Discussion
Some late night thoughts about "AI"
(Longer thread incoming):
I'm a programmer and a software engineer. I love to code and to solve technical problems. Analyze a problem, think of a solution and implement it. In a hopefully elegant and readable way. The journey is the destination.
🧵 1/5
I notice that in the retrogaming community too: A flood of "Someone ported X to platform Y", "Someone decompile game Z", when "someone" basically is "some AI".
Until last year I was excited about these things and ask "how did they do it" and "how did they bypass the limitation of platform Y". Now I think "Meh, it's probably slop, no insights in here", and I don't care at all.
🧵 3/5
The point of the homecomputers of the 70ies and 80ies was to democratize programming. Something that was only possible at universities and big companies was now available and accessible to everyone.
If you turned on a random 8bit-computer, the chances were good that you were greeted by a Basic interpreter, inviting you to code.
🧵 4/5
Now we are rolling all these achievements back. Back to mainframes / clouds instead of computers at home and move back the programming skills to the mainframes, but this time not to the humans operating them but to some software.
So why should I still code? Or do any creative work at all? To feed the copyright infringment machine and make some billionaires more billionaire? Time to go to live in a lonely shed in the woods.
🧵 5/5
So, now there is this new shit available, these "AI". Everybody can now spit their wishes into the big Grand Theft Autocomplete-Machine and Claude et al vomits out their own personal software. No need or incentive to learn to code or to understand software architecture at all. "Software as a Service".
So I ask myself, where is the point in coding or becoming better at coding. Seems pointless now.
🧵 2/5
#noai #coding #programming #retrocomputing #homecomputer