"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Oh we are in the process of 'accepting that its a bubble' right now.
Problem is that what that looks like is more and more Private Equity/Credit firms taking haircuts and a few starting the Private Credit version of a bank run.
So, when the bubble pops, the economy gets much, much worse than it currently is, and yeah that means your 401k and pension funds get fucked.
And the ultra wealthy won't feel the sting, and will be able to buy up much much more and repeat the process allll over again
Sure it will burst, companies will go bankrupt, millions of peoples retirement savings will disappear, and many will suffer /die from the economic aftershock...
BUT
The rich will have already realized their dividends / capital gains
The rich will have already purchased the land / property
The rich will already have the data centers / ram / AI
They rich will have their assets and eat ours to
...
The whole system is a kleptocracy and the AI bubble bursting will make late stage capitalism worse not better.
the AI bubble bursting will make late stage capitalism worse not better.
No arguments here
You may or may not be surprised by how many people call me an AI shill for acknowledging that.
I am surprised, I mean fuck AI entirely, but how could it get better? Us plebs will just get more fucked over
If people in general had the economic/historic background knowledge to understand what's actually coming we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place.
Unfortunately people are powerless, angry, and grasping at straws with regards to cheering for the AI bubble to burst.
Not only that, they'll get a public bailout because they're "Too big to fail." Like literally why are we paying taxes when we know that our tax dollars will just be handed over to the billionaires because they just keep breaking everything?
They dont have enough money to bail out these tech companies...
They can always print it.
And effectively tax all of us via inflation.
Fed does that everytime the US government wants to issue debt and there aren't enough buyers for at the given interest rate.
... why do you think Trump has been basically taking over the Fed?
It replaced jobs, used nonrenewable resources, oh and drove teenagers to suicide! It sounds to me like it was responsible for negative economic growth.
Are you kidding? Think of all the savings on avocado toast and rotisserie chicken from all those needless, young deaths! /s
Yeah, but on the other hand it sometimes answered questions correctly, when I have been too lazy to Google myself. So there is that
Google has sucked for many years.
I understand when people say LLMs are better than Google, but that bar can't drop lower.
Yeah i thought the same thing.
I asked it for a complete list of all fissile materials and it said it's basically only three: Thorium-232, Uranium-235, Plutonium-239 or sth like that. I asked repeatedly whether there were no others, and it assured me it's only these three.
Well, three months later i actually bothered to check and read up on Wikipedia. Turns out there's a looong list of fissile isotopes, like at least 20 of them ...
I'm so tired of hearing about AI at work. They don't have the fundamentals of software development down - no tests. no linters. no automatic deployment. Dependency management is a joke. Code reviews are a rubber stamp. They only this quarter stopped people from SSH'ing onto the prod machine and making live, not in source control, changes. But they want everyone to start leveraging AI. Spending untold piles of time and money on it.
It would be far cheaper and more cost-effective to spend like, a week, on software development fundamentals.
Meanwhile, I've stubbornly forced my way through various processes and red tape to get a bare minimum of checks that run automatically on PR. This week it found someone had pushed a script with a fatal syntax error, gotten it reviewed, approved, and merged. My check goes live and flags this before it's in prod. No one cares. Management still just wants to talk about AI.
There's no reward for preventing fires, they only care if you put a large one out. It's immensely frustrating.
Truth. I've been rewarded for putting out fires that I caused. I find the best thing to do in these situations is to keep my stupid mouth shut.
You might get more traction if you frame it as "I caught Gary trying to do an arson" instead of "I prevented a fire"
I'm going to substitute the name Claude for no reason in particular, but I might just take that feedback on board...
99.999999999999998898999999999899% of what's described by the executives at my work isn't AI either, it's either formulas or macros. Which have existed since what, the 80s?
Just absolutely goes to show you that these idiots have no clue, and are just throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. Aka just another Tuesday.
Eat the rich. Eat the executives.
Fuck AI
We had a town hall at my company today and they demo'd their new AI product. It looked and sounded impressive, until you realized it wasn't the actual product but a Figma demo. If this thing ever sees the light of day, and it actually works without hallucinating bullshit data points, I'll eat my socks.
Management does not want you trained, they want to see you replaced by AI.
And yet so many people who would be replaced if this AI stuff worked seem so eager to embrace it.
Meanwhile most electric utility and metal works companies have gone up 75% on the stock market ... i wonder why that is
(i actually don't, i know why it is, it's because cheap renewable energy boosts all heavy industries)
What about the losses due to stolen IP? Fewer jobs for creators? Should be net negative.
Yeah. Obviously. There's a phrase which gets misinterpreted very often. "The customer is always right". People think it means if you go into Walmart, and try to buy a TV, and you say 480p is a higher resolution than 1080p, you'd be right. Because you're the customer, and you're always right, even if you're wrong.
That's not what it means. It means if you go to a store and ask to buy a 480p TV, and they don't have it, they lost a sale. The phrase really should be "The customer always dictates the market".
So when we look at AI, you ask "Ok, who's using it?" and the answer is "Everybody hates it. Everybody resents it. But we're being forced to use it, so it gets 'used' in a sense, but not willingly."
So if you have a product that nobody wants, and everybody is openly hostile towards, but you just keep forcing it down peoples throats, then yeah, you lose sales. Just ask Microsoft how Windows 11 adoption rates have been. I guess by definition, I am now a linux user. I still hate it. I have no idea how to do anything besides open a web browser. I wish I could do more with my own PC. It's not linux that's preventing me, it's my own inability to understand things. By all means, I SHOULD be a windows user.....but I'll be damned if Microsoft is going to tell me HOW I can use my own PC that I paid for. Linux isn't restricting me, but I still don't know how to do it. I'm the example of why Windows 11 is failing, and it's all because of policy regarding AI.
If nobody wants your product, it will not contribute to growth. Go try standing on the sidewalk and selling a fat mans used gym socks for $200. Nobody will buy it. Nobody wants that. So it would be kind of weird if the 11 o clock news was surprised to report that the fat mans used gym sock market was not profitable. Yet that's where we seem to be with AI right now. Media outlets are continually reporting that AI is not doing well, and every time they report it, they seem surprised.
Literally all it would take for me to go back to Windows would be for them to release "WindowsXP12" It's Windows 12, which is just Windows XP but with quality of life improvements, such as not limiting file sizes to 4GB, and allowing more than 16GB of ram, and being able to read more than 2TB hard drives. No AI, just WindowsXP exactly as you remember it, just built for the modern world. But Microsoft is too stubborn to do that. They've been baking in anti-customer features since Windows 7. So I guess by default I'm a linux user now.
I also feel like AI got used as an excuse to fire without spooking the market. As interest rates rose and remote work opportunities opened up the world labor market, saying that your company was using AI to fill developer jobs gave tech companies the smokescreen to fire senior devs in high CoL areas by saying "fUtUrE!" instead of admitting they were cutting development to the bone.
After the layoffs, since the tools are in place to develop from everywhere, why maintain Bay Area salaries?
It did.
Thats not even a conspiracy theory, that's just math.
The consumer economy is contracting, the vast majority of businesses report somewhere between negative to 0 to minimal productivity gains from AI... a number of firms that cut people for AI, are already trying to hire people back.
Yeah. Its mostly a cover story... because we are starting to slope down more rapidly into the Second Great Depression.
Because all those assholes want everyone in the office.
Might be that they're finally realizing you don't need to be in-office, but to them that means you really should be in Punjab.
Yeah. Remote work means you can work anywhere.
"The customer is always right" is only half the saying, the second part is "in matters of taste."
It's been warped from "the customer knows what they want, but not necessarily what they need" to "the customer is free to abuse minimum wage workers."
This might help. https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/linuxupskillchallenge@programming.dev
Sunken cost fallacy
We didn't replace workers like we thought we would.
-Rich people, effectively.
Sam Altman is such a dweeb
They did him dirty with that image, and I'm all for it 😂
They told us years ago that AI would transform the job landscape within 6 months. This is starting to feel like Elons musks full self driving. Which he still hasnt effing delivered. Industry con artists like Musk and Altman should be in jail for defrauding investors.
I don't know about others, my job has been transformed quite a lot, as well as how we approach hiring.
Additionally, although it turned out to be a mistake, plenty of people got fired to be replaced by AI, that's a transformation (nobody said it would be a positive one).
Less than zero.
That's probably because we've not poured enough money in it yet. 1 or 2 more trillions and it will create growth like you've never seen before!
I am shocked!
It did, however, add a shit ton of fraud and severe episodes of mental illness. So that more than makes up for it!
We must keep the money pit burning!
Wow, what a hitpiece, the only reason AI added "Basically Zero" to US Economic Growth last year is in the calculations for this article they deceptively subtracted costs from the revenue!!!!!!
I feel like the relevant text for this moment would be The Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang.
AI was just a blip on the radar when it was written, but I felt he did a good job illustrating how tech bubbles form and are propped up using examples from the 2008 housing crisis.
There's a better anti AI narrative than this mostly false one. First if you had $100 of GDP all imported your GDP is zero. But Nvidia profits and wages are net additions to GDP, and datacenter building, cooling, power use is GDP positive. At least half of datacenter spend goes toward supporting US profits, wages, and support sales.
The better narrative is that without the absurd AI overinvestment, GDP would be negative. last quarter (only 1.4% total growth) is not in OP numbers and this would result in 2.2% GDP growth for the year. about $650B in nominalized real growth. $450B in public/large company investments in AI doesn't include all of the power/construction done on spec, or the extra spending that employed vs unemployed construction workers do.
I guess OP is trying to support Fuck AI by saying it is doing very little, and massaging the numbers to show as little as possible. But massaging the numbers to show as high as possible, supports Fuck AI by saying rest of the economy is contracting/suffering.