Social proof is a hell of a drug. Getting off Instagram was always a “yeah they suck, I barely use the app, but I do not really want to spend the energy” for me; then I saw a real life friend do a post about how they were getting off Instagram. I promptly did the same.

That’s always the problem when deciding whether to post something you did you think is good and that you want others to do more. How much would I possibly influence others to do the same (because my nobody ass followed my nobody friend in getting off Insta, we clearly do not have to be mega celebrities to put our small drop of influence in the proverbial bucket), vs how much backlash will I get in the vein of “why do you have to announce it and have a public privacy tantrum, you’re not that special boo” and “humblebrag much? nobody cares”. (I’m special to the group of people that cares about me, as I am sure everyone is to the group of people that care about them! And social media makes it easier to announce it to them instead of texting everyone individually, and if you don’t have a giant group chat… I do wonder what standards you have to meet before you can post online without being told “nobody cares”.)

I think as long as there are 2 people on earth who do not have perfect trust in each other, there will be politics.

[email protected] would like this

Except, how do you convince all the other engineers the tech stack is both shitty and that switching off is worth the switching costs? That your data is empirical and also not the “lies, damned lies and statistics” thing where you cherry pick data in your favor so you can look empirical when you are actually just going off your own vibes and ego? Even if your intentions are pure, others might not think so (whether because they have ulterior motives of their own or not).

Unfortunately, that is politics.

A bit off-topic, but:

Knowing about these cognitive distortions always makes it so hard to self-evaluate too! Am I actually better than I think and I am just aware of how much I do not know, causing me to evaluate myself too lowly? Or am I an arrogant asshole, “knowing about the Dunning-Kruger effect does not make you special, especially with how often it’s cited everywhere online now,” and I should keep evaluating myself lowly? Imposter syndrome exists, but some people really are faking it and do not know anything, so am I underevaluating myself and feeling like an impostor when I should not be?

However, I also know if I state things with confidence or say I’m good at something, I’m more likely (at least online) to receive challenges and arguments about why I’m a puffed-up blowhard who actually knows nothing about anything, so I always trend towards “actually I’m just stupid” to avoid being whacked with the “ARROGANT FUCKHEAD” stick. (This is in general, not just about the tech topics this forum is for.)

I’ve read another article on his site that I have to be able to just at least appear to confidently make a decision and live with the consequences that maybe my guess is wrong instead of presenting the whole pro-and-con list, instead of hemming and hawing about how my judgment is imperfect and I’m afraid of thinking I’m competent but actually being someone the internet would tear apart for gross incompetence and the audacity to assume I’m not. (I went through a lot of his articles on a rabbit hole from another of his articles posted on programming.dev.) But luckily I’m not in the decision-making-advise-non-tech-folks-on-big-decisions-most-qualified-person-in-the-room position that this advice is geared towards and do not bear that responsibility.

one heartbroken anti-AI human who loves em dashes replying ☹️ we’re split into two classes: the type who abandons our typing habits to avoid being told our human efforts are definitely AI, and the type who stubbornly carries on using em dashes

As far as I know, don’t all modern cars have the telemetry and computer crap, and you can’t opt out unless you buy something old and hope to god it never breaks in some unrepairable, must-scrap-and-buy-new way? The old cars we can use now to escape all the telemetry will eventually break beyond a repairable state and no new cars like that are being produced (again as far as I know), so all that is left is the existing selection with it. And once it gets to that point, not all of us are rich enough or without connections tying us to a local place such that we can say “then just fuck cars, time to move somewhere with really good public transit” to escape car surveillance hell. At some point the consumer is out of choices unless they want to build a car themselves. I get your sentiment while non-surveillance-capitalism alternatives exist and can be bought, but as these alternatives dwindle I’d rather move away from the “stupid fucking consumer lol, just buy smart” mindset.

Besides, I’ve never been of the opinion that people being victimized should be blamed for it. Yes, I probably should remember to lock my door as a matter of practicality because thieves exist, but if I forget and get robbed one day I hope people would blame the robber for doing that instead of me for failing to do due diligence. Besides, with so many threats in the world and the fact that humanity is fallible, with smart scambaiter types also getting scammed from time to time, I really don’t want to turn to a “blame the stupid person who fell for it/bought the surveillance capitalism thing” mindset. Just because I am smart enough in the tech realm to know of the problem and a bit of how to defend myself does not mean everyone else is knowledgeable here, and I’m probably vulnerable in other areas I know less of. You should not have to become knowledgeable of every possible threat in every possible realm and take every possible countermeasure to be deserving of safety or nonviolation.

Hurray for my stupid fridge, may you continue to function and for more fridges like you be created.

In real life I either say “Ess-cue-ehl” (spelling it out), or I say “sqwool,” “sq” as in squirrel and “wool” like sheep wool

SQL -> Structured Query Language ❌

SQL -> SQuirreL ✅

I’m glad to hear that!

I still want to just go to the information source myself instead of an extra middleman of AI and what it thinks its sources are. I emailed Ecosia asking for a config switch to get rid of the AI search option at the bottom of my search results. Not a priority/not planning on it (one of them). Valid, it is not like I’m a paying customer, but also I want to reward people not hopping on the AI train. But at least Ecosia is not being as awful about AI as I thought they were. Will be trying LibreWolf instead.

was the comma a typo of a period, or did you have more to say here? if you have more to say i’m eager to listen

Hey thanks! I was wondering what my alternatives were. Bought RPis, having remembered that name from a decade ago, and then read the posts here about how those are getting worse. Glad to see something that could take their place for my next project :) This is the kind of stuff I come to programming.dev for.

I think it’s both.

It sits at the fast and cheap end of “pick three: fast, good, and cheap” and society is trending towards “fast and cheap” to the exclusion of “good” to the point it is getting harder and harder to find “good” at all sometimes.

People who care about the “good” bit are upset, people who want to see stock line go up in the short term without caring about long term consequences keep riding the “always pick fast and cheap” and are impressed by the prototypes LLMs can pump out. So devs get fired because LLMs are faster and cheaper, even if they hallucinate and cause tons of tech debt. Move fast and break things.

Some devs that keep their jobs might use LLMs. Maybe they accurately assessed what they are trying to outsource to LLMs is so low-skill that even something that does not hit “good” could do it right (and that when it screws up they could verify the mistake and fix it quickly); so they only have to care about “fast and cheap”. Maybe they just want the convenience and are prioritizing “fast and cheap” when they really do need to consider “good”. Bad devs exist too and I am sure we have all seen incompetent people stay employed despite the trouble they cause for others.

So as much as this looked at first, to me, like the thing where fascists simultaneously portray opponents as weak (pathetic! we deserve to triumph over them and beat their faces in for their weakness) and strong (big threat, must defeat!), I think that’s not exactly what anti-AI folks are doing here. Not doublethink but just seeing everyone pick “fast and cheap” and noticing its consequences. Which does easily map onto portraying AI as weak, pointing out all the mistakes it makes and not replacing humans well; while also portraying it as strong, pointing out that people keep trying to replace humans with AI and that it’s being aggressively pushed at us. There are other things in real life that map onto a simultaneous portrayal as weak and strong: the roach. A baby taking its first steps can accidentally crush a roach, hell if the baby fell on many roaches the roaches all die (weak), but it’s also super hard to end an infestation of them (strong). It is worth checking for doublethink when you see the pattern of “simultaneously weak and strong,” but that is also just how an honest evaluation of a particular situation can end up.

Responding just to the “Why all the vitriol?” portion:

Most people do not like the idea of getting fired and replaced by a machine they think cannot do their job well, but that can produce a prototype that fools upper management into thinking it can do everything the people can but better and cheaper. Especially if they liked their job (8 hours doing something you like vs losing that job and having to do 8 hours on something you don’t like daily, yes many people do that already but if you did not have to deal with that shittiness it’s tough to swallow) or got into it because they thought it would be a secure bet as opposed to art or something, only to have that security taken away (yes, you can still code at home for free with whatever tools you like and without the ones you do not, but most people need a job to live, and most people here probably prefer having a dev job that pays, even if there is crunch, than working retail or other low-status low-paying high-shittiness jobs that deal with the public).

And if you do not want the upper management to fire you, you definitely don’t want to give any credit towards the idea of using this at work, and want to make any amount of warmth for it something unpopular to engage in, hoping the popular sentiment sways the minds of upper management just like they think pro-AI hype has.

As much as I’m anti-AI I can also acknowledge my own biases:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

I’d also imagine most of us find generating our own code by our own hand fun, but reviewing others’ boring, and most devs probably do not want to stop being code writers and start being AI’s QA. Or to be kicked out of tech unless they rely on this technology they don’t trust. I trust deterministic outputs and know if it fucks up there is probably a bug I can go back and fix; with generative outputs determined by a machine (as opposed to human-generated things that have also been filtered by their real-life experience and not just what they saw written online) I really don’t, so I’d never use LLMs for anything I need to trust.

People are absolutely going to get heated over this because if it gets Big and the flaws ironed out, it’ll probably be used not to help us little people have more efficient and cheaper things, less time on drudgery and more time on things we like, but at least to try to put us the devs on programming.dev out of a job and eventually the rest of us the working people out of a job too because we’re an expensive line item, and we have little faith that the current system will adjust with (the hypothetical future) rising unemployment-due-to-AI to help us keep a non-dystopian standard of living. Poor peoples’ situation getting worse, previously-comfortable people starting to slide towards poverty… automation that threatens jobs that seems to be being pushed by big companies and rich people with lots of resources during a time of rising class tension is sure to invite civilized discussions with zero vitriol for people who have anything positive to say about that form of automation.

I did just remember more from English class: Verbal irony, a type of irony, fits the colloquial definition of sarcasm (“oh, just great” when something upsetting happens). (According to https://literarydevices.net/verbal-irony/ sarcasm is verbal irony used to mock or insult. Don’t 100% remember what they said about sarcasm vs verbal irony in English class.) The irony being talked about here is situational irony. It seems people colloquially use “irony” for “situational irony” and get upset when it gets used to refer to the sarcastic type of “verbal irony”

The people who legitimately hold the view that it’s just a word might be a little frustrated at the small bit of extra work of needing to change their scripts or code that uses those words to the new words, but otherwise no big deal. But a lot of “it’s just a word bro” folks actually do care and just like to pretend they do not for clout, because caring is for lame losers and being able to falsely present yourself as a previously-neutral party now moved to care by how stupid something is can hold a lot of weight when convincing others and make you feel cool.

It always mildly annoyed that we call them “black people” and “white people” because “black people” are more brown than black, and “white people” are more tan than white. And brown can be viewed as a shade of tan. Not very descriptive.

Hi, American checking in. I was taught in English class in high school that irony is an ambulance running people over, not just sarcasm. I do agree that colloquially (and I am probably guilty of it too) we Americans use the word “irony” to talk about things being presented in a non-genuine and earnest manner, to talk about sarcasm and snark and parody.

I half worry for society and half feel that as much as I feel bad about my coding abilities, I’m better than people who never actually bother learning the concepts themselves and fully outsource their homework to AI and that population is growing. It’s a low bar but more people are failing to clear it every day!

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