A couple years back, I think I would have bent over backwards to defend the maintainers. It is a gruelling and thankless effort to maintain any open source project, let alone one as established as rsync. I guess I just don't see AI being a net positive anywhere, and I have to see this backlash to using gen AI as a good course correction from the general populous.
There are other posts talking about the instant gratification of LLM use and the more I have to interact with people using the tools, I think this may truly be the problem. Our biology can't handle it. I see otherwise very smart people do really really stupid things because the slot machine told them, but it has even trained them to be helpless when the slot machine fails them.
I'm being seen as a Luddite, blind to the advancement, and then I see colleagues writing benchmarks that make no sense but have beautiful graphs made with AI. Then I basically have to choose to smile at them and pretend it's good work or scold them for not seeing that the bench is testing an interval baked in as a constant so it's moot. Both options are treating them like they are 7 years old, not intelligent colleagues.
I'm with you. I don't understand why it affects some people more than others. To me, using AI triggered my sense for drugs and addiction after a while: when your first association for an engineering product is "it feels _great_!" then run, it's just cocaine with extra components.
A tool should not make you feel good, just accomplish the task.
It is honestly offensive to me that this isn't plainly obvious to everyone. AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. It has always been, and always will be, about wealth consolidation and control. Does anyone think it is coincidence that now local models are more useful the market has suddenly made it massively more expensive to buy your own hardware? Companies are just giving up making consumer hardware because they can can just focus on hyper-scalers. They want to control compute as well, there is no liberating aspect to any of this.
Businesses, especially tech ones, are not altruistic. The idea that tech companies are out to make anyone's life better is a joke and a sentiment that should have died decades ago. The evidence is of predatory business practices and leveraging the worst aspects of our brain chemistry to keep us hooked on apps that make us less happy, keep us stupid and less informed, and buying more.
Even more confusing are the people who are welcoming AI with open arms as just another skill to learn, _surely_ they'll be the ones who come out on top, right? It has all the stink of the countless Americans believing they too will become billionaires and everyone else are just suckers as they are all one healthcare problem away from bankruptcy.
> AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. It has always been, and always will be, about wealth consolidation and control.
I think here it's useful to separate "AI" as sold and marketed today from "AI" as a CS discipline, a field of study, and a category of tools and techniques.
The field of Artificial Intelligence has always been, at least for the majority of people in it, about improving things for real people.
The LLMs that have garnered huge valuations and an outsized share of everyone's attention in recent years started as part of that field, and grew out of its research and technological advances.
But once companies started seeing how they could monetise it, that's when it started being about wealth consolidation and control.
>AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human.
You don't know that. And this same line could be said about any technology that results in accruing of capital, but actually does end up making life better for the average human.
What if AI at AlphaFold finds a cure for Alzheimer's disease? What if it finds a way to actually perfect fusion?
You can't tell me we don't live better lives than people 100 years ago right now, and that is because of technology.
I am okay with Alzheimer's not being cured if it means we are not bending over backwards to welcome a billionaire overlord class. I don't think Altman or Amodei give a fuck about Alzheimer's unless a cure gives them a reason to obtain more investments. You could say that is the system working, but as a member of said system, it feels pretty shit.
> It is cold for me to not want to concede everything to billionaires to cure a disease?
"Concede everything" is way too vague to argue against, but I'd be more than happy if whoever is behind the tech to cure a horrible disease like Alzheimer's is made filthy rich for it.
> It is cold for me to not want to concede everything to billionaires to cure a disease?
That's a fallacy. You're assuming we all agree that this is going to happen. I don't agree. And I think AI will drive a huge amount of innovation that is going to make almost everyones lives better.
Billionaires? We're basically talking about the first 10 trillionaire, Elon Musk, and the inauguration of the supervillain category. He'll hold a majority stake in his soon to be Skynet empire SpaceXAI+Tesla. Which means he'll put lasers in space to control access, as he needs to prevent the Kessler syndrom, as that's the only way to take him down. So he'll want repressive governments. He'll give them the mark of the beast to solve their problem, those pesky humans need to behave better, and it'll be dandy like an iPhone was, progress! The other billionaires? He can darth vader them at will. We're seeing the coup first hand and we're blind to it. No government can wipe him out, as his empire stretches into the universe.
This is the new old way. This was fine before irresponsible use of AI. Between vibe coding and using AI to find vulnerabilities as a result of vibes, I'm afraid that we will have to find ways to have more controlled environments.
It seems likely that some companies where the trade off shifts will head in that direction.
The problem with controlled environments is that even when done sensibly by people with good intentions they do slow things down and a lot of orgs will decide the trade off isn’t worth that.
I’ve worked for companies that did have much more controlled environments but given everything is made of a thousand packages these days and those packages have CVE’s and you do need to patch doing it after the fact is a recipe for paralysis.
Low cost to entry, easy to get scale from the beginning if you need it. The large cloud providers throw free credit at startups to lock them in all the time. I had a short lived stint trying to get my own startup off the ground and it was really easy to get free compute from Google with no strings attached. This was many years ago now, but I would be surprised if it is any different.
I am with you entirely and would not have taken that route today, but it is really easy to see why people go that route.
> Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI.
The goal posts are being moved, yet again, as the reality of generative AI's usefulness starts to narrow. I think most "anti-AI" devs wanted the technology to be supplemental in the first place, in the hands of responsible engineers. The hype riders are the ones who are saying our job is over.
> reducing the cost
The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.
As a more emotions based response to your post: I find it pretty gross that we are ready to accept that this tech should be used in art whatsoever. I think saying this is a barrier-to-entry-lowering tech is a misnomer, because even those who use computers still need to understand the program, mechanics must understand the function and implications of a torque wrench; there is no effort or skill involved with generating slop, you always get a result. Additionally, the first part of your post was to argue that we should be using these tools to do narrow scoped tooling and one-off script, and then you moved to generating videos and music, which shows that you aren't even aware of the "scope" involved in those efforts.
> The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.
Maybe, but compare the monthly cost of a ChatGPT subscription to the cost of a face to face CS education, the cost of a dev machine, the cost of spending your time building the software that you want. The subscription easily wins. And yes, yes, overtime the sub is more expensive but the point is that your average layman is not going to front five figure amounts in costs in something like this just like most people don't buy a gym's worth of fitness equipment, they instead go to their local gym and pay monthly. Now think of all the things LLMs cover even if unreliable and low quality and you can see why the fast-food/fast-fashion era of software is upon us. People won't be experiencing the software equivalent of Michelin rate restaurant food or wearing Gucci but they will certainly be having their needs met in a way that they didn't use to before.
This post is delusional. There nothing liberating about generative AI and folks aren't investing hundreds of billions because they think it will liberate people.
There are other posts talking about the instant gratification of LLM use and the more I have to interact with people using the tools, I think this may truly be the problem. Our biology can't handle it. I see otherwise very smart people do really really stupid things because the slot machine told them, but it has even trained them to be helpless when the slot machine fails them.
I'm being seen as a Luddite, blind to the advancement, and then I see colleagues writing benchmarks that make no sense but have beautiful graphs made with AI. Then I basically have to choose to smile at them and pretend it's good work or scold them for not seeing that the bench is testing an interval baked in as a constant so it's moot. Both options are treating them like they are 7 years old, not intelligent colleagues.
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