We are in the age of intellectual strip mining.
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Ooh nice image. Intellectual clear-cutting.
@cwebber Well expressed!
@cwebber next, intellectual fracking
One thing I thought of and explained as contrast to all the vibey stuff going on is the demoscene. Pushing the limits of old computers as art. There's no reason to do it except craft and joy.
But of course, this weekend I saw an article where someone tried to do just that. Even on HN people were saying, why? You're missing the point of the demoscene. There's nothing to "gain" from the demoscene other than community and craft.
If you're using an LLM to try to understand and explain to you how a technique works, I suppose that's one thing. But if you're using it to build a demo, why? Exploring the limits is only there for community joy. There's no other reason to do it.
But every community, the joy and artistry is torn out of it. Intellectual strip mining.
@cwebber I think there is opportunity to some degree where in a year or whatever we get very clever things out of frontier LLMs and *humans* distill and investigate and incorporate those techniques into new standards of ‘how to do a thing’ elegantly.
I don’t know who would ever fund it but I think this marriage of artisan craft and technological insight where you have the entire power of a data center and a stupid machine pointed at a problem and a human reviewing may expose interesting things.
@cwebber I want to show one slide from a presentation on the demoscene I recently held. I told the audience that using vibe coding with a supraintelligence would completely defeat the purpose of the scene. And now I'm a bit flabbergasted that there actually are people who don't understand that?!?
@cwebber don't they call this clout?
They don't care about the craft nor the community. All they want is the attention.
@cwebber Yea the same happened to the game decompilation scene, the retrocomputing scene, the niche languages (cough lisp) scene, nothing is safe because what the slop men want is attention.
@cwebber I hate that stupid ass "why" question. You can't post about anything cool before someone is demanding to know why and not accepting ANY answer. I couldn't believe it when all of /r/C++ turned on me when I posted about my weird template shit and couldn't explain to those fucking assholes why they should use it. "I think it's cool" was not an acceptable answer and the whole fucking group... Well whatever.
I've found I'm not that original a thinker anyway. Such is the Internet.
@cwebber Unfortunately there IS value in it - social cachet, perhaps, but that's still _worth something_, in the abstract. The category error is in imagining that that value is separable from the means of realizing it, which is The MBA Mythos writ tiny.
@owen "Solving" your loneliness by making everyone lonelier
@cwebber ("you" in the post is the "general you" not you personally of course!)
You see that person who did an amazing demo. Everyone was celebrating that person. You want some of that. You WANT to be celebrated. Nay. You DESERVE to be celebrated. Yes, you're absolutely right, people should worship YOU.
So the question becomes: do you put in the work or do you mimic the form. And putting in the work is work. And mimicking the form is easy. So you fake it with an LLM.
I saw this post using an ad for AI to explain what the AI companies are selling.
https://ketanjoshi.co/2026/11/02/microsoft-just-gave-us-the-perfect-name-for-ai-thieves-kyle/
He argues the ad shows the point of GenAI is to give mediocre people who feel they should be special the ability to steal work from others so they can try to get unearned respect.
The demoscene still generates respect for the people who managed to get the computer to do something impressive, and I'm guessing some people feel like they should get that respect without putting in the work to deserve it.
@cwebber Ah! You noticed.