642 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 16, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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... what are you working on?

I find it kind of hard to work on software projects for fun knowing AGI will make it significantly easier to work on if I wait a year before starting. In fact this might always be true.

Labor done in 2025 will be so much less leveraged than labor done in 2026, and so on.

That's quitter talk. Do it for the craft, do it to skill up, do it to impress your friends, anything - but talking yourself out of having fun because the end result may possibly be dredgeable out of the electronic collective unconscious is stupid. I've talked myself out of working on side projects before because someone's already done it, and I was still wrong to do so! Don't do nothing now because you'll (presumably) be able to do it better in the future, you're skipping the important steps of practicing and fucking up, also known as having fun and learning!

Anyway I'm working on my attention span. I haven't given myself time to touch most of my side projects recently because IRL, but I did take some time to set up custom firmware on my friend's 3DS. I'm also trying to work through FUTO's guide to setting up a self-hosted home cloud.

This reminds me of the wait calculation from speculations about interstellar travel. If you leave Earth too early, your technology is too slow, and future faster travellers have already colonized your destination planet by the time you arrive. So you wait... But calculating the best time to leave has so many uncertainties that you end up never leaving, and humanity dies on Earth, never traveling to the stars despite having the technical ability to do so.

Trying to finish several of my half-written (or less) political/philosophical essays (like "Society Is Not a Van Der Waals Gas," "You Are Not Avalokiteśvara," and "Darwinism Is Not a Creation Myth"), which are increasingly looking to turn into potential chapters in a hypothetical book.

Looking for beta readers?

Looking for beta readers?

Not presently, but thanks for offering. And if I do, I'll keep you in mind.

Working on a software synth, and I have the opposite feeling. I made a half-baked one on my own in 2024, but in 2025 my labor is so much more efficient that I can make a vastly superior product that will actually realize my original vision. In 2026, I'll be able to do something more ambitious.

Still chipping away at my novel which I started as part of last year's NaNoWriMo competition, as documented here. Knocked out a thousand words in the last hour.

An album I finished last year was released three weeks ago.

Released how? On what platform? How do we find it?

I find it kind of hard to work on software projects for fun knowing AGI will make it significantly easier to work on if I wait a year before starting. In fact this might always be true.

This strikes me somewhat like saying "I don't want to work on learning to play an instrument because music recordings will make it a lot easier to have music in my home". That's true if all you care about is the end result. But if you were going to do this for fun to begin with, presumably you were going to do it because you enjoy the craft. So why wait for different tools? The enjoyment of the craft will be just as much today as it is a year from now.

I agree whole-heartedly with @MathWizard .

I write my own novel(s) for two reasons, one being that I want to establish, for reasons not much more noble than "I was considered a good writer back when that was a rare commodity", the other being that since there's very little of the very niche genre of fiction I enjoy, I might as well write my own.

Some authors view the rise of AI writing with fear and panic. I don't, both because I never relied on it for an income (and of course I'm worried about my own job going away) and I read far more than I write.

My default existence is boredom and ennui, desperate trawling and doomscrolling for literature (or any text) that assuages that thirst. There are never enough of the novels I enjoy, the authors I admire never seem to churn out novels faster than I can read them. Some of them, like Banks, are churlish enough to die instead of keeping on writing indefinitely.

Thus, even if I lose a small amount of utility from my writing becoming obsolete, I gain a great deal more from just having a near endless buffet of good writing to read.

Some would deny that AI can ever do that. Those people are idiots.

I think current LLMs are about 70% of the way to replacing me as an author, assuming they're given an excerpt of text I've written and then told to go wild with it. It's only a matter of years before the matter is settled. A year, if I'm being both highly optimistic and pessimistic.

So it goes for most people. For those who aren't making music as a career and who don't reflexively hate AI made music, the endlessly availability of fresh new music in the genres they like is amazing. While surgeons wouldn't be happy about being replaced, someone who got their appendix removed cheaper and safer would be happy about it. At any rate, it's coming for us whether we like it or not.

I'm assaulted daily by anti-ai takes that sap my will to live, but one in particular sticks in my mind. It went something like comparing generative tools to a child throwing his toy box into a ceiling fan, because the end result is the same as him playing with them. If taken as anything other than babbling of a motivated partisan, that metaphor would reveal how little the poster thinks of his readers, and of himself as well. His writing might only have value for the fun he has while producing it, and nothing else. But that's not normal.

Obviously if one really cares about the output and not the craft itself, then it's different. But I don't feel like that is the central example of "I'm writing software for fun". But yes, if that's you (and @MathWizard), you might decide to hold off based on your personal evaluation of how quickly we will have AI tools available to do that for you.

I would say I'm not convinced that will be soon. Right now AI generated content sucks ass. I'm not reflexively against it (though you might not believe me), but it just is bad and not worth my time even if I want to Consoom (TM). And that's just talking about creative endeavors (not my area of expertise), where I can only really judge the output from a layman's perspective. If we are talking about programming (which is my area of expertise), AI is laughably bad. It's so bad at writing code that it's a drain on productivity, because you have to check everything it does to make sure it is correct. LLMs are a really neat party trick, but right now that's all they are. They still can't actually do anything useful.

Could it get better? Sure. But people have been saying "it's gonna get better in a year or two" for years now, and it still isn't there. At this point, there's not evidence to suggest that AI is going to be able to do these tasks competently within the next 5 years or so. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but I think that people predicting AI to do all these wonderful things (meaning no personal disrespect to you) are getting caught up in hype without any substance behind it at this time.

In my case, the goal is the end product. I want a videogame with every single feature I want in a game and none of the features I don't want, and whenever I run out of content I can make more content. The software project is "for fun", in that the game is for fun and tailored to me specifically, I don't think it will ever be commercially viable, but 70% of the fun is (or would be if I ever get anywhere) the game itself, 25% is being able to think about game design features and add and tweak things, 5% is the actual coding line by line. If I could tell an AI what features I want and have it keep adding them cohesively and coherently on a global level without hallucinating or forgetting details from months ago, I would easily drop the 5% line by line coding part.

Instead I keep getting bored and losing motivation because I get too ambitious and it takes too long to do what I want to do before I get to enjoy it in a playable state.

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