His wife is going to leave him, and he will have no idea why.
post
Parenting hits different when you work in AI
Yeah, hits like mental abuse.
I knew people were gonna be obsessed with AI, but I genuinely never thought people would surrender all executive function and thought to what is, ultimately, a very elaborate and planet destroying if=then machine.
the amount of people I have seen becoming totally dependent on it is ridiculous. There are people who cant even have human interaction anymore without running it through their AI model to process the message, and produce a reply.
and its 100% invading the real world too, I dont know the whole details cause you try to turn your ears off at the pharmacy to not hear other peoples private information.. but there was a woman getting very heated with one of the pharmacy people and I only took notice when she slammed her phone on the counter, aggressively pointed at it, and said very loudly "I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU SAY, LOOK, RIGHT HERE, MY AI SAYS YOU'RE WRONG" in a that kareny way that says her and her AI was 100% wrong.
Damn I try to keep my mouth shut but if someone screamed that near me I'd be interjecting. Like goddamnit the AI does not know anything.
It's a machine modeling human speech. It's all a hallucination and sometimes that hallucination is straight up lies and sometimes, hopefully most of the time, it aligns with actual reality.
I fucking loathe that people won't take 15 minutes to just read a basic primer on what an LLM is. It's a fancy autocorrect, and yeah it's way more complex than that but at the end of a day it's made to model realistic human language output - and that's it. It doesn't have any actual knowledge, it doesn't have any way to know if what it says is true or not, and it certainly doesn't know if what it says is insane.
I think I fall a bit between the people who use it for everything and your opinion of it.
I get that it's basically just a prediction engine but thinking of it like that is unhelpful in my opinion. I've seen AI rewrite entire code bases overnight that would have taken a team of humans over a year. It's obviously useful technology it's just people have this tendency to overuse it.
It's kind of like how in the early 2000s they were putting Bluetooth in everything. Eventually we'll work out what it's useful for and only use it to that we just have to wait for the frenzy to die down.
I've seen AI rewrite entire code bases overnight that would have taken a team of humans over a year.
And was the code better, cleaner and more readable? Moreover did it actually still do what it was supposed to and not introduce further unknowns?
I get that it's basically just a prediction engine but thinking of it like that is unhelpful in my opinion.
Unhelpful in the sense that it is what it actually is or unhelpful in the sense that it makes you question the fake narrative we're getting shoveled to us by tech bros and traditional mass media?
Like that's just what it is. All I want is folks to be honest about the limitations of this tech and what is underpinning it. It's still very impressive but at the end of the day there will always be an inherent problem with LLM in that they are non deterministic - you can give the same AI the exact same prompt 10 times and you'll get 10 different replies.
There is no way to get around that. You can't have a perfectly predictable output and even 1% of the time error is not good enough for widespread adoption when a mistake could mean someone dies or is horribly injured or loses a ton of money etc etc
And was the code better, cleaner and more readable?
I'm going to interject here. I've got family who does software development professionally, and has leaned heavily into AI to assist with coding, and the answer is 'yes', but there are some caveats. If you just tell an AI what to do and let it run hog-wild, you end up with shit. When you have an experienced programmer review and have the AI make targeted changes, it is extremely effective. Some of his projects are seeing 1000% improvements on resource usage and/or compute time.
Here is the rub though. You're not going to end up with experienced programmer to manage programming AI agents if they never get any actual experience programming because they've just been having an AI do all the coding for them.
Right I appreciate your insight. I'm not heavy in coding myself, I brush up against code and use it for some automation and assistance but I've also seen it write literal nonsense for code.
That rub is so real. I asked the thing to write some code for me for a Sailpoint workflow and I wasn't familiar with the syntax so figured it'd be a good place to use AI. That thing hallucinated extremely convincing code except it just wholesale made up how it worked and of course it looks fine to my eyes but then go to run it and error -> work to fix that error and then -> error, etc etc.
After chasing my tail for an hour or two I finally stopped and went to pull up some official documentation and that's when I figured out the AI was just hallucinating like a motherfucker. So I went back and did it the "old fashioned" way, but at least the AI did give me an idea of what I had to do.
Anyways, I could see someone who isn't me just running around in circles for days because they believe the LLMs we call AI are giving them actual answers.
I blame some of it on how AI got mixed into web search. Traditionally, the resource from the web would at least be written by a human and usually relevant. Generally semi trustworthy and not made up. Now people see search results with AI summary/answer at the top and that is not vetted, could be a straight up hallucination*, or even just a total misinterpretation of your search phrase so totally irrelevant.
*I wish this term was different because it has an implication that the AI can and cannot hallucinate when the truth is the AI is always hallucinating. Put another way, to the LLM there is no such concept as truth. It annoys me that people seem to believe that the AI "knows" stuff. It does not. Stop anthropomorphizing the fancy robot.
It's simply better than a human could have produced in the same time. If it works who cares how clean it is like this is what I don't get about programmers they're so obsessed with cleanness and it doesn't matter it's so unimportant to the end goal yeah I get that maintenance of the program would be a pain but the AI is going to do that so who cares.
I do sort of feel that this community is so obsessed with hating AI that they don't give it the benefit of the doubt when it actually achieve things.
The problem with AI is not the product itself it's the way that people use it like let's not lose sight to that, that's not give all the tech Bros ammunition by trying to claim that everything AI does is terrible and bad and awful simply because it was the AI that did it.
who cares how clean it is like this is what I don't get about programmers they're so obsessed with cleanness and it doesn't matter
It matters to the compiler so the code actually will run and not break. It matters to whoever has to fix or update it when things change. It matters to the hardware it runs on and how much memory that hardware has.
It very much matters.
Yeah I get that but if we're going all in on AI then humans won't be involved in the process of recompaneling it.
Like I wouldn't want infrastructure criticals software to be like that but if it's just random stuff that needs to run for me personally then I don't really care.
How code is written directly impacts how well it runs and if it can even do what you want. Like if it's written shitty it might work for 95% of the time and things you need it to but 5% you hit some random edge case and it explodes because it wasn't properly tested and developed.
I don't understand what people use it for. At work I use it because it's much easier to ask an AI than try and deal with our crap internal documentation. People who use AI in their personal lives are just weird to me.
The only technology I really use is a digital calendar, which is an objectively superior product to the paper-based calendar simply because it gets updated by the whole family and stays in sync. I don't have smart light switches, or cameras in every room, if a hard drive on my computer breaks then I lose all my data there's nothing on there that I really care about, I might be ultra weird because I even get my photos printed.
Also using a model for this is totally missing the bonding experience.
I have a few friends who use OpenAI and Gemini to do this (generate new stories every night) and I do not understand why you would do so. There are a bazillion kids books out there. Just get ten of those and your kid will be happy for ten months!
Ten? They'll fixate on one that'll you'll need to read so often that you don't need the actual book anymore
I can imagine some reasons they would opt for this. First, the AI is always there so they don't have to do put in any effort at all in acquiring the story. Second they could make the stories tailored to what they want to teach their kid - regular kids books usually have decent morals and lessons for helping the kid become a better person and a lot of AI aficionados don't want that.
Why do you need an AI to do that? My grandpa used to let us just make up what we wanted to hear a story about and tell a story about that. I do the same. Its not hard. It doesnt have to be the most minted story in history.
Most people do not have an imagination.
If you're in the US just sign up for Dolly Parton's Imagination Library and you'll get a free kids book for your each of your kids every month.
That woman could've been a billionaire several times over but consistently chose to reinvest her wealth into community rather than hoarding it all to herself like a dragon. What a shame she's gone.
Not to mention the creation of a shared cultural heritage.
Most Danish kids have heard a few, or all, of HC Andersen's biggest works. It gives them something to talk about when they're socialising with other kids
If your friends kid, becomes the only kid in their class which haven't heard the stories of their local cultural heritage. That's a potential for creating a social rift in school, why have you not heard about the ugly duckling?
Childrens books are expensive. A 20 pages one cost the same amount like a 700 pages roman.
We use the library but cant go there every week.
Thinking is hard after full workday + 6h intense childcare. Youll see what i mean when you have kids and do it without screentime. Zero.
You could try thrifting :3
Also, you've assumed that:
A, this person wants to have kids, and
B, that this person does not have kids.
If you’re in the U.K., The Works will sell you 10 children’s books for £10, which is less than one hour of work at minimum wage for an adult.
I certainly wouldn't buy all our kids books brand new.
I do buy a couple of the hard cover classics.
I buy a heap from thrift stores. This is probably the majority.
We go to the library when we can.
I also pirate and print some.
Do you not have access to books from when you were a kid? That's what mom did until she could buy new books.
Yeah, you'll be handed a ton of books from relatives and friends if you ask openly
Sorry, I guess the context is that none of those things we kept from when I was a child.
With kids paraphernalia there's the cheap stuff that gets worn out quickly and discarded, and the expensive stuff that might last more than a generation. We had the items in the former category.
Taking a hard stance against screen time while recruiting AI to do your parenting. Ok
Libraries near me don't require you to actually go to the building to get a book. You can borrow an e-book using an app. It's not the greatest way (especially if your kid likes picture books or is that age where a lot of children's books are just picture books). But it doesn't require you to go to the library every day or even every week.
There's also no law saying you have to read to your child every night. But offloading parenting onto AI just because you're tired and want to limit their screen time isn't a good look. But I've gotten books, toys, movies, games, TV shows from other parents who's kids have aged out of those items a fair few times in my life. I don't think it counts as limiting screen time to have the bot read your kid a story.
Yes I have a kid. We are both special needs which means that a lot of parenting is challenging on its face.
Every child is hell in their own special way but not every day is going to be 6h 'intensive' childcare. Unless you've got an intellectually challenged child, you're going to have some days where it's easier and some where it's harder.
And, if they make it hard enough, they go to bed without a story. They cry and scream and they learn, then maybe tomorrow they'll just be hard instead of too hard.
Expensive new maybe, but...
Secondhand shops. Both online and offline.
Charity/ thrift shops.
Places like Vinted and eBay.
Ask relatives and friends for books instead of yet another toy.
Interesting you used roman for novel. Are you Ukrainian or Russian? Edit: I see this is the same in a lot of languages. Could be German.
Swedes call longer stories on prose "Romaner", and we call short stories, novellas, novelletes "Noveller".
Me: "Why dont you come visit and talk to me in the nursing home?"
My kids: "just talk to grok"
I'm sure there is a good few older people who would find a lot of comfort in Groks world view.
I'm so glad AI is here to relieve me of the physically and mentally overwhelming task of checks notes spending time with my child.
That poor kid, Imagine your own father thinks so little of you that he would rather spend 10X the time to train a clanker just so he doesn't have to spend time with you.
I'm guessing some day he will be one of those oblivious assholes on facebook whining because his kids cut off contact.
I thought this was satire, but it appears to be real.



This is ragebait. Right? People can't possibly be that shitty...
I watched a presentation from a big tech company in which the presenter talked how, while his wife was giving birth, he saw that as an opportunity and asked AI to build a "nursery design" site because he could use his daughter as a model. People were praising him for being forward thinking about providing to his family, I just couldn't imagine being this greedy.
I saw people from the same company eagerly discussing using AI to recreate dead relatives. It's disgusting how much these people are hypnotized by AI
I said this the other day, it's a story. Regardless of whether or not it's ragebait it has a kernel of truth existing inside a story. Could this have happened, sure. Is it an objective truth? Most definitely not.
There was a clip from legal eagle that the victims sister used his pictures to create an ai video of him to present at trial. I don't know if its shitty... but its fucking weird man
Brought to you by the creators of, "just give them an ipad" and "call the cops there's a kid outside playing"
Parenting hits really different when you’re an idiot and a sociopath.
Alvin there doesn’t want to bother talking to his child.
Siri, play Cats in the Cradle
top 97 comments