69 posts tagged with "icymi"

I’ve stopped trying to debate software developers on LLMs. You might have noticed if you’ve been following this blog. It’s a fruitless debate. Even if the believers in agents and copilots could be budged on empirical grounds, and the past few years have given us plenty of evidence that they can’t, this is still a crowd that is explicitly fine with using tools that are themselves deeply unethical.

Debating people who look past “chatbot psychosis”, the dismantling of the education system, the gendered abuse, the generated CSAM images, the overt attacks on the media industries, or the ultra-right’s glee about “AI”, by showing them a well-constructed academic study is never going to work.

'AI' is a dick move, redux

Even the most staunch capitalist out there must acknowledge that this isn't it. There's no competition. There's no innovation. There's only a bunch of dumbasses who call themselves "product managers" whose whole job is to figure out novel ways to fuck you over, lock you in, and leave you with very little recourse. It's no longer about making cool shit that people like, if it was ever that. It's about setting the pieces in a way that you simply have no other choice. The highest achievement for this kind of enterprise today is not to have happy customers: is to get to the point where they can say "What are you going to do? Leave us for the competition? There's no competition."

Be interesting

This isn't about China — it's so much fucking easier if we let it be about China — it's about how the American tech industry is incurious, lazy, entitled, directionless and irresponsible. OpenAi and Anthropic are the antithesis of Silicon Valley. They are incumbents, public companies wearing startup suits, unwilling to take on real challenges, more focused on optics and marketing than they are on solving problems, even the problems that they themselves created with their large language models.

By making this "about China" we ignore the root of the problem — that the American tech industry is no longer interested in making good software that helps people.

Be interesting

When you come from an environment of cutthroat competition, of constant backstabbing, of extreme individualism where you have got to get yours, fuck everyone else, collaboration seems like a completely absurd idea. What's in it for me? It should also be clear by now that the whole "tech" scene these days is exactly like this. Get your VC money, sell out, fuck everybody else. If the game is not a zero-sum one, it's not worth playing: it's not sufficient for me to win. You need to lose.

Pour one out for community

So, instead of having a place where a lot of questions have been collectively answered satisfactorily, indexed, archived, and catalogued, we are choosing the method of individually asking the same questions over and over again. If I have the exact same question as you do, I need to ask the LLM again. All the tokens, and energy, and GPUs, and training data, and models, are doing the same work twice. Or thrice. Or a billion times. Instead of a thousand people finding one answer that's one search away, we are asking the same question a thousand times. Instead of a thousand people typing "How do I reference a specific list item in Python" on the search box and getting answers, we're asking LLMs to compute and generate the same answer a thousand times. And that's only possible for those who even have access to these tools.

Pour one out for community

Musk has spent his entire career using his money to convince people he’s smart. This is why Musk sued the actual founders of both the platform that would become Paypal and, also, Tesla to make sure he’d have to be called a founder of both. And why he has spent considerable energy over the last two decades trying to convince credulous journalists and idiotic politicians that he was irl Tony Stark. Now he’s found the dumbest, least inquisitive, most media illiterate people to ever walk the Earth as his new marks: Republicans. So he bought their favorite website and set up his super PAC and is now, once again, using his money as a way to convince American conservatives that, as Trump put it, “he knows those computers better than anybody.” Maybe Trump thinks X posts helped him win (they absolutely didn’t), maybe Trump thinks Musk actually rigged the election (also doubtful). But I imagine it’s similar to when you help your grandfather reset his Netflix password. Doesn’t matter what happened in the computer, but it worked. The PDF rotated. And if Musk did have any actual impact on last year’s election, it was almost certainly thanks to the $290 million he spent on Trump’s campaign, around $50 million of which were spent on million-dollar giveaways like the one he tried again this week. But, once again, did it matter? Seeing as how things played out in Wisconsin, likely not. Which is a problem because the only thing Musk is truly a genius at is burning through unimaginable amounts of money on dumb shit no one cares about.

I think Elon's getting Vivek'd after this one, folks

That paints a terrible picture about the state of things: a lot of people don't know what they're doing, and the people in charge don't know what the people doing things should know. If your boss thinks Cursor can replace you, there's not much you can do because there's a fundamental conflict that cannot be resolved until your boss understands things at a level that's above "who gives a shit?". Don't count on that.

What can possibly go wrong?

The leaders behind the funding, functionality, and media coverage of the tech industry have abdicated their authority so severely that the consensus is that it's fine that OpenAI burns $5 billion a year, and it's also fine that OpenAI, or Anthropic, or really any other generative AI company has no path to profitability. Furthermore, it's fine that these companies are destroying our power grid and our planet, and it's also fine that they stole from millions of creatives while simultaneously undercutting those creatives in an already-precarious job market.

The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism

Another trend I expect to emerge is an attempt to re-create the Internet of a decade ago by erecting virtual barriers to keep out the rabble. When I'm feeling down I call it “Internet Gated Communities”, when in an optimistic mood, “The Faculty Club”. This may lead to what many observers refer to as “the Balkanisation of the Internet”—a fragmentation of the “goes everywhere, reaches everybody” vision of the global nervous system into disconnected communities. This may not be such a bad thing. Yes, we will not end up with a ubiquitous global wired community. But if you want to get an idea what that might actually look like, here's a little experiment you can try. Turn off your spam filter and read all the spam you get in a day, including visiting the Web sites they direct you to. Now imagine that, multiplied by a factor of about a hundred. Welcome to the electronic global slum! I am one of those despicable people who believe that IQ not only exists but matters. From the origin of the Internet through the mid 1990s, I'd estimate the mean IQ of Internet users as about 115. Today it's probably somewhere around 100, the mean in Europe and North America. The difference you see in the Internet of today from that of ten years ago is what one standard deviation (15 points) drop in IQ looks like. But the mean IQ of the world is a tad less than 90 today, and it's expected to fall to about 86 by 2050. So, when the digital divide is conquered and all ten billion naked apes are wired up, you're looking at about another standard deviation's drop in the IQ of the Internet. Just imagine what that will be like.

The Internet Slum

If you've been around the block for a while, you know that this industry was always prone to hyperbole: some things get blown out of proportion, some people overestimate their own knowledge, and some people take advantage of the fact that this field is complicated to advance their own "brand" by speaking authoritatively about things they know very little about. It doesn't matter that reality insists on being nuanced and more complicated than what you can convey through a couple of paragraphs on LinkedIn. If you are in a position of power, and you sound like you know what you're talking about, you can get away with some bullshit.

20% of Zero is Zero