- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
Twonks | Bluesky
Transcript
TW😶NKS
A comic in four panels:
Panel 1. White text on black
AI Design Logic
Panel 2. A guy sits in a restaurant at a table with a checkered table cloth. A waiter stands near, hands behind back waiting attentively.
Guy: Get me a cheese pizza
Panel 3. The waiter returns with a pizza in hand.
Panel 4. The guy gestures proudly at the pizza. The waiter looks less than amused.
Guy: Wow, look what I made!
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you know, i’ve tried to defend some usage in the past, explaining my processes and the many steps of manual refinement, masking, and layerwork i put in to things, how i only run local models with open weights, how all my power comes from hydro etc etc
but as the tools keep evolving i’ve realised nobody else seems to actually care about the process. the pro-people just want as much slop as possible. someone likened it to a slot machine, where you keep pulling just because. that’s where we are now.
I fully get where you’re coming from. I fully believe that you can’t vibe code correctly unless you already know how to code correctly. I’m against the shifting paradigm of “who cares what the code looks like aa long as it works properly and the LLM can read it quickly” bullshit that’s coming out of it. I want to read the code and understand it too. I want it to be object oriented and not just dumb ad hoc methods everywhere that’s 1,000 lines when it could’ve been 100 lines.
Now anecdotally, as someone who uses it for my main work and side project, I am still getting a lot of use out of it. I’m learning new things at a faster rate than I would have before. For my side project, I am trying to optimize gear sets for a game and there’s hundreds of millions of different configurations. The LLM I’m using knows about my code and the project and what I need and is able to suggest other algorithms, like I was able to learn about Dinkelbach’s algorithm. I have it write up design docs with formulas and pseudocode implementation and I review that and it takes my comments into account. I treat it like a junior developer and ask for questions to make sure I understand what it’s doing. I think a lot of people aren’t treating it like a junior developer or intern and that’s where problems come from.
Now, I wouldn’t be using it if it wasn’t free with my company, as this is more of “learning/research” for my job.
And for my job, we have semantic memory and a ton of MCP servers setup that guide it through the right code and can do internal documentation search so it’s way more powerful than just using base Claude Code or whatever. It has helped me stay more on track with my projects as an ADHD person (even though I’m medicated) by documenting what it does after it does it in a shared doc rather than me forgetting to do that because I run a command and log off for the day or something.
I do hate the water usage and energy usage though…
Same, but you forgot, the massive stealing of intellectual property that no government fights against because they are scared to be left behind by big tech, the impact on learning (especially students), and the impact on little hands that had to moderate the NSFL content.
As a min maxer in a lot of games, I used to make spreadsheets in little tiny janky python programs do all sorts of crazy s*** to optimize stuff.
Would spend hours on it! A little local model has basically reduced my effort. 10. Fold and saved me hours upon hours of work.
Probably the single best thing is I can just yell at it to tell me what’s on the f****** to-do list and it will just tell me. And it helps my ADHD ass actually decide on what to start working on for the day and actually get something done instead of doing 20 things at once.
Fantastic little tool.
Now I have more time to play my games and I have something to yell at me so I don’t get distracted
i refuse to use ml models for code. the copyright issues alone should be enough to keep them away from every public code base until the matter is settled. but also because local tooling is, frankly, shit. i have a bit of hope for text diffusion models, but i have a hard time seeing the situation improving because everyote is full in on cloud models now.
Imagine if you put that much time into a useful skill.
i do. i experiment with transformer and diffusion models like a few hours a month, tops. the result isn’t interesting enough. the process of bending and breaking the models is the fun part.
Sounds like it’s a very rewarding hobby lol.
yeah, it’s a great way to see the limitations of these systems. just like ctf and ioccc.
I was being sarcastic, man. That sounds like a tremendous waste of time.
i will always take the time to explain things i find interesting to people. the benefit here is that i can now much more efficiently break large models as well when i come across them. helps me add anti-ai clauses to websites, cv’s, and repos i publish.
Thanks for taking one for the team then, I guess!
I prefer the term ‘built’ when I share my vibe coded slop, thanks
*sarcasm
I definitely get the sentiment. But in my opinion it’s closer to somebody going to the pizza shop, ordering and picking up a pizza and bringing it home to fam and saying “hey I got us a pizza”
“That’s a good looking pizza, look at that cheese”
“… Thanks! White glue is commonly used in the industry to get a picture perfect cheese pull”
That’s if you use AI at work. But instead of the fam, it’s your boss.
Rich people think this way for everything
That’s why they don’t see any problem with replacing workers with AI. They think AI will do X better than humans do just like machines could build X better than humans could at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
But the cost benefit analysis often proves to be quite the opposite in the long-term, despite deceptive short-term gains. But a short-term gains seem to be all that businesses seem to care about.
They like AI because it doesn’t provide feedback about their ideas being less than perfect.
on a slight tangent: that’s why I tend to prefer Claude (when I have to use AI), because it does actually provide push-back and doesn’t get all kiss-ass with me like ChatGPT
You’re absolutely right!
And here’s the thing
You’re not crazy!
You can just tell AI to provide feedback and not be a kiss ass… Hell most of the good models well"good" models do provide feedback by default. The whole AI is a kiss ass thing is almost entirely a byproduct of free cheap low-end models or outdated ones.
So this particular criticism hasn’t really been valid for a hot second anymore. Honestly, 99% of everything everyone thinks AI is in this entire thread is either flat out wrong at this point as things have already changed. Or they’re conflating the business problems with the actual tool.
Mean hell Claude will straight up. Tell you you’re dumb. You’ll do so professionally and in corpo speak and it’s awful. But it will tell you you’re dumb.
It will also totally throw shade at you while taking the blame for your f****** which is pretty funny.
Mean to be fair, most people who hate AI aren’t going to go spend a bunch of money to actually learn what good models do and how good models actually operate. They’re just going to look at the s*** on their phone that’s free. That sucks and go it all sucks.
Mean to be fair. Those models do suck. The company’s running them suck. Those companies did a bunch of illegal s*** and are ruining the environment and that sucks.
There’s a lot to hate about AI.
But the actual tool in and of itself isn’t actually that bad and it doesn’t need to be bad. The open models trained on data that’s actually freely given in license appropriately while not as good as those big giant multi-trillion dollar ones.
Aren’t ruining the environment, aren’t displacing people out of a job, aren’t full of stolen information, and can still genuinely be useful for small tasks.
A tool is a tool and it’s only as bad or good as we make it.
That’s one of the core injustices of capitalism.
Rich person says “Build a thing”
Workers design, research, and build the thing.
Rich person keeps the profits.
and credit
…or swallows the loss.
The laid off workers also suffer the loss, typically.
Furthermore, I don’t think “he gambled” compellingly makes this system fair or good.
The laid off workers also suffer the loss
Or benefits when they got employed. Point is, that you aren’t rising much with just working. You earn your wage whether the owner did right or wrong decision. Unlike them you don’t have to bear the risk of losing your savings
The owner also gets a wage and benefits while the process is running.
And much of the time, they’re spending VC money. Minimal personal risk.
And even so, that doesn’t justify the owner keeping almost all of the proceeds. I don’t care if they put their life savings into it. Labor built it.
Wage paid out of your own money to youself isn’t a benefit.
VC funding.
Also why are you so invested in defending capitalists?
“The Life and Times of Thomas Edison”
Reminds me of when I heard someone talk about a recent experience when they “built houses”. I thought that sounded unlikely, as I could not picture this person wearing a toolbelt and hardhat and actually swinging a hammer. I asked for clarification, and they explained how they managed a construction company or something, and that in English, saying “I build houses” covers the management side as well, not just the people actually doing the building.
It’s not that hard to say they’re a manager, they just wanted to feel included
As someone who has actually physically built houses (i.e. nailing walls together, putting up the siding, hanging and mudding sheetrock, installing doors and windows etc.) this mindset pisses me off more than anything. “Management” does stuff like buying already-built houses, trucking them to our site and placing them on foundations, discovering the houses were built in the 1960s with 2x3s instead of 2x4s and thus needed to be torn down to the floors because they’re no longer up to code, necessitating us rebuilding the houses entirely from the floors up, and then discovering the houses were placed two feet too close to the property line so we have to literally chop two feet off of them and rebuild the walls.
True fucking story. And I forgot to mention that the floors were 3/4 rotten so we had to rebuild most of them, too.
the amount of resources that must have gone into that whole process, and the fact that they [management] were apparently fine with is appalling to me. wouldn’t they at least have financial incentives to do it right the first time?
Well, the organization was kind of like Habitat for Humanity, just smaller. They mainly existed on charity donations. Looking back on it (forty years later), I suspect that the guy running it was embezzling a lot of the money.
2x3s instead of 2x4s
How about building houses the right way like in the EU: Out of cellular concrete
And because of that, unfortnately, a lot of regular people also think the entire point of technology and wealth is to never have to do anything substantive.
“Give me a cheese pizza in the style of a famous italian restaurant pizza kitchen. Use lots of cheese, tomato sauce, and bread. Cook it in an oven at a very high temperature. The cheese should be hot to the touch. The crust should be thin when the cooking is complete and have a few tiny black spots on it to show that it is crispy. Put the pizza on a metal tray and deliver it to my table within the next thirty minutes. Make no mistakes.”
You forgot to specify Italian DOP cheese, now you have a pizza oozing with shitty Kraft/Lactalis pseudo-cheese.
This is why no one wants to go to Altoona.
Also you’ll get framed for murder there
Receives pizza
“Why is it covered with pineapple?!?”
That server didn’t make the pizza.
They can still be offended on behalf of their coworkers who did.
Who claimed that they did?
The server never presented a list of credits for the pizza, so I assume they made it.
So you assumed they made it but also in your first comment said that they didn’t make it. So which is it?
Yes
A thought experiment you could take further.
The chef didn’t even make the dough. That came from a Cisco truck, from a factory maintained by a team of maintenance workers. The base was good, but made better because the chef added some flour and oil to it.
Pointless observation, but…many people contribute to most things we only associate to one “maker”.
Peaches come from a can. They were put there by a man. In a factory downtown.
I feel delighted by the implication that the pizza dough came from Cisco, and not Sysco. It’s a $300,000 pizza, with a $15,000/mo support contract. You only get that discount if you’re buying it as part of an 8+ figure contract though. It can handle 20 billion pepperoni per second though, and if you figure out how to eat it you can get a degree in it that pays pretty well.
You also get the best waiting music known to man while you wait.
I used to work for Cisco as a programmer, and when I got laid off by them I found out that my mom thought I had been working for Sysco the whole time. She had never understood why I was working for a food services company, although I expect they employ a large number of programmers too.
Did working for Cisco suck? I can’t say as I never did a lick of actual work for them. They acquired my original company and then we all sat around for a fucking year doing nothing until they laid most of us off. Weirdly, everybody who got laid off was childless – the only people from my original company who were kept on had one or more children. I don’t know what to make of that.
My only regret is not saying that my work macbook had been stolen. That’s what all of my coworkers did and they all ended up with free macbooks.
They have good hold music? Can you elaborate?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N7xn5zeJ4D4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_on_hold#Cisco’s_Opus_Number_One
Cisco also sells phone systems, and one of their phone engineers wrote a song with a friend once and used it as the default on what went on to become a very common phone system.
It’s not the best song ever, but it’s definitely the best hold music. Can elicit a proper, heartfelt “not bad” from most people.
It’s also common enough that there’s a decent chance any random person has heard it and had no idea where this song came from.I attribute it’s quality to it being an authentic piece of music, and not a corporate design creation, that was created on lower fidelity hardware, because that’s what they had to muck around with, and so it had some actual creative feeling to it and it coincidentally didn’t lose much being piped over a 90s voip phone system to a household landline handset.
The engineers of the AI should get a cut I guess
Ahh shit I guess game engine designers should get a cut of the games too?
As someone who builds things from scratch, this is how I feel about people who 3D print things
Where do you draw the line? I’m a hobbyist woodworker, but I don’t cut, mill, or dry the wood myself. I didn’t even plant the tree - it likely came from another country entirely.
I also didn’t make most of my tools and I use prefabricated fasteners and screws, whereas my grandfather, a professional woodworker, made many of his own tools and primarily used joinery.
Does that mean I’m not a true woodworker?
I find that quite dismissive as someone who spends ages in CAD designing 3D printable mechanisms. There are more design constraints with making a 3D printable design.
They didn’t make this distinction but I think there is a clean line separating 3D printing like “I’m printing a mini for my TTRPG” and 3D printing like “I’m printing 15,000 discrete armor plates to assemble my mech cosplay.”
Basically, if you are printing parts to assemble something than you are still assembling something. If you print out a thing that you’re immediately “using”, eh…you just had something delivered.
If you design and print the thing though, that is still creating something, just using different tools to construct the thing that you visualised in your mind.
Oh, well, yeah. You made the design.
I hold no exclusionary love for handmade crafts. I just know I’ve downloaded things off the internet that got printed, but I would never claim I made those things.
Architects to engineers? Engineers to construction workers?
This, but you don’t get a pizza, you get a wheel of iron, colored in brown with glue on top of it.
the best part is that the waiter stole it from another restaurant
Mmmmm mmmmm steamed hams
*from the dumpsters of several other restaurants
AI would bring you a big cheese wheel with salami on it, and temu Ratatouille in the background, in the wrong scale. Because that shit is DUMB!
How is this different from what anybody who hires or employs people do?
I think most people leading a team would say “we built this”. Personally, if I hire someone to build something for me, I’d say something like “I had this built” intead of saying I built it myself.
I think there should be a short form for “I had AI do this for me”… “I prompted” maybe?
People very comfortably say “Company made this”, or “we made this” regarding a place they work even if not on the team if talking to someone external.
When people get houses built they often say they’re building a new house, even if it’s actually someone else doing every part of it.There’s a part of our language that lends itself to having the cause of a thing be responsible for the thing.
The closer it gets to being something you could have personally done every part of and another person is involved the more we tend to draw back, which is why the AI art language grates a bit.
My coworker said he’s building a cabin up north: I have no uncertainty at all that he’s approving a design and someone else is doing it.
I wouldn’t say I put up a handrail on my stairs: it’s plausible I could have, but I didn’t (it’s an awkward space with weird stud spacing, and I have older family I want to be able to rely on it, so I paid someone with licensing to do it right in 20 minutes). I don’t want to take credit for what I didn’t do.With the art, only one person actually caused it to be made. But it also feels like taking credit for something more difficult than it was.
If I drop a bucket of paint off a balcony, I wouldn’t say “I caused a giant mess to be made”, but “I made a giant mess”.
If I pointed at it and said “I have made art”, people would assume I was joking, despite a surface similarity to some art. The amount of effort is disproportional to the claim.I believe the “part of our language that lends itself to having the cause of a thing be responsible for the thing” (in the contexts you give examples for) is just the human desire to be included in what’s happening, even if you shouldn’t be. If we were honest, we would callout these inaccurate claims. But it is a component of social lubrication that we ignore minor inaccuracies. We allow white lies because the cost of pursuing them is greater than the value of uncovering them.
That is not the case with people falsely claiming ownership of things genAI has made for them. Presumably because we understand that the person “building their house” is not building their own house from scratch. And so it doesn’t erode the foundation of architecture to allow that inaccuracy. Carpentry as a profession won’t be written off because Business Chett heard someone say “anyone can build a home (by having someone else do it for them).”
If you drop a paint bucket you made high class modern art worth tens of millions. If you bullshit hard enough. But in all seriousness.
There is to a point a matter of art being entirely “valid” only to the eye of a beholder. Ai “art” is by all reasonable arguments art and made by who ever is piloting the bot. That is how it is. With out the willful intent of a human the bot is innert and can not create anything. So even the most slop or slop is still a willful human creation. A tool can not act on its own.
The problem is people saying it’s not real art or that the person piloting the bot isn’t an artist are doing so based on a personal belief. Not a hard fact. Which because of the nature of art is entirely valid. People have argued what isn’t and is real art for decades. People argued digital art was fake for a decade. People argued photography was fake art for decades. And the further back you go you can find endless examples.
Some of the “best” art work in history range from extremely hard and demand decades of skill and dedication. While others took a few mins and no real skill at all.
Intent, reason and personal subjectivity are the defining facets of what is or is not art. If someone lazily has an ai generate something and takes the first pass then that’s on them for making low effort art. No different then if I draw a stick man and call it a day.
Someone who uses a bit to draft, create and literate over and over and pushes a bot to its absolute limit. Is vastly different.
Sometimes the art is in the process and not the result as well. So even if the bot shits out something mediocre, the ability to get something that actually passes for acceptable instead of slop is in and of it self an art.
AI art to me personally is a problem of quantity letting everything because of ease of access to Creation. Never before. Has humanity had the ability to create faster or more efficiently. And people are taking advantage of that to simply not try to not push the tool and to not see what can be done with the tool.
And to be very clear this is entirely aside to the legal issues around how early models were trained as well as the copyright problems, which is an entirely separate issue to all of this. It’s related but it is very much its own problem and a solvable one. We just got to convince the multi-trillion dollar companies to stop being assholes…
Well see that’s the thing about patent/copyright/trademark/etc laws that don’t make sense to me. If it’s illegal to copy someone’s idea and sell it as your own how is it viable to ask AI to do something where it pulls all of the data from someone else’s work and gives it to you and you sell it as your own. (Or use it to make something you sell) In general it would make sense that you would have to pay the person who’s idea it was you used for each sale… Or that no one can own any idea, and patents/copyrights shouldn’t exist at all.
AI eliminates software copyright.
Look at malice.sh
Not sure what malice.sh is, the link goes no where for me.
That said, as far as I knew a fully AI created work couldn’t be copyrighted, but that doesn’t mean someone who uses AI to make something and sell it can be used legally without purchasing it. I assume you probably could even make a copyrighted work that you used AI to make, so long as it wasn’t fully AI created
Presumably this:
malus.sh - Clean Room as a Service | Liberation from Open Source … Clean Room as a Service Finally, liberation from open source license obligations. Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.
The problem is that AI actually can do useful work, unlike what the fuckais want people to believe. It can do that. Except you don’t get any updates or support, or help with fixing bugs. So not even sure how useful this is. But oh look how evil lol
All this shows is how stupid intellectual property, patents and copyright is. We’re not talking about “high art” or ingenious inventions or stuff, it’s all capital sucking up the work of workers and turning it into a commodity. A commodity that fundamentally is easy to copy. And copying isn’t theft, it doesn’t take anything away except the potential profit the capitalists are dreaming of. If you are taking away my copy, my ability to learn or enjoy culture, then you are the thief. Because most of the time there is no profit, only potential profit that would never materialize. We have a 1000 textbook variations about the same topic, because every one has their own copyright instead of collaboration and free resources. Pulp.
There are no artists posting on reddit, they are no genius comments or novels posted. Millions of books from an industry that produces slop. And LLMs managed to turn all that into something resembling intelligence which might be useful for quite a few things. And they don’t even copy, they use machine learning to turn it into a model of the thing.
And suddenly everybody looses their fucking mind and pleads for more stringent copyright laws lol.
Fuck the AI bubble and environmental BS and do address the avalanche of societal problems coming our way, but copyright law is not the fucking answer. It’s an oppressive and imperialist tool to collect rent. And it will make things much worse long term if there are no legal open source/weight AI models.
These guys sound like a bunch of assholes.
I mean yeah totally, it sounds comically evil lol. But I don’t think this will even work out for them.
If it could work out to really cleanroom create new standard library stuff, then the “value of programming labour” has actually gone down very much. At least for these kinds of “solved problems”. That would be the moral there, that we have solved certain problems and now have machine intelligence who can create infinite variations and adaptations to this. Which would be awesome, being able to rewrite much of the IT stack in more safe or more performant languages, or automatically optimize and improve. If that was possible already it would be a cause to celebrate. On to code bigger and better things.
But we’re not even there yet, they’d have plenty of problems, bugs, issues and downsides with their “malus alternative”. So I don’t see a huge issue with this.
How is this different from what anybody who hires or employs people do?
Fun question.
- Most employees will someday no longer be day-one idiot employees. (conttasted with AI)
- Many managers take a class or something to know how to get results from their employees. (in contrast with many people given unlimited token allowances)
- Most employees are capable of a relationship and even loyalty, if any is merited. (in contrast with corporate AI API vendors who only want to extract wealth)
This reads like a rebuttal but I’m not seeing it a contradiction.
If you don’t provide the ideas, manage the logistics, supply the labor, test for quality, etc., then I wouldn’t say that you were a part of making it. You’re an investor, certainly, but that’s not a maker.
Removed by mod
The sad part it did try… and wasted electricity and water
I sometimes have LLMs make and spin up single us UIs for things. It’s not uncommon for me to prompt “make it pretty” or " can you make it" pop " more" which makes me laugh quite a bit.
![Great job 👏 [Twonks]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/69fd8e3b-4aea-4e91-addf-bd8fafc25787.jpeg){kind=link}