I've definitely found it annoying to hear what AI is going to do, from soothsayers, greedy visionaries, self-assured authorities, future-tellers, and I guess prescience wielding Melange users somehow.
I can see what it IS doing, which is creating lots of slop. I can see it destroying reddits until they get a handle on them. I even see places like r/programming doing 'no AI' test runs as they wrestle with the right way to handle it.
Tech has always been a little culty.. but it was fun cullty, nerdy, geeky. AI culty is nasty culty, like crypto and rugpulls, surveillance and privacy intrusions. It doesn't feel fun and nerdy anymore.
It feels sinister. It feels like it maybe should fail... like NFT's and the Metaverse.
It's already actively harming society as people use it to apply for jobs and employers use it to screen candidates. Nobody stands out and people who write their own cover letters don't get through as much.
Unless AI fully solves everything (as nvidia or faangs fantasize) maybe this will force people to drop tech for these tasks. We'll have a better time and better chances of matching by simply spending 1h in a room together talking face to face or sharing work.
It’s already changing how I teach. Next year my students are only using tech to type final drafts or do some research. Other than that it’s pencil and paper and everything stays in class. If I don’t see you working on it in class, no credit. Exams are back to scantrons. (Luckily my school held onto all the machines and had a tons of leftover sheets.)
It’s already helping my students focus and behaviors. AI was starting to really destroy any sense of purpose.
Trying to push electronics in schools was always a terrible idea. Outside of computer class to specifically learn how to use them, it's just a massive distraction kids aren't ready for.
Also my students were cheating on everything. It was kinda noticeable last year, but now everyone has access to it and there’s no real pushback from society or lawmakers.
I hate that now our non-technical people at my company are "coders." They don't just produce slop, they produce exploits. One of the apps they made and are selling to customers let anonymous users delete their data from a DB. Now thankfully they currently live on one of the vibe coding app spaces but talk about garbage. They don't respect release processes, requiring approvals for their code is "slowing them down" and they bristle at the idea of proven best practices.
I've also seen where a company begins using claude/codex/etc AI tools on their codebase. After a while though, they lose the ability to work on it without the tools. The code itself becomes increasingly abstract in nature instead of code they hold in their head. So many of the developers work 'on it' with AI tools but not really 'with it' as readable understandable code anymore. That's a kind of lockin though, and a company is then addicted to and bound to the AI tokens to work on their codebase. The company can hope they do not alter the token cost deal any further, I guess.
That lock-in is surely the gameplan for these AI companies. Cultivate a generation of people who are mentally useless without your tools and then you can charge almost literally anything for it.
And every company that is participating in letting the junior pipeline languish right now is walking right into that trap like goddamn lemmings.
I'm so morbidly curious how bad this will get in the future. Not the immediate future, but in 10 or 20 years as the more senior language fluent workers retire out or are phased out. What's gonna happen in 20 years when every coder doesn't actually know the language, just knows how to use the LLM to crap out code?
Its like they're all gambling they'll no longer actually need anyone fluent in the codebases in 10 years, but if they're wrong its just gonna set everything back decades.
> The company can hope they do not alter the token cost deal any further, I guess.
Open weight models will be there if they need them. They will soon be good enough for maintenance work on vibe-coded repo and their token costs are capped at the raw price of compute.
I was moved to a team that uses a programming language I'd never used in my life. I objected saying it'd take me months to ramp up on a new language and years to reach the level of expertise I had in my current role.
We don't try to police our non-technical folks because it feels like a fruitless endeavor. Instead we developed a new service model where they can use AI to generate new proofs of concept that they'll eventually try to sell and hand off ownership to one of the engineering teams to rewrite.
It's massively increased the backlog of work for us on the engineering side, but thus far has been a pretty successful business model for containing the associated risks.
This is already happening within our own internal product teams, with unskilled “senior” engineers trying to dump ownership of their AI slop onto my team. I can see it from a mile away and actively fight it.
This is a great approach. Let the business folks do some of the prototyping and design thinking (much more than they would in the beforetimes), then have actual engineers build the real solutions.
In all honesty, I think that the predictions that engineering is going to see a big drop in jobs are going to be proved quite wrong. at least for the next 5 years or so. Who knows past that.
I am using it as a software engineer and doing what management says. Use it to let it put out shitty code and they can deal with it after I get laid off.
This is exactly right. Waiting for the day when businesses unload their Security Architects for AI slop; to later learn that all my money from my bank account is gone.
Does it really put out shitty code though? What are you using? I have a colleague who is a modeler and he uses the Claude pro (the expensive one) and says it’s pretty fire for writing good code that’s a lot more efficient than what he writes.
It’s not about code. Most engineers are just trying to find pieces to engineer. This is the same process as using stack overflow to architect programs. The problem is management now wants things done lightning fast and not check the ai work. You need to understand what is being printed out and that can take time.
It's really just the dumbest shit that is made AI as well. It's like...videos of a cat and dog playing. Or waterfalls that exist in real life but made with AI. Why is that so common on FB? "Oh, here is this amazing waterfall, *insert name here." But it's clearly fake if you've ever been there.
But why though? It's so stupid to me. I want to see real animal videos. Real waterfalls. Real sports, etc. Not stupid shit that isn't even remotely real.
It's also baffling how so many people are seemingly okay with it. Maybe they're bots. I don't know. You see these posts on FB (more so for me at least) and it'll have 100s if not 1000s of likes and a bunch of comments talking about how cool it is, and how cute they are. And then 3 comments saying how it's very obviously AI. So obvious a dog is through the glass door type obvious. This is what we have to look forward to?
Because if one wants to make a video of a dog and a cat playing, they need access to a dog and a cat. If they want to make a video of a waterfall, they need to go out and find a waterfall to shoot.
But AI video just requires a device they already have.
> Tech has always been a little culty.. but it was fun cullty, nerdy, geeky. AI culty is nasty culty, like crypto and rugpulls, surveillance and privacy intrusions. It doesn't feel fun and nerdy anymore.
Tech billionaires consider LLM as the absolute tool to control people, they hope that AI will decisively enable the absolute power for them. Absolute power always becomes a cult.
I find the best use of AI is in areas where accuracy doesn't actually matter as much.
For example, I may ask for advise on a product or advise on personal care products; the cost of AI being wrong is me buying some soap or some deodorant which doesn't work. Or I may ask AI to explain a bit of code or offer an example of how to solve a problem--but I always verify the results before actually accepting the answer. (So, for example, I may have AI offer an example of how to make a network API call, but I then look at the developer documentation for the methods AI offers and read on how they should be used. That is, I'm using AI as a sort of glorified Google search of Stack Overflow, but checking the results.) And I definitely use AI as a 'rubber duck'; holding a conversation with it about how to solve a problem.
Because my goal is to learn and to increase my understanding. Not to outsource my understanding to some machine which has literally no idea what it's doing.
And anyone using AI to outsource their understanding--or who have no desire to understand or who have no basis for understanding in the first place--are absolutely fucking dangerous.
It absolutely is dark and sinister because they’re in a race to become the first with true AI. What we have now , as impressive as it is, is lacking both the “artificial” and “intelligence” parts of AI. It requires taking already-existing data and then using that to essentially fill in the blank with prompts by matching it with the closest existing data. There’s nothing artificial about it since it requires already-existing data, and there’s nothing intelligent about it since it’s not synthesizing new information, just guessing by using what it already has access to.
What they need is huge datasets to use to essentially create a human brain. If anything, this goes to prove just how unbelievably efficient and powerful the human brain is. We’ve got how many millions (billions?) of square feet of data centers that still aren’t capable of coming close to replicating actual human intelligence.
But…if they do manage to get there, they’ll have the infrastructure in place, the patents ready to go, and then they’ll become the single most powerful entity on Earth. More powerful, more influential than any government in existence.
In the meanwhile…who makes a fortune during a gold rush? The shovel makers. Even if we’re centuries away from genuine, Matrix-like AI, these tech companies are making ungodly profits by selling their snake oil while being subsidized by taxpayers.
You see so much slop because most people use AI like a magic genie that will do exactly what they want with a 2-sentence prompt. But there are also a minority of technical professionals who treat using an AI more like an engineering discipline, and there AI mostly lives up to the hype.
I genuinely dont understand how social media has become so brainrotted that everyone thinks AI is a trend that will disappear like NFTs. People are becoming less rational by the day.
How are the models going to make money when the cost to train is exponential and the performance improvement of the API models is linear, slowly becoming logarithmic overall?
Edit: notice how the dumb fucks who boost AI don't even know how to answer this question? It's the biggest weakness of the whole thing.
> especially for a lot of the slop being written today, you don't need a better model than that, you can certainly get by with it
I don't think we fully understand the costs yet of all the tech debt and other problems this slop code will create down the line. Let alone the AI industry more broadly speaking as well as its data centers.
It is also worth pointing out that these AI model companies are still operating firmly in the red and are doing a lot of circle jerk money BS to simulate real economic activity and that cannot last forever.
So it remains to be seen whether their business is even sustainable.
It seems firms are more bothered by the prospect of missing the boat than the market being collectively wrong about AI. And investors would likely penalize firms who don't adopt the tech.
Yeah I don't disagree about that. There seems like a strong collective panic about missing the boat that is driving all kinds of irrational behavior right now.
Cost of compute is only going to keep decreasing, so the models will only get more and more powerful, and when AI tech gets unleashed into the world of quantum processors powered by personal nuclear fusion reactors your brain is going to explode.
Yeah my brain will explode from all the useless acid trip slop it creates.
How about we spend trillions on universal healthcare, better schools, infrastructure etc., instead of supercomputers that fix spreadsheets, write buggy code, and make silly videos.
> How are the models going to make money when the cost to train is exponential and the performance improvement of the API models is linear, slowly becoming logarithmic overall?
I remember 20 years ago when they threatened jobs with robots. Oh the self driving trucks will take trucker jobs, the self check outs will take cashier jobs, the robots will take janitor jobs, and blah blah blah. No a self driving truck can't do everything a trucker does, just like self check out need multiple people to stand around and watch, and robots can't do every task a janitor does. It's just threats to create skeleton crews working to work at a low wage. Now white collar workers are going to get squeezed.
It's why the "bring manufacturing back" discourse in the United States is stupid. We manufacture more now than we did in the 70s and 80s, we just need significantly fewer workers to do it, and those workers are increasingly holding prerequisites beyond a high school education.
China isn't cheap labor anymore, their cost of labor is higher than any other country in the region other than South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Yet they didn't lose their manufacturing industry because a decade ago they started a push to automate manufacturing. Now factory owners have less incentive to be move operations to Vietnam when labor costs aren't a major factor in production.
Now compare that to American leadership who also wanted to increase domestic manufacturing, but instead of investing in or encouraging infrastructure that makes American manufacturing more competitive they instituted tariffs.
I've been saying that since his first term. We don't need more manufacturing jobs, that's not feasible. We need better workers rights and protections for people who are working new industries now that people aren't working in factories. Something that the current administration undermines.
It's similar to all the people crying about coal mining jobs. We shouldn't want people to have to work in coal mines in the first place. Retrain them to install renewable energy which is safer work anyways.
How many people are standing around self check out and how many more are guarding the doors. No, just as many people hired at cashier wages to stand around.
Depends where. In my wealthier/extremely low-crime area there's no one new guarding the doors, no items are locked up.
They even change the settings on the self-checkouts to be less annoying than elsewhere - none of the stuff to annoy you with having to keep all the stuff in the bagging area or locking up if you scan stuff too fast/haven't put the last item down yet is turned on. I can just scan things and put them directly back in my cart or my bags in the cart if I want, for example.
Now, in an area where people actually are more inclined to shoplift - I agree the labor savings appears to be non-existent.
Self-driving trucks will eventually happen especially between logistical centers and slow urban delivery routes. The robot truck doesn't have to replace the trucker everywhere and all the time to be useful.
I have never stepped foot in a factory over the last 20 years. I honestly don't know which jobs in a factory have been taken from human workers. I have seen videos of the Amazon warehouses where computer racks self drive and I'm not sure what jobs are gone because of things like that.
You can read books from the 1700s where they fear monger about when the machines can make the machines and then there will be no need for the working population.
At the main grocery store I go to they don't have any self checkouts. At the other one I used to go to there's someone who has to watch them and two cashiers typically.
I worked at a grocery store 20 years ago, I dunno if they got self check outs in that store because I moved away. Anyways I worked closing shift, like 5pm-11pm and I was the only cashier who had alot of different duties besides standing behind cash register, I had to stock bags, break down boxes, and wipe counters. Anyways, I was the only person there, no other checkers. How many cashiers you think work there now from closing if they did get self check outs?
Trucks need humans for filling the tank or changing a tire. Then there's the parking in busy lots or unloading or loading merchandise. I am not a truck driver, these are just things I notice living in a world that truck drivers exist in. There's probably alot more that they do.
The truck driver also can't change his own tire. Nearly all trucking companies forbid it due to liability and practicality. They will almost always send a service truck to do it. Changing a semi tire isn't like changing the tire on your Prius.
Autonomous trucks won't be filling their tanks either. There is a massive push for electric trucks for a good reason.
Okay, so massive amounts of electric self serving stations need to be built. How long you think that will take? And will the climate collapse before or after electric pollution causing builds are complete?
They are being built. It's not like a dramatic shift in technology rolls out in one day and magically changes everything overnight. There are a shit ton of fleet modernizations being rolled out. The USPS is a good example. After modernizing to EVs, autonomous versions can be slowly rolled out. That's where multiple companies are at right now: testing the commercial rollout of AVs.
On the flipside, our trash ass power grid is slowly being forced to upgrade. This isn't a new problem either. It's been a massive national security issue for decades. Policies like the New Green Deal and and Biden's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act are recent examples that had a heavy focus on improving and hardening our power grid. Unfortunately we have one party that is vehemently opposed to investing in America so they consistently fist f* those policies every time they regain power, but even they will eventually cave to the FAANG hunger for reliable and secure power.
So you think a human can charge a battery faster or more efficiently than a computer?
You think a human can load or unload goods to and from their truck better than a machine?
I feel like saying these things out loud sounds categorically insane. It's like you've never heard of a forklift or smart charging technology/e-mobility. I feel like you're living life in the 1990s right now. This is all wrong by significant magnitudes. Where are you living? In the bayou of Louisiana?
The world we live in was built based on human labor. You speak like we live in a world of ubiquitous automation. It may be coming, but so far it’s in only in a small number of highly specialized facilities.
Because capitalists believe this is how they corner the labor market. This is how capitalists corner every market, look at Amazon operating at a loss for a decade ro corner online retail. Its disgusting, we need to cap wealth at 10M so we can end this madness.
Then they are to relinquish enough shares or bedrooms in their house to the government immediately to reduce their wealth to the rightful amount, or suffer harsh prison sentence. In Soviet America.
Shares would be sold automatically with the value redistributed. Call it a tax if that helps.
A house would struggle to appreciate to the cap because there wouldn't be demand at that price point.
Large swaths of land might hold that much value. Maybe that's a grandfathered in thing, but could be mitigated by plugging the primary loophole used by the super wealthy today: You couldn't leverage your assets in the form of a loan that exceeds the wealth cap. It would be in your best interest to sell it (divert to the gov, for food supply, green energy, public works etc). This is about narrowing the wealth gap, reducing government budget issues, and reinvesting in the good of the broader populace after all.
This all might not work exactly these ways. Maybe the cap is $1b instead and adjusted for inflation annually. Nonetheless, it isn't difficult to brainstorm.
People say this will happen but it wouldn't. Small case study is to see how many sold their non primary residence properties in NYC under Mamdani's tax. That line of thinking is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire mentality.
How many business owners are worth a billion? That's a ridiculous number to reach. Would the country have enough businesses if we removed those owned by billionaires? Would no others take their place or line up to reach the absurdly high cap through competition? Do we really lack the problem solving and creativity to think of something like "the business can be co-owned by a board of directors each worth $1b that expands as the business grows"?
I know that the idea of sharing is hard to overcome in a society that rewards greed, but if they want to leave after hitting $1b they can go get richer in another country. It isn't like being worth $1b would mean a lack of power and influence. They could have control over where their post-cap wealth goes even. Good riddance if they can't compromise to that degree.
Sure, but we're not talking a billion here, we're talking 10 million. Start a real estate company in NY and you lose control after one purchase.
No one wants to leave NYC, that was just bullshit, but losing control over your company just because you sold 100 cars that year, yeah no.
And I'm so fucking tired of the "worth" statistics, that's just more Forbes listicle crap, Bezos does not have all those billions. And if we tax some people of their unrealized gains we should tax everyone on it. Tax law should be fair.
The other poster threw out the number $10m. I genuinely think that's too low for reasons you bring up. It should be extremely hard to hit the wealth cap and I chose $1b somewhat arbitrarily.
The US has about 1,000 billionaires and they're worth trillions of dollars. A quick google suggests $7.8t. Then there is the rest of us wondering how the country at large could benefit from $6.8t if their wealth were capped.
Sure, but how do you do that? Who should get the shares we now take from the owner because they're "worth" too much? The state? That means that the state will also have to run all those companies unless we expect the owners to run the company for free.
Why would the state have to take the shares? Why not just adjust the value of the shares to the cap for the owner and the state takes the incremental value?
No owner has to give up their business or control and they stay as wealthy as the chosen few that reached the cap and won capitalism.
Because the value of the shares should be coming from how the company performs. With this thing the better a company performs the worse the stocks will be valued by some mechanism.
At that point there's no reason to even have stocks.
Just tax everything the billionaires own instead, if they have a 200 million dollar house, tax that, the 500 million yacht, taxed. At that point it doesn't matter how they translate their virtual value into real money.
Oh boy, I'm glad you aren't in charge of anything with that kind of foresight. You're suggesting a radical tax policy without "worrying about" the implications.
Oh see, its not a tax, its a CAP. We have tried taxing, clearly its doesnt work. Thats why we just put a cap on it. No excessive wealth means nobody with more resources than the government can afford to fight. Everything else will pretty much fix itself because thats how economics work when markets arent manipulated by Oligopoly
Then I ask again, how do you cap my wealth when I own a house and it appreciates to over 10M in value? I now own an 11M house, how do you ensure my wealth does not exceed 10M in that scenario?
You seem hesitant to explain this policy suggestion of yours, so I imagine I'm not going to get a thought-out answer, but one can hope.
People dont have their entire networth tied up in a single asset. I dont think you even understand what you are saying if you are asking that question. . . .
When your house's valuation exceeds $10M, it becomes force-sold. And since nobody owns more than $10M, the buyers would be collectives who pool their resources to buy the property together. Each buyer then owns shares in the house, but if the value of those shares ever exceeds $10M, the excessive shares become force-sold.
Alternatively, your $11M house becomes nationalized, and you get a preferred option to rent it. Rent could even be free, since everyone works and society is egalitarian and everyone in the commune is happy together.
I mean we've shown we don't let businesses fail for their poor business choices. When they start failing they get loans and bailouts from the government. We have a few businesses dominating the market share in most markets. We let them slide on taxes. Corporations themselves layoff employees, raise their stocks for shareholders, and give the CEOs even more money. When they don't have consequences they'll do things like this.
Fortunately the major tech companies don't even "need" a bailout if things go south honestly.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have a fraction of the debt to equity ratio that companies like Verizon, JP Morgan Chase, or Walmart have, and have significantly larger margins than basically any other large company.
I'd be more worried if they were significantly leveraged, but they seem to have done a good job not going into debt, and what debt they do have is very low interest.
Trump during his last presidency allowed American companies with significant amount of money overseas (to avoid taxes) to bring that money back to America for a one time small tax. They did that and major tech companies had billions and billions of dollars sitting around for a few years before the AI hype cycle came about.
One danger that nobody is talking about: by using external AI tools to do most of their jobs, companies are surrendering their core competences to the AI providers!
This means that if anything happens to those AI providers, those companies are going to be royally screwed.
Even worse, they are also giving away most of their know-how and company secrets so that if AI companies ever want, they can earn enormous amount of money on that data, either via insider trading or by directly using this information to unfairly compete with their clients.
If a company wants to spend on AI it should invest into own hardware and use open-source models even if it seems more expensive in the short term.
I don’t know what the answer is with regards to ethics and environmental sustainability, but what I can say is that AI has been a game changer for the research science field, which is what I work in. What I tell people is that if you’re an absolute expert on a subject, then these tools will take you to the next level. But if you’re not an expert and a learner in an area, then the tools will bring you down. Should I use the term game changer with a very heavy IF in there?
>Somewhere on the 40th floor of a building you would recognize, a room full of people who could not create an email account without calling someone from IT is making the largest capital allocation decisions in the history of American business.
Totally normal when it's only IT that has permissions required for email account creation, nobody can make their own email accounts in enterprises, even smart AI-experienced people.
> but only 2.7% of the directors sitting on those boards have any disclosed AI expertise.
What is AI expertise? If you can't write a transformer from scratch in Python you don't have expertise? Do you have to sell prompting courses to be an expert?
>MIT's GenAI Divide study found a 95% failure rate when enterprise generative AI projects attempt the jump from pilot to production,
Authors of this survey were biased because they were "selling" a solution to this, I'd not put faith in that number, and IIRC 95% failure is just a quote from the interview they did, not their own number based on multiple interviews.
>94% of organizations will continue or expand AI investments even if current initiatives fail in the next twelve months
yeah, because some things that were hardly possible 12 months ago, now work, and in 12 months it'll probably be the same. It's a sensible choice to not abandon a one of the most promising quickly-improving technologies of our lifetime.
Poor research glued together with poor quality data from various sources to paint a narrative.
One the one hand AI companies and chip sellers say we will lose all white collar work. On the other, AI bros keep swearing layoffs aren't happening and you just need to "learn AI". Hey remember a year ago when they said if you got laid off, become an AI prompter as if companies would need dozens of AI prompters. The only funny part is watching AI cultists get annoyed when people reject AI for being slop, taking jobs, and jacking up prices. Also LinkedIn is a cesspool of AI slop now
See this is going to continue even for a longer time even if it makes mistake today when I give some task at least. Today when I am trying to build some solution or some app using any model I give my overall PRD to the AI which at least takes very short time to come back with a yes or no and I love that it allows me to look up a couple of other things by the time it even gives me a wrong answer I have some other task which I have completed using my brain to see whether it is feasible or not I think the biggest advantage of model is giving the answer that is exactly what is happening here even a wrong answer at least it fast for me to disqualify
What the fuck is with these replies? Not one comment addresses the actual post, it’s just a bunch of socialist garbage masquerading as discourse. At least have something new to say.
Anyway there’s no reason more than 2% of execs would have exposure to AI. They’re executives god damn it. This article is borderline fearmongering and doesn’t say anything the plebs on this subreddit have already.
supercyberlurker | 17 hours ago
I've definitely found it annoying to hear what AI is going to do, from soothsayers, greedy visionaries, self-assured authorities, future-tellers, and I guess prescience wielding Melange users somehow.
I can see what it IS doing, which is creating lots of slop. I can see it destroying reddits until they get a handle on them. I even see places like r/programming doing 'no AI' test runs as they wrestle with the right way to handle it.
Tech has always been a little culty.. but it was fun cullty, nerdy, geeky. AI culty is nasty culty, like crypto and rugpulls, surveillance and privacy intrusions. It doesn't feel fun and nerdy anymore.
It feels sinister. It feels like it maybe should fail... like NFT's and the Metaverse.
HedonisticFrog | 17 hours ago
It's already actively harming society as people use it to apply for jobs and employers use it to screen candidates. Nobody stands out and people who write their own cover letters don't get through as much.
_jnpn | 6 hours ago
Unless AI fully solves everything (as nvidia or faangs fantasize) maybe this will force people to drop tech for these tasks. We'll have a better time and better chances of matching by simply spending 1h in a room together talking face to face or sharing work.
Resident_Accident540 | 5 hours ago
It’s already changing how I teach. Next year my students are only using tech to type final drafts or do some research. Other than that it’s pencil and paper and everything stays in class. If I don’t see you working on it in class, no credit. Exams are back to scantrons. (Luckily my school held onto all the machines and had a tons of leftover sheets.)
It’s already helping my students focus and behaviors. AI was starting to really destroy any sense of purpose.
HedonisticFrog | 5 hours ago
Trying to push electronics in schools was always a terrible idea. Outside of computer class to specifically learn how to use them, it's just a massive distraction kids aren't ready for.
NJTigers | 5 hours ago
Research also shows especially children don’t learn or retain knowledge nearly as well of they type instead of writing with a pen/pencil.
Due-Zucchini-8520 | 3 hours ago
Yup. Same reason Sweden, one of the first countries to introduce technology in classrooms en masse, is going back to textbooks and paper.
Resident_Accident540 | 3 hours ago
Also my students were cheating on everything. It was kinda noticeable last year, but now everyone has access to it and there’s no real pushback from society or lawmakers.
_jnpn | 5 hours ago
Oh yeah I've seen a small doc on youtube asking teachers how they were dealing with this and indeed no more computing devices.
ps: "AI was starting to really destroy any sense of purpose." this is still an issue to be resolved on the job market I think
fumar | 17 hours ago
I hate that now our non-technical people at my company are "coders." They don't just produce slop, they produce exploits. One of the apps they made and are selling to customers let anonymous users delete their data from a DB. Now thankfully they currently live on one of the vibe coding app spaces but talk about garbage. They don't respect release processes, requiring approvals for their code is "slowing them down" and they bristle at the idea of proven best practices.
supercyberlurker | 17 hours ago
I've also seen where a company begins using claude/codex/etc AI tools on their codebase. After a while though, they lose the ability to work on it without the tools. The code itself becomes increasingly abstract in nature instead of code they hold in their head. So many of the developers work 'on it' with AI tools but not really 'with it' as readable understandable code anymore. That's a kind of lockin though, and a company is then addicted to and bound to the AI tokens to work on their codebase. The company can hope they do not alter the token cost deal any further, I guess.
nicetriangle | 13 hours ago
That lock-in is surely the gameplan for these AI companies. Cultivate a generation of people who are mentally useless without your tools and then you can charge almost literally anything for it.
And every company that is participating in letting the junior pipeline languish right now is walking right into that trap like goddamn lemmings.
Phugasity | 5 hours ago
Captive markets have been a goal for decades, if not centuries.
nicetriangle | 4 hours ago
Yeah no doubt but this one is especially disgusting
The_Brian | 5 hours ago
I'm so morbidly curious how bad this will get in the future. Not the immediate future, but in 10 or 20 years as the more senior language fluent workers retire out or are phased out. What's gonna happen in 20 years when every coder doesn't actually know the language, just knows how to use the LLM to crap out code?
Its like they're all gambling they'll no longer actually need anyone fluent in the codebases in 10 years, but if they're wrong its just gonna set everything back decades.
FearlessPark4588 | 13 hours ago
Talk about making a deal with the devil
FullOf_Bad_Ideas | 6 hours ago
> The company can hope they do not alter the token cost deal any further, I guess.
Open weight models will be there if they need them. They will soon be good enough for maintenance work on vibe-coded repo and their token costs are capped at the raw price of compute.
GrandMasterPuba | 13 hours ago
I was moved to a team that uses a programming language I'd never used in my life. I objected saying it'd take me months to ramp up on a new language and years to reach the level of expertise I had in my current role.
I was told "Just use Claude."
Great_Northern_Beans | 13 hours ago
We don't try to police our non-technical folks because it feels like a fruitless endeavor. Instead we developed a new service model where they can use AI to generate new proofs of concept that they'll eventually try to sell and hand off ownership to one of the engineering teams to rewrite.
It's massively increased the backlog of work for us on the engineering side, but thus far has been a pretty successful business model for containing the associated risks.
fumar | 5 hours ago
See I have to police them because they're allowed to do this in core products because the CEO is all in on gen ai
DellGriffith | 3 hours ago
This is already happening within our own internal product teams, with unskilled “senior” engineers trying to dump ownership of their AI slop onto my team. I can see it from a mile away and actively fight it.
mcsul | 40 minutes ago
This is a great approach. Let the business folks do some of the prototyping and design thinking (much more than they would in the beforetimes), then have actual engineers build the real solutions.
In all honesty, I think that the predictions that engineering is going to see a big drop in jobs are going to be proved quite wrong. at least for the next 5 years or so. Who knows past that.
ninjadude93 | 17 hours ago
Upvoting for the dune reference lol
ConfidentPilot1729 | 17 hours ago
I am using it as a software engineer and doing what management says. Use it to let it put out shitty code and they can deal with it after I get laid off.
vinyl1earthlink | 17 hours ago
You can come back as a contractor at $200 an hour to fix all the problems.
RealisticForYou | 15 hours ago
This is exactly right. Waiting for the day when businesses unload their Security Architects for AI slop; to later learn that all my money from my bank account is gone.
nanoH2O | 6 hours ago
Does it really put out shitty code though? What are you using? I have a colleague who is a modeler and he uses the Claude pro (the expensive one) and says it’s pretty fire for writing good code that’s a lot more efficient than what he writes.
ConfidentPilot1729 | 3 hours ago
It’s not about code. Most engineers are just trying to find pieces to engineer. This is the same process as using stack overflow to architect programs. The problem is management now wants things done lightning fast and not check the ai work. You need to understand what is being printed out and that can take time.
lolexecs | 17 hours ago
Well the funniest thing about AI has got to be that nearly everything, heck almost everything we see, is human curated.
What to create - human decision. And filtering of through the chaff to find the “wheat” - again a human decision.
Geewhiz911 | 16 hours ago
Great take, I’ve been trying to understand the feeling and ‘sinister’ is exactly right.
PapayaMysterious6393 | 15 hours ago
It's really just the dumbest shit that is made AI as well. It's like...videos of a cat and dog playing. Or waterfalls that exist in real life but made with AI. Why is that so common on FB? "Oh, here is this amazing waterfall, *insert name here." But it's clearly fake if you've ever been there.
Journeyman42 | 3 hours ago
It's all just a mad desperate hunt for clicks and views
PapayaMysterious6393 | 3 hours ago
But why though? It's so stupid to me. I want to see real animal videos. Real waterfalls. Real sports, etc. Not stupid shit that isn't even remotely real.
It's also baffling how so many people are seemingly okay with it. Maybe they're bots. I don't know. You see these posts on FB (more so for me at least) and it'll have 100s if not 1000s of likes and a bunch of comments talking about how cool it is, and how cute they are. And then 3 comments saying how it's very obviously AI. So obvious a dog is through the glass door type obvious. This is what we have to look forward to?
The future seems so bleak.
Journeyman42 | 3 hours ago
Because if one wants to make a video of a dog and a cat playing, they need access to a dog and a cat. If they want to make a video of a waterfall, they need to go out and find a waterfall to shoot.
But AI video just requires a device they already have.
bk7f2 | 12 hours ago
> Tech has always been a little culty.. but it was fun cullty, nerdy, geeky. AI culty is nasty culty, like crypto and rugpulls, surveillance and privacy intrusions. It doesn't feel fun and nerdy anymore.
Tech billionaires consider LLM as the absolute tool to control people, they hope that AI will decisively enable the absolute power for them. Absolute power always becomes a cult.
jl2352 | 9 hours ago
A lot of AI use in business though is very different to the slop you see in comments and blogs online.
w3woody | 6 hours ago
I find the best use of AI is in areas where accuracy doesn't actually matter as much.
For example, I may ask for advise on a product or advise on personal care products; the cost of AI being wrong is me buying some soap or some deodorant which doesn't work. Or I may ask AI to explain a bit of code or offer an example of how to solve a problem--but I always verify the results before actually accepting the answer. (So, for example, I may have AI offer an example of how to make a network API call, but I then look at the developer documentation for the methods AI offers and read on how they should be used. That is, I'm using AI as a sort of glorified Google search of Stack Overflow, but checking the results.) And I definitely use AI as a 'rubber duck'; holding a conversation with it about how to solve a problem.
Because my goal is to learn and to increase my understanding. Not to outsource my understanding to some machine which has literally no idea what it's doing.
And anyone using AI to outsource their understanding--or who have no desire to understand or who have no basis for understanding in the first place--are absolutely fucking dangerous.
zedazeni | 5 hours ago
It absolutely is dark and sinister because they’re in a race to become the first with true AI. What we have now , as impressive as it is, is lacking both the “artificial” and “intelligence” parts of AI. It requires taking already-existing data and then using that to essentially fill in the blank with prompts by matching it with the closest existing data. There’s nothing artificial about it since it requires already-existing data, and there’s nothing intelligent about it since it’s not synthesizing new information, just guessing by using what it already has access to.
What they need is huge datasets to use to essentially create a human brain. If anything, this goes to prove just how unbelievably efficient and powerful the human brain is. We’ve got how many millions (billions?) of square feet of data centers that still aren’t capable of coming close to replicating actual human intelligence.
But…if they do manage to get there, they’ll have the infrastructure in place, the patents ready to go, and then they’ll become the single most powerful entity on Earth. More powerful, more influential than any government in existence.
In the meanwhile…who makes a fortune during a gold rush? The shovel makers. Even if we’re centuries away from genuine, Matrix-like AI, these tech companies are making ungodly profits by selling their snake oil while being subsidized by taxpayers.
sam_the_tomato | 14 hours ago
You see so much slop because most people use AI like a magic genie that will do exactly what they want with a 2-sentence prompt. But there are also a minority of technical professionals who treat using an AI more like an engineering discipline, and there AI mostly lives up to the hype.
Petrichordates | 17 hours ago
I genuinely dont understand how social media has become so brainrotted that everyone thinks AI is a trend that will disappear like NFTs. People are becoming less rational by the day.
Olangotang | 16 hours ago
How are the models going to make money when the cost to train is exponential and the performance improvement of the API models is linear, slowly becoming logarithmic overall?
Edit: notice how the dumb fucks who boost AI don't even know how to answer this question? It's the biggest weakness of the whole thing.
FearlessPark4588 | 13 hours ago
people just live with the models that already exist because you don't need frontier models for everything, if you want a grounded non-boosted take
especially for a lot of the slop being written today, you don't need a better model than that, you can certainly get by with it
nicetriangle | 13 hours ago
> especially for a lot of the slop being written today, you don't need a better model than that, you can certainly get by with it
I don't think we fully understand the costs yet of all the tech debt and other problems this slop code will create down the line. Let alone the AI industry more broadly speaking as well as its data centers.
It is also worth pointing out that these AI model companies are still operating firmly in the red and are doing a lot of circle jerk money BS to simulate real economic activity and that cannot last forever.
So it remains to be seen whether their business is even sustainable.
FearlessPark4588 | 13 hours ago
It seems firms are more bothered by the prospect of missing the boat than the market being collectively wrong about AI. And investors would likely penalize firms who don't adopt the tech.
nicetriangle | 13 hours ago
Yeah I don't disagree about that. There seems like a strong collective panic about missing the boat that is driving all kinds of irrational behavior right now.
Olangotang | 13 hours ago
I agree, but the major firms need to keep making bigger models to compete. Open Source models are great if you aren't trying to vibecode everything.
LillianWigglewater | 15 hours ago
Cost of compute is only going to keep decreasing, so the models will only get more and more powerful, and when AI tech gets unleashed into the world of quantum processors powered by personal nuclear fusion reactors your brain is going to explode.
Resident_Accident540 | 14 hours ago
Yeah my brain will explode from all the useless acid trip slop it creates.
How about we spend trillions on universal healthcare, better schools, infrastructure etc., instead of supercomputers that fix spreadsheets, write buggy code, and make silly videos.
Olangotang | 14 hours ago
> How are the models going to make money when the cost to train is exponential and the performance improvement of the API models is linear, slowly becoming logarithmic overall?
Did you read what I said, you stupid fucking bot?
_ECMO_ | 10 hours ago
No one says that it will disappear. Only that it should.
VideogamerDisliker | 17 hours ago
Ah yes because as we all know, Reddit is a one-to-one reflection of the current zeitgeist. A reflection of humanity and its opinions writ large. LOL
a_little_hazel_nuts | 17 hours ago
I remember 20 years ago when they threatened jobs with robots. Oh the self driving trucks will take trucker jobs, the self check outs will take cashier jobs, the robots will take janitor jobs, and blah blah blah. No a self driving truck can't do everything a trucker does, just like self check out need multiple people to stand around and watch, and robots can't do every task a janitor does. It's just threats to create skeleton crews working to work at a low wage. Now white collar workers are going to get squeezed.
MajesticBread9147 | 12 hours ago
Manufacturing was and is increasingly automated.
It's why the "bring manufacturing back" discourse in the United States is stupid. We manufacture more now than we did in the 70s and 80s, we just need significantly fewer workers to do it, and those workers are increasingly holding prerequisites beyond a high school education.
China isn't cheap labor anymore, their cost of labor is higher than any other country in the region other than South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Yet they didn't lose their manufacturing industry because a decade ago they started a push to automate manufacturing. Now factory owners have less incentive to be move operations to Vietnam when labor costs aren't a major factor in production.
Now compare that to American leadership who also wanted to increase domestic manufacturing, but instead of investing in or encouraging infrastructure that makes American manufacturing more competitive they instituted tariffs.
HedonisticFrog | 5 hours ago
I've been saying that since his first term. We don't need more manufacturing jobs, that's not feasible. We need better workers rights and protections for people who are working new industries now that people aren't working in factories. Something that the current administration undermines.
MajesticBread9147 | 5 hours ago
Yup exactly.
People need to touch grass, or just browse LinkedIn and see how nobody cares about manufacturing jobs.
HedonisticFrog | 5 hours ago
It's similar to all the people crying about coal mining jobs. We shouldn't want people to have to work in coal mines in the first place. Retrain them to install renewable energy which is safer work anyways.
ryuzaki49 | 17 hours ago
Well the self checkouts did impact jobs the same way atms impacted jobs.
a_little_hazel_nuts | 16 hours ago
How many people are standing around self check out and how many more are guarding the doors. No, just as many people hired at cashier wages to stand around.
SkiingAway | 15 hours ago
Depends where. In my wealthier/extremely low-crime area there's no one new guarding the doors, no items are locked up.
They even change the settings on the self-checkouts to be less annoying than elsewhere - none of the stuff to annoy you with having to keep all the stuff in the bagging area or locking up if you scan stuff too fast/haven't put the last item down yet is turned on. I can just scan things and put them directly back in my cart or my bags in the cart if I want, for example.
Now, in an area where people actually are more inclined to shoplift - I agree the labor savings appears to be non-existent.
Elukka | 11 hours ago
Self-driving trucks will eventually happen especially between logistical centers and slow urban delivery routes. The robot truck doesn't have to replace the trucker everywhere and all the time to be useful.
LofiStarforge | 16 hours ago
This is very short sighted. You picked the few things that didn't impact jobs.
I could like the other commentator name many other things that did take peoples jobs.
a_little_hazel_nuts | 16 hours ago
Fine, name the jobs that are gone.
benfro6 | 7 hours ago
Tons of manufacturing work. The opportunities still in the US are hugely reduced as robots have taken over the repetitive and risky work.
a_little_hazel_nuts | 6 hours ago
I have never stepped foot in a factory over the last 20 years. I honestly don't know which jobs in a factory have been taken from human workers. I have seen videos of the Amazon warehouses where computer racks self drive and I'm not sure what jobs are gone because of things like that.
discostu52 | 16 hours ago
In my town apparently you can get your grocery bill down by 50% at the self checkout.
Stringdaddy27 | 15 hours ago
The five finger discount
a_little_hazel_nuts | 16 hours ago
Yeah, I don't know how much stores are losing or gaining because of "mistakes", but I'm guessing it's subsidized by one tax credit or another.
Illustrious-Lime-878 | 6 hours ago
You can read books from the 1700s where they fear monger about when the machines can make the machines and then there will be no need for the working population.
turbo_dude | 8 hours ago
The self checkouts have taken cashier jobs. There are literally way more self checkouts and hardier any cashiers. What are you going on about?
Self driving vehicles are on the roads today.
HedonisticFrog | 5 hours ago
At the main grocery store I go to they don't have any self checkouts. At the other one I used to go to there's someone who has to watch them and two cashiers typically.
a_little_hazel_nuts | 6 hours ago
I worked at a grocery store 20 years ago, I dunno if they got self check outs in that store because I moved away. Anyways I worked closing shift, like 5pm-11pm and I was the only cashier who had alot of different duties besides standing behind cash register, I had to stock bags, break down boxes, and wipe counters. Anyways, I was the only person there, no other checkers. How many cashiers you think work there now from closing if they did get self check outs?
Stringdaddy27 | 15 hours ago
Can you expand on the "self driving trucks can't do everything a trucker can" bit? Curious to know the human advantage over computers in that realm.
a_little_hazel_nuts | 15 hours ago
Trucks need humans for filling the tank or changing a tire. Then there's the parking in busy lots or unloading or loading merchandise. I am not a truck driver, these are just things I notice living in a world that truck drivers exist in. There's probably alot more that they do.
nah-42 | 5 hours ago
The truck driver also can't change his own tire. Nearly all trucking companies forbid it due to liability and practicality. They will almost always send a service truck to do it. Changing a semi tire isn't like changing the tire on your Prius.
Autonomous trucks won't be filling their tanks either. There is a massive push for electric trucks for a good reason.
a_little_hazel_nuts | 5 hours ago
Okay, so massive amounts of electric self serving stations need to be built. How long you think that will take? And will the climate collapse before or after electric pollution causing builds are complete?
nah-42 | 4 hours ago
They are being built. It's not like a dramatic shift in technology rolls out in one day and magically changes everything overnight. There are a shit ton of fleet modernizations being rolled out. The USPS is a good example. After modernizing to EVs, autonomous versions can be slowly rolled out. That's where multiple companies are at right now: testing the commercial rollout of AVs.
On the flipside, our trash ass power grid is slowly being forced to upgrade. This isn't a new problem either. It's been a massive national security issue for decades. Policies like the New Green Deal and and Biden's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act are recent examples that had a heavy focus on improving and hardening our power grid. Unfortunately we have one party that is vehemently opposed to investing in America so they consistently fist f* those policies every time they regain power, but even they will eventually cave to the FAANG hunger for reliable and secure power.
a_little_hazel_nuts | 4 hours ago
I haven't seen them. But maybe in large cities it's happening. But for the middle of nowhere people, there's no electric service stations.
MajesticBread9147 | 12 hours ago
Yeah, this is why the most realistic way to do it is have one driver followed by 1-3 autonomous trucks once the technology is mature.
Stringdaddy27 | 15 hours ago
So you think a human can charge a battery faster or more efficiently than a computer?
You think a human can load or unload goods to and from their truck better than a machine?
I feel like saying these things out loud sounds categorically insane. It's like you've never heard of a forklift or smart charging technology/e-mobility. I feel like you're living life in the 1990s right now. This is all wrong by significant magnitudes. Where are you living? In the bayou of Louisiana?
Stevedorado | 12 hours ago
The world we live in was built based on human labor. You speak like we live in a world of ubiquitous automation. It may be coming, but so far it’s in only in a small number of highly specialized facilities.
Busterlimes | 17 hours ago
Because capitalists believe this is how they corner the labor market. This is how capitalists corner every market, look at Amazon operating at a loss for a decade ro corner online retail. Its disgusting, we need to cap wealth at 10M so we can end this madness.
Content_Source_878 | 17 hours ago
They’ve exploited every workforce on the planet except penguins so now they are having to eat itself to find growth.
PrivilegedPatriarchy | 15 hours ago
>we need to cap wealth at 10M so we can end this madness.
What happens if someone owns shares in a company and those shares appreciate to over 10M? Or they own a house that appreciates over 10M?
LillianWigglewater | 15 hours ago
Then they are to relinquish enough shares or bedrooms in their house to the government immediately to reduce their wealth to the rightful amount, or suffer harsh prison sentence. In Soviet America.
Zookeeper187 | 10 hours ago
lol
DrWalterJenning | 14 hours ago
Shares would be sold automatically with the value redistributed. Call it a tax if that helps.
A house would struggle to appreciate to the cap because there wouldn't be demand at that price point.
Large swaths of land might hold that much value. Maybe that's a grandfathered in thing, but could be mitigated by plugging the primary loophole used by the super wealthy today: You couldn't leverage your assets in the form of a loan that exceeds the wealth cap. It would be in your best interest to sell it (divert to the gov, for food supply, green energy, public works etc). This is about narrowing the wealth gap, reducing government budget issues, and reinvesting in the good of the broader populace after all.
This all might not work exactly these ways. Maybe the cap is $1b instead and adjusted for inflation annually. Nonetheless, it isn't difficult to brainstorm.
arcalumis | 12 hours ago
So a founder should lose control over his company because it's going to well? Say bye bye to anyone starting a business if that's the case.
DrWalterJenning | 6 hours ago
People say this will happen but it wouldn't. Small case study is to see how many sold their non primary residence properties in NYC under Mamdani's tax. That line of thinking is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire mentality.
How many business owners are worth a billion? That's a ridiculous number to reach. Would the country have enough businesses if we removed those owned by billionaires? Would no others take their place or line up to reach the absurdly high cap through competition? Do we really lack the problem solving and creativity to think of something like "the business can be co-owned by a board of directors each worth $1b that expands as the business grows"?
I know that the idea of sharing is hard to overcome in a society that rewards greed, but if they want to leave after hitting $1b they can go get richer in another country. It isn't like being worth $1b would mean a lack of power and influence. They could have control over where their post-cap wealth goes even. Good riddance if they can't compromise to that degree.
arcalumis | 6 hours ago
Sure, but we're not talking a billion here, we're talking 10 million. Start a real estate company in NY and you lose control after one purchase.
No one wants to leave NYC, that was just bullshit, but losing control over your company just because you sold 100 cars that year, yeah no.
And I'm so fucking tired of the "worth" statistics, that's just more Forbes listicle crap, Bezos does not have all those billions. And if we tax some people of their unrealized gains we should tax everyone on it. Tax law should be fair.
DrWalterJenning | 6 hours ago
The other poster threw out the number $10m. I genuinely think that's too low for reasons you bring up. It should be extremely hard to hit the wealth cap and I chose $1b somewhat arbitrarily.
The US has about 1,000 billionaires and they're worth trillions of dollars. A quick google suggests $7.8t. Then there is the rest of us wondering how the country at large could benefit from $6.8t if their wealth were capped.
arcalumis | 6 hours ago
Sure, but how do you do that? Who should get the shares we now take from the owner because they're "worth" too much? The state? That means that the state will also have to run all those companies unless we expect the owners to run the company for free.
DrWalterJenning | 6 hours ago
Why would the state have to take the shares? Why not just adjust the value of the shares to the cap for the owner and the state takes the incremental value?
No owner has to give up their business or control and they stay as wealthy as the chosen few that reached the cap and won capitalism.
arcalumis | 5 hours ago
Because the value of the shares should be coming from how the company performs. With this thing the better a company performs the worse the stocks will be valued by some mechanism.
At that point there's no reason to even have stocks.
Just tax everything the billionaires own instead, if they have a 200 million dollar house, tax that, the 500 million yacht, taxed. At that point it doesn't matter how they translate their virtual value into real money.
tpounds0 | 4 hours ago
People are going to stop being entrepreneurs if their business can only be worth $999,000,000?
Lyle91 | 4 hours ago
Okay 100M then. No sane, moral person could accrue that much wealth.
Busterlimes | 15 hours ago
I dont worry about "what ifs" when there are actual issues at hand right now.
PrivilegedPatriarchy | 15 hours ago
Oh boy, I'm glad you aren't in charge of anything with that kind of foresight. You're suggesting a radical tax policy without "worrying about" the implications.
PapayaMysterious6393 | 15 hours ago
10m honestly seems kind of low even. Dude is not remotely thinking about this.
Busterlimes | 15 hours ago
Oh see, its not a tax, its a CAP. We have tried taxing, clearly its doesnt work. Thats why we just put a cap on it. No excessive wealth means nobody with more resources than the government can afford to fight. Everything else will pretty much fix itself because thats how economics work when markets arent manipulated by Oligopoly
PrivilegedPatriarchy | 15 hours ago
Then I ask again, how do you cap my wealth when I own a house and it appreciates to over 10M in value? I now own an 11M house, how do you ensure my wealth does not exceed 10M in that scenario?
You seem hesitant to explain this policy suggestion of yours, so I imagine I'm not going to get a thought-out answer, but one can hope.
Busterlimes | 13 hours ago
People dont have their entire networth tied up in a single asset. I dont think you even understand what you are saying if you are asking that question. . . .
haakon | 13 hours ago
When your house's valuation exceeds $10M, it becomes force-sold. And since nobody owns more than $10M, the buyers would be collectives who pool their resources to buy the property together. Each buyer then owns shares in the house, but if the value of those shares ever exceeds $10M, the excessive shares become force-sold.
Alternatively, your $11M house becomes nationalized, and you get a preferred option to rent it. Rent could even be free, since everyone works and society is egalitarian and everyone in the commune is happy together.
PapayaMysterious6393 | 15 hours ago
Who buys their stuff then? I guess the top 50% make enough money to keep them happy and get rid of the rest of us?
Busterlimes | 13 hours ago
The top 90% are making up 50% of consumer spending right NOW, so its actually currently worse that what you just said. . . .
PapayaMysterious6393 | 4 hours ago
So they really don't care about the bottom.
arcalumis | 12 hours ago
I don't think Bezos or Musk even have 10 million. They have stocks.
Busterlimes | 9 hours ago
Oh, good thing I said
#WEALTH CAP
arcalumis | 9 hours ago
You say nothing but the same tired old marxist bullshit us in Europe have been fighting for over a century now.
anti-torque | 5 hours ago
A wealth cap is not a Marxist thing.
?
I believe Plato was the first advocate for such.
thinkB4WeSpeak | 17 hours ago
I mean we've shown we don't let businesses fail for their poor business choices. When they start failing they get loans and bailouts from the government. We have a few businesses dominating the market share in most markets. We let them slide on taxes. Corporations themselves layoff employees, raise their stocks for shareholders, and give the CEOs even more money. When they don't have consequences they'll do things like this.
machinationstudio | 15 hours ago
They are too wrapped up in the narrative that AI will generate share holder value that they will need to wait for the next Big Thing to show up.
MajesticBread9147 | 12 hours ago
Fortunately the major tech companies don't even "need" a bailout if things go south honestly.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have a fraction of the debt to equity ratio that companies like Verizon, JP Morgan Chase, or Walmart have, and have significantly larger margins than basically any other large company.
I'd be more worried if they were significantly leveraged, but they seem to have done a good job not going into debt, and what debt they do have is very low interest.
Trump during his last presidency allowed American companies with significant amount of money overseas (to avoid taxes) to bring that money back to America for a one time small tax. They did that and major tech companies had billions and billions of dollars sitting around for a few years before the AI hype cycle came about.
Ateist | 5 hours ago
One danger that nobody is talking about: by using external AI tools to do most of their jobs, companies are surrendering their core competences to the AI providers!
This means that if anything happens to those AI providers, those companies are going to be royally screwed. Even worse, they are also giving away most of their know-how and company secrets so that if AI companies ever want, they can earn enormous amount of money on that data, either via insider trading or by directly using this information to unfairly compete with their clients.
If a company wants to spend on AI it should invest into own hardware and use open-source models even if it seems more expensive in the short term.
nanoH2O | 6 hours ago
I don’t know what the answer is with regards to ethics and environmental sustainability, but what I can say is that AI has been a game changer for the research science field, which is what I work in. What I tell people is that if you’re an absolute expert on a subject, then these tools will take you to the next level. But if you’re not an expert and a learner in an area, then the tools will bring you down. Should I use the term game changer with a very heavy IF in there?
FullOf_Bad_Ideas | 6 hours ago
>Somewhere on the 40th floor of a building you would recognize, a room full of people who could not create an email account without calling someone from IT is making the largest capital allocation decisions in the history of American business.
Totally normal when it's only IT that has permissions required for email account creation, nobody can make their own email accounts in enterprises, even smart AI-experienced people.
> but only 2.7% of the directors sitting on those boards have any disclosed AI expertise.
What is AI expertise? If you can't write a transformer from scratch in Python you don't have expertise? Do you have to sell prompting courses to be an expert?
>MIT's GenAI Divide study found a 95% failure rate when enterprise generative AI projects attempt the jump from pilot to production,
Authors of this survey were biased because they were "selling" a solution to this, I'd not put faith in that number, and IIRC 95% failure is just a quote from the interview they did, not their own number based on multiple interviews.
>94% of organizations will continue or expand AI investments even if current initiatives fail in the next twelve months
yeah, because some things that were hardly possible 12 months ago, now work, and in 12 months it'll probably be the same. It's a sensible choice to not abandon a one of the most promising quickly-improving technologies of our lifetime.
Poor research glued together with poor quality data from various sources to paint a narrative.
NoPerformance5952 | 2 hours ago
One the one hand AI companies and chip sellers say we will lose all white collar work. On the other, AI bros keep swearing layoffs aren't happening and you just need to "learn AI". Hey remember a year ago when they said if you got laid off, become an AI prompter as if companies would need dozens of AI prompters. The only funny part is watching AI cultists get annoyed when people reject AI for being slop, taking jobs, and jacking up prices. Also LinkedIn is a cesspool of AI slop now
Fantastic_Ninja_5789 | 17 hours ago
See this is going to continue even for a longer time even if it makes mistake today when I give some task at least. Today when I am trying to build some solution or some app using any model I give my overall PRD to the AI which at least takes very short time to come back with a yes or no and I love that it allows me to look up a couple of other things by the time it even gives me a wrong answer I have some other task which I have completed using my brain to see whether it is feasible or not I think the biggest advantage of model is giving the answer that is exactly what is happening here even a wrong answer at least it fast for me to disqualify
mmmfritz | 6 hours ago
What the fuck is with these replies? Not one comment addresses the actual post, it’s just a bunch of socialist garbage masquerading as discourse. At least have something new to say.
Anyway there’s no reason more than 2% of execs would have exposure to AI. They’re executives god damn it. This article is borderline fearmongering and doesn’t say anything the plebs on this subreddit have already.