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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I’m a huge fan of AI, but come on… It’s being used in the most reckless and insane ways. It’s so insanely destructive to society

    Our experience so far has not been that AI is capable of or going to replace our labor. However, the threat of AI and the use of AI mandates has been used already to drive down wages, institute speedups, and generally degrade our working conditions.

    Have you noticed how a lot of software has been getting worse, like way buggier? How three times now, huge swaths of the Internet have gone down?

    It’s because tech companies keep laying people off. They’re already operating a skeleton crew, and now they’re trying to replace portions of that skeleton crew with AI

    And already, it’s not working.

    At this rate, remotely complicated software is going to become a lost technology


  • Holy shit, you’re a fucking retard. Like of the “people look and laugh” scale. I’m unironically going to take your response to share with technical people in my life to laugh over

    And no hate to the mentally ill, I’ve never laughed at them. I laugh with them, because they’re delightful and love joy to an extent that leaves me jealous

    But you’re not a real person. You’re a joke, if your ego was two sizes smaller I’d be gently explaining to you how no number of code katas would result in Microsoft XP


  • So is semiconductor design, application of transistors to implement logic gates, etc. We still have people who can do that, not very many, but enough. Not many people work in assembly language anymore, either…

    Yeah, that’s a lost tech. We still use the same decades, even century old, frameworks

    They’re not perfect. But they are unchangeable. We no longer have the skills to adapt them to modern technology. Improvements are incremental, despite decades of effort you still can’t reliably run a system on something like RISK.




  • Okay, but if it’s writing 800 lines at once, it’s making design choices. Which is all well and good for a one off, but it will make those choices, make them a different way each time, and it will name everything in a very generic or very eccentric way

    The AI can’t remember how it did it, or how it does things. You can do a lot… Even stuff that hasn’t entered commercial products like vectorized data stores to catalog and remind the LLM of key details when appropriate

    2000 lines is nothing. My main project is well over a million lines, and the original author and I have to meet up to discuss how things flow through the system before changing it to meet the latest needs

    But we can and do it to meet the needs of the customer, with high stakes, because we wrote it. These days we use AI to do grunt work, we have junior devs who do smaller tweaks.

    If an AI is writing code a thousand lines at a time, no one knows how it works. The AI sure as hell doesn’t. If it’s 200 lines at a time, maybe we don’t know details, but the decisions and the flow were decided by a person who understands the full picture




  • I don’t think we should be having the AI write the program in the first place. I think we’re barreling towards a place where remotely complicated software becomes a lost technology

    I don’t mind if AI helps here and there, I certainly use it. But it’s not good at custom fit solutions, and the world currently runs on custom fit solutions

    AI is like no code solutions. Yeah, it’s powerful, easier to learn and you can do a lot with it… But eventually you will hit a limit. You’ll need to do something the system can’t do, or something you can’t make the system do because no one properly understands what you’ve built

    At the end of the day, coding is a skill. If no one is building the required experience to work with complex systems, we’re going to be swimming in a world of endless ocean of vibe coded legacy apps in a decade

    I just don’t buy that AI will be able to take something like a set of State regulations and build a complaint outcome. Most of our base digital infrastructure is like that, or it uses obscure ancient systems that LLMs are basically allergic to working with

    To me, we’re risking everything on achieving AGI (and using it responsibly) before we run out of skilled workers, and we’re several game changing breakthroughs from achieving that



  • Well the real problem is that what you’re saying does exist to some extent, and it’s a very easily controlled variable

    So when execs and investors look at marvel, they learn the wrong lesson. Endgame threw in an insane number of expensive actors and made an insane amount of money

    Instead of looking at the years of setup and buildup of characters in this grand artistic vision, they’re working with spreadsheets to try to min-max the actor to box office numbers

    It’s why everything just keeping getting worse. The finance brained people are running the world, and you can always count on them to learn the wrong lesson







  • You keep jumping back and forth between biofuel and biomass. You can bury solid biofuel, you can pump liquid biofuel, both are stable if you put them somewhere without much oxygen

    Biomass is something different… Do it right and you can just use it as fertilizer. Just grow a bunch of algae and spray it over dry land… It’s that easy. It’ll feed the soil, which locks up a lot of carbon back into the food chain. Stack wood in a desert, who cares. There’s so many better ways to do this

    And CO2 is a fucking gas. Yes, it’s liquid under pressure or at low enough temp… But it does not stay that way! We live in Earth, and most cavities aren’t able to stay pressurized without leaking