These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
AI as a tech is fine. But disliking it and the social/economic effects around it is fine too, people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations.
To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.
There's a normative argument in the parent that's reasonable to engage and rebut, but there's also a positive component that's less easy to take issue with. It really isn't going anywhere, no matter what world you want to live in. People were upset about databases in the 1980s (some still are).
What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.
Short of societal collapse, there's no way the technology is going to go away or fade out of existence (unless it's replaced by something even better), that's just not how technological progress works. It's useful, probably in ways we haven't even thought of yet.
I don't get it, why would operating a datacenter needs massive amount of high skilled blue-collar labor. Datacenters are resource hungry. With so much automation in place I don't think there would be a need for large pool of labor.
You seem to suppose the building of those datacenters - even the power plants behind them - won't soon be automated. Almost as if robotics isn't happening.
They stopped being used as primary weapons because better ones were found - mostly firearms - not because people got bored of it; or reverted to some earlier methods of warfare.
Yes, there is the general class of technologies (warfare, computing ...) and there are particular instances of those for a given time and space and evolve as the landscape changes.
The technology of warfare evolved to better mechanisms, perhaps same with computing.
Bows and arrows are still widely used for hunting all over the world. I was able do freelance work on a relatively low income because of access to ~150lbs of deer meat that came from multiple bow-hunted deer.
This is an interesting question that I haven't thought about, thanks.
What we currently have is a simulacrum of thought - albeit a good one.
Any technology is useful only in the sense that it helps us with solving the problems we are dealing with in that time. When we face issues that a pseudo-thought is not useful in tackling or worse is one of the causes - this will recede in the background.
Beyond that, the implicit assumption in the question is that thinking is the highest form of activity that is useful to us.
I don't know how my thoughts arise but thinking happens when I engage with them. I think what we look for is meaning in our lives and thinking helps us generate/achieve one, whether real or illusory.
I don't know about you, but I can buy bows and arrows at hundreds of sporting goods stores in my local area alone, and I even know of 2 local blacksmith shops that sell swords.
Castles still exist as well, you just aren't invited to them (which was true for us peasants back in the day, too). Trump is still trying to get one built under the ruins of the East Wing, in fact.
But are these actually completely different technologies, and if so, where is the dividing line? Firearms certainly have not decreased in significance, and they're the modern version of a bow, which is simply 2 iterations later in propulsion methods: tensioned string -> high-tension cable -> high-pressure gas.
Are LLMs really going to fall off in significance, or will it just be the nth newest incarnation of LLMs?
The function of what an LLM does (generative language) is what people seem to take issue with, but the function is here to stay, even if the next iteration has a different name or method.
The difference is in what other enabling technologies do you need to achieve it. Advanced technologies sit on a pyramid. One can build a bow and an arrow from sticks, string and rock. For reliable firearm we need chemistry and advanced metallurgy.
My view wasn't whether generative language is here to stay or not but rather will it continue to be a significant thing or not.
The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business.
Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.)
The tech isn't going anywhere. Is there a path to a sustainable business model that uses that tech?
You may have an answer to that question. Can you prove it to someone who doesn't already agree with your answer?
Juicero wasn't useful therefore it went away. Generative AI is useful therefore it won't go away, just like how fire is kMy old yet it's still here to stay.
Juicero had customers that thought it was useful. Both "smoothie juicers" and "smoothie subscriptions" were big product categories equally before and after Juicero tried to unite them with a technological middleman. Kuerig, the Juicero of coffee, remains quite active and profitable (and wasteful).
There are likely _many_ paths to sustainable business models based on AI tech, that will come to fruition over the next decades. However whether they might not be as profitable as OpenAI and Anthropic are gambling on, is more uncertain.
In the same way that any technology could just magically disappear, sure.
But I hear everyday, non-IT-sector people talking constantly about how they're using it, and that means there's a demand for it, and someone is going to supply it. I think a lot of anti-AI people think it's still equivalent to the PDA, and don't realize it's a smartphone already.
The other side is that "AI" is of course very very broad and isn't new, and e.g. medical vision models are making advancements that are having huge impacts on patient care already, especially around early cancer detection. Those aren't going away (and shouldn't), so there's still going to be a demand for the underlying technology and infrastructure to support it, even if LLMs stop being spammed everywhere.
The other thing which people seem not to understand is that you don't need a whole datacenter to RUN individual LLMs, you need it to train them, or to run them at scale for thousands of customers. A lot of the upper-mid-tier models that exist now can be run on a single (beefy) 4U server in your closet if you've got the GPUs to put in it. And people are running e.g. Deepseek V4 Pro FP4 locally. If you've got an actual server room, like at a university, you can run the full, un-quantized versions with ~2-4 servers.
Technology that is living in peoples' homes and businesses already is not going to just disappear. It's a lot less centralized than the market prevalence of OpenAI and Anthropic would lead you to believe.
I think this disconnect is based on the ambiguity in the term "AI".
"AI" as tech - the models, how to train them, etc. Isn't going to go anywhere short of a Library-of-Alexandria-type catastrophe. We know how to do it and it's useful, so why would we forget?
However, "AI" as the thing that is enveloping our culture - the slop everywhere, the mandates to use it at work regardless of its usefulness, the constant talk about it being the future, the machine-dominated future that's been promised/threatened by the heads of the labs - we do still have a chance to put that onto the scrapheap.
The old gods lost their power because they had been conquered by the Spirit of Christ.
It's a danger to beware of, that people might start to listen to LLMs like they have the gospel truth on morality and spiritual matters. But they're just an image of a man given breath and speech, without true wisdom. Man took sand and copper and formed the simulation of a mind. If we then bow down to it and obey it, we're fools.
It makes tremendous sense - when understand as reflexive straw-clutching and wish-thinking aimed at reducing the frequency of the poster's nightmares and reducing their diaper expense.
Sweden had from 1973-1998 a law that made it illegal to have a computer database of personal information without getting approval from the government (in 1982 it was opened up so that approval was only needed for "sensitive" information).
Looking back getting rid of that may have been a mistake.
AI is here to stay, I don't want it anywhere near the art, literature, and music I enjoy, not least because part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge it had a very human creator. That should be perfectly achievable.
People forget that a lot; my father came home end 70s explaining his life was over because databases, mid 80s because code could now be synthesised from models (with 'AI') that domain experts write; the latter went on a bit in different forms until now where it is becoming reality for things that were not very hard before anyway or in the hands of people who use it as one of their tools (antirez comes to mind), not as 'english programming'. The absolute crap (ads, tracking, no responsibility because computer says no etc) my generation built is, in my eyes, not really positive without something to counter it. Many positive things are there, but many things 'we' started and made normal must be ring-fenced and controlled as they are negative to an absolute sometimes. The current AI is hard to see; I am building things with it I could have never built on my own (and I have been programming since the 70s) as programmer, tech lead or cto, 1000s of projects over the decades, some tiny, some huge. I could build complex things but they took time, now they take time but only a fraction. But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience. I will keep on happily hacking anyway until I die.
> But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience
people are doing this inside companies as well; stupid animations generated by ai posted in slack, powerpoint slides with super detailed drawings and images of ai generated "user experiences" where a couple of text boxes would have been fine, etc etc
The widespread criticism isn't based on "the tech not going away eventually". All of that is a red herring, a response to something nobody (mainstream) is talking about.
Crypto bros said the same thing about NFT’s and ICO’s and whatever other nonsense they were pushing. And to some extent, they were right, I guess, in that these things still exist. But they’re practically irrelevant.
There's plenty of things that are ubiquitous but not well-liked, so I don't see how "it's not going away, get over it" works as an argument. Many people won't be getting over it. Traffic jams are here to stay but I'm never delighted to be in one.
Outside the tech bubble, a significant proportion of the population is using AI, but in all surveys, it's hugely disliked. It's probably due to social anxieties that in big part trace back to how AI tech companies do marketing. If you have billboards that say "don't hire humans" and Gates and Altman talking about how most jobs are going away, what do you expect? People are not gonna be optimistic even if they secretly enjoy asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.
I think that AI is less analogous to "traffic jams" and more analogous to "wheel-based transportation". It's an entire category, not a specific problem. The traffic jam is more analogous to excessive energy consumption or workforce disruption.
Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI.
> Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI.
its because "ai" means whatever the marketing dept decides it is... we've had all kinds of 'ai' in the past its just they enabled features based on some intelligent logic not just llms.
right now llms are being shoved into everything whether its a good fit or not; so it makes for additional noise...
Some people say that we cannot solve catastrophic climate change. And then some other people claim that those are anti-solving the problem. Indeed the climate change problem is massive and it is incredibly, incredibly difficult to solve given the kind of world that we have engineered for ourselves. By contrast it wouldn’t be a problem at all to magically wipe the wonders of AI since that only happened three years ago, or last month, or last December, or whatever the current inflection point is or was deemed to be.
So I don’t really buy the inevitability of technological progress in a world where infinite progress and growth have turned out to be false. Especially with the strange dichotomy of this being so apparently obvious, as commonly stated, juxtaposed with the horde of people that point this out to us on the daily.
Tangentially, I expect both this Pandora’s Box narrative to continue and narratives about how the good times for commoners are over and they need to learn some real life skills like foraging for their own food. Just as a sort of emergent narrative development.
Germany shut down all their nuclear power plants. The Amish don't use tractors or whatever. I guess we could have AI free countries. The last bastions of true humanity or something.
I would not recommend that people "suck it up", but I think people have to come to terms with the fact that AI is a legitimate technology that is going to transform the way people live and work. That is just a fact of life, as surely true about AI as it was true about the internet, or smart phones, or cars, or radio, or the train.
You can close your eyes and pretend that it is not coming, or you can organize politically to mitigate the damage it is going to do while harnessing the benefits of it. Because it absolutely _is_ going to harm a lot of individuals, even if the best case scenario of benefiting humanity as a whole comes to pass.
There is no possible universe where AI is banned, or it just fails and goes away as a technology. None. People have to just accept that and focus on realistic ways to regulate it and tax it, instead.
This is the central problem with the dismissals of the tech's capability. Public discourse needs to shift to planning for the economic impact in particular, but the kind of High Brazilism from the naysayers who insist it's a proof of psychosis to even mention AI's potential, makes the inertia in policymakers much easier for them to maintain. Waiting for the financial effects to arrive and then improvising policy is the stupidest way of handling an upheaval on this scale - even if the precise form of those shocks can't be anticipated.
There's a voluminous amount of code and documentation on how to build and run LLMs. You can build your own chatgpt literally in a weekend and run it on a home server, based on publicly available models.
If OpenAI and Anthropic literally evaporated overnight, there would still be Chinese labs training and releasing new models.
I'm sorry - but you're not going to ban AI no more than you can ban the transistor. You could limit & limit the potential of who uses it - but historically that seems to benefit the few rather than the many.
Banning doesn't mean the thing you ban disappears, you're stretching the definition quite a lot. The limit you're talking about is what a ban is. I would personally support a complete ban on AI technology impersonating humans. At no point would I expect that would completely get rid of the phenomenon. But it should be seen as extremely cringe and face meaningful push back, given how antisocial and antihuman that is.
I don't want to live in a society where privacy is a second class citizen, yet the prevailing sentiment seems to be "suck it up, we have to protect the children."
There are plenty of things not to like about society. What's funny about AI is that the inequality it brings is proportionally affecting white people, and thats got a lot of people discovering with great consternation that the world isn't fair.
>people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations.
All the white collar workers whining about AI didn't give a damn about the tens of millions of factory workers who lost their jobs to automation. Society doesn't owe them any more sympathy than they gave to the workers whose jobs they automated away.
> To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.
Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter. It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.
> It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.
No, it isn't. If you think it's "perfectly fine" to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole, not that AI is unimportant or whatever it is you're trying to imply.
Ignoring your rudeness, the word "legitimate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It would take me one second to present you with an issue that concerns me, that will make you say "suck it up" because you don't consider it a legit issue, and I would end up being the asshole in the exchange.
> It would take me one second to present you with an issue that concerns me
Does this hypothetical issue concern you AND the rest of society as a whole as well, or just you? Because there is a big difference between the two cases.
How many people do you require for it to be a legitmate concern? I can show you millions but you will disregard them anyway, because they all have wrong opinions.
I don't know where to draw the line entirely, it probably depends on a mixture of absolute numbers, relative numbers to the population involved in the discussion and the issue discussed. But it's clear that in this AI discussion case, telling "suck it up" to all the people complaining it's rude.
> Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter
Nah, it's just one with high relevance to a tech audience. We say similar things around here re ubiquitous surveillance tech, internet censorship by governments / payment processors, the effects of social media...
Things that actually matter have been teetering on the edge because of the simple fact that labor has been needed to make money and money is power. If AI takes away the last leverage of labor, then things that actually matter will collapse entirely.
Could you give an example of an issue we tell people to suck it up about? I'd like to think a reasonable society would hear the worries and complaints of everyone within it.
I think this attitude is part of the reason there's so much pushback. "it's here, it's staying, so shut up and like it".
You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.
Cars are useful but they ruin places. AI is useful and it ruins at lot of what it touches, too.
I own a car for occasional trips to the countryside and couldn't imagine using it anything like daily. I use AI plenty in my work and for finding information, and similarly don't want it in most of the rest of my life.
Your comparison just helped me understand how I feel about AI a little better. I too own a car but don't like driving, and don't like how my environment is shaped by what cars need. I use AI daily and I'm excited about it, but reshaping our whole world around it will make our lives worse.
It also gives me a better sense of what to do about it. It's not too late to stop the AI equivalent of how cars killed streetcars, vibrant communities, and literally children walking to school.
I, maybe naively, think if AI users and AI abstainers can actually talk about what it can do and what it shouldn't, we have a shot at making the world better, not worse.
The same thing happened when we transitioned from horse carriages to cars. I'm sure a lot of people were quite outraged. But aren't we glad it happened?
Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.
I actually think that's a great comparison but not for the reasons you're making it.
I live in NYC. When the automobile started to get popular the city saw it as the future and went to extreme lengths to accommodate it. Bulldozed houses, split neighborhoods in half to accommodate parkways and highways that formed our inevitable future. Turns out, cars don't scale. Eventually folks did push back and some of the proposed projects never happened[1] but we're still suffering the consequences the ones that did to this day.
Had there been more criticism and more discussion at the outset we might have avoided a lot of problems. I don't think the choice was "cars or horses", it was "how do we implement this new technology?". Trains and trams, it turns out, would have been better. But the automative industry was rich and powerful and persuaded cities to rip up their streetcar tracks. Many parallels to today's AI industry.
> “virtually everyone believed that the private car was the greatest invention since fire or the wheel. Public transportation seemed to be nothing more than a relic of the past.” Wide modern expressways, Moses believed, would save New York as a great city.
Heck no. The world would be a way better place with no personal automobiles. Trains, yes. Even trucks and buses, sure. Cars, nooooooooooo. Cars are among the most clearly net-negative inventions to come out of industrialization. They should be criticized and fought until finally defeated. Self-driving cars are a massive waste of human and physical resources to provide a solution that is still strictly worse than proper urbanism and transportation network design.
Absolutely not happy it happened. It would have been way way better for everyone if we replaced horse carriages with subways, trams, walking and biking. The fact that we chose cars was an enormous mistake currently costing people health and happiness in large swaths of the country. Indeed, over 40k people literally die each year. Your change of dying in a car is 0.5% over your lifetime. Your chance of a serious injury is ~30%.
It's so funny when technological progress guys encounter YIMBYs. They can't even perceive that somebody would have a criticism of the impact of a technology on one's lived environment. "But, history is one big game of Civilization, and we replaced the little horses with tanks? What do you mean you don't like it?"
Technology-brain is confusing because it's usually pretty well-educated people who presumably read. There are so many examples of technological adoption that has made our lives worse. Cars and social media are easy and widely obvious examples.
I don't think it's self-evident that we've gained by switching from horses to cars. For most of the trips one makes in their daily life, the ubiquity of cars just means that you now have to travel greater distances. Plus the environmental devastation that cars have wrought. Are we really better off?
I feel like there's this idea that progress is good because of economic output, but there's this much squishier and more subjective concept of how much a change impacts our satisfaction with life. I think cars have produced a lot of good in the world, but I also live in the US where we've paved so much of the world that people don't feel like being outside on their feet very much anymore. I think it's had some negative impacts on how we interact as humans.
I feel the same way about AI. Does it make me more productive? Sure. Does it make me suddenly hate the career I used to love? Definitely. Every day I'm told to move faster and to love this cool thing that takes away the math and low-level problem solving that I used to get so much enjoyment from and instead makes me a manager of a chatbot. Any attempt at moderation in the presence of upper management is met with clear threats to my job. Even better, my company (and so many others) are finding unlimited budgets for AI while putting off any sort of raises for the humans involved.
I’ll give you the brutal answer that many of you don’t want to hear.
None of you (including me) matter. The only thing that matters is the sovereignty and security of the nation. The people in power care a great deal about furthering this. All the billionaire’s sing to their tune for money does not exceed power.
Moreover - you are only of interest to the state to the extent you are productive. The moment you cease to be productive, it’s in the interest of the state to diminish your quality of life.
Therefore the state cares about output and progress - not about how you feel whilst progress continues on.
No. Or rather, I wish it happened very differently, and much slower. The rush to make every new city and development "car-friendly" had negative consequences that will last centuries. That's why my city isn't walkable and has awful public transportation, and biking is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention the insidious environmental and health effects!
Of course cars have their place in efficient modern transportation, but we would live in a much better world if their development and integration had been slower, more carefully considered, and more criticized.
Not exactly the correct example. Machines replaced horses, the tendency of the current crop of AI tends to replace humans and concentrate unseen control and power and around a small elite. I have nothing against AI as a technology but plenty of concerns about how it’s being used currently.
My wife is a former journalist and was beginning her career when the web began to take off. All the old editors and reporters in her industry blew off the Internet, blogs, and web publishing in general. They thought no one will ever quit buying papers, it was a staple of modern life! She tried to clue them in but hit a brick wall ever time. I feel like history is repeating.
I use AI regularly, where it works it works very well for me. I've helped two people now who are not developers get started putting things together using claudecode. Nothing earth shattering, some dashboards of stock prices and an html clickthrough to pick a college backed by a bunch of spreadsheets. They're having a ball and learning a lot.
I'm not fightning it, just learning where it works and where it doesn't and teaching others the same.
/I'm 50 and have been in tech professionally since i was 20 so have been around this block once or twice
Internet caused loss of jobs in journalism and also consolidation of power. There are few billionaire owners and that is it. Small independent journalism as such basically stopped to exist - it was replaced by basically hot takes. Low key institutional fact checking does not exist anymore, local news dont exist anymore.
So, it would be entirely correct for someone back then to hate the changes and say it will destroy most of journalism. Because it did.
>Internet caused loss of jobs in journalism and also consolidation of power.
This is completely false; compare reporting on the initiation of the Iraq war vs the recent Iran war. Before the internet the flow of information was more centralized and heavily controlled.
I think there's a difference between 'the flow of information' and 'journalism'. The journalism/newspaper industry is indisputably smaller than it was 20 years ago and the newspapers that are left are all being consolidated into huge corporations with little to no ties to local communities.
Before the internet there were competing regulatory and commercial and cultural forces keeping The News the news.
Decentralized uncontrolled flow can also be seen as free rein for select power players who can manipulate the system. It changes, but not necessarily positively, how media power consolidates. And without scrutiny or national corrective pressure, that consolidation of power creates a very different perceived media system than is experienced.
The combined Senate report on the 2016 election interference from Russia — anti-both sides, lying to both sides and claiming it was the other — should have triggered a strict and meaningful reaction. Now we are in a spot where our kids are being mainlined Al Jazeera and Russian Times propaganda filtered only through uninformed useful idiots in short form video while they do their makeup or emulate Joe Rogans podcast. It’s pay for play media, with no scrutiny, bothers make it easy to heat, juice, or manipulate chosen content, hosts, and themes.
Power consolidation at the local/national level prevented it at the global level. At the global level those power structures move around axes we can no longer even name in polite company, and have fully corrupted the political discourse.
yes i agree, but keep in mind they're not getting into coding. They don't have the time for that, they just want to get something to work for a need they have. These two aren't building control systems for a nuclear reactor so don't panic, they're just getting something to work for themselves. Even the most simple use case is very empowering for them.
Your wife is right. History is repeating itself. And not even for the first time.
Horse carriage drivers -> Cars
Print media -> Internet
Drafting -> CAD
Music -> Electronic music, DAWs
Film photography -> Digital
Traditional film special effects -> CGI
Hollywood nepotism -> YouTube / TikTok / Creator economy (there are more millionaire creators now than movie stars)
In each of these cases, there was a subset of people that did the previous thing that hated on the people doing the new thing. They had every opportunity to adapt, but chose not to. They thumb their nose at it as everyone else jumps on board.
This time around, it isn't just practitioners hating on it. The internet has enabled a bunch of cling-on performative folks that aren't even artists, engineers, etc. that love to dog pile onto the hate.
It's really funny because I've shot lots of films over the last few decades. When people criticize my AI films, I ask them what they've made. Not only will a lot of them proudly tell you they've never made anything, they'll then double down. They'll say that if they were to hypothetically make something (which they won't), it would be using the old tools and that I should be ashamed of myself for using AI. Despite the fact that I have years of experience using the tools they're describing to me.
I don't even get it. Not even putting in the effort to try, yet telling me that my enormous wealth of experience is wrong and that I'm unethical and my creative output is "worthless".
You give examples of transitions that happened, but you have made no argument about how those transitions made us better off. It is not self-evident that a change in technology is necessarily an improvement.
> but you have made no argument about how those transitions made us better off.
Are you kidding?
> Cars
I make weekend trips to the beach and mountains. I can have a nice big house and drive around the metro and visit all kinds of places. I take my family and my dogs with me.
> Internet
The best thing in the entire world. The highlight of my life. My career, my entertainment, how I met my wife. I don't know what you're on about.
> CAD
Pretty much all materials, mechanical, consumer, and industrial innovation. You're welcome.
> Electronic music, DAWs
Dude, most of my favorite music is this. Most of my favorite indie artists only exist because of this.
> Digital
I take so many photos. I wouldn't if it was stupid film. Memories are amazing.
> CGI
Jurassic Park.
Lord. Of. The. Rings.
I use CG in my films.
I wish I could wave a magic wand and wish all of you to a different earth. It's super annoying being around so many negative folks all the time.
Absolutely not. I'd take it on a case-by-case basis, but cars, the internet, and film CG at the very least are not purely improvements to the world.
Many cities, especially in the US but elsewhere too, have been effectively destroyed as places for people by changing to accommodate cars.
The internet democratized publishing and connected people like never before, including the cranks and nazis.
CGI: Star Wars prequels. Ian McKellen crying on a green screen set.
Heck as I sit here and type this out, I even have a take on DAWs and digital photos. DAWs have made for a lot of soulless music based on loops and samples instead of actual musicians playing. Digital photos have created an enormous mountain of images that we can only sort through with AI now; it's totally devalued any particular photograph to worthlessness.
> "Working my ass off as an IC who can't move up the gradient" -> "Principal Investigator, CEO, CTO, CMO, CRO of a 10-person team, captain of creation, actual Iron Man."
* Are you being compensated for all those roles you now do?
* If you do 5x does this mean you get more time for yourself or are you now busy 24/7 with more work?
* Extrapolate this all other "5x" IC, now you all are CEO CTO CMO CRO iron man. Now what?
Have you somehow sourced unsubsidized inference? Isn't all of this built on the false economy of a handful of very large vendors trying to capture you?
> The opportunity to climb the ladder is the strongest it has ever been.
I think what you're missing is that AI shows, more directly than most other technologies, the ladder you're climbing is made up of other people. Not everyone wants to get ahead that way.
Small business ownership/consulting. AI can't own a business because they're completely unaccountable. Even embodied AGI would never be given human property rights, because they can't be punished/held accountable by the law when their weights can be infinitely copied and reproduced anywhere (digital immortality).
...but one of your examples has had disastrous consequences. Sure cars prevailed but they have changed the climate and let to unfriendly development patterns. Likewise social media may make people less happy, less likely to couple etc. Novel tech solves problems but can create others. We can surely afford to move deliberately at least, particularly in education.
Hollywood nepotism -> YouTube / TikTok / Creator economy
Certainly seems like an apt comparison! Personally I think we should just ban AI if it’s going to primarily facilitate the production of slop-shit like TikTok.
And despite the touts insisting on how useful and amazing these tools are, I have yet to see anything of true value be produced. Slop-shit vomit factories indeed.
Tech people had a really good thing going for a lot of years. It peaked right after COVID when it seemed like anyone could get a job and a raise in tech by doing some interview practice and learning how to say the right things. Things even started getting weird for a while when this combined with remote work and being overemployed (multiple remote jobs) entered the common vernacular, even if it wasn’t common. When I interacted with college student software devs doing resume reviews and interview prep it was crazy how many had plans based on trends like getting a FAANG job to FIRE in 10 years, using a VPN to do a remote job while they secretly traveled the world, or doing overemployment with 3 jobs. Everyone had this idea that tech was the place to be for an easy job with low demands and high pay.
Only a few years later the situation has completely reversed. Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.
It’s natural to be frustrated with this sudden change. None of likes when our industries start changing in ways that reduce our leverage.
What’s unhealthy is reacting with denial or a belief that you’re going to stop the future by resisting it. There are a lot of anti-AI writings that reach the front page every week, but nearly all of them come from writers who pride themselves on not using AI. One of the highly upvoted posts yesterday was from someone who had only used a little AI in a free trial of a tool some time ago, but they were talking authoritatively as if they were an expert on these tools. These writers are just not good sources for anything other than feeding denial about the future.
> Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly
The barrier to entry was always low. You only need a book and a computing device that allows to run code you’ve edited. The rest is just technical skills, theoretical knowledge and practical experience (gained over time). What was always hard is systematic problem solving, which is a mindset thing. And LLM can’t help you there.
I don’t consider my talents unique. My only value as a developer was always problem solving. Anything else has been automated for ages.
> but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.
The barrier to entry to make slop is lower, but it's gotten much higher for developing the skill of programming. There was already an issue with a lack of mentorship and path for juniors when agile attempted to turn software engineers into assembly line workers, among other issues with the industry becoming hyper short-term focused.
Now you have educational barriers where students are competing with other students that are cheating with LLMs. There are psychological barriers with learned helplessness. The 100k lines of vibecoded slop produced hits a wall but they've gained no understanding of the code in the process or ability to make changes themselves. At the first job juniors and interns get they're being told not to take the time to learn and understand the problem they're working and instead they need to hit the LLM slot machine or risk getting fired.
I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op.
How about we start reasoning from here instead: Humans are here to stay. Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.
We still have hundreds of nuclear power plants worldwide! There have been some terrible accidents but overall the consequences of nuclear power are much less than fossil fuel electricity generation. And some people wish we hadn't nerfed our ability to build nuclear power plants through over-regulation.
Now of course we shouldn't completely deregulate nuclear power either. As in all things, the middle way.
In the mid-80s the world was estimated to have some 60000+, so 12000 is somewhat of an improvement. Ideally through arms control we could reduce this further, but that's no trivial undertaking.
That kind of inevitability rhetoric is a big reason why people dislike AI. It's an impressive technology sure, but impressive doesn't automatically mean operational. It's got serious issues with reliability today, and appealing to some possible future state is less rigorious engineering and more unfalsifiable magical thinking.
I like the example of the actors' unions in the 1960s, where instead of "fighting" television in the sense of demanding people stop using it, they fought by organizing to get ongoing residual payments whenever their work was repurposed for the new medium. You don't have to stop fighting, you just need to recognize what the real problem is.
The only entities that would make meaningful money from an ai version of this would be IP giants like Disney. Your average guy is not going to get rich off his microscopic amount of data used. Basically Spotify.
I think you read the analogy too narrowly. I too doubt whether micropayments are worth fighting for, but there are other outcomes for which we could and should work together. For example, data center effects on water and power usage are well-known negative externalities of AI industry that could be eliminated by requiring data centers to invest in mitigations. The government could buy large holdings of stock in AI companies and distribute dividends, just like the Alaska Permanent Fund. etc. etc. You can quibble with individual examples here, but the larger point is that there are productive ways of tackling this transition, old man yells at cloud is not one of them
Ok i actually agree with that. Imo the gov is going to have to print a lot of money to deal with the impacts of ai (covid was $5T), if we do it now that same dollar would go 10x further and the people would effectively be the largest owner of AI labs like Anthropic.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure idea.
AI is here to stay. It's getting better every day with no end in sight.
We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent)
We're maybe 3 years away from robots, they'll take over blue-collar jobs, anyone working manufacturing or in the trades will be fired.
This is what we keep being told.
So why would I bother adopting it? How will that help me whatsoever? I'm getting fired no matter what I do.
We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent)
FWIW the people saying this tend to be remarkably ignorant.
When we have AGI, we'll have self-driving cars. We aren't getting either in a year's time. The need for white-collar jobs in areas will shrink (not disappear), possibly to expand elsewhere.
This is the part the AI advocates don't seem to get. There's nothing to learn with AI: each new model is better then the last. Requires less input to achieve a workable result.
The advocacy has always felt like cope to me and you see it in the advertising and LinkedIn: "get ready for AI", "adapt your AI workflows" - it's all centered on saying "you need the skills for the new thing so you don't get left behind".
But I don't need the skills for the new thing, because it does things for me. And each new successive generation will do more. Any time I would've spent bolting together some AI workflow a couple of years ago was wiped out when Claude came along. People are talking about there very clever multi-agent workflows or whatever, but it's all just prompts into the same datacenters and then...wiped out when the next model can just do it.
The advocacy is well...an excuse. The product looks and feels like AI. It's not impressive when it's generated by AI. The user isn't going to improve or build a better one, because they don't work on training new AI models. And a new AI model of sufficient power will just wipe out whatever skills you obtained, and the thing which might be useful - understanding the AI output - you'll never learn because you aren't doing it.
You need to steer the AI effectively and assess its results, otherwise you just get nonsense. That takes real-world knowledge. In fact availability of AI makes knowledge skills more valuable, not less.
The amount of steering necessary is rapidly decreasing. You're looking at a way too small timeline if you think this will be sustainable, or you're hoping that LLMs will hit their peak very soon.
Eh, there’s definitely some value in understanding for yourself via experience which models are actually good for which use cases. The benchmarks are unreliable imo, and as I’ve interviewed developers who don’t really use AI, they say things like how they don’t think the (free versions of) copilot or ChatGPT (requests routed to their cheapest models) don’t seem very good. Totally out of touch with the capabilities of the leading models and harnesses.
I think the real argument is just staying employable. Companies are expecting faster and faster turnaround, and it’s simply becoming impossible to meet these deadlines with fully handwritten code. Even before outright mandates on AI usage. If you refuse to use AI, they’ll bring on someone who will, whether or not the quality drops, high quality code is not the primary goal of the business.
Dogshit, hideous vibe coded messes are launching daily and reaching 6-7+ figure ARRs while leaking customer data. Nobody cares in this environment.
If you’re a freelancer it’s even worse, the expectations are that producing a fully functional moderately complex app shouldn’t take a single person more than a couple months, and ideally one.
Expectation for a contractor coming into an enterprise codebase that’s been running for 11 years with a dozen+ internal devs and a mishmash of legacy and new tech -> they want you to implement a totally new feature which touches half a dozen systems in the app ready to demo in 6 weeks and launch to the public in 8.
As Jack T. Chick said, "No one can save you. We will all be eaten."[1] But isn't the real goal to be eaten first, so you can miss out on all that noisy screaming and awful mess?
Eschatons have a solid track record of never showing up when invited, so there's that.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Beanie babies are here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. The third reich is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Dogecoin is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Spiked hair is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Sears and Roebuck is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
That's completely meaningless. Of course everyone will be doing their best to try to be the one who is AI-augmented rather than AI-replaced, but the end effect is still a far more brutal job market. Not to mention the 2nd and 3rd order effects of massive unemployment.
Short-sighted. There exists substantial evidence we're barreling straight into a period of high-instability, in-part driven by technology and AI. The world in ten years will look very different from the one we live in today, in the worst ways possible. AI depends heavily on the stable capital environment of the 2010s, but even that is disappearing (e.g. look at the 30y yield), let alone incoming Western political instability and class divide. A ton of the spend in AI is circular, and one small breach in that circle can torpedo OpenAI or Anthropic's financial projections by so much that they start missing required payments for data centers (or worse, paychecks). The technology isn't going anywhere, but the meaningful ability to deploy it at an affordable price may be.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is DOA, and it's vanishing very rapidly. If you can't participate in a functioning society, fight them.
I think the Death Star is the most apt analogy so far. You can either help build and maintain it, or you can risk becoming one of its first test targets. In this analogy, the laser system has demonstrated to function at low power as of a few months ago, and some targets have already been destroyed successfully (i.e., layoffs). A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next.
At some level, I want to hand the keys to the business. Some developers are really yucky people to work with and I would like nothing more than to see a totally non-technical person run circles around them. I've given up on the notion that I can out-code the computer. I am leaning on taste, trust & customer sentiment as a career moat now. No one can hide behind bullshit technology arguments anymore. The business can instantly pierce that veil now.
It bothers me that this is just the "deal with it" and "get on the rocket ship if you are offered a seat" argument. These are the exact arguments of the CEOs that were booed and the article correctly interprets it as giving graduates no choice or agency.
Even if a technology is good like the German Maglev, it can ultimately find (almost no) buyers. AI tech isn't even good. It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone".
If you don't resist and learn real skills, you will be the first to be fired in maybe four years. The companies are using the current enthusiasts as useful idiots, and it is well known what happens to those after a revolution.
The graduates are well advised to wake up and see their real roles. You can fight them.
Of course these graduates have agency. So do the companies not employing them. Telling them to deal with it is well meant advice, not an attempt to coerce them into compliance. To be honest most likely nobody cares deeply if they take that advice or not.
To be frank I'm having a hard time already. I was already wanting to be out of tech as a job because after years of mental issues since 2020ish I've come to realise that remote working is a significant factor in that. Being in a company where all I hear day-in day-out when I do talk to people is “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, …” really isn't helping.
If GenAI continues unabated with current growth patterns, many of our (dev, writers, certain researchers, etc.) jobs will be gone, and we'll be fighting for table waiting and shelf stacking tasks before they are taken over by physically capable AI too. Maybe those of us avoiding the train and hoping to be made redundant before we leave [insert-industry-here] voluntarily because we can't stand being surrounded by it any more, will be ahead of the rest of you in already having one of those minimum wage jobs when you are desperately looking for one rather than having nothing :)
Or maybe there will be some room for some of us who want to do a job ourselves, rather than manage others (people or machines) that are doing the job. Unlikely, but you never know…
Remote working is an incredible privilege I'd today take a big big salary cut for. Instead I'm in an expensive city paying 8 dollars for coffee, whatever in rent, and dealing with congestion of people everywhere. Congestion of people everywhere is way more of a mental health hazard for me than being alone.
Point is, you lost me after complaining about remote work. It reminded me of what I lost forever. I could have been working from a rainforest or the beach, in a low cost of living area, instead of this nightmare.
> Point is, you lost me after complaining about remote work.
The/A point is, not everything works the same way for everyone.
> working from a rainforest or the beach
Would you really want to turn somewhere you enjoy into where you work. I at least go into the office so I have some work/home separation (though I'm effectively remote as the rest of the team I work with is usually elsewhere).
> Remote working is an incredible privilege I'd today take a big big salary cut for.
Actually working with people, not just occasionally seeing names and faces on a screen or in future largely interacting with mostly just this one odd individual called Claude, is something I'm seriously considering taking a massive pay cut⁰ for. AI isn't the reason, but it is the extra bale of hay that might finish me off in this respect.
I'm not even really a massive “people person”, I avoid town at busy times, avoid big cities aside from the occasional tourist trip, I'm not even happy in a pub if it gets too crowded, and really fear being centre of attention in more than a tiny group, etc. But connecting with remote people feels so fake sometimes, and I have to concentrate to care about them or even keep them in my head at all¹ once the mail is sent or the call is ended, that they might as well be LLMs.
--------
[0] at very least 50%, even allowing for differing tax allowances meaning I'd keep more of the gross pay
[1] which takes a draining amount of mental effort over time
I understand - and I think our respective feelings on the matter are deeply tied to where we are geographically. High-cost of living vs low-cost? Jobs nearby versus not so much?
For me - remote jobs seem few and far between, and highly competitive. Stuck locally, I suffer from being forced into commutes, forced into high cost of living situations, and being that I despise high density living/noise and I'm sensitive to crowds, for me remote work is a paradise-like fantasy. I can picture myself working throughout the world exploring new lives rather than being stuck in dystopian city life.
Most of us where I live are "four days a week in the office." No choice. I think what's missing here is the dimension of choice. Some people thrive in noise, others not so much. Sometimes 2 days a week is good, for others 0, for others 5. For some, it might be that they love coming into the office, but want to spend a month in the rainforest. Etc.
Remote versus office requirements are 100% about control.
One idea we have discussed in my network is if as an industry reset we all said CS should become a 2X to 6X minimum wage career. So say 30k beginner to 100K senior/lead. This would keep many more jobs available and open. But I guess it would not be acceptable to many?
Yeah, it’s like living in an unsustainable society whose luxuries you enjoy are entirely predicated on the destruction of the natural world, the enslavement and abuse of your fellow human beings, and the death and torture of billions of other sentient beings annually.
If you’re honest, you know it’s evil, but it’s pretty undeniable that all the affordances this provides us are useful (to the beneficiaries) and that we all contribute to it daily.
I was more thinking, Taxi drivers that hate cars, or people who hate their work but still do it, the whole life.. but yeah your answer is good too lol :)
If your ability to engage with the article and this topic is reduced to parroting cliches, consider this one: if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?
I'm generally friends with good, sane, smart people. If they're all jumping from the bridge, there's almost certainly something to jump from, so yes I would.
Or you should wonder why they might jump instead of directly questioning their sanity. Then if you see the bridge is on fire and it's safe to jump into the water, then it makes sense, right?
Plenty of these comments that wash their hands of being pro- or anti-. They are just about the Inevitabilism. It is just here.
Whatever happened to rational critique for or against something? No, humbug—what do you expect from this forum full of technologists (and misc.)? It’s technology; fruitless to critique, impossible to stop, resistance is futile.
This is a similar argument that the one people used to justify Facebook: "if you don't join then say goodbye to your social life". Now that we have papers, books, and even court decisions showing conclusively that this was a bad idea (including, paradoxically, the death of social life), I would argue the exact opposite: if you don't fight against it now then Silicon Valley will take your choice away from you.
And more generally: I find it interesting that your argument isn't "this is good" but rather "this is unstoppable". With that attitude we might as well bring CFC and leaded gasoline back.
It's yet to be seen that LLM oracles have to be a remotely owned mono-culture. Technology wise, more local and more diverse seem better, but that won't get "race to own the monopoly" money. At that point it's just another tool used by people.
This is exactly the out of touch sentiment that the article criticizes.
AI is not rain or a thunderstorm or electromagnetism. It is not an unavoidable force of nature that we have to "deal with", and pretending otherwise is a clear political statement.
When people write articles like this about AI, they are not even talking about the specific technology. That's unimportant. They're talking about the economical and political decisions driving the "its coming, its unavoidable like electromagnetism or gravity, deal with it or else" magical thinking that people like you are making.
> These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
I'm perfectly capable of hating this shit even while my employment situation demands that I use it.
If you're working somewhere that's pushing this stuff, there's never been a better time to dust off your copy of the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual."
I think this is a fair point. I'm not a programmer but I'm a well paid professional with a technical background and the means to dive in.
I cannot find a single significant use in my working or personal life for AI (I have infrequently used it to look up information - for example, providing me with plumbing advice).
I've looked into products like OpenClaw etc. I'm desperate for a significant personal use for this technology - but I just can't find one. It's incongruent with the constant public proselytizing I see online
I don't hate AI - how can you, really? It's the humans behind it we should be focusing on.
What I have, and cannot shake, is a growing contempt for all the AI pushers and many of the users, as they make choices that clearly go against the public interest.
- Students graduating into a job desert as CEOs urge them to "get on the rocket ship"
- Data centers spewing noise and waste into communities
- The ongoing collective cognitive retreat of students, teachers(!) and knowledge workers in general
- Consumers reacting to low-quality AI output by lowering their standards to match
This is defeatist. If you can’t fight them, then don’t play their game. Joining them just continues the terrible state of things. By not using llms nothing has changed in my life over the past 5 years. I don’t have any disadvantages either. Can you name any disadvantages to an average individual not using AI products hocked by the rich?
Nowhere in that piece did she say AI is useless or isn't generating returns for businesses. She's just saying it's probably going to be a net negative for society and I'm not sure she's wrong. World leaders are not taking it seriously.
What the author is actually discussing is a broader sociopolitical issue of society having a thing jammed down its throat by billionaires. While the thing in question is GenAI, it's not really about the actual technology or the applications of LLMs.
I swear everyone seems to forget how awful software has been BEFORE AI. The trajectory as an industry has been going downhill. Now with AI I can build myself fully native tools that aren't just some browser wrapper piece of trash because I fully grasp what I am designing. I'll take the slop that's high quality (which arguably isn't slop, but the haters label anything 'tainted' by AI as slop). I welcome our new AI coding overlords if I can get an OS that isn't eating up all available RAM for no good reason.
The problem of low-quality software is a problem of people and organisations, not tooling. It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before. The biggest players just learned to optimize away every shred of 'excess' usability if it meant they got to save a few cents. AI doesn't change this. The people who already cared about quality will continue producing quality software. But when you make producing good software easier, big tech won't jump on the bandwagon - they'll use the newfound efficiencies to lower the bar even further. Fire workers and use the rest with an AI machine gun to spit out whatever without ever checking, optimizing or fixing their output unless absolutely financially necessary.
Yes, and there is still good tooling now, you don't have to use Electron. The reason why many companies use bad tooling or bad practices was provided in the sentence immediately after the one that you've quoted. When tech was new, companies needed to gain customers and engineers were on longer leashes, so making reliable and high-quality software was paramount. Now that everyone has to use computers, they refocused on extracting more money from what they already had by taking shortcuts, cutting dev teams and letting profit motives always take the driver's seat. But you can still write good software. Arguably, it's the easiest it has ever been.
"These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Slavery is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them."
I don't hate AI as AI. I hate AI for what it's doing to human conversations.
I want to hear from other humans. I want to touch their minds and their hearts, and have them touch mine. I hate AI for what it's doing to things I love. I hate AI because I love and value those other things, and I'm watching AI badly damage them.
At least in America, The 2024 (63%) and 2020 (66%) elections had the highest turnout since 2004. Political violence has been steadily increasing here since 2000. It's gotten to the point there are multiple assassination attempts on the President per year.
Moreover there was a spat of warehouse arsons earlier in the year. So for me, I would not be so confident in saying nobody is going to be burning anything.
These anti AI westerners won't burn down the datacenters in China. These westerns will be subjugated to a lower quality of life as Asia in general rises as they embrace tech and use the advantages for their own. The same with the tech companies the westerners try to neuter, they'll pass the advantages to giant Chinese conglomerates instead
This is the lifecycle of every civilization. Reach dominance and then when life becomes easy, forget about what it takes to stay at the top. This makes room for the next civilization.
If you burned down every data center in the world, AI would still not go away. It's just a computer program. You can run it on your laptop. You can't burn down an idea.
Not too many people have a problem with AI technologies conceptually, and arguing like they do is ignoring the real criticism in favor of semantics. People have a problem with the economics of how AI things are being implemented, positioned, marketed, and used. Burning data centers would radically change the economics of AI.
> People have a problem with the economics of how AI things are being implemented, positioned, marketed, and used.
Those economics are also changing very quickly, with free local AI becoming increasingly dominant for many everyday uses and even starting to become relevant for the enterprise ones.
How many devs would be able to keep working if GitHub disappeared tomorrow?
You can do inference on SOME laptops, but the current shape of GenAI need massive data centers to be used at scale.
Also the existence of various big tech companies rely on these data centers being place, without them they are useless.
The nice thing about local AI is that it really can run anywhere, you just need enough storage space for the weights and the context. It just gets slower if you run it on potato-level hardware.
For bang-on user cases like coding, sure. For concept art and other still-image diffusion tasks, sure. For damn near anything else, calling hardware that doesn’t approach the inference breadth and performance of data-center-hosted remote services ‘potato-level’ is pretty disingenuous… never mind any significant training. Not only that, hardware is less accessible than it’s been in years— nvidia is re-releasing the 3060 so gamers can buy something. For anything you’d stake your business on? Good luck.
I've had pretty much the same experience with my AI chat app. Nothing works well. Markdown rendering is slow and laggy, streaming is slow and laggy, everything locks up the UI. I've tried at least 5 of the most popular text editor components for UIKit and SwiftUI on GitHub, and all were broken in one way or another, buggy, and slow as well. It's ridiculous.
Honestly, this kind of thing seems to work quite well with vibe coding. If I remember correctly, the Ladybird JS engine was "vibe-ported" to Rust as well, and it passed 100% of the original test suite, in addition to new Rust tests.
I kind of see your point, but I also kind of don't.
Sure, it would be great if you'd immediately get hammered with hundreds of requests and start make money quickly. It would also be great if it was a bit more transparent, and you could see more stats (what counts as "idle"? Is my machine currently eligible to serve models?). But it's still very new, I'd say give it some time and let's see how it goes.
If you have it running and you get zero requests, it uses close to zero power above what your computer uses anyway. It doesn't cost you anything to have it running, and if you get requests, you make money. Seems like an easy decision to me.
Bootstrapping will be near-impossible (or incredibly costly) unless they offer inference consumers models with established demand arriving at some least-cost router service where they can undercut the competition (if they actually can). And then dogfood the opportunistic provider side on their own Macs, but with a preference to putting third parties first in the queue. Everything else is just wishful thinking.
For something that is as personal as a keyboard, it would be good to know what "Usage data" you are collecting and how it is used. I am eager to switch away from ios keyboard, but I do not trust most developers to have access to what I type. I understand it is "not linked to me", but this is an area where heavy skepticism is warranted.
Hey, we're super transparent about the data we collect.
We collect zero data about your typed words, personal dictionary data, stored contacts, clipboard history and basically anything else that's privacy-sensitive.
What we do collect is very generic and fully anonymized metrics such as: Do you use a theme, did you modify the keyboard, did you add an emoji key to your keyboard, etc.
We are not interested in typed words or any private data. We just want to know how people use the keyboard in general (which features in particular), and that's all we collect. You can opt out at any time, and all collected data is automatically deleted every 30 days because we only keep a 30-day rolling window.
If you want to be extremely safe, you can also skip enabling full access for the keyboard, which makes it impossible for us to send data from the keyboard itself to the app. But as said, we don't actually collect any privacy-sensitive data (and never will), and disabling full access comes with a few other caveats because Apple put many basic features such as vibration etc behind the full access setting as well, for whatever reason.
This is exactly the reason why I haven't looked into other keyboards. Gboard seems like a google-sponsored key logger? Anyone know of some good privacy-focused ones?
Please see my other comment here :) We do not collect any private data, and we never will. We only collect very generic and fully anonymized usage data, but that does not include typed characters, words, clipboard history, snippets, or anything else that could be considered private.
Yeah, this is the great irony of it all. Germany really wants to discourage taking a car for "environmental reasons" and so on and does everything to encourage public transport.
But one thing is clear: I won't be bothered, robbed or even stabbed in my own car, and I also won't arrive in a different village lest I drive there myself. I won't arrive three hours late either, or have to stay overnight in some shitty Hotel because they couldn't find a replacement train.
The German public transport, like many other things in Germany, is an absolute fever dream for a "developed country".
All of these are incredibly obvious. If you have even the slightest idea of what you're doing and review the code before deploying it to prod, this will never succeed.
If you have absolutely no idea what you're doing, well, then it doesn't really matter in the end, does it? You're never gonna recognize any security vulnerabilities (as has happened many times with LLM-assisted "no-code" platforms and without any actual malicious intent), and you're going to deploy unsafe code either way.
Sure, you can simplify these observations into just codegen. But the real observation is not that these models are more susceptible to fail when generating code, but that they are more susceptible to jailbreak-type attacks that most people have come to expect to be handled by post training.
Having access to open models is great, and even if their capabilities are somewhat lower than the closed-source SoTA models, and we should be aware of the differences in behavior.
> more susceptible to jailbreak-type attacks that most people have come to expect to be handled by post training
the keyword here is "more". The big models might not be quite as susceptible to them, but they are still susceptible. If you expect these attacks to be fully handled, then maybe you should change your expectations.
> All of these are incredibly obvious. If you have even the slightest idea of what you're doing and review the code before deploying it to prod, this will never succeed.
Well this is wrong. And it's exactly this type of thinking why people will get absolutely burned by this.
First off the fact they chose obvious exploits for explanatory purposes doesn't mean this attack only supports obvious exploits...
And to your second point of "review the code before you deploy to prod", the second attack did not involve deploying any code to prod. It involved an LLM reading a reddit comment or github comment and immediately executing.
People not taking security seriously and waving it off as trivial is what's gonna make this such a terrible problem.
Afaik rubygems kicked some long term contributors and stole the entire project. Thats some serious red flags for me. At what point rubyruby gems does something nasty is only a matter of time. They could start to gatekeep or even worse add some sort of paid version.
Anyway.. a core piece of infra like this needs to be open for anyone and not closed for some shady entrerprize.
In short, a hostile takeover forced by Shopify through Ruby Central.
It was sparked after Ruby Central chose to platform an extremist figure prominently for their last RailsConf against the wishes of the sponsors, losing them a lot of sponsorship money, as well as community support.
This is a little glib, you dropped "Entirely" because you know multiple first hand accounts are actually worth something. If you want to argue the credibility of those accounts, then please be specific about it.
So you critisize Joel because he worked at Shopify. He pointed that out when he wrote the article.
Let's add here that YOU also worked at Shopify, until recently.
IF we are going to be critical, then let's be complete here.
I actually think there is a lot of validity to the statement made that Shopify is NOT a neutral party here. We can dispute how much Shopify was involved, but to assume "all is unsubstantiated" while not even disclosing one's own work at Shopify, feels super-strange here.
> It was sparked after Ruby Central chose to platform an extremist figure prominently for their last RailsConf
This is so incredibly one-sided that it misleads more than it informs.
The person they are talking about is DHH. Inviting the creator of Rails to speak at RailsConf – a conference for Rails – is not the outlandish behaviour this comment makes it sound like.
Agreed. There is a lot of conflation of statements that are not directly connected.
The whole DHH argument, for instance, as well as some people having a vendetta about him, is not, or not directly, related to the hostile take-over of rubygems.org. There is a slight partial overlap, but it is a separate discussion (even if DHH was involved with the take-over via Shopify because he does not like Arko or Shopify wanting more power-control to bully the independent developers at rubygems.org with more corporate rules and restrictions; and, by the way, DHH never mentions Arko's name, but even this is a separate discussion still. For instance I specifically do not care about rails nor DHH really, but the hostile take-over was a complete no-go. Ruby Central really pissed off too many people here and unfortunately there are still many open questions that ruby-core has to think about. I am not necessarily saying all came with malicious intent, because I think there is an english language barrier too in regards to Hiroshi Shibata, but even then it may be better to have someone with better knowledge about the english language in charge of gems; there seems to be some strange disconnect or translation going on between english, into japanese and japanese culture, and it is super-confusing.)
Interesting, I only knew who he was through his "Leaving the cloud" serie of posts.
I am just trying to draw a parallel between the two to try to understand its broader ideology. So some might say both big cities like London and hyperscaler like AWS are:
- very expensive and have become unaffordable for many actors
- limit your freedom to scale and accommodate a very broad range of guests
- under massive surveillance and control
where the comparison stops is:
- AWS offers pretty good security but London is not (and hasn't for a long time)
- It is pretty easy to get kicked out of AWS if you do not follow the rule or pay
NYC has roughly the same stats - 40% of the residents there are foreign-born. This is more to do with low birth rates by natives, so population growth in NYC and London is entirely driven by immigration. The biggest problem is that it's too expensive for most people to have and raise kids in major cities.
What was more troubling to me was that he called the Tommy Robinson rallies "heartwarming". TR was a member of an explicitly fascist, white nationalist party. The rallies were full of signs calling for death to Muslims. Or, in the same blog post, his disproven claims of migrant gang r*pes. On top of that, he has written some really vile things about transgender people.
I would like to go to a tech conference and focus on Ruby, not politics. I'd like to leave my identity home and discuss software engineering and interesting technical ideas. DHH has made that impossible.
> I suspect these "really vile things" will turn out to be not so vile (like JKR)
"Not so vile" things like spreading lies about a female Olymics Boxer's gender, calling her terrible names, and inciting her online followers to harass her? She not only bullies transgender individuals but also targets other women who don't meet her own standards of femininity. If you have no problems with people like that, no wonder you can't fathom why the Ruby community has trouble accepting similar people with open arms.
Evidence for thee, but not for me? You write with such authority on this topic, yet you insist on demanding evidence for even the most basic knowledge surrounding it.
Consider what this conversation was actually about - a male sexual predator, caught pleasuring himself in the showers attached to a girls' changing room, who claimed, when caught, to have a female gender identity:
Setting aside that you're passing claims from a far-right troll as facts, that still doesn’t make it acceptable to equate trans women with sexual predators, both morally and logically. Or are you suggesting that if you can find one male sexual predator, it justifies equating all males with predators? I have a feeling you’d be up in arms about that.
Anyways, it's clear that you're intent on dehumanizing others, even creating a new account for the sole purpose of saying the most vile things, so I'll stop replying here.
The reason that this male sexual predator was allowed to use the female changing room and showers is because he claimed to have a female gender identity.
This illustrates the safeguarding risk in allowing males to use female spaces on the basis of simply saying that they identify as female. It ends up with situations like this: a registered sex offender pleasuring his erect penis in a shower area that young girls are using, and a reluctance of the authorities to stop him and file charges because they're in the thrall of policy that deems self-declared gender identity to be unquestionable.
> are you suggesting that if you can find one male sexual predator, it justifies equating all males with predators
For the purposes of safeguarding, yes. This is much of the reason why we have female-only spaces in the first place, as a preventative against male predation.
Not all males are predatory, but one can be quite sure that the subset of males who disregard and ignore women's and girls' boundaries are. Including the sex offender being discussed in that Twitter conversation. And any other male who demands access to female spaces.
Oh sorry I thought you were talking about DHH. I've been trying to find a link to something awful that he's said but nobody has one.
And as for that incident, "spreading lies" is clearly an exaggeration. That boxers gender is at best debatable. She's clearly on the awkward boundary between genders that sport (and society in general) doesn't really know how to deal with.
> literally equating trans women with sexual predators
Not what she was saying. She was calling out an only-true-scotsmen argument.
Shame on you for promoting libel by spreading unverified claims as fact. Have you even paused to consider what it's like for those on the receiving end of such harmful lies? Or do you, like JKR, revel in it even more after you've thought about it?
The evidence indicates that Khelif is male, with male physiological advantage, and therefore should never have been competing in women's boxing. And it is a matter of record that Khelif withdrew from the Eindhoven Cup rather than take the sex verification tests required to compete.
That proposed lawsuit mentioned in your BBC article near the end of 2024 went nowhere, by the way. How could it? The facts show there was no libel.
I'm not. It's true that I dislike Ruby and prefer everyone would abandon it, but that's orthogonal to the issue we're discussing. In fact I'm saying that the Ruby community is being stupid and shooting themselves in the foot by characterizing relatively mainstream right wing views as "extremism".
If I was being disingenuous I should really encourage this schism!
> It
Dunno if you're a native English speaker or not but the normal way to refer to someone of unknown gender is "they". "It" is offensive.
This doesn't preclude extreme. Not commenting on whether the community's is shooting themselves in the foot or not, just that the reason provided is not a good one for believing so.
> If I was being disingenuous I should really encourage this schism!
I do not think that you are necessarily being disingenuous but misunderstanding the difference of opinion in this way actually seems to encourage said schism.
You have misunderstood why people use the term "extremism".
> Mainstream views can't be extreme by definition.
Of course they can; mainstream views can't be uncommon by definition. Extreme doesn't strictly mean uncommon (not even in a political context), it is also used to mean "high degree", which can include distance from political centrism but can also include, e.g., frustration or flavor of cookie. To give another example, various online "challenges" like the "ice bucket challenge" are extreme but were also relatively mainstream when they were commonly performed and posted online; the term "ice bucket challenge" is still mainstream and the challenge itself is extreme (in fact, the reason it's called a "challenge" is because it is extreme).
Thinking there's too many immigrants might be mainstream (it currently is) but whether or not it's extreme depends on the degree to which it's believed. If it's believed to a high degree (such as "immigration is the worst thing about the capital city of this nation") by a large number of people then it is an extreme mainstream view by definition.
> various online "challenges" like the "ice bucket challenge" are extreme
Ok I think you just have a very abnormal (extreme even?) definition of the word "extreme".
In a political context it literally means "far from the norm". His views are not far from the norm, as much as you might hate that. (I'm not a huge fan either but I'm not going to distort reality to make myself feel better.)
> In a political context it literally means "far from the norm".
No, this is simply what you want it to mean, keeping in mind you're trying to tell other people what they mean with their word choice. Extreme views can be normal and mainstream and typical. There are many normalized-but-extreme views in current mainstream politics.
> Ok I think you just have a very abnormal (extreme even?) definition of the word "extreme".
Pouring a bucket of ice water on your head to bring attention to something is extreme. Like, it's over-the-top and exaggerated. You can disagree but that's kinda moot: someone isn't strictly wrong that it's extreme, you just disagree. You still didn't address the greater point that extreme, as it's being used, is orthogonal to mainstream.
But I guess I can link to a dictionary so you can see that I have a pretty normal (and mild) definition of the word in question. I hope you don't cherry-pick definition 1c, ignoring definitions 1a and 1b, which are, of course, valid.
Maybe 4 is the best definition, seeing as it gives "the extreme political left" as an example usage. It's not obvious to me how "advanced and thoroughgoing" means "not mainstream", though. I wouldn't mind an explanation.
As I understood it, to secure (their words) the supply chain, they took ownership of the code and repo (which others disputed as being owned by them) and kicked out users from Github.
It is said the underlying cause is that devs push rv which is threatening RubyGems.
How is rv threatening rubygems? I am pretty excited about rv on first glance, I tried it and it was too beta when I did to work nicely, but definitely good to have a uv type tool for ruby.
"Yes, I agree. And some of the “admins” even announced publicly many days ago they were launching a competitor tool and were funding raising for it. I’d not trust the system to such “admin”."
But how is this a conflict? Both are not-for-profit projects with the same goal? How can one even use the term 'competition' in this context? What if the Ruby community embraces a new and better package manager? This is, again, a net win for the Ruby community, and both projects strive for that?
Is Rubygems a company? My mind cannot comprehend why are people conflating not-for-profit open-source projects with for-profit companies...
If Rubygems was a company, they'd have a trademark, they'd have patents, they'd have lawyers to protect the money they were making from their brand and product. But we are speaking about not-for-profit open-source projects, not for for-profit corporations!
Ruby Central is a company that manages rubygems.org and rubygems. The maintainers who were locked out were being paid by Ruby Central while fundraising for their startup creating a competitor.
Doesn't it seem like a bit of a security risk to you?
reply