Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn't it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Ugh, I carried to listening to the episode in the hopes it might get better, but it didn’t deliver.
I don’t understand how people can say, with a straight face, that ai isn’t coming for your job and it is just going to make everyone more productive. Even if you ignore all the externalities of providing llm services (which is a pretty serious thing to ignore), have they not noticed the vast sweeping layoffs in the tech industry alone, let alone the damage to other sectors? They seem to be aware that the promise of the bubble is that agi will replace human labour, but seem not to think any harder about that.
Also, Willison thinks that a world without work would be awful, and that people need work to give their lives meaning and purpose and bruh. I cannot even.
Beyond the obvious and well-discussed material externalities, it strikes me that we don't know and can't yet know the true total cost of the LLM-driven development cycle. The manifestation of security holes and rewrites are possibly still years off in the future, maybe decades in the case of lower-level code. And yet, given industry practice and the mentality of most of the management strata, I have little doubt that such future costs will either a) be ignored completely and thus rendered true externalities or b) somebody else's problem, I done got my bag, brah, see ya...
I feel like one day that “no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose” thing will have to give.
@rook
I figure two things will happen:
a) In a year or two companies will realize that LLMs aren't going to improve enough, and that they need skilled people because AI has turned their software into a shit show, and start hiring desperately.
or
b) In a year or two LLMs will get good enough for code that the software developed is just good enough despite the deskilling effects, and companies can get by with drastically reduced staff.
The more likely version of b) is not that AI improves in any way, but that the definition of "good enough" gets degraded so much that no one will care.
My gloomy prediction is that (b) is the way things will go, at least in part because there are fewer meaningful consequences for producing awful software, and if you started from something that was basically ok it’ll take longer for you to fail.
Startups will be slopcoded and fail quick, or be human coded but will struggle to distinguish themselves well enough to get customers and investment, especially after the ai bubble pops and we get a global recession.
The problems will eventually work themselves out of the system one way or another, because people would like things that aren’t complete garbage and will eventually discover how to make and/or buy them, but it could take years for the current damage to go away.
I don’t like being a doomer, but it is hard to be optimistic about the sector right now.