It must be confusing — upsetting, even! — to hear that somebody is willing to accurately and vociferously tear into a tech industry largely controlled by people with no regard for their users or workers, who are willing to bathe their products in mediocrity all because it’s the thing that everybody else is doing.

I love you Ed

The heavy users of AI are even dumber than the CEOs, at least the CEOs are getting rich.

what infrastructure will the ai bubble leave behind when it collapses?

An understandable hatred and mistrust of Silicon Valley tech types and technology in general within people.

Fucking incompetent idiots

Google is a perfect example that the idea that capitalism is inherently efficient is an absurd fantasy.

Google represents an absolutely massive waste of talent and all of it is focused on making the world a markedly worse place.

I am not a professional programmer but it seems to me that the idea that AI is needed to increase the firehose of code being written to “improve” programming and how well computers work is as absurd as the idea that the point of a university degree in a language is to increase the raw amount of words being written in that language.

The point is to convey ideas with language not produce more language, same thing with code, the point is to solve problems not produce ever larger and larger amounts of code with automation.

Something I know without a doubt is that for many people who love language, they desire a great deal less of the fake, hurtful, useless words that drown out the good ones. People who love words and work in crafting and shaping them tend to think it is inherently good to shape useful words not just mindlessly produce combinations of words in as great a volume possible.

To put it in a more abstracted fashion, relying on AI to produce more and more code faster and faster feels like a Jazz musician saying they rely on AI to fill in all the empty spaces they leave between notes with complementary embelleshing notes. The point of a jazz musician is clearly not to produce the most notes possible, it is to convey meaning with notes.

To bring it back to a concrete example, how many times has Google built a new chat program/app from scratch and then abandoned it? Sure there is lots of code there of very high quality, an intimidating amount to be sure, but isn’t the primary job of the programmer here to say “hey, why don’t we stop writing new code from the ground up for every chat app a different part of the company wants and standardize it to a much smaller codebase with a set of customizations different parts of the company can apply to the same core chat program”?

It seems to me a good programmer would be good at framing problems from a perspective that requires as simple implementation in code as possible within reason, not be best at producing the program with the most lines of code fastest that still solves the problem.

Can we stop repeating Anthropic’s fear mongering about AI? They are just trying to prop up their stock price and keep the bubble from popping a little longer.

ACAB

Who cares anymore though? Microsoft burned all their bridges to places where the kinds of people who get excited about this kind of thing hang out. There is no button they can press to unburn those bridges and no gurantee, indeed little likelihood they can rebuild them when better bridges have been built to better places in the meantime.

Windows phone was great, what killed it was Microsoft’s clueless management.

I am shocked!

They could have at least have done a compromise where the company is Zoox and the vehicle is the anthellae, The Zoox Anthellae sounds kinda cool to me.

Aesthetically maybe, but that is a hollow fleeting sensation that is immediately suffocated by the fact that cars ruin cities no matter how “smart” they are.

yawn self driving cars are so boring, all they do is allow taxi companies to fire their drivers and treat their employees worse, how is this exciting? How is it futuristic? How does it improve and evolve cities?

AI is so dumb but at least we have Ed Zitron.

I propose a solution. Invest in unmanned surface vehicles to carry duplicates of mail and require every piece of mail sent to sailors to have a duplicate of which randomly is selected the actual copy of mail to send to the real navy ship. Collect duplicates of the mail and send it on unmanned surface vehicles to sail around and pretend to be navy ships while gathering surveillance data.

Then even if someone thinks they have planted a tracker on a ship successfully they will still be second guessing themselves over whether they are tracking the real ship or not.

The most important part is to take more time than you think to speak, everyone always thinks they need to rush as if they are an inconvenience with their words, trust me your words are worth the time it takes to say them slowly, no matter what words you choose.

It makes me feel like when people insist it would take an astronomical amount of effort to move their community off of discord.

I know it will but you are worse than wasting your time putting that decision off because it will limit your community in ways you cannot even perceive yet.

Stop wasting everyone’s time, don’t build houses on top of destabilized sinking mud and expect people to move in, and if they do now you have a MUCH bigger problem on your hands than the challenge of building a new building since you have to convince people the old building which looks fine is not safe.

I would say that poor foundational choices are also the enemy of progress too.

Ad Hominem attack, try harder :)

Maybe cite some evidence?