I never thought I'd say this but... don't slander category theory like that, compared to LLMs it's downright useful

This is true, but also importantly this only works if you carefully redefine productivity to mean something else than a craftsman would consider productivity. You need a simple metric that's easily cheated.

For example, a software engineer who cares about what he does would define productivity fuzzily, as general growth of functionality for the consumer of the application, with the implied "actual working well-crafted functionality". If you're an idiot who wants to hack productivity, you define it as something straightforward and stupid, e.g. lines of code added. Suddenly you can claim that an "AI software engineer" is more productive than a human.

This exists even in something seemingly all about quality, such as research. One of the many problems with the current state of academia is the obsession with "number of papers published" to the disregard of rigor, and so you'll get people who are more interested in hacking the metric than actual research. Hence the seemingly annual scandal where someone is caught completely fabricating data, or the even more frequent sham experiments in psychology that never replicate. The replication crisis falls into the same category -- it's good science to replicate, but journals are not interested so it doesn't grow the sacred metric by which every academician is judged.

Unfortunately we're in an age of hacked productivity. The productivity metric for our markets is line going up, which has long been disconnected from actual productivity, as in providing a product to customers that willingly buy it. It's hard to keep focus on actual productivity when seemingly everyone around you, and especially everyone hierarchichally above you, cares only about the hacked metrics. Art is one of the few mainstays where you alone can be the judge of your own productivity and whether you're happy with your output, since at the core the only metric that matters in art is "does it feel right to me". This must be untenable to promptfondlers because they never experienced actual artistic fulfillment, so instead they need a hacked metric to feel good about improving -- how many images can we churn? how long of a video can Sora output before killing itself? how many seconds of "music" can our box generate?

xD oh what a delight, the one thing missing from the complete gobshite of a "database" that Mongo is was an AI to mangle your queries

Cargo cult business meeting

Since their output is, in the technical sense of the term, bullshit [1],

== References

[1] Frankfurt H. On Bullshit. Raritan Quarterly Review 1986; 6:81-100.

Let's start collecting a bibliography

I love the leaves and gold meme and I use it constantly even though quite literally no one ever understands it, so, thank you, now I know there's two of us.

Sir, this is a Wendy's, also

There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.

did you get sucked up your ass so deep you forgot who's on the reactionary side?

The FDA thing gave me whiplash what the fuck, what did I miss

It still has to go through peer review, so I fully expect one (1) accepted paper with the title "Large Generative AI Models in Telecommunications - What? No. Why? No!"

Hit me up if you want to collaborate on one lol

Dunno, I disagree. It's quite impossible for me to put myself in the shoes of a person who wouldn't see a difference between shouting at an INANIMATE FUCKIN' OBJECT vs at an actual person. As if saying "fuck off" to ChatGPT made me somehow more likely to then say "fuck off" to a waiter in a restaurant? That's sociopath shit. If you need to "built the habit of being respectful" you have some deeper issues that should be solved by therapy, not by being nice to autocomplete.

I'm a programmer since forever, I spend roughly 4h every day verbally abusing the C++ compiler because it's godawful and can suck my balls. Doesn't make me any more likely to then go to my colleague and verbally abuse them since, you know, they're an actual person and I have empathy for them. If anything it's therapeutic for me since I can vent some of my anger at a thing that doesn't care. It's like an equivalent of shouting into a pillow.

Don’t y’all get tired of being wrong sometimes? Maybe try to learn from the past.

Fondly remembering all the times we were wrong. Ah, remember that one time we were totally wrong about the metaverse not being the future? Oh, oh, or the classic "cryptocurrencies are just a scam" talk we had to walk back so many times. Damn, good thing we didn't call out WeWork for being a money sink or we'd be looking pretty fucking stupid now!

will become expensive, slow, and dumb

Wouldn't they have to become smart first?

Welcome to the wonderful XXI century where our innovations in communication technology and financial instruments allow a hyperoptimised economy where two tweets are more than enough to cause billion-dollar shifts on the market. Completely organic and based on solid fundamentals I am assured by the same people that assured me of this in 2000 and 2008.

"Our product that costs metric kilotons of money to produce but provides little-to-no value is extremely difficult to price" oh no, damn, ye, that's a tricky one

Wait but he controls the price, not the subscriber number?

Like even if the issue was low subscriber number (which it isn't since they're losing money per subscriber, more subscribers just makes you lose money faster), that's still the same category of mistake? You control the price and supply, not the demand, you can't set a stupid price that loses you money and then be like "ah, not my fault, demand was too low" like bozo it's your product and you set the price. That's econ 101, you can move the price to a place where your business is profitable, and if such a price doesn't exist then maybe your biz is stupid?

If anything that sounds like an indictment? Like, the current models are so incredibly fucking bad that we could achieve the same with three bits and a ham sandwich

xD

My favourite dotcom is Ford

I just want to harp on this one:

“Existing methods for testing are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for developers nor for users.”

Wtf, can you imagine saying something like this about literally any other profession than software engineering? "Existing methods for checking brake pressure are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for mechanics nor for users". "Existing methods for sterilising surgical equipment are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for surgeons nor for patients". "Existing methods for checking voltage are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for electricians nor for users".

The lack of any fucking standards that devs are held to is insane, so the excuse for accessibility in the web being shit is that it's TOO TECHNICAL and kinda annoying for web devs??? Again, can you fucking imagine saying this about anything else, "ye, cars kinda suck because making sure they don't is all technical and kinda boring for mechanics to do".

It's YOUR JOB. Literally YOUR PROFESSION. PROFESSIONALS ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE STANDARDS you fucking piece of shit, have you no honour, not a single care in the world for your craft, you fucking babies. "Oh but it's very technical" YOU'RE A TECH SPECIALIST. THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU GET YOUR SALARY FOR????

Oh don't worry, I wouldn't suspect someone from around TechTakes to have such framing on this issue.

It's obvious the video is tailored for usual YouTube-y overexaggeration clickbait style, but like, if you are going to speak for devs maybe talk to some of them first lol.

I think most of this was caught immediately when the announcement was made (like the edited live coding), and in any case I can't stand watching this video to the end. "This scared the pants off every software developer in the world" no. No it hasn't. That's just not true. Why do you even say that. The immediate first reaction of any SE with even a passing awareness of how marketing of software tools works and not completely high on genAI farts was "ye that won't work" and, fucking shocking, it doesn't work, wow, no way.

People were trying to sell you that software engineers will be obsolete because "codeless apps" like 10 years ago. Wizards were supposed to eliminate jobs because they'd generate code so well. Knowing SQL was supposed to be completely obsoleted with ORMs. I'm too young to have been there but apparently XML was supposed to "solve networking" or something nonsensical like that.

Those ads aren't targeted at software engineers. They're targeted at execs. It's execs who get all excited that they can start firing their expensive and pesky developers that complain so much. Software engineers worth their salt don't buy this shit because bollocks like these come as part of the job description.

Anyway, trying to frame it as "it was supposed to be this revolutionary tool to replace developers" without mentioning that this is a song that's been sung for fucking decades is a disservice to the topic. Nothing makes executives as wet as the thought of not having to deal with those fucking "specialists" that they need to pay actual salaries and can't huff down their necks 8h a day with a whip to use if they don't hit KPIs. And that's extremely important to have in focus when you talk about shit like this and wonder "why did they raise so much money". Because VCs hate labour that's why. The answer is always that.