Nothing wholesome I would wager.

Ironically, I see far more visual pollution from people whinging about AI slop than actual AI slop at this point. People will incessantly complain about AI everywhere, derailing conversations and adding noise. If somebody spots an em dash somewhere then a whole thread turns into a discussion of whether something written by an LLM or not, and whether it’s acceptable for humans to use em dashes. It’s frankly exhausting.

there were a lot of laundry fires of late

I use these tools extensively, and they absolutely do not replace the need for a coder. The reality is that they’re fundamentally incapable of telling whether something is correct or not in the business sense. And Simply churning out a ton of wrong code really fast doesn’t actually help anybody.

They certainly can be a help for a developer. For example, I can fluently write code in any language now even if I’m not familiar with the stack or syntax. A skill that would’ve taken months of effort to build previously. But in terms of actual workflow, it’s not all that much faster because I still have to review what the tool is doing, and human comprehension is still the bottleneck in the whole process.

back before the days of hard drives being a standard thing :)

love to see it

and?

yup

same

Completely agree, and the fact that this is the narrative that’s being peddled means that most people have no idea what’s really coming.

Yeah, very much agree with all that. The decision making is very erratic. Although, I do think that attack on Iran was largely about cutting Asia and Europe off from the energy in the Gulf. While Venezuela and Greenland could be long term grabs where they don’t necessarily expect an immediate benefit. The big question is whether the US economy can handle the immediate shock.

I’ve been using LLMs pretty extensively. These tools are effective, they can solve hard problems, and they allow me to work on a wider range of tasks than could before.

But, they’re also jagged in terms of functionality. When you work with a human, you can learn what their core competencies are, and then if you give them a task that falls within that domain, you can be reasonably sure they’ll finish it correctly. That’s not the case with LLMs. It might do one task brilliantly, and a next similar task, it just shits the bed on. And since it has no understanding of the task in a human sense, it can’t self correct, learn or improve. All its doing is stringing tokens together based on probability.

So, you need a human in the loop to review everything that it’s doing. Reviewing everything the model outputs takes a lot of time, hence actual productivity gains aren’t all that significant. Having an LLM will allow a backend developer to work on the frontend with fairly low friction for example, but they’re still going to build stuff roughly at the same pace.

Companies that try to replace humans with LLMs will soon find that they end up with a whole bunch of code that doesn’t actually work, and they have no hope of fixing. The fact that LLMs can produce a lot of code very quickly is precisely the danger because nobody knows what that code is doing, and it’s almost certainly not correct.

I don’t really see how that helps the current crunch though. Any new oil development is going to take years to ramp up. By then the crisis will have already happened, and likely countries will have started mass switching to renewables from China.

That’s the beauty of Chinese state driven economy. The state can pour money into new technologies at a scale that no private business would ever do, which makes it possible to get to the point where new tech becomes commercially viable.

I mean that fits given the US is a gerontocracy.

read all about it on your beloved wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism

literally every survey done in China by western orgs confirms that it is in fact a democracy, and one functioning better than any western attempt I might add

• https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176
• https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilified-abroad-popular-at-home-China-s-Communist-Party-at-100
• https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-26/which-nations-are-democracies-some-citizens-might-disagree
• https://web.archive.org/web/20230511041927/https://6389062.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6389062/Canva images/Democracy Perception Index 2023.pdf
• https://www.tbsnews.net/world/china-more-democratic-america-say-people-98686
• https://web.archive.org/web/20201229132410/https://en.news-front.info/2020/06/27/studies-have-shown-that-china-is-more-democratic-than-the-united-states-russia-is-nearby-and-ukraine-is-at-the-bottom/

and looks like it’s cause of data centre water use too https://www.commondreams.org/news/aoc-data-centers-water

yeah it’s not like they’re hiding it

I mean we’ve seen how prices for Chinese solar and EVs dropped once production ramped up, I expect we’ll see the same with memory and eventually chips too.