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submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

At this point, anti-AI sentiment is just cope. AI is here to stay. For the people against AI, what is the praxis that must be undertaken against AI? AI, like any other tool, is lifeless but has living users that use, support, and develop it, so the question of praxis against AI becomes a question of praxis against workers who use, develop, and propagate AI.

This is why the Luddites failed. The Luddites had enough people to conduct organized raids, but the fact that those machinations were installed and continued to be installed by other workers meant that they represented a minority of workers. If they had a critical mass of workers on their side, those machinery would quite simply not be installed in the first place. Who else is going to install the machinery, the bourgeoisie, the gentry, and a bunch of merchants involved in human trafficking of Africans slaves?

Those looms didn't sprout legs and installed themselves. They were installed by other workers, workers who, for whatever reason, disagreed with the Luddite's praxis or ideology. Viewed in this context, it made sense why the Luddites failed in the end. Who cares if 500 looms got smashed by the Luddites if 600 looms got installed by non-Luddite workers anyways.

Corps are already starting to build underground data centers, so you and your plucky guerilla band of anti-AI insurgents can't just firebomb a data center that's build from a repurposed nuclear bunker. Pretty much all of the AI scientists who push the field forward are Chinese scientists safely located within the People's Republic of China, so liquidating AI scientists for being class traitors is out of the question. Then what else is left in terms of anti-AI praxis besides coping about it online and downvoting pro-AI articles from some cheap knockoff of R*ddit?

[-] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

This is precisely what I've been trying to explain to people as well. Corporations will keep developing this technology. Nothing will stop this. It’s happening. So the only question that matters is: How will it be developed, and who controls it?

The irony is that fighting against the use of this tech outside corporations guarantees corps become its sole owners. The only rational path is to back community-driven development, just like any other open-source alternatives to corporate tools. Worker-owned. Community-controlled.

It’s mind-boggling that so many people fail to understand this.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 6 days ago

The argument that workers should capture AI instead of the ruling class is interesting, but let me ask you.

Has there been a single technology entirely captured and for the workers in history, ever? Has not every piece of technology been used primarily by the working class, yes, but the direction it develops and what value it produces is decided by the ruling class? Always has been unless we can remove them from controlling the mode of production..

I think China is an interesting example of this, where the worker's party controls the majority of the economy and wouldn't let a program like DeepSeek threaten to unemploy half of it's economy (America does probably have a larger segment dedicated to programming, though, silicon valley and all). Even then, the average worker there has more safety nets.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

The threat I see is the dominance of AI services provided by an oligarchy of tech companies. Like Google dominance of search. It's a service that they own.

Thankfully China is a source of alternative AI services AND open source models. The bonus is that Chinese companies like Huawei are also an alternative source of AI hardware. This allows you to run your own AI models so you don't necessarily need their services.

You're thinking of class war. There's only one proven way to win that war: The working class rises up, kill some MFers and takes over. There's no point smashing the loom - kill the loom owners and take their looms.

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[-] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Has there been a single technology entirely captured and for the workers in history, ever?

No, technology has no ideology, which is why we shouldn't be opposed to using the tools that the ruling class uses against us. The chinese communists didn't win the civil war without using guns or without studying military tactics and logistics.

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago

If people can build it, it can serve the people. Think of open-weights LLMs. If we got a couple of 32B models that score as high as GPT-4o and Claude-3.5, why not use them? It can be run on mid-high end hardware. There are developers out there doing a good job. It doesn't need to be a datacenter/big tech company centered scenario.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

There are many technologies that serve the people that regardless are captured and extracted value mainly by the ruling class of our mode of production. Extracting value from it ourselves and our own projects doesn't mean that we own it.

My point was also that despite our efforts; corporations and the ruling class will build destructive datacenters/big tech.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago

I mean, technology will be used to oppress workers under capitalism. That is why Marxists fundamentally reject capitalist relations. However, given that people in the west do live under capitalism currently, the question has to be asked whether this technology should be developed in the open and driven by community or owned solely by corporations. This is literally the question of workers owning their own tools.

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[-] [email protected] 30 points 6 days ago

LLMs really might displace many software developers. That’s not a high horse we get to ride. Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody else’s have been for the last 3 decades. We’re not East Coast dockworkers; we won’t stop progress on our own

why did I do computer science god I fucking hate every person in this field it's amazing how much of an idiot everyone is.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

You can tell the ones that got A's in their comp sci classes and C's in their core/non-major classes by how bloodthirsty they are.

Me, the enlightened centrist, just got C's in everything

[-] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago

Writer is the type of guy to only fail his ethics courses

[-] [email protected] 25 points 6 days ago

Every six months the tone of these "why won't you use my hallucinating slop generator" get more and more shrill.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 6 days ago

I think his point that you basically give a slop generator a fitness function in the form of tests, compilation scripts, and static analysis thresholds, was pretty good. I never really thought of forcing the slop generator to generate slop randomly until it passes tests. That's a pretty interesting idea. Wasteful for sure, but I can see it saving someone a lot of time.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 6 days ago

you basically give a slop generator a fitness function in the form of tests, compilation scripts, and static analysis thresholds, was pretty good.

forcing the slop generator to generate slop randomly until it passes tests.

I have to chuckle at this because it's practically the same way that you have to manage junior engineers, sometimes.

It really shows how barely "good enough" is killing off all the junior engineers, and once I die, who's going to replace me?

[-] [email protected] 20 points 6 days ago

This is absolutely the crisis of aging hitting the software engineering labor pool hard. There are other industries where 60% or more of the trained people are retiring in 5 years. Software is now on the fast track to get there as well.

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[-] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago

I'd much rather the slop generator wastes its time doing these repetitive and boring tasks so I can spend my time doing something more interesting.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

wastes its time doing these repetitive and boring tasks

To me, this is sort of a code smell. I'm not going to say that every single bit of work that I have done is unique and engaging, but I think that if a lot of code being written is boring and repetitive, it's probably not engineered correctly.

It's easy for me to be flippant and say this and you'd be totally right to point that out. I just felt like getting it out of my head.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 6 days ago

If most of the code you write is meaningful code that's novel and interesting then you are incredibly privileged. Majority of code I've seen in the industry is mostly boring and a lot of it just boilerplate.

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[-] [email protected] 19 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Thanks for sharing these AI posts.

Paid employment could mean retraining under socialism. Remember communism is moneyless, stateless and classless. The aim of society is the socialisation of all labour to free up time to do more leisure including art. People will still want art from humans without AI but there’s a difference between that and the preservation of regression through ludditism to maintain less productive paid labour.

Equating anti-capitalism to anti-corporatism, the appeal to ludditism, the defense of proprietorship, or the appeal to metaphysical creativity is not going to cut it, and that is a low bar to clear for marxists.

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7917393/6409037

[-] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I find the tone kind of slapdash. Feel like the author could have condensed it to a small post about using AI agents in certain contexts, as that seems to be the crux of their argument for usefulness in programming.

I do think they have a valid point about some in tech acting squeamish about automation when their whole thing has been automation from day one. Though I also think the idea of AI doing "junior developer" level of work is going to backfire massively on the industry. Seniors start out as juniors and AI is not going to progress fast enough to replace seniors probably within decades (I could see it replacing some seniors, but not on the level of trust and competency that would allow it to replace all of them). But AI could replace a lot of juniors and effectively lock the field into a trajectory of aging itself out of existence, due to it being too hard for enough humans to get the needed experience to take over the senior roles.

Edit: I mean, it's already the case that dated systems sometimes use languages nobody is learning anymore. That kind of thing could get much worse.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago

The developer pipeline is the big question here. My experience using these tools is that you absolutely have to know what you're doing in order to evaluate the code LLMs produce. Right now we have a big pool of senior developers who can wrangle these tools productively and produce good code using them because they understand what the proper solution should look like. However, if new developers start out using these tools directly, without building prior experience by hand, then it might be a lot harder for them to build such intuition for problem solving.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago
[-] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

If you're not coding in assembly you're not a real programmer vibes there.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

I don't think that was their vibes.

From article:

the point is not to let ourselves be replaced by AIs, but to use them to improve ourselves and our productivity

My take:

The role of the programmer is ultimately to solve the problems. There are many ways to skin the cat. The better solutions comes from the better programmers.

Bosses under capitalism have less understanding of the pros/cons of a particular solution. Hence they will often use their decision making powers to choose the quick solution rather than the best.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

I mean that's been the case all along, that's why most software is janky. The problem isn't technology itself, it's capitalist relations and the way technology ends up being applied as a result.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

There are bugs in every system. AI will just create different types of bugs. It's the nature of technology.

The hype money being thrown at AI is making the F35 of software out of this shit though. Big Tech accumulated so much cash and had nothing to throw it at after VR didn't take off.

Then we get Skynet.

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

Really? I got "if you don't understand the code you're producing, then that's a real problem, not just for you but for software development as a whole".

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[-] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago

See, for coding AI makes a lot of sense, since a lot of it is very tedious. You still need to understand the output to be able to debug it and make novel programs though, because the limitation is that the LLM can only recreate code its seen before in fairly generic configurations.

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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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