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!
Fuck AI
"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.
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"
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.
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?
Because all those assholes want everyone in the office.
It replaced jobs, used nonrenewable resources, oh and drove teenagers to suicide! It sounds to me like it was responsible for negative economic growth.
Yeah, but on the other hand it sometimes answered questions correctly, when I have been too lazy to Google myself. So there is that
What about the losses due to stolen IP? Fewer jobs for creators? Should be net negative.
It did, however, add a shit ton of fraud and severe episodes of mental illness. So that more than makes up for it!
Sam Altman is such a dweeb
They did him dirty with that image, and I'm all for it 😂
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!!!!!!
We must keep the money pit burning!
One COULD call it Artificial Stupidity.
Most of the stupidity is real.
The problem, as I see it, is they tried to START with intelligence.
If it were programmed "properly" it would start dumb and LEARN from there but nobody wants to buy into that.
So here we are.
@grok is this true?