Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Tech stonks continuing to crater š«§ š«§ š«§
Iām sorry for your 401Ks, but Iād pay any price to watch these fuckers lose.
spoiler
(mods let me know if this aint it)
ā¦why do I get the feeling the AI bubble just popped
So I enjoy the Garbage Day newsletter, but this episode of Panic World with Casey Newton is just painful, in the way that Casey is just spitting out unproven assertions.
Got to a point in this where Casey Newton enumerated his āonly two sidesā of AI and well, fuck Casey Newton.
Was he the one who wrote that awful āreal and dangerous vs fake and sucksā piece? The one that pretended that critihype was actually less common than actual questions about utility and value?
Yeah, and a lot of the answers he gave seemed to originate from that point.
One particularly grating thing was saying that the left needs to embrace AI to fight facism because āfacism embraced AI and they are doing well!ā which is just so grating a conclusion to jump to.
New-ish thread from Baldur Bjarnason:
Wrote this back on the mansplainiverse (mastodon):
Itās understandable that coders feel conflicted about LLMs even if you assume the tech works as promised, because theyāve just changed jobs from thoughtful problem-solving to babysitting
In the long run, a babysitter gets paid much less an expert
What people donāt get is that when it comes to LLMs and software dev, critics like me are the optimists. The future where copilots and coding agents work as promised for programming is one where software development ceases to be a career. This is not the kind of automation that increases employment
A future where the fundamental issues with LLMs lead them to cause more problems than they solve, resulting in much of it being rolled back after the āAIā financial bubble pops, is the least bad future for dev as a career. Itās the one future where that career still exists
Because monitoring automation is a low-wage activity and an industry dominated by that kind of automation requires much much fewer workers that are all paid much much less than one thatās fundamentally built on expertise.
Anyways, hereās my sidenote:
To continue a train of thought Baldur indirectly started, the rise of LLMs and their impact on coding is likely gonna wipe a significant amount of prestige off of software dev as a profession, no matter how it shakes out:
- If LLMs worked as advertised, then theyād effectively kill software dev as a profession as Baldur noted, wiping out whatever prestige it had in the process
- If LLMs didnāt work as advertised, then software dev as a profession gets a massive amount of egg on its face as AIās widespread costs on artists, the environment, etcetera end up being all for nothing.
This is classic labor busting. If the relatively expensive, hard-to-train and hard-to-recruit software engineers can be replaced by cheaper labor, of course employers will do so.
I feel like this primarily will end up creating opportunities in the blackhat and greyhat spaces as LLM-generated software and configurations open and replicate vulnerabilities and insecure design patterns while simultaneously creating a wider class of unemployed or underemployed ex-developers with the skills to exploit them.
NASB: Ed Zitronās made wealthsimpleās newsletter in Canada, and got compared to Kendrick Lamar in the process.
Gotta say, it feels kinda funny to see a comparison I made a while ago (if semi-jokingly) pop up again.
A hackernews doesnāt think that LLMs will replace software engineers, but they will replace structural engineers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43317725
The irony is that most structural engineers are actually de jure professionals, and an easy way for them to both protect their jobs and ensure future buildings donāt crumble to dust or are constructed without sprinkler systems is to simply ban LLMs from being used. No such protection exists for software engineers.
Edit the LW post under discussion makes a ton of good points, to the level of being worthy of posting to this forum, and then nails its colors to the mast with this idiocy
At some unknown point ā probably in 2030s, possibly tomorrow (but likely not tomorrow) ā someone will figure out a different approach to AI. Maybe a slight tweak to the LLM architecture, maybe a completely novel neurosymbolic approach. Maybe it will happen in a major AGI lab, maybe in some new startup. By default, everyone will die in <1 year after that.
Gotta reaffirm the dogma!
but A LOT of engineering has a very very real existential threat. Think about designing buildings. You basically just need to know a lot of rules / tables and how things interact to know whatās possible and the best practices
days since orangeposter (incorrectly) argued in certainty from 3 seconds of thought as to what they think is involved in a process:
[]itās so fucking frustrating to know easy this bullshit is to see if you know a slight bit of anything, and doubly frustrating as to how much of the software world is this thinking. I know itās nothing particularly new and that our industry has been doing this for years, but scream
You basically just need to know a lot of rules / tables and how things interact to know whatās possible and the best practices
And to be a programmer you basically just need to know a lot of languages / libraries and how things interact, really easy, barely an inconvenience.
The actual irony is that this is more true than for any other engineering profession since programmers uniquely are not held to any standards whatsoever, so you can have both skilled engineeres and complete buffoons coexist, often within the same office. There should be a Programmersā Guild or something where the experienced master would just slap you and throw you out if you tried something idiotic like using LLMs for code generation.
Huggingface cofounder pushes against LLM hype, really softly. Not especially worth reading except to wonder if high profile skepticism pieces indicate a vibe shift that canāt come soon enough. On the plus side itās kind of short.
The gist is that you canāt go from a text synthesizer to superintelligence, framed as how a straight-A student thatās really good at learning the curriculum at the teacherās direction canāt really be extrapolated to an Einstein type think-outside-the-box genius.
The world āhallucinationā never appears once in the text.
I actually like the argument here, and itās nice to see it framed in a new way that might avoid tripping the sneer detectors on people inside or on the edges of the bubble. Itās like Iāve said several times here, machine learning and AI are legitimately very good at pattern recognition and reproduction, to the point where a lot of the problems (including the confabulations of LLMs) are based on identifying and reproducing the wrong pattern from the training data set rather than whatever aspect of the real world it was expected to derive from that data. But even granting that, thereās a whole world of cognitive processes that can be imitated but not replicated by a pattern-reproducer. Given the industrial model of education weāve introduced, a straight-A student is largely a really good pattern-reproducer, better than any extant LLM, while the sort of work that pushes the boundaries of science forward relies on entirely different processes.
Nothing says āthese people needed more shoving into lockersā than HPMoR 10th anniversary parties.
These chumps are a disgrace to Harry Potter fans, and I say that in full knowledge of how embarrassing Harry Potter fans can be!!!
While not exactly celebration worthy and certainly not worth a tenth anniversary celebration, you could argue HPMoR finally coming to a fucking end by whatever means was a somewhat happy occasion.
So did the series actually end or did it just sort of stop?
It had an actual ending. Not a satisfying one, even by the standards of the rest of the fic, and I remember finding the treatment of Hermione kinda distasteful, but it wasnāt even close to the worst part of the entire story. 3/10.
the author decided to stop publishing texts but instead
lecturetiradepreach unto the thronging youths directlyin person itās easier to do sketchy shit that wonāt immediately get caught by a wider audience, you see?
that was my first read, yeahā¦ and then I realized thatās probably not what the poster meant
Also disturbing that OPās chosen handleāScrewtapeāis that of a fictional demon, Senior tempter. A bit Ć -propos.
are we really clutching our pearls because someone named themselves after a demon
I wouldnāt say pearl-clutching as much as eye-rolling. Though we do dip into full BEC mode sometimes and the stubsack in particular can swing wildly between moral condemnation, intellectual critique, and calling out straight-up cringe.
Iād assume that is very intentional, nominative determinism is one of those things a lot of LW style people like. (Scott Alexander being a big one, which has some really iffy implications (which I fully think is a coincidence btw)).
