• 6 Posts
  • 1.14K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

help-circle


  • IMO the best way to use this crap in software development for projects that already exist is to have the fucking things write up or amend docs.

    Developers mostly hate writing docs, and in corporate software I’ve found that the docs are usually added once and then never verified again.

    Writing up profuse gibberish that contains some amount of useful information is what these bullshit machines were made to do. Have it write up some docs, read them and make sure they aren’t completely insane and get a pat on the back from your boss for working with “agentic AI”.





  • But it’s NOT intellectually honest to be okay with having one pound of shit in the canoe and not being okay with the other two. You can’t point at the two pounds of shit and say: this abominable! While ignoring the other pound of shit. Because it’s all shit.

    Sure, because that’s a terrible analogy.

    Gen AI data centers don’t just require more power and space, they require so much more power and space that they are driving up energy costs in the surrounding area and the data centers are becoming near impossible to build.

    People didn’t randomly become “anti-data center”. Many of them are watching their energy bills go up. I’m watching as they talk about building new coal plants to power “gigawatt” data centers.

    And it’s all so you can have more fucking chat bots.


  • Yeah the wording on this is wrong. The closest adjacent (honest) question would be “how can I appear to be arguing in good faith when I have a predetermined position on this technology?”.

    EDIT:

    I don’t even like GenAI myself and that’s how this comes off.

    If you’re looking for reasons: (1) sustainability / ecology, (2) market concentration, (3) intellectual theft, (4) mediocre output, (5) lack of guardrails, (6) vendor lock-in, (7) appears to drive some people insane, (8) drives down the quality of the Internet overall, (9) de-skills the people that use it, (10) produces probabilistic outputs and yet is used in applications that require deterministic outputs…I could go on for a while.


  • For the ecological side of things, sure, ai uses a lot of power. Lots of data enters. So does the internet. Do you use that? So does the stock market. Do you use that? So do cars. Do you drive?

    There are many, many differences between AI data centers and ones that don’t have to run $500k GPU clusters. They require a lot less power, a lot less space, and a lot less cooling.

    Also you’re implying here that your debate opponents are being intellectually dishonest while using the same weasely arguments that people that argue in bad faith constantly employ.


  • It’s great at bullshitting that it did what you wanted, even if it obviously didn’t, which I guess is what counts for results at Microsoft.

    It would be much better if they treated it as the slightly better (yeah, I said it) auto complete that it is instead of the beginning of fucking sky net – which was supposed to be a bad thing anyway, remember?

    But that wouldn’t move the needle on all of the share prices, so instead we have to pretend it can do people’s jobs when it fucking obviously cannot.

    So, instead they keep pushing this AI (auto-complete insanity), and keep burning more and more cash. Imagine if we just put a portion of these billions (approaching trillions) into anything that could actually help anyone. Or don’t, because it’s pretty fucking depressing to think about.


  • But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses.

    Not all process is pointless, but needless process by definition is. There are also a shit ton of things that stop engineers from “striking out on their own”.

    If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.

    The whole talk of “go[ing] it alone” kinda strikes me as “bootstrapping”, libertarian non-sense.

    I don’t want to do marketing, sales, finance, legal, and product bullshit myself. That’s why I’m an employee.

    Two things can be true at the same time, for instance, a company can have a lot of bloated, needless process that stifles people and still pull in enough money to be able to pay for their employees to live a life.

    With the amount of market concentration there is in every sector as far as the eye can see, nearly every software-producing company has a cash cow of some sort, and then has a bunch of complete money losers that are subsidized by that cash cow.

    So, it’s completely possible that the company overall fully sucks and hasn’t developed anything new of value to someone in decades, but the legacy business keeps the miserable employees from the bread line.

    To return to the point, AI doesn’t solve any of this or even help with it.