Stoner AI Thoughts

…because talking to computers is just totally bananas

I talk to computers more than I talk to people

If you count ’talking’ as an exchange of any sort of message, I definitely talk to computers more than people. If you randomly take ‘something I’m writing or saying’ there’s a greater than 50% chance it’s not meant for a human.

This blog post is probably going to get ‘processed’ by LLMs more times than its read by human eyeballs.

And while today words literally coming out of my mouth are probably 80-90% human-bound, I really like google gemini assistant and that ratio is probably trending towards and beyond 50% too.

I don’t think is is TERRIBLE per-se, but it’s been this way for a while and I only recently kinda thought of it this way.

The 1-person-1-billion-dollar-company…what a sad, sad dream

First time I heard someone mention this it was in-person, at the github offices in San Francisco from a speaker giving a talk and I thought, ‘Wow. This pathetic/sad man is being surprisingly transparent about his pathetic/selfish dreams for this incredible technology.’ And then I kept hearing about the 1-person-1-billion-dollar idea, with the same unapologetic glee, and it just bums me out.

I think I get what people (charitably) mean when they talk about the one-person-1-billion-dollar company: one person can do a lot more with LLMs. That’s cool.

But just to come right out and say phrase it as ‘one person can make a BILLION dollars with NO HELP how COOL IS THAT?!’ and to focus so much on the not sharing aspect of it…its a bummer and makes me feel like silicon valley culture really is juvenile and gross.

its crazy that vibe coding works at all considering 90+% of the tools/technologies we use are pre-AI

A blog post I read & liked recently (https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/) said:

I’m confident the designers of the Go programming language didn’t set out to produce the most LLM-legible language in the industry. They succeeded nonetheless.

This resonated, and has had me reflecting recently on some of my own experiences vibing.

I’ve done weird things that at the time I didn’t realize were weird…like set up an EC2 as a web server with nginx without once looking at the nginx docs (And only even using nginx because a chatbot told me to). I look at docs more these days, but learning to code, I really truly never did.

ChatGPT dropped ~1 year into my ‘getting into tech.’ I’m realizing more and more that my experiences learning (& learning to love) computer stuff will very soon be unremarkable and incredibly normal, but today make me a very different species of developer than the people I work with.

I feel like a guy in a T-rex costume standing around at a party where everyone else is dressed normally and it’s 8:45, and around 9 is when the rest of the people in the dinosaur costumes are expected to show up.

I feel bet-my-life confident that very soon my experiences will be very normal, but right now I’m a weirdo. And I’m equally confident that in this coming world where I’m normal, the world is gonna be a much stranger place.

Hold on to your butts!