I started my IT career in 2011, I have enjoyed it, I have got to do a lot of interesting stuff and meet interesting people, I will treasure those memories forever.

But, starting with crypto turing general computing from being:

“Wow, this machine can run so many apps at the same time!” or “Holy shit, those graphics look epic!” or “Amazing, this computer has really sped up that annoying task!”

To being:

Yo! Look at how many numbers I can generate!

That brought down my enthusiasm severely, but hey, figuring out solutions to problems was still fun.

Then came AI/LLMs.

And with it, a mountain of slop.

Finding help about an issue has gone from googling and reading help articles written by something with an actual brain to mostly being rephrased manuals that only provide working answers to semi standard answers.

Add to that a general push to us AI in anything and everything, no matter how little relevance it holds for the task at hand.

I also remember how AI was sold to the us at first, we were promised to do away with boring paperwork, so we could get on with our actual job.

What did we get? An AI that takes the fun and creative parts, leaving the paperwork for the workers.

We got an AI that we need to expect to be stealing our work and data at every point, giving us shit work back, while being told that we should applaude it and be grateful for it.

And the worst thing, the worst thing is that people seem happy with it. I keep getting requests to buy another Copilot license or asking for another AI service to be added to our tenant, I am sick of it!

We got an AI that somehow has slithered onto the golden throne and can’t be questioned.

I am not able to leave the tech market at this time, but I will focus on more tangible hobbies going forward.

This year, I have given myself a project, I will try to build a model railway in a suitcase. That will be a Z-scale tiny world in a suitcase.

I have never done anything remotely like it, but I feel like I need something physical to take my mind off tech.

Sorry for the rant, but I just came off of a high from realizing and putting words to my feelings.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    11 hours ago

    One method was to lower the quality of inputs. Plywood instead of hardwood. Then fiberboard/chipboard instead of plywood.

    In fairness, hardwood is in limited supply. It takes a long time to produce, is expensive to harvest correctly, and typically means demolishing old growth forests to obtain. The “lower quality” products definitely have their trade-offs, but a lot of the quality issues are resolved through engineering improvements and materials sciences.

    I would argue the real downside of lower quality inputs is the advent of “disposable” furniture (the IKEA brand crap most notably). Stuff that could have been designed to last, but isn’t, and ends up in landfills after moving day as a result. Rather than a savings yield, what you get is a waste surplus.

    And later, CNC machines stepped in to produce delicate and complicated designs in a fraction of the time - and frequently even more precisely and more cleanly - than anyone with a carving chisel could do.

    And that is the part which is NOT being effectively duplicated in IT.

    Lolwhut? We’ve come so far even in the last ten years, in terms of IDEs, deployment pipelines, and automated unit testing.