"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
I feel ya. My single straw that I hold on is: They're losing tons of moneys. The AI-bubble probably bursts soon.
I already felt like I don't belong in this world before AI, and now AI hits even worse. Fuck that shit. :c If you want someone to talk, I'm here btw. :/
If you want someone to talk, I'm here btw. :/
Thanks so much for your kind words. There was some upside to this lol.
I have left my boring IT job that forced me to use AI and ship ridiculously fast. I vastly improved my fitness now and started working in outdoor adventures. It's quite fun too.
They're losing tons of moneys. The AI-bubble probably bursts soon.
Ikr. I'm eagerly waiting for it.
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I eventually just accepted my out of place-ness. Just doing one day at a time and focusing on my health. Kind of waiting for something to change and keeping myself entertained and being mildly productive in the meantime.
Why would all the most powerful people with the most assets in the world? Let their little bubble pop? I’m pretty sure with the amount of wealth concentration and collusion, You don’t need to worry about the stock market going anyway that doesn’t benefit these guys.
We’re still here. What you’re describing as missing is still here. We have lives, experiences and wants that may differ, but we exist and the people we love and respect are also here. Here is the world.
True. The people around you IRL become an echo chamber and fool you into thinking that it is missing nowadays.
So many send me ai slop in chats, go on endless speeches about how they wrote an email, created a poster in 1 minute with chatgpt etc.
I started working on a side project recently with a dev on the condition that he would code without llms. We were aiming for very generous deadlines. But the quality and style of the code were horrible and inconsistent. It was as if each change was written by an amnesiac or a different intern who didn't read the rest of the code.
I confronted him about it and he admitted to using llms from the start. Turns out he was spending 20-30 min a day generating ai slop and creating PRs. His response was "who cares the code is readable and it works."
The response to that is "it's not readable and it isn't consistent, which is going to turn this into a nightmare when something breaks later and the code needs to be reviewed or revised"
Anyone who has ever had to support code for even a year after it goes live should have some experience dealing with the results of poor earlier choices and leaning on "it works, that means it's good".
Software design, hell even basic scripting, does not end at the minimum viable product, treating it as such is a recipe for future disaster. These sorts of people will lean on "well I'll have the AI fix it", ignoring that they're effectively playing tech debt russian roulette with multiple bullets in the revolver cylinder.
What has gotten me about the recent decade of change is the devaluation of creativity.
I have an art degree but work in tech (and am a working artist, but that's beside the point) and being able to approach complex problems creatively sets a person apart from other people in a very positive way. My team at my day job is made of four different people with unique perspectives and when building something new, we all test it because we all notice different things and end up having different suggestions for ways to improve it.
However, things don't always work, and that's the other half of creativity: identifying and dreaming up methods to work around processes that do not function correctly without creating negative impacts to users and other folks involved in the project.
And in another ten years it's eminently possible that I'll be working with a person in their 20's who cannot function without putting a prompt into a machine.
We are in a period of magical thinking. Absent of learning process, people have shifted towards the idea of innate skill. It's a false idea.
It happened before LLMs. Take the tech industry's enamoration with unicorns. At it's peak during the 2010s, they were all searching for the magical nerd who could mash away at a keyboard. Then miraculously produce a billion dollar magic box that spews rainbows and pixie dust.
That person does not exist. That person is the work of millions of people of varying skill type and level doing their day job. But the corporate driven world needed its wunderkind.
LLMs have made this idea believable for anyone. What if you had a magic box that could make you perform like a unicorn yourself. What if others had a magical box that could make the average or below-average person perform like a unicorn that you think you are.
I suspect people had become demoralized by all this magical unicorn stuff. Who really is that smart. Nobody. The world is average by definition. Can we all drop the charade? Nobody is that special.
The corporate rat race has caused credential inflation, as generations of people today stepped over each other to put up a facade of being the most outstanding employee you'll ever hire. The reality is most of us are average pretending to be above the standard deviation. What a stupid thing.
I suspect this has caused silent collapse of morale that nobody wants to talk about. Doing so would be to concede defeat, and make yourself vulnerable in a bizarro world that revolves around capitalist sharks smelling blood in the water. I think people are tired of the autodidact slog that corporations have offset to your personal time. People got tired of having to learn to be a supergenius unicorn in order to put food on the table. People are scared that others might suddenly get a magic bean that will make themselves less competitive anymore.
We are in a period of magical thinking. Absent of learning process, people have shifted towards the idea of innate skill. It’s a false idea.
Yep. I'm convinced that the closest thing we have to innate talent is love of the skill. It always takes work. Some people are wired to understand a little more a little earlier in the process, but work is what develops skill.
As for learning things with no material gain: it's hard to predict. I started learning lock picking last year. I'm firmly mediocre, but when the front door knob broke, I bought a knob with the same keyway at the hardware store and keyed it the same as every other door in the house. I didn't start the hobby with that in mind, but it came in handy.
It started over a decade ago, maybe more. In my 20's I hung out with people who had studied computer science at some very prestigious schools. The typical "I vote for the right, because I'm very smart and should be allowed to do whatever I want"-types.
Their attitude was that you should never learn anything that you're not making money from or is getting paid to learn, because they thought the brain has limited space.
When I was young television was run to inform and educate. Programmes for children and adults ran at natural speeds taking their time to unfold ideas. Then business graduates took over and everything was fast and flashy but said nothing anymore. Then later the internet came and at first it was run by the technical people who had designed it and there were personal websites on any interest you might have and newsgroups where people from all over the world took time to help others in their own area of expertise. Then the business graduates took over and everything was bright and fast, ill informed and run only for profit or to profile the user which is the same thing but worse. The repeated trend here is clear and common, people who are able to create things very often have a notion of acting for the good of society. When these things do well they are overrun by a different sort of person, one who has no feeling for the common good or wellbeing, one who in fact often disdains it and is motivated only by greed and will without conscience ruin anything good for profit. The second sort of person should be identified and nullified and corrected and the first type allowed to flourish and not the reverse as is the case in the world we have allowed to grow up around us.
I think when you see an action you should always look for the reaction. For example the rise of short video and fragmented content also gave us a kind of golden age of long form spoken content. There's always a swing to the pendulum.
Similarly I believe the age of slop will put a large premium on anything that is done sincerely and well thought out by a human. Just because they desperately want to sell slop, doesn't mean the people want to buy slop.
with slide rule, stopwatch, machine, and automation the destroyed pride in manual labor.
Now, with AI, they want to destroy pride in mental labor.
The subjugation of the working class remains the goal.
Yes, when you start reading history and giving attention to traditional crafts you realize that this process of theft, enslavement and alienation has been going on for very long already. Trying to kill your inner factory clock is hard, even when you have the chance!
I am cut from my company because im a junior dev that still needs to learn :/
I've had this sense that all these data centers being built will eventually be these deserted mega complexes. Some not even being completely built. Once the bubble pops. It'll be some real dystopian/backroom type shit until they get repurposed into something else.
Here is my encouragement to go and learn something new! Try something computers can’t do yet, like cooking or playing an instrument. The learning by remembering information era is long gone, but there is the opportunity to learn skills robots cant mimic yet.
For sure. I have learned the basics of mountaineering, cooking and fermenting foods. I make sourdough bread, sprouts, and natto at home. And it's so meditative. 😄
Oh yeah, once you get started in the kitchen, if you enjoy it there's no end. I've been teaching myself how to make greek/Mediterranean food lately and I'm trying to get my hands on a specific ice cream maker that works with equipment I already have.
Seriouseats dot com has probably been the biggest help in teaching my self to cook.
Eventually this will blow over and we will be left with a mess to fix. They will expect you to fix their fuck ups for less pay. AI was always a joke... it was always about beating down the worker.