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 thisā¦)
Shopify going all in on AI, apparently, and the CEO is having a proper born-again moment. Donāt have a source more concrete than this yet:
https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114298302252798365
(and transcript: https://infosec.exchange/@barubary/114298367285112648)
Itās a lot like this:
Extreme sent at 4am energy.
That text is painful to read (I wonder how much of it is slop)ā¦ ugh, what is chatgpt doing to the brains of people? (And Iāve had the bad luck of reading some pretty unhinged pro-AI stuff from management at my employer too, although not as bad as this mail from shopify).
Is there a precedent for this hype? For the extent of damage that it will cause? Most tech industry hype is a waste of resources, but otherwise mostly harmless. Like that time when everyone believed that XML is the holy grail, that was silly, and although we still have to deal with some unfortunate data formats from those days, it passed. There were worse ones, most notably blockchain was almost catastrophic, but most companies hesitated to go all-in and pursued it more on the side, so when that hype faded, they simply buried their involvement and that was that.
But āAIāā¦ it has such potential to create significant and long term damage to the companies adopting it. The slop code alone might haunt them forever, in ways that even the worst excesses of 90s enterprise java couldnāt. Thereās nothing to learn from resulting failure, except ādonāt use AIā.
In this case, given shopifyās general behaviour, I wonāt be sad at all though if they crash and fail.
I also thought āguess LLMs dont work as an editorā.
And blockchains did massive damage, all the ransomware crime would be impossible if the tech world had not jumped into blockchain as much as they did and created and kept maintaining the ecosystem. (It also caused the techbro people who now pivot to AI rise, so it is connected). Note that the damage done by BEC is still greater than ransomware, so not cybersecurity advice.
But I get your point, I think a real example would be facebooks pivot to video. Which destroyed companies.
Yes, thatās true. Indirectly it costs them all dearly with ransomware. Likewise, I think the overall damage that AI will do to society as a whole will be much, much greater than just rotting some tech companies from the inside (most of which I wouldnāt be sad anyway if they went awayā¦).
What I meant is that with blockchain the big tech companies at least didnāt willingly destroy their products, their processes, their decision making etc. I.e. they didnāt put blockchain into absolutely everything, all the way to MS Notepad. What I find staggering about this hype is the depth of the delusion, the willingness to not just experiment with it but really go all-in.
blockchain targeted libertarian post-goldbug pro-cyberpunk-dystopia fuckheads, llms target management types (you will replace workers with machines!), maybe thatās why
yeah, no I agree that blockchain is a bad example, just think we shouldnāt understate the massive damage that has done. Not just in actually damaged systems but also just in additional cost that now everybody has to worry about this. Same as how AI is not just causing climate change problems by running it, but the scraping as well has increased the cost of running a webserver by 50% in load alone. (which on a global scale is just horrid). And then there is the forcing of it in everything, the burning of the boats.