But I don't think AI art can possibly take away from the beauty and enjoyment that can be found in drawing and making art. You mention how a musician loves playing their instrument. I can download a music edition software and summon a virtual orchestra out of my speakers in seconds. But does this take anything from the musician? Is their feeling any less true, their music any less meaningful to themselves and to those who listen? If I bring my laptop to a party and play Vivaldi's seasons on it, will that elicit the same reaction as if I play it in the living room's piano?

If language models eventually get good enough at programming that I'm out of a job, I won't derive any less enjoyment out of programming. I'll be a lot poorer, sure, but I will still enjoy the process of coming up with a way to express constraints in code, even if a machine can do it for me in the blink of an eye. Just like I find it relaxing to do the dishes myself when I'm anxious, even if I have a perfectly good dishwasher. Just like how people who enjoy solving Sudokus don't find it less fun just because automatic Sudoku solvers exist. The journey is the destination.

And for the record, I don't think human art will disappear because of AI art, or human programming will disappear because of AI programming. If there's one thing that's demonstrably true through the history of humanity, is that humans have a strong human-centric bias. The sooner we commodify something and remove the human element from it, the sooner we bring that human element back, now elevated to the status of luxury and catered to a niche.

Let me explain what I mean: I can buy black garlic in a plastic container for cheap, but I can also go to the weekend farmer market and pay three times as much for black garlic from a lady who lives up the mountains and can tell me the shape of the jar she fermented it in. IKEA makes perfectly good furniture that you can use to play board games for less than a hundred, but board game enthusiasts pay hundreds or thousands for custom furniture with nooks and bezels to stop the tokens from sliding out. Glass blowing as a form of art continues to exist, regardless of the availability of perfectly fine, industrially-made glass appliances. It's just in artisanal fairs in Venice, not in your living room.

And sure, you won't be able to make a living anymore out of cranking out uninspired corporate Memphis for bay-area startups, or drawing cartoon furries for Twitter randos on commission. And, in a way... thank fuck for that, right? The combinatorial space of drawing people with smooth curves in fantasy skin colors using technological appliances in collaborative settings can be exhausted by an AI, and you can actually focus on making art that breaks the mold, art that hasn't been made before, art that is meaningful to you. You can imbue art with meaning and use art to communicate with other humans, while the "art" that ticks out boxes and replaces placeholders in landing pages can be cranked out by AI.

Yes, it will be harder to make a living out of that, but I'm sure it won't be impossible. Computers have been able to generate Mondrian paintings since the 80s, and that hasn't made Mondrian paintings any less valuable. An AI may be able to produce the exact same drawing that you do, but it can't imbue human meaning in it.

Good luck finding the time to enjoy your hobbies when being poorer.

You'll have much less time an energy for passions at that stage. You'll probably be flipping burgers at burger king, until that's automated too.

I'm not saying you won't be able to enjoy programming when poorer, but life is sure a lot tougher when you need to think about money constantly. When having a health problem means maybe not having the money for treatment etc.

On the other hand, if all programming was truly able to be created instantly by an AI, the productivity of our entire species would be increased to such a great degree, that being poor would be of little concern, because everything that you would want to buy would be instantly available for a fraction of the price it is today.

Also I kind of agree that in the short term this will suck for artists and illustrators but on the other hand, we recently went on a day trip with some friends and paid an artist to sketch us while we sit together and drink coffee, it was a great experience and I could’ve just used the “sketch” filter on my phone but there would be no “experience” or individuality. No memory that made it special.

What was interesting was, she had a huge queue of people paying about $100 an hour :) she was open for 9 hours.

Drawing Corporate Memphis bullshit for startups is a great way to transfer a big chunk of VC money from some Bay Area jerkoffs to an artist living somewhere much cheaper, where it can pay multiple months of their rent for not much work, and maybe even let them have some luxuries and/or financial cushions. Thank fuck that all that money can extend the startup's runway a tiny bit further now instead! Thank fuck those artists won't have to wrestle with the feelings that comes from getting paid better for a few hours of corporate work than for anything they've poured their passion into!

If you're regularly taking on client work, then you have places to play and experiment while still getting what you need to pay your bills, and even if you're just turning the crank to make another piece that fits in with everything else you've made, you're getting a tiny bit better at making art with every drawing you do, and you can bring that back to the time you spend on your crazy personal work. If you take some other job to make ends meet, your rate of progress slows way the hell down. I've seen it happen. Friends who used to draw a lot better than I did twenty years ago now just draw as a hobby, and draw just like they did back then; me and my friends who made it my job have spent the last twenty years drawing, and it shows in our work. Thank fuck that's endangered! Thank fuck we, too, might have a bunch of recurring gigs collapse out from under us! Thank fuck those of us who embrace becoming an AI wrangler for a corporation will be asked to do tons more stuff for the same pay, or less!

How do you propose the artists who are now blissfully freed from the work that pays their bills should pay the rent on their homes and studios, and to pay for their tools and materials, while still spending all their time making art that "breaks the mold, hasn't been made before, and is meaningful to the artist"? How do you propose they should find the time to hone the skills needed to do this? Because doing that is a lot of work.

Serious question: are you sure that it can be? What you just described as the value proposition of your work is not the delivery of some pretty pixels. You’re selling a service, an experience, a human connection. You’re selling your artistic judgment and your ability to translate back and forth between client’s imperfectly expressed wishes and the visual design space. You’re selling work that is valuable to the buyer _because_ it was made by you.

I completely understand the fear that is gripping a lot of artists. But I’m as of yet unpersuaded by the predictions of doom and gloom. Art is human connection. Once the hype has worn off and we all get inured to generative art, I think we’ll find that people still value and pay for the real thing.

A final thought: algorithms can’t lay graphite on paper or put brushstrokes on canvas. You may consider offering your clients tangible artifacts that only a human can make.

They should connect with the people that aren’t artists and have a similar preference for non-AI art.

Or, they should learn the new tooling of the field, and use it as part of their mix of tooling.

The vast majority of would-be artists have never been able to afford to do it full-time and have needed “real” jobs; it would be astonishing for the narrow fortunate elite that have to think that they are somehow the one group of people in all of human history entitled to have that privilege without being concerned to adapting to change, even though that’s never even been the case in that same elite, which has had to deal with change (whether driven by technology or changing aesthetic preference for media, techniques, subjects, etc.) rather continuously, historically.

Artists are the ones now experiencing what the Luddites did. Smashing the looms didn't stop more looms from being built. Also, now the average person can afford fabric because of the technology.

Simply put as we move into a world where most needs can be provided by technology keeping up the 'winner take all' method of capitalism so many subscribe to isn't going to work.

Capital formation is always and everywhere painful for labor (see: medieval enclosure, the American frontier/genocide, the Great Leap Forward, the triangle trade, and many others). This is obviously really really bad but so far we haven't devised a workable, lasting way to systemically stop the ownership class from doing it to us.

How will we support ourselves until the extremely unlikely event that becomes a reality?

What are you doing to support artists through this shitty transition? Hint: Calling us "luddites" and vaguely waffling about the hoped-for death of capitalism is pretty much the opposite of supporting us.

All I’m saying that it is already a problem that should be better solved, so all the talented artists that as of now can’t sustain themselves from their work can also feed their families.

Yes, but the moment you publish one piece the AIs will be able to crank variations on it at the push of button. So artists might think twice about publishing.

The interesting question here is, what happens when the people who are working on something for free move on, or when their motivation is no longer enough to ensure the quality of the resulting product? What would the millions of people who rely on that thing do then?

Maybe they'll just move on to an alternative, or just do without this particular product. That's fine, at least at an individual level. But collectively, the cost of millions of people moving to an alternative, or figuring out how to go on without it, is surely much higher than the cost of maintaining the original product.

So there's a tragedy of the commons in the making here, right? Millions of people collectively benefit from the existence and maintenance of this project, and would be harmed to some extent by its absence, and yet, because it's "free", no one is willing to put in the time, effort or money needed to ensure its continued existence.

You can plainly see that none of this is about whether it deserves to be paid. Regardless, "you deserve to be paid if people pay you" is as absurd a sentence as "you deserve to be alive if people don't kill you". That's not what "deserve" means, that's just stating what things are.

Given the excellent alternatives, there may actually be a long-term benefit to switching off Babel, since the end result will be cleaner and faster transpilation tools that don't support increasingly antiquated browsers. This sucks for anyone who needs to support very old browsers, but if you really need Babel presumably you'll be willing to pay for it.

Last year I was working with a client that still (yes, still) had to support IE11 (this was in healthcare) and was able to do so while writing Vue (v2) and bundling with Webpack all thanks to Babel and a handful of polyfills. We basically got to write the modern JS we’re used to and still support IE11 without having to think about it too much.

Hopefully this becomes less necessary (that client’s IE11 requirement will likely end this year when one of their partners finishes converting their ActiveX app to Electron), but right now it still is, and Babel actually does do what people say it does, and very well.

The tragedy of the commons happens long before that.

Developers cannot an build and publish a software product like babel for-profit, because someone else would give out a V1 version for free. I suspect that there are many languages, compilers, IDEs, libraries, and build tools that no longer get written because the authors can't make a living from doing it.

There is probably a need to refresh it periodically to account for what the MMAcevedo fictional story [1] calls "context drift" -- the relevant search terms to infer from the query are themselves contextual. Say, if I ask Bing today "is Trump running for president", the right search term today could be "donald trump 2024 election", but ten years from now it might be "eric trump 2036 election".

[1]: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Obviously it's because they themselves don't know what it means, so it just gets filtered by their brain as nonsense tech words. But is it really that hard for them to reach out to a tech person and ask them "hey, what does it mean that they use an SS7 vulnerability to hack into Telegram accounts?", so that they can explain "Oh, that means they're impersonating your phone number, so that when Telegram sends you an SMS to verify that it's you, they receive that SMS on your behalf and can log in to your Telegram account"?

It baffles me, because it would take so little effort for them to provide this additional context into how the actual hacking is done, in a way that is understandable and interesting for the average non-tech person, and yet... they just don't bother to?

Somehow this seems to only be acceptable for tech stuff. If when they found out that this guy was involved in the Nigerian elections, the reporter shrugged and said "Huh, Nigeria. I wonder what a Nigeria is. Anyway, not worth Googling it or checking whether it has any relevance to the story whatsoever" then everyone would agree he's doing a disservice to the story and to the public. Yet somehow this is routinely done with technical terms, the public is worse off because basic things are hidden to them behind inscrutable acronyms by lazy reporters, and no one bats an eye.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/19/ss7-hack-...

When we talk about some of the tangible things that we might actually want this "serendipity" for, these are the ones that I constantly see pop up:

- Spontaneously detecting and addressing small issues with the product

- Spontaneously coming up with and implementing ideas for the product

- Spontaneously coming up with and implementing workflow improvements

These are all things that should be addressed as part of day-to-day work. The reason they're not addressed is often overzealous prioritization of shiny things to the detriment of everything else. Or, in other words, bad management.

That's all this "serendipity" is actually for: a release valve for the pressure imposed by bad management, which helps mask the effects of bad management.

All you actually need to do, in order to reap the benefits of "serendipity" without locking hundreds of people in the same room together, is incentivize the necessary interactions, provide people with the necessary time to act on their urges, and get out of the way.

Here's some free ideas that I've seen work in real life:

- Have a Slack room for people to share user feedback, and explicitly encourage negative user feedback (maybe a different room for positive and negative, to avoid dampening good moods)

- Encourage employees to suggest improvements to the product and the workflow, and to publicly (yet politely) vent about the current processes that bother them. Don't make a "feature request" JIRA form that dumps it into an endless backlog, never to be seen again. Instead, have people discuss the issue publicly in a Slack room, which allows feedback and potential improvements to be considered and taken into account, then have them create an issue once they understand what it's actually about.

- Your planning should aim to drive around half of the actual work that gets done, under the acknowledgement that the other half will be organically filled with work that needs to be done. It's always easy to pick the next task if you're done earlier than expected and there's nothing else to do. It's a lot harder to sideline planned work that you've explicitly been told to do in order to do something that's actually important instead.

Basically all orgs need something that acts as a random mixing function so that connections between areas can form and strengthen. Working in the same building can provide that, if the building layout allows for it, but it's far from the only option.

The problem is that managers, particularly those with a strongly hierarchical, Taylorist mindset, won't necessarily appreciate the value of lateral connections between teams. They end up benefiting from serendipity by accident because when they force people into the office those lateral connections form anyway.

For legacy reasons, JavaScript's "character unit", the basic component of a string, is an "UTF-16 character", that is, sixteen bits that are interpreted as being UTF-16-encoded. That said, sixteen bits are not enough to represent all valid Unicode characters in the UTF-16 encoding. Instead, characters in the [supplemental planes] are represented in UTF-16 using two sixteen-bytes "non-characters", which do not individually map to any Unicode codepoint in any plane, but in combination reference an Unicode codepoint in one of the supplemental planes.

JavaScript's internal representation of strings, as well as the APIs it exposes for dealing with strings, such as index accessing and string length, treat each of the sixteen bit "halves" of the UTF-16 representation of a supplemental plane codepoint as individual characters.

This means that, when you index a string, you might get an UTF-16 character that represents a Unicode codepoint in the basic plane, or an UTF-16 "non-character" that, along with its other half, would represent an Unicode codepoint in one of the supplemental planes.

[supplemental planes]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Unicode) (see planes 1 to 16)

That's great feedback! After reading your comment and re-reading the section in the article it does indeed sound wrong. Decided to remove that paragraph. Your explanation of the string representation is really good. Thanks for sharing!

It seems like _some_ string operations treat each surrogate (that's the fancy name for the half-characters) as its own character, while others (correctly) treat the surrogate pair as a single character.

This might explain how ensuring that the function name does not contain astral character would make it easier to use different string functions together without accidentally introducing bugs.

Imo this isn't really viable because you will eventually run into version conflicts in the transitive dependencies of your the Python applications you're using/developing on your system, on most operating systems.

The version(s) that ships with an OS should only be used for shipping applications that are themselves part of the OS/distro.