davydm

"get ready for a wave of anti-AI populism"

buddy.

buddy.

it's long been here, and not just for the power-draw, but also for the absolute grifter garbage that it is - promises from the creators because they desperately need to recoup several countries' worth of gdp, and it doesn't really improve - we still have to reject the shit code, recovering meth addicts are still instructed to "treat themselves to a little meth", people are encouraged to kill themselves, fake news and bullshit aigen video and images made not for fun but to deceive - all of these issues and more are why current ai is really just an over-expensive toy that can't be trusted to be reliable in any way, but is sold as cognition to the silly sheep that keep believing the hype.

I personally can't wait for the bubble to pop. There are uses for "ai" as it is now, but most of those uses are not what it's being sold as being good at (no, sorry, your aigen code is still a greasy butt snickers), and the few arenas where it actually is kinda useful (eg in entertainment) it's either used for nefarious means ("entertainment by deception to get the numbers") or it's rejected by the users anyway (see recent "ai in games" stories).

awesome - lean into the privacy leaks

if this feature ever makes it to consumer-grade gpus (and why wouldn't it?) I hope someone smart figures out how to cripple/disable it.

Interesting to choose an immutable distro because "I never had a setup survive multiple years. At some point, package updates would always break something enough that it felt easier to just do a clean install rather than spending hours debugging." when I've never, not once, reloaded due to package manager issues. I've reloaded on the recommendation of the upstream team (Ubuntu release). I've reloaded to get a more up-to-date package index (eg debian stable -> Ubuntu). I've reloaded to get away from systemd and pulseaudio (ubuntu-based distro - forget which, but likely mint), and I've stayed on the same live rolling Gentoo machine without reloading for over a decade.

If your package manager is causing you to reload - find a different distro. And by that, I mean a completely different distro with a different package manager.

part of me says "wow, cool"

another part says "oof, reads like shit, sounds like shit, i really hope the authors don't mind that they flushed their lives in a toilet to make this crap" (yes, rude, i know)

how I wish people could stop this stupid {first letter}{count the letters}{last letter} naming - it just wastes people's time as they have to go look up what the abbreviation of the week is

No

1. AI still makes mistakes - you'll still need a mentor to guide it 2. AI doesn't learn - so all the companies leaning on AI to replace interns are just putting more pressure on whoever is required to clean up after the ai, but that pressure won't be relieved because the same mistakes will happen going forward.

These are just the immediate business reasons for the "no". The bigger over-arching reason is that if no-one is hired as a "junior", there's no-one ramping up from "just studied, full-confidence, zero experience" through "wow, I thought I knew stuff", "wow, I'm learning more and making fewer mistakes", "I'm capable enough to contribute to the team without hand-holding" and finally "I could mentor someone else". Replacing entry-level jobs with ai causes a proficiency vacuum down the road.

Of course, short-sightedness never stopped the greedy before.

alrighty, show it then...

I get your part about mentors. I came up through having to figure stuff out myself a lot via stack overflow and friends, where the biggest problem for me is usually how to ask the right question (eg with elastic search, having to find and understand "index" vs "store" - once I have those two terms, searching is a lot easier, and without them, it's a bit of a crapshoot). Mentors help here because they had to travel that road too and probably can translate from my description to the correct terms.

And I really wish I could trust an llm for that, or, indeed, any task. But I generally find answers fall into one of these useless buckets: 1. Reword the question as an answer (so common, so useless) 2. Trivial solutions that are correct - meaning one or two lines that are valid, but that I could have easily written myself quicker than getting an agent involved, and without the other detractors on this list 3. Wildly incorrect "solutions". I'm talking about code that doesn't even build because the llm can't take proper direction on which version of the library to refer to, so it keeps giving results based off old information that is no longer relevant. Try resolving a webpack 5 issue - you'll get a lot of webpack 4 answers and none of them will work, even if you specify webpack 5 4. The absolute worst: subtly incorrect solutions that seem correct and are confidently presented as correct. This has been my experience with basically every "oh wow, look what the llm can do" demo. I'm that annoying person who finds the big mid-demo.

The problems are: 1. A person inexperienced in the domain will flounder for ages trying out crap that doesn't work and understanding nothing of it. 2. A person experienced in the domain will spend a reasonable amount of time correcting the llm - and personally, I'd much rather write my own code via tdd-driven emergent design - I'll understand it, and it will be proven to work when it's done.

I see that proponents of the tech often gloss over this and don't realise that they're actually spending more time overall, especially when having to polish out all the bugs. Or maintain the system.

Use whatever you want, but I've got zero confidence in the models, and I prefer to write code instead of gambling. But to each, their own.

wtf

What a dumb piece, basically promoting consumerism in the name of "the economy". I think it's great that people are starting to wake up, waste less, and recognize the hollowness of perpetual upgrades.

The moment I started reading, I came to the same conclusion as the paper - causality is unknown. It's very likely that kids with autism/adhd are drawn to the high-stimulus sources of entertainment more than their peers.

sounds like a terrible idea, another rabbit device, but this time at oodles more money because it's an iShit, not just any old shit.

Also makes the output tedious to copy-paste, eg into an editor. Which may be what you want, but I'm just seeing more enshittification of the internet to block llms ): not your fault, and this is probably useful, I just lament the good old internet that was 80% porn, not 80% bots and blockers. Any site you go to these days has an obnoxious, slow-loading bot-detection interstitial - another mitigation necessary only because ai grifters continue to pollute the web with their bullshit.

Can this bubble please just pop already? I miss the internet.

Author is deluded. LLMs aren't the quiet, smart assistant. LLMs are regurtitators of "truths" they have mapped in their models. The outputs are always subtly wrong, and, at best, an average of existing outputs out there.

You will never make something completely "wow" with an LLM alone. You will spend more time debugging the output than you would have making it from scratch. And, at best - you'll end up with mediocre results, by definition.

Author needs a serious case of a holiday, rest, and mental reset.

Apply the same logic you did to chair acquisition to headphones. Yes, the good stuff costs more, but also lasts longer. I bought top-end turtle beaches a while back and actually saved because I can use them on my work and home machines, and they sound great. Metal band, low pleather (which always fails after 6 mo to a year), great sound, Bluetooth, 2 dongles for 2 devices. Win.

Certainly more reliable than shitcoins. And I'm talking from a country with rolling blackouts given the disingenuous name "loadshedding".

Electricity is actually useful, actually has some value. Shitcoins, not so much.

The muppet speaks.

Before work can be optional, ubi has to be a thing. And a conservative redneck twat like musk will fight tooth and nail against that.

What he's really expressing is a wish for humans to be optional. And fuck him, with the spikiest appendage of the meanest beast you can imagine.

The ai-grifter smoke-and-mirrors routine can only do so much, I guess.

If they don't dogfood their own stuff, why should we guinea-pig it?

Rust is cool. A great idea, if a little hard to wrap a grug-brain like mine around (I've tried, and will try again, I'm sure)

BUT

There are plenty of programs written in C which require no rewrite, do what they're supposed to, and have been doing what they're supposed to for decades. Yes, it's possible to write C code with "heisenbugs" and it's harder to do so in Rust - and that's a good thing. But if it works, it doesn't need fixing, so calling C a "stain" is a little over-dramatic. Continue with the ports, continue to use Rust - especially now, as the pace of development is (imo) faster than 2 decades ago, and the one thing that speed almost guarantees is mistakes - having a compiler catch those for you (especially if you can understand the output!) is great. Requiring total conversion of all C projects to Rust is... cultish? I guess to be expected - the author has had pain in the past, alleviated by Rust, and so they will spread the good word about their savior, but I see a lot of conversation in this realm which is all-or-nothing (both ways - C or Rust), and I think those arguments miss the points:

1. Reliability - use what's reliable to write new stuff; if old stuff is already reliable, and simple enough to check, focus elsewhere - there's too much to rebuild it all, so focus on what actually needs attention 2. Functionality - use what works (program-wise). Going "ew, written in C" gets you nowhere. On this line, I'd really appreciate an "ez mode" for Rust where errors are displayed in language that someone not living in the Rust world for months can grok. I'm not alone here. 3. Kindness - there's no need to go on crusades in the name of a language. All software is flawed in some way, including that golden turd you wrote in Rust. Got no bugs? Someone will be missing a feature. Got heaps of features? Someone has a bug. This world would be a lot nicer to live in if people could just be kind. Instead of "C is trash", perhaps "We got a lot of shit done in C, but Rust helps us to make better software, so let's go!".

Calling one of the greatest inventions in programming history a "stain" is egotistical at best, shining hubris at worst (seriously! without it, no linux, no GNU, and heaps of other things that just don't get made, or are made in something like FORTRAN or COBOL).

Also, shut up and eat your vegetables, and get off my lawn. :D

aw, I thought this would be a diatribe about genai learning from it's own shitty output, but it's more of a complaint that "traditional knowledge" isn't in the training set for llms, mostly because it's not available online.

Still probably valid points, but not ai-specific: this is an effect of having an internet with lots of available information only from specific sources, and the fix isn't moaning about ai (though we will likely experience informational collapse if they keep recycling the same data through the llms) - the fix is ensuring internet accessibility for that information, either by getting original sources online, or by taking the time to sit with those original sources and take notes.

The biggest problem I have with ai is the inaccuracies. When you're making a meme, no big deal. When you're asking a question and you get back garbage, it's a reminder that the machine knows nothing. It's just less effort to do a proper web search and find an article or forum thread with the validated information than to waste time with the ai companion. The problem is ai perfectly nails the Dunning Kruger curve - people far to the left don't know how wrong a lot of it is, so they report major confidence gains in the few valid results they get, discarding all the trash on a gamblers high. But the moment you are actually capable in the field, you'll start to see the flaws in aigen, and confidence (and usage) drops off. Regular people are also more likely to be pulled in by all the grifter hype, lacking the understanding to resist the shitty tool.

Yeah I basically use it only for 2fa. Used to use FastHub, not sure if that's still going, but I liked it more. But at the end of the day, for, eg, review, web lets me see more, so unless that change is minor (and mostly new files), web is easier.

...and the drifting continues. Just make the bubble bigger so the pop is more like a boom, eh.

Ah, money for the sake of money. Winning by score alone. This is incredibly unhealthy - those at the bottom get depressed, those at the top focus solely on money. Thanks for adding another enshittification to the web.

duh

people shouldn't need convincing with data or authority

I think the author has "done a job" saying what _he_ thinks the articles are about.

But he already primes the reader to take his viewpoint by shoving it in there, instead of treating the reader like a person able to make up their own mind, probably because he doesn't trust the reader to reach the exact same conclusion as he does.

Whilst DHH is a lot of things (many unpleasant), I find it difficult to get behind someone's argument when they provide links to blog posts, but retitle them to suit their own agenda - it's disingenuous, bordering on deceit. Such subtle lies detract from the actual facts in that article and make me view the author with an air of skepticism.

Pity, because DHH is a weapons-grade plum, to borrow words from Sue Perkins, though she never used them against DHH - it's just an apt title.

Yet another reminder that The Great Orange Bigot and His Buddies DGAF about the "common person", (ie their own voters). They keep doing shit like this and their voters are apparently such rabid no-brain grugs that they keep voting for the shit. I'm not talking about his rich voters - they're in the same boat as him: zero fucks given. I'm talking about the everyman and everywoman and everywhateveryouwanttobe who actually has to buy groceries from the store, not talk about them like some mythical construct.

There's "flow" and there's FLOW. Even at minor levels of "flow", when you're still trying to "get in", you're building large mental models of the domain you're working in. If you don't have to build large mental models, then you can deal with interruptions easier - but if you spent the last 1/2 an hour getting your head into something and then some muppet interrupts you - poof - it starts crumbling, and if it's an interruption that lasts more than a few seconds, it quickly tumbles down into dust, to be rebuilt later.

There's a theory about mental exhaustion vs interruptions that I've definitely experienced - interrupt me or another dev enough and you can forget anything useful coming out today. Every time is harder to get back into after an interruption on a day, as your brain is getting primed to respond to external stimulus over internal thought.

Perhaps OP hasn't been challenged with a gnarly enough domain. Perhaps OP is lucky enough to have a well-defined domain they can TDD out every time (I found TDD to be a great remedy against distraction, because I can always write the name of the next test before leaving my desk to jolt me back to where I was when I get back - it's not perfect, but it's a vast improvement). But saying that flow state is overrated clearly indicates that they haven't experienced the smooth glide that is proper flow, getting shit done bit by bit, the right way, being able to effectively use multiple levels of "zoom" to look at the problem at different levels (which all rely on models built in your head).

I'll take a flowful day over "personal connection" with people who aren't actually my friends - they're just acquaintances: how much do you actually befriend people at your place of work (ie, actually do stuff with them outside of work, actively care about them like your long-standing friends, would take personal advice from them? On a regular basis? Tell them personal stuff? Who at your work really knows you?)? It was quite the eye-opener for me to realise that I'd been over-investing in work "friendships" with shitty people I don't care about and that I was just harming myself caring about them. You may be in the same boat and not even realise it until you think it over. Now I try to float above their turmoil, make things, do the best I can, and let their bullshit flow elsewhere.