Tag: personal

My 2c on the AI/GenAI/LLM bubble

A premise

I am writing this to clarify my ideas more than anything else. This blog has such a small following that I doubt anyone will be influenced, but if you have opinions, please share them.

I will refer to AI/LLMs interchangeably in this post. I am aware the translate function in your phone, or the spam filter in your email inbox is also Artificial Intelligence. I know it’s also what we used to call Machine Learning. It’s also what we used to call statistics. It’s also, obviously, not AGI.

It does not matter. I went through the whole era of telling people that no, the people who get into your computer to steal your money should be called crackers, not hackers, but I am older, and I have realized it’s not worth it to fight all the battles. People will call AI-powered a toothbrush with a led, and that’s fine.

Mixed feelings

I am a mastodon user and my circle over there is dominated by people who, for one reason or the other, hate AI. Their arguments are, in large part, reasonable. I will not debate the power, water, and general resources usage arguments, because I don’t feel strongly about those.

The fairness argument is the one I will consider: the big AI labs have built their fortune on a trove of illegally obtained data, and are making money by offering to replace people whose data they stole. While we can argue about the details (some data was legal, some labs are trying to give back something, there are blurry lines on what constitutes fair use) it seems objectively shitty.

I understand the feeling, more for artists than for programmers, and I would welcome a sort of regulation that compensated them somehow, but I cannot imagine how that would work. Maybe let’s fund UBI taxing AI vendors? That sounds like a good idea! But to me, so does taxing megacorps in general to fund welfare.

What I do think, it’s that it’s not useful to yell at people using AI to do inferior knock-off “art” and expect it to disappear.

You can vote with your eyeballs and avoid content that is clearly AI slop, but I don’t think this will be effective long term.

AFAIR boycotting products has never been effective long term: Nestlé still markets powder milk for babies in poor countries, after 50 years of boycotts.

This does not mean boycotts are useless, but IMO a boycott is only effective if it leads to regulation, and that is what people should strive for.

Grief and all those thing

I think what I’ve seen in myself and others is a response that very closely resembles the five stages of grief pattern. When confronted with the idea that AI can somehow replace their skills, people have clearly gone through these things: denial that computers could ever do their work, anger at the peddlers of slop, then getting to the idea that yeah, sure, they can do some things but not everything I can (bargaining). I expect depression will follow and then perhaps acceptance.

Most reactions I’ve seen were anger. That’s where most people complaining about AI these days are, even if they’re not aware of it (I wasn’t, either).

Why wouldn’t they be angry? If you’re someone like me whose identity is strictly tied to what you do and you get told what you do is no longer unique or useful, of course you’re going to get angry. If you think insecure about your ability to keep a salary, you will be upset. Add to this that people like Sam Altman or Elon Musk are genuinely horrible people, why wouldn’t you be fuming?

But I think being angry is not useful to anyone. Luddites were right in their anger, but it did not stop the rise of automation.

But riffraff, haven’t you heard this quote?

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words. – Ursula K. Le Guin’s

I have, and I think this is a misrepresentation of the issue. Systems need to be changed, but the righteous anger needs to be directed properly.

I do not think it’s possible to stop the increasing usage of LLMs, because even if we burned all the data centers we’re at a stage where it’s becoming more and more simple to just get an open weight model and run it on your machine.

And in my memory, we were never able to stop something that everyone can do at home. People still distill illegal alcohol at home in countries where it’s forbidden. You can still download pirate movies. You can rip CDs on your machine.

Containers and dockworkers

I think one needs to look at what’s happening in the optics of an industrial revolution of some sort. There will be winners and losers. Our duty to humankind is to make sure there are not too many losers, and that they don’t lose too much. But we cannot deny the technological changes.

A few years back I read “The Box”, a wonderful book about the rise of shipping containers. Did you know that in the past there were whole towns of dockworkers? Some cities were basically wiped off the map economically once shipping became automated, because they failed to adapt, others rose to prominence. The people didn’t really go anywhere tho, they had to transition to different jobs, because what else could they do?

I am not sure the same will happen with workers whose job can be partially or totally replaced by LLMs.

Perhaps, as some say, this is more a case of raising productivity while not really losing workers. In computers, we saw this happen with the move from punch cards to hand coded assembly to ever higher level programming languages. At each rate, the productivity went up (allegedly), the level of abstraction rose, but people just adapted, and companies chose to do more, not to do the same with less.

I subscribe to this idea. Perhaps artists will get to work 1/10th of the time on commissions, and 9/10 they will just ask Photoshop to copy their style.

The most positive perspective is, in my opinion, that in a couple years we will all be able to run inference on our machines with open weight models. This will still be unfair to people who get copied more but I think it is an acceptable outcome: the commons have built a data set of images, words, codes, and it will get back to them. We need to fight for this outcome, and avoid more data getting siloed.

Where I stand

Nolan Lawson wrote a good piece about how programmers are mourning our craft. I got exposed through it through another post, by Les Orchard, in which he notices that programmers seem to mourn the craft coming from two different sides. I was literally going to write the same thing in this post when a colleague shared it, but he put it in a nicer way.

My idea, in brief, is that, some programmers were into coding for the typing, some of it where in it for the output.

I was, and still am, more interested in the typing than in the outcome, most of the timing. I enjoy working on things which are not world-shattering, provided I can code it nicely. That’s why I love the Advent of Code. Or why I used to read about weird programming languages (I miss Lambda The Ultimate!). Heck, once I printed and read a whole manual on SGML and I am not exactly sure why.

But some other people see programming as a tool to achieve something, or enable other humans to do it.

For those who mostly saw programming as a mean to an end, going one more level up in abstraction is good, you get more stuff done!

For me, it removes a part of the programming experience which I enjoyed, and I am left with more of the part I enjoy less.

I am afraid we will all have to deal with this. Continuing with the bad analogies, it looks like this might be a case of photography vs painting. Photography didn’t kill painting, but it did supplant it as the mean of getting someone’s image. Painting had to be reimagined as something other than realistic painting. But realistic painting still exists!

I’m not so sure there will be people doing hand crafted code as a hobby, and I’m pretty sure the chances of people paying premium for free range humanely developed code are close to zero. But I’ve been wrong before.

Personally, I am at the bargaining stage of grief. At this point in time, in the Year of Our Lord two thousand and twenty six, it appears machines still can’t do everything I do as a programmer. They for sure can’t do what a good designer can, so visual artists will be fine for a while longer.

A good agent can actually write decent code and do whole features at this point. A good human still needs to review it, and direct it and integrate it, but it makes no point to put your head in the sand and think it’s useless now, or that it will never work.

Be prepared

What I find interesting, is that different people have completely different experiences with coding via LLMs. Some seem to think they are barely more productive, some sound like they’re producing whole businesses every weekend, some feel they can’t get anything done faster.

I think, as it’s often been said, that typing code was never the hard part of the craft. Most of my job is talking to people, and I expect it will continue to be so. That’s not the case for everyone tho, Depending on how you worked before, your feeling of LLM usefulness will be different.

And if you do use some agent to code, you have to at least invest some time. For a couple years I’ve repeatedly tasked every LLM with the same coding task (write a simple weekly meal planner) and I think we’re at the point where they work well enough. I can ask to implement the thingy, and they produce a working prototype.

More importantly, they are able to do changes incrementally. Until a few months ago, coding agents would run wild and undo what they did so you would never “converge” to what you wanted. Now they seem to work okay.

So, in my opinion, whatever your craft is, you should invest some time now and then to see if agents can help. I don’t think (or can’t accept, yet) that AI will wipe out knowledge workers, but it’s not wise to stick your fingers in your ears and go LALALALALALA.

Parting words

Do not be too anxious about this. Do not be to angry about this. Things that worked before will continue to work: be ready to learn, take care of yourself, have people close to you and be close to people. Try to change what you can, and put an effort into understanding what that is. Save money for the bad times, stay healthy, be good.

We’ll get through this.

Of tinnitus and gratefulness

A few years ago, AS Roma destroyed Barcelona in a thrilling 3-0 in Champions League quarter finals. Around that time, I started hearing a whistling sound in my ear. The two things are unrelated, but that’s why I remember the year.

I went to see my doctor about it, the day Roma was going to play the return leg against Liverpool, she asked me if I had any sort of stress, and I blamed work, cause I didn’t feel like blaming football.

Turned out, I had very high blood pressure, and I needed to make some lifestyle changes and get some pills. I did, and my blood pressure is under control now.

But the whistle didn’t go away, and after many tests, doctors, hacks etc.. I had to accept the fact I have tinnitus (acufene), and I am going to live with it for the rest of my life.

It felt horrible at first. You can’t turn it off, ever. I no longer know how silence sounds. It’s like being unable to close your eyes.

But I am lucky, mine is not too strong, and I can barely notice it if I’m in a room with other people talking, or watching TV, or driving.

Today I was asked about, as someone else started suffering from it, and they’re going crazy. I feel genuinely sorry for them.

But also, this was a good reminder: my problem is not too bad. It sucks, but it could have been so much worse.

I’m very lucky.

A short walk on the aging path

Every morning I go for a walk, for health reasons and to have some time to listen to audiobooks or podcasts. Also, I’ll admit, to stay away from the mess of trying to get kids to school on time.

Over the years, I have become familiar with the people who go out to walk the dog, run, or walk at the same hour.

We’ve hardly exchanged words beyond “good morning” but I’ve become a bit attached to them anyway. A small catalogue includes: the bald man who runs at a fast pace and just doesn’t age; the blond woman who runs and shows some wrinkles but is still in great shape; the lady with the hat and sunglasses; the guy who walks his old dog but carries a dog-cart in case the aging animal fails to walk back; the three ladies who walk their dog together.

It seems odd to become attached to people you haven’t even talked to, but still, I haven’t seen the lady with the hat in a while, and she didn’t look great last I saw her. I hope she’s ok. The bald man had also disappeared for a while, but he’s back, and he still looks the same age as the first time I saw him a few years ago. I’m pretty sure running makes you immortal.

But today, I met the guy with the old dog, and I was taken by a sudden sadness, thinking of when the dog may die. I imagined a whole life for the man and his quadrupedal friend, of going through good and bad times, and the man still takes care to walk the dog, even tho it’s been years since the dog has ran after a tennis ball, and it can barely lift a leg to pee now. And then sometimes soon the dog will die, and the man will maybe take a walk alone, or maybe just sit in an armchair after breakfast, and kill time.

This month I turned 45, which, my friends make me notice, is interesting because 45*45=2025. They also made me notice I’m now closer to 50, then I am to 40. I’m not exactly sure when middle age starts or ends, but I think I’m firmly in it.

Possibly this means I’ll get a divorce and a Porsche. But to be honest, my wife is still far more attractive than I ever was, and I don’t like cars very much. I guess a mid-life crisis can entail a variety of things, and perhaps noticing you’re getting old is the first step.

Cause you see, Dear Reader, I just noticed today that almost everyone on my morning walk is old, for some value of old. There’s a couple folks in their 20s or 30s, but I think almost everyone is above 50 and 60.

“It’s so odd, everyone is old but me!” – I thought to myself, before noticing my mistake. I feel I’ve been old for a long time, even when I was younger. I also feel still childish, even as I grow older. Maybe people don’t really change with age.

I’m at a point in life where I’ve reached most of what I looked forward to. I’ve got a family, a job, a home. I never cared much for career or fame, so I don’t feel a need to struggle to become CEO of the World™.

I got bored a lot as a kid, so I learned to be entertained with little, I feel I could spend the next few years just playing silly games, watching TV and reading. I look forward to seeing the kids age, and I hope to see some more babies among family and friends. Some more traveling too.

Perhaps this is what a mid-life crisis looks like. If that’s the case, I think I’m fine with it.

Or perhaps, it’s just the end of summer, and the sight of an old dog.

On Dad’s neck

Some time ago, I realized my daughter had become too heavy to carry on my shoulders. I could still do it, but it’s no longer something I’d do trivially. She doesn’t ask for it anymore either, probably sensing it wouldn’t be a good idea.

She still holds my hand, tho, and I try to hold hers when I can, until she grows old enough to think parents suck or something.

Some time later, I was on a walk with my son, who’s two years younger, and I thought: I should carry him on my shoulders now, it might be the last time. So I told him to jump on, and he was surprised cause he’s a big boy now, but I told him it was for me.

And so I remember, somewhat, the last time I carried my son on my shoulders§.

I planned to write about this at some point, but then I never did. But recently, I was watching The Grand Tour, and Jeremy Clarkson mentioned how, if you think about it, there’s always a last time you do something, and usually you go through it with no awareness. It seemed an incredibly profound thought delivered by a random dude in a car comedy show.

Perhaps you know the last day of school, your last university exam, your last night unmarried. You don’t remember the last time you played hide and seek, or the last time you kissed your first love.§

It’s easy to remember when something happens the first time, you know it’s the first! But it’s hard to know when something will stop happening. You have to pay attention to what’s happening and tell yourself: this may be the last time I experience this, dear brain stop being in cruise mode and actually focus.

When I had my first blog§ I remember writing about coincidences, and someone (Nicola, perhaps) telling me: at your age you still believe in coincidences? Now that I’m older I’ve learned it’s much better to believe in the manifest narrative sense of the universe than in chance (or believe your mind primed to notice coincidences).

So a few days after Clarkson’s epiphany, I discovered the concept of ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会). Supposedly§ this means “one life, one meeting” and it points to the fact that every meeting you have is unique and irrepeatable§, and you should cherish it.

I like the idea, and it rhymes with a lot of old-wisdom-sounding modern advice about “being in the moment“. I think it’s probably good advice, but it’s really hard, and probably impractical.

Do I really care about meeting the bus driver for the last time? Should I really treat my team’s daily stand up meeting as if it was the last? How about lunch with my family? And what of dinner out with my wife?

I don’t have an answer, nor multiple answers. But I think it makes sense to try and think: if this was the last time this happened, would I do something differently?

And the other question is: would it matter? I remember when my father died, in a hospital bed, sedated, and I don’t remember the last thing I said to him, nor the last thing he said to me. I remember my mother telling me she hated those situations in movies where someone gives an “I love you” to someone on their last breath, or viceversa. If you haven’t bothered to tell them before, what’s the point of doing it now?

Maybe that’s the point of “as if it’s the last time”: think of what you should have done before, and haven’t done yet. It didn’t matter to my son that I took him on my shoulders a last time, and it didn’t matter much to me either.

But it’s good to remind me of all the other times I took him, my daughter, my brother, friends, and girlfriend on my shoulders. Maybe one day my grandkids, if I’m lucky. When that happens, I’ll update my memories once more, and think I did well to pick them up when I did, and to tell them I love them, and not wait until the last moment.

PS

the title of this post is “on dad’s neck” rather than “on dad’s shoulders“, because of a little poem my kid learned in kindergarden, and I’ll offer a modest adaptation here. The original always uses “on” where I wrote “from” but I think this scans better. Traduttore traditore.

On Dad’s Neck (Shoulders)

(badly translated from “Apu Nyakában” by Gáti István)

From Dad’s neck
You can see the neighbourhood.
No need for binoculars
Nor miracle glasses.
A thousand and one adventures
Promises the distance.
The newspaper vendor is a dwarf
From Dad’s neck.

On Dad’s neck
there’s a pirate tattoo.
A comfortable seat,
Better than the subway.
A hundred meters high
My legs float.
I can be a pilot
On Dad’s neck.

If Dad puts me down
Quite unusual.
The sidewalk becomes huge
Here I stand below myself.
A big dog runs.
I’m no coward.
But still…
Put me on your neck!

Me and my fern

The apartment in which I grew up had a long balcony, and lots of plants on it.

When I was little, there was a big Cycas, and I hated it, its leaves would sting me or scratch me all the time. I don’t know why I was near the plant, maybe some toy had fallen behind it.

I remember my dad watering the plants in summer nights, my grandma (his mother in law) always said you should water plants when the dirt is cold, either morning or night.

I do not know if this is true, but I believe it. I have noticed there are many things I was told once as a kid and I have assumed to be true, and I think it’s a too late to challenge them now. So I water my garden when it’s cold.

We kept geraniums (or rather, pelagorniums? English is odd), basil, rosemary, ficus plants, and a host of succulents. Cyclamens were often present, as I always bought one for my mom, grandmas, and a specific grand aunt for Christmas.

After my father died, my mom cared less about our balcony plants, so there were more succulents. Also she got obsessed with pigeons shitting on the balcony, so an increase of spiky plants was a pro.

And we had ferns. In the beginning it was a single fern, I believe, in a big terracotta vase. Then at some point they became two, I seem to have a vague memory of my father splitting the plant into two big terracotta vases.

My mom died about two years ago. She got cancer, and was gone in a few months after finding it out. I count myself lucky that I managed to spend some time with her in those months, and to be with her in her last days. And I was happy she got to see her grandkids once more in that summer, even if she had gotten thin, and weak, and could not play with them anymore, nor take them to the beach.

Me and my brother had both moved out years ago, and I remember my brother first bringing up the balcony issue in the last days, or perhaps she was already dead: now the plants on the balcony would dry up and die.

I asked my aunts to try and water them from time to time, and I believe they did. As did I, when I visited the place, and my brother, when he did. At some point, one of the ferns died.

I noticed this spring that the other fern seemed quite dried up too, so I resolved to do something about it. I’d split the plant, and take some with me. Maybe my plant would survive. I see it now, in the subconscious choice of words.

A fern is a big ball of somewhat independent stalks, roots, bulbs. I researched a bit and formulated a plan: I would detach the whole plant from the vase, turn it over and pull it out, split the stalks in a few smaller vases, and replant them. Seemed easy.

But the fern had been in this vase for years, decades, perhaps since the dawn of time . The vase is so old the clay on the top has partially eroded. I used a long bread knife to try and detach the fern from the vase, I hurt my hands on a million old broken stalks. At some point I realized the vase had two big intersecting cracks on one side, and probably the fern’s roots are the thing keeping it together.

So I went with plan B: I would cut out chunks of the plant by cutting diagonally into the dirt, and pull them out using the stalks themselves. I managed to do it, and I ended up with half a fern in his original vase, with some new soil, two smaller ferns in smaller vases, and a smaller fern in a big vase. I put some bulbs in some vases too, maybe they’ll sprout.

And I took one of the ferns with me, thousands of kilometres by car, and I put it in our garden. I’ll move it inside later, maybe. My hope is that it will survive, it’s a rustic, robust plant which doesn’t require much. My mother was like that too, I realize, subconscious again.

My mom didn’t go for jewels, nor expensive clothes (but she liked quality clothes). She used to say to us, when we were little, that me and my brother were her jewels. She had a wonderful sapphire ring, and it was stolen in a house robbery years ago, and her regret was she almost never wore it.

Mom was serious, and severe, when we were little. And she always seemed angry with us. She seemed softer with the grandkids, and I don’t know if it’s because she was softer, or because she didn’t see them enough, or because I’m not a child anymore, and I don’t consider “you already had ice cream” a cruel statement.

I felt very guilty, being away from home in the last years, after my father died and my brother moved away. I am happy I told her this, and she told me I should not be. I still feel guilty, but less.

My mother always made us feel loved, unconditionally. I remember when I was about ten, and she somehow got in her mind I could be gay, and told me, if that was the case it’d be ok, she’d love me anyway. I guess this should be the default these days, but I’m not sure this was the case in Italy 40 years ago.

Since I had kids, we built a routine of calling grandma a couple times a week. During COVID, they didn’t go to school, and she’d read them stories via skype. The modern world is a strange place.

I used to call my mom often when cooking. How do you prepare this? Do I fry the garlic? How do I tell if something is ready? On one hand, to make her feel useful, and thought of. On the other hand, mom was a fantastic cook.

That’s when I miss her more. At some point, you realize you can’t ask your mom anything, anymore. Whatever you failed to learn, you’re not going to learn anymore, your chance is gone. Whatever you didn’t say, you can’t say. I am lucky, very lucky to have told my mother that I loved her, and she told me I didn’t have to say it, she knew it, and what’s the point of telling someone you love them when they’re dying, if you didn’t show them love before?

So, I miss my mom, a lot, and so does my wife, and my kids. But I have a fern now. I will try to keep it alive as long as possible. I’m not sure I’ll manage, but I have nothing else to do, and perhaps it will fill that huge, gaping void in my life, a bit. Or perhaps it won’t, and when the plant dies too, it’ll be a chance to cry, like writing this piece.