Technology

I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it's impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate.

This. Many of these tools are good at incredibly basic boilerplate that's just a hint outside of say a wizard. But to hear some of these AI grifters talk, this stuff is going to render programmers obsolete.

There's a reality to these tools. That reality is they're helpful at times, but they are hardly transformative at the levels the grifters go on about.

I don't fear Artificial Intelligence, I fear Administrative Idiocy. The managers are the problem.

Another friend of mine was reviewing software intended for emergency services, and the salespeople were not expecting someone handling purchasing in emergency services to be a hardcore programmer. It was this false sense of security that led them to accidentally reveal that the service was ultimately just some dude in India. Listen, I would just be some random dude in India if I swapped places with some of my cousins, so I'm going to choose to take that personally and point out that using the word AI as some roundabout way to sell the labor of people that look like me to foreign governments is fucked up, you're an unethical monster, and that if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)

This aspect of it isn't getting talked about enough. These companies are presenting these things as fully-formed AI, while completely neglecting the people behind the scenes constantly cleaning it up so it doesn't devolve into chaos. All of the shortcomings and failures of this technology are being masked by the fact that there's actual people working round the clock pruning and curating it.

You know, humans, with actual human intelligence, without which these miraculous "artificial intelligence" tools would not work as they seem to.

If the "AI' needs a human support team to keep it "intelligent", it's less AI and more a really fancy kind of puppet.

Hacker News was silencing this article outright. That's typically a sign that its factual enough to strike a nerve with the potential CxO libertarian [slur removed] crowd.

If this is satire, I don't see it. Because i've seen enough of the GenAI crowd openly undermine society/the environment/the culture and be brazen about it; violence is a perfectly normal response.

I will learn enough judo to throw you into the sun

best line

I work in AI as a software engineer. Many of my peers have PhD's, and have sunk a lot of research into their field. I know probably more than the average techie, but in the grand scheme of things I know fuck all. Hell, if you were to ask the scientists I work with if they "know AI" they'll probably just say "yeah, a little".

Working in AI has exposed me to so much bullshit, whether it's job offers for obvious scams that'll never work, or for "visionaries" that work for consultancies that know as little about AI as the next person, but market themselves as AI experts. One guy had the fucking cheek to send me a message on LinkedIn to say "I see you work in AI, I'm hosting a webinar, maybe you'll learn something".

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of cool stuff out there, and some companies are doing some legitimately cool stuff, but the actual use-cases for these tools where they won't just be productivity enhancers/tools is low at best. I fully support this guy's efforts to piledrive people, and will gladly lend him my sword.

I feel like some people in this thread are overlooking the tongue in cheek nature of this humour post and taking it weirdly personally

This is such a fun and insightful piece. Unfortunately, the people who really need to read it never will.

Oh my god this whole post is amazing, thought I'd share my favorite excerpt:

This entire class of person is, to put it simply, abhorrent to right-thinking people. They're an embarrassment to people that are actually making advances in the field, a disgrace to people that know how to sensibly use technology to improve the world, and are also a bunch of tedious know-nothing bastards that should be thrown into Thought Leader Jail until they've learned their lesson, a prison I'm fundraising for. Every morning, a figure in a dark hood7, whose voice rasps like the etching of a tombstone, spends sixty minutes giving a TedX talk to the jailed managers about how the institution is revolutionizing corporal punishment, and then reveals that the innovation is, as it has been every day, kicking you in the stomach very hard.

Where the fuck do I donate???????

I've been a professional data scientist for 5+ years and I'm okay at my job. Good enough to get 3 different jobs at non FAANG companies and I have already 3 or so hype trains and name changes of what words we use for the same tools and techniques. This AI hype is going to be another one of these with a few niche cases.

Most of my job is insisting on doing something correctly and then being told that doesn't give the "correct" response based on leadership expectations. I just change what I do until I get the results that people want to see. I'll just ride this hype wave out here for a few years here learning nothing new again. I'll find another job based on my experience and requirements gathering to start the cycle again. Maybe I'll get more data engineering skills which are actually valid

Best AI rant hands-down. I can agree with every word there.

Hey, we can always say: how can you check if an AI is working, it doesn't come to the office? 🤔

We need AI because it's convenient to blame for any problems.

Using satire to convey a known truth some already understand implicitly, some don't want to acknowledge, some refuse it outright, but when you think about it, we've always known how true it is. It's tongue-in-cheek but it's necessary in order to convince all these AI-washing fuckheads what a gimmick it is to really be making sweeping statements about a chatbot that still can't spell lollipop backwards.

This gets a vote from me for "Best of the Internet 2024", brilliant pacing, super braced, and with precision bluntness. I'm going to pretend the Monero remark is not even there, that's how good it was.

you know what, yes, I love this energy and I want more of it. This is how brave people should talk to management, but it's how everyone should talk to AI hucksters.

After reading that entire post, I wish I had used AI to summarize it.

I am not in the equally unserious camp that generative AI does not have the potential to drastically change the world. It clearly does. When I saw the early demos of GPT-2, while I was still at university, I was half-convinced that they were faked somehow. I remember being wrong about that, and that is why I'm no longer as confident that I know what's going on.

This pull quote feels like it’s antithetical to their entire argument and makes me feel like all they’re doing is whinging about the fact that people who don’t know what they’re talking about have loud voices. Which has always been true and has little to do with AI.