[abirch]

"The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed."

AI has made my life so much easier. If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. If I need to create the first pass of test scripts, I ask my AI. It's reduced technical debt and let me focus on the things I care about.

[mold_aid]

>If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they.

Did you just tell a "how many X does it take to change a lightbulb" joke about yourself?

[soulchild37]

it takes 10 prompts, 5 fuse jumps, and hiring one electrician to change a lightbulb

[ihumanable]

For the last 15 years you could take a picture of a lightbulb and pop it in google search and it would tell you what kind it was.

I know because I bought a house in 2013 where the builder delighted in using a dozen weird fixtures and the cheapest bulbs they could find and I spent a lot of 2015 doing just that.

There are lots of things that LLMs are genuinely good at, searching by image isn't something we need LLMs for. I asked Google's LLM when google image search launched and it reported

> Google officially launched its "Search by Image" feature—allowing users to upload a picture or image URL to find related content—in 2011

[kakacik]

There are some of us who still prefer actually learning stuff, even about light bulbs.

AI is mental comfort zone so deep it will be extremely hard to ever get out of it, basically back to beginning of rat race. Maybe not applicable to you in your blissful ignorance, but sure as hell I won't put literally all my eggs into one tiny foreign-owned basket.

[dingaling]

> It's reduced technical debt

I think that's a misunderstanding of the phrase.

AI may have reduced your immediate technical burden.

However AI, if not carefully used, increases technical debt because it builds up a vast heap of code and business logic that nobody understands. The agent that created it forgets about it once it's out of its context window, the programmer that scripted it just knows it passed some tests.

In two, five, ten years from now trying to maintain that vibe-coded slop will be a battle between various agents making conflicting changes and some poor human trying to get it into a shippable state.

[abirch]

You are completely right that AI can be misused/abused. If done right it can fix things like code bases that were created by multiple people and groups each with their own conventions. Before I had to know which group did what to know the variables. Claude fixed that.

There used to be pushback to have 100% test coverage. If you don't have that, then you can't merge. AI can write the tests but a programmer must own them.

[kjkjadksj]

Or you take the old bulb to the store and buy the same kind. Funny how everytime someone says the AI made their life easier, it really didn’t seem like it when you paint out what the “old way” actually looked like.

You should ask how ai people make their slides. It is a crazy exercise in micromanaging what used to be a couple minute task. And the people engaging in that think they are saving time somehow or ending up with a better thing than they could make themselves.

[wat10000]

I've been making some good use of this stuff, but identifying light bulbs, really? That wasn't exactly difficult in the Before Times.

[brendoelfrendo]

As the old joke goes, "How many output tokens does it take to change a lightbulb?"

[abirch]

The G9 was completely new to me. Sure I could try to figure it, but I'd rather be focusing on the things I care about. This is the thing that I'd historically procrastinate.

To quote Adam Grant, "Procrastination is an emotional management problem not a time management problem"

[wat10000]

Search "light bulb base types," you'll get a page showing what they all look like, G9 among them. I get that it's useful (and it's amazing it can do this), but it hardly seems enough to justify calling it "so much easier."

[abirch]

Sorry, this was one small example. Yes, the lightbulb by itself isn't hard, but when you have a full-time job, long commute, and are a parent these little friction points add up. Yes I can drive 30-minutes each way to take this to a hardware store to have someone knowledgeable help me or I can order it online.

There are so many examples of this. Removing small friction points that significantly make me happier and my life better. It means I have time to go grab a beer with friends instead of driving. The lightbulb was a recent example so it was fresh in my mind.

[butlike]

Nitpick, but it's not <your> AI. Would be nice if that were true, but it's not

[mekoka]

I imagine how you intended your comment to come across and I get it to some level. But I can't help feeling that there's something a bit dystopian in a world where all friction is removed just to more quickly get to the juicy bits.

[_factor]

You’re still free to walk to your destination instead of driving, it would just be a lot of time friction.

Funny how reducing the friction with technology eventually increased the friction of the older transportation methods.

[mekoka]

Your analogy is apt in more ways than one. It comes down to how often the point of a journey is to get to the destination. Most old wisdoms teach that the latter is more often just a MacGuffin to embark on the former. If they're right, AI offers tremendous potential for new adventures, but also as a catalyst for completely missing the plot. Yes, we're "free" to choose, but I'm skeptical that a culture conditioning us to eschew friction necessarily equips us to distinguish when the grind and frustration might be "good" for us.

I once made a travel friend who just didn't get the point of me taking eight hours to slow travel by train or by bus across a country that we were both visiting, when she could just hop on a plane and get to the next city in an hour. Earlier in my youth, transportation choices were economically motivated, but what I got from it would influence all future visits to other countries. When chilling with other travelers, exchanging tips and stories, it was as if my friend was visiting a completely different place. She left the country shortly after, confiding to me in the end that she really didn't see what the big deal was with it and that she would probably never be back.

I understand that some people may not resonate with this outlook -- and maybe it's just me getting older -- but I've grown to see that there's indeed such a thing as going through life in a hurry. I do think that the jury's still out as to the overall impact of AI on what I would label "useful friction".

[oulipo2]

"AI has had a limited improvement over my life, so I'm happy fucking over the rest of the world by polluting water, using huge amounts of energy, and reinforcing class hierarchies, just so that I can change a lightbulb a bit easier" is peak tech-bro

[pesus]

I honestly can't tell if this is satire or not. If so, great job. If not - destroying the world so you can look up a lightbulb is not worth it, and you could have done that before anyway.