Hot take(?) of the day(?) (xcancel):

UPDATE: I ran across a third (xcancel). Kill me.

A piece like this would dovetail nicely with Baldur’s deep-dive into AI’s link to esoteric fascism. Hope to see it get finished.

Took me a second to get the “fourteen words” nod. Blake, you clever bastard.

I was tempted to write this up for Pivot but fuck giving that blog any sort of publicity.

On the one hand, I can see you not wanting to give the fucker attention, on the other hand, AI’s indelible link to fascism is something which needs to be hammered home and shit like this gives you a golden opportunity to do it.

https://xcancel.com/kosa12matyas/status/1899828643376816521

For the record, the paper’s real

But Cursor just took an important step toward artificial general intelligence — someone gave it dumb orders and it told them to go away. Git gud, scrub.

Ah, that primo British wit. Good for taking the sting out of the unending nightmare that is modern life.

Excellent work as usual, David.

chefs kiss

This is only tangentially related to your point, but gut instinct says shit like this is gonna define the public’s image of the tech industry post-bubble - all style, no subtance, and zero understanding of art, humanities, or how to be useful to society.

Referencing an earlier comment, part of me also suspects the arts/humanities will gain some degree of begrudging respect post-bubble, at the expense of tech/STEM’s public image taking a nosedive.

If OpenAI’s woes are what finally bursts the AI bubble, I’m gonna cackle.

They started this goddamn bubble, and it’d be oh-so-poetic for them to end it.

…the fuck’s a BEC

I’ve been beating this dead horse for a while (since July of last year AFAIK), but its clear to me that the AI bubble’s done horrendous damage to the public image of artificial intelligence as a whole.

Right now, using AI at all (or even claiming to use it) will earn you immediate backlash/ridicule under most circumstances, and AI as a concept is viewed with mockery at best and hostility at worst - a trend I expect that’ll last for a good while after the bubble pops.

To beat a slightly younger dead horse, I also anticipate AI as a concept will die thanks to this bubble, with its utterly toxic optics as a major reason why. With relentless slop, nonstop hallucinations and miscellaneous humiliation (re)defining how the public views and conceptualises AI, I expect any future AI systems will be viewed as pale imitations of human intelligence, theft-machines powered by theft, or a combination of the two.

…why do I get the feeling the AI bubble just popped

NASB: Ed Zitron’s made wealthsimple’s newsletter in Canada, and got compared to Kendrick Lamar in the process.

Gotta say, it feels kinda funny to see a comparison I made a while ago (if semi-jokingly) pop up again.

I could elaborate upon that observation with an analogy to Masto reply guys and FOSS culture at large.

Please do, I wanna see FOSS get raked over the coals

New-ish thread from Baldur Bjarnason:

Wrote this back on the mansplainiverse (mastodon):

It’s understandable that coders feel conflicted about LLMs even if you assume the tech works as promised, because they’ve just changed jobs from thoughtful problem-solving to babysitting

In the long run, a babysitter gets paid much less an expert

What people don’t get is that when it comes to LLMs and software dev, critics like me are the optimists. The future where copilots and coding agents work as promised for programming is one where software development ceases to be a career. This is not the kind of automation that increases employment

A future where the fundamental issues with LLMs lead them to cause more problems than they solve, resulting in much of it being rolled back after the “AI” financial bubble pops, is the least bad future for dev as a career. It’s the one future where that career still exists

Because monitoring automation is a low-wage activity and an industry dominated by that kind of automation requires much much fewer workers that are all paid much much less than one that’s fundamentally built on expertise.

Anyways, here’s my sidenote:

To continue a train of thought Baldur indirectly started, the rise of LLMs and their impact on coding is likely gonna wipe a significant amount of prestige off of software dev as a profession, no matter how it shakes out:

• If LLMs worked as advertised, then they’d effectively kill software dev as a profession as Baldur noted, wiping out whatever prestige it had in the process
• If LLMs didn’t work as advertised, then software dev as a profession gets a massive amount of egg on its face as AI’s widespread costs on artists, the environment, etcetera end up being all for nothing.

To sorta repeat a prediction of mine, shit like this is gonna tank the public image of coding as a profession.

Inevitable software issues aside, “vibe coding” as a concept undermines any notion of coding as being a difficult/skillful thing, making it sound like coders are doing the equivalent of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. That the software produced by this method is inevitably derivative, dogshit or derivative dogshit is gonna help damage coding’s image, too.

New piece from Brian Merchant: So the LA Times replaced me with an AI that defends the KKK

Recommending a piece I ran across: I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats