BlueMonday1984

...why do I get the feeling the AI bubble just popped

NASB: Ed Zitron's made wealthsimple's 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.

I could elaborate upon that observation with an analogy to Masto reply guys and FOSS culture at large.

Please do, I wanna see FOSS get raked over the coals

New-ish thread from Baldur Bjarnason:

Wrote this back on the mansplainiverse (mastodon):

It's understandable that coders feel conflicted about LLMs even if you assume the tech works as promised, because they've just changed jobs from thoughtful problem-solving to babysitting

In the long run, a babysitter gets paid much less an expert

What people don't 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 "AI" financial bubble pops, is the least bad future for dev as a career. It's 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 that's fundamentally built on expertise.

Anyways, here's 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 they'd effectively kill software dev as a profession as Baldur noted, wiping out whatever prestige it had in the process
• If LLMs didn't work as advertised, then software dev as a profession gets a massive amount of egg on its face as AI's widespread costs on artists, the environment, etcetera end up being all for nothing.

To sorta repeat a prediction of mine, shit like this is gonna tank the public image of coding as a profession.

Inevitable software issues aside, "vibe coding" as a concept undermines any notion of coding as being a difficult/skillful thing, making it sound like coders are doing the equivalent of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. That the software produced by this method is inevitably derivative, dogshit or derivative dogshit is gonna help damage coding's image, too.

New piece from Brian Merchant: So the LA Times replaced me with an AI that defends the KKK

Recommending a piece I ran across: I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

This is pure gut instinct, but I suspect this is gonna prompt an uptick in Google crawlers getting blocked. Mainly because Google just removed any real reason for people not to block them.

New thread from Ed Zitron, focusing on the general trashfire that is CoreWeave. Jumping straight to the money-shot, he noted how the company is losing money selling shovels in the gold rush:

You want my off-the-cuff prediction, CoreWeave will probably be treated as the Leyman Brothers of the 2020s, an unofficial mascot of everything wrong with Wall Street (if not the world) during the AI bubble.

Hey, we're an island nation which ruled over a globe-spanning empire, we had a damn good reason to be obsessed with boats.

Couldn't exactly commit atrocities on a worldwide scale without 'em, after all.

In other news, a piece from Paris Marx came to my attention, titled "We need an international alliance against the US and its tech industry". Personally gonna point to a specific paragraph which caught my eye:

The only country to effectively challenge [US] dominance is China, in large part because it rejected US assertions about the internet. The Great Firewall, often solely pegged as an act of censorship, was an important economic policy to protect local competitors until they could reach the scale and develop the technical foundations to properly compete with their American peers. In other industries, it’s long been recognized that trade barriers were an important tool — such that a declining United States is now bringing in its own with the view they’re essential to projects its tech companies and other industries.

I will say, it does strike me as telling that Paris was able to present the unofficial mascot of Chinese censorship this way without getting any backlash.