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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

ludic.mataroa.blog

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Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#241

Post by nemosaltat »

keeganpoppen wrote: post #223
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - "Add these domains with these mailboxes to an SMTP server running on my homelab, forward all incoming and outgoing via mxroute" I laughed reading this. Have you actually tried it? I recently tried to get Claude (Opus) to give me a setup for a simple SMTP relay with Postfix. I had to constantly fight it not to include completely unnecessary components and configurations like Dovecot or just override my requirement…

[flagged]

that’s perhaps a bit harsh, and I’m late (intentionally) to all this as I’ve worried about personal atrophy, security, and feeding the shoggoth

but also with my instructions it will churn on prompts for hours. It makes use of my local rags by domain (which it also helped me build and maintain). Most recent example: it’s been on my list to set up headscale for like 5 years now. I know how to do it, I’ve read the docs and kept putting it off, partially cuz Tailscale works and has a generous free tier, and partially because I didn’t want to strand assets that I’d somewhat shortsightedly hardened to only accept ssh from my Tailnet.

claude did it all in 3 hours, while I worked on other stuff, prompting for `op` access when it needed keys, and logging each usage, with minimal involvement from me. All with more documentation, roll back points, and “learnings” propagated to the appropriate rags than I could have created in a weekend session. It made mistakes (some that I likely would have made, like region settings) then reasoned about it, corrected and tested, all transparently, all git backed, all posted about on my Mattermost server as it went, so I can easily search it the way I would of an extremely detailed teammate did it.

I don’t know what to make of it all, but letting it churn through my backlog has been eye-opening.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#242

Post by annzabelle »

I have, in two wildly different companies, on opposite sides of the globe, witnessed leadership go all in on using LLMs to write external documents that would have significant legal and financial consequences for any inaccurate statements or numbers included. There's always a "we'll have our experts read and fact check everything before we send it out," but I have a strongly held view that people whose expertise is not in editing/fact checking tend to be far worse and sloppier at it than they are at writing things correctly the first time.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#243

Post by amalcon »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #238
amalcon wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That observation[0] isn't particularly useful for arguing that it's a political allegiance thing. A lower fraction of voters in the pro-tech part of California (SFO, roughly) voted for Trump than, say, in NYC. Your observation cuts against the argument that political allegiance is the main driver, not in favor of it. [0]- Assuming it's true, which in my experience it isn't especially, but this isn't the best argument…

You have no idea, you must not know that they are afraid of Waymos out in the northeast, they think they are evil or something, I'm not even joking. Anyway, I didn't say it was a political thing I said it was a cultural thing. The average liberal is not someone who thinks primarily in political terms, they are just going about their lives unreflectively and they genuinely believe in the moral weight of their feelings…

You did claim that it was political:

> Its just the thing that upsets me the most about your everyday liberal professional, how much they hate AI just because Trump is pro AI

That's what I'm refuting here -- that people here dislike AI just to be contrary to Trump. This is implausible.

And trying to lecture a life long New Englander who currently lives within the MBTA zone on what the culture is like in the northeast is maybe not the best look. We aren't afraid of Waymos here; the only people I've met who weren't jealous of them were taxi or Uber drivers. That supports my hypothesis, not yours.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#244

Post by DiscourseFan »

amalcon wrote: post #243
DiscourseFan wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no idea, you must not know that they are afraid of Waymos out in the northeast, they think they are evil or something, I'm not even joking. Anyway, I didn't say it was a political thing I said it was a cultural thing. The average liberal is not someone who thinks primarily in political terms, they are just going about their lives unreflectively and they genuinely believe in the moral weight of their feelings…

You did claim that it was political: > Its just the thing that upsets me the most about your everyday liberal professional, how much they hate AI just because Trump is pro AI That's what I'm refuting here -- that people here dislike AI just to be contrary to Trump. This is implausible. And trying to lecture a life long New Englander who currently lives within the MBTA zone on what the culture is like in the northeast…

I'm not sure why my experience differs from yours. When I was in the northeast recently I got into heated arguments with people, one person said they "hated Waymo" and refused to elaborate (but also said they used AI everyday for work), another said flat out that technology is evil, so I asked them if poor people should go without electricity. Then they restricted their argument to AI is evil, and that was a more nuanced (if not trite) debate, which they eventually conceded. But not without some gnawing and thrashing!

But I don't think that hating AI or technology or whatever to be contrary to Trump is a genuine political statement, its just reaction. It involves politics in the same way that everything we do involves politics, but it is not "consciously" political in the same way that a baby demanding care from an overworked mother is also not consciously political. Baby wants milk, your average liberal wants to feel self-righteous (they would honestly do better with the milk). Someone can claim anything they want is political, it does not mean they are doing it for genuinely political reasons, they are probably just doing it because they fear the censure of their friends and the dissolution of their social life. Not engaging with something because you are afraid of how it could harm you personally, consciously or no, is not an objective way of making a decision that effects society more broadly. Like, a baby will just die if it doesn't get milk, you won't necessarily die because some of your friends stop talking to you.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#245

Post by maxerickson »

preg_match wrote: post #229
dehsge wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not going to go back to pre LLM times, it’s also not going to go to a generative ai utopia where we can turn off our brains and a model will understand every nuance of human existence without some from of defined guidance. Just like block chain still exists, it just didn’t revolutionize decentralization. It created a new tool that can be implemented when you want the benefits of what the blockchain can do, same…

I think the biggest realization to me of this whole thing is that most people don't want to turn off their brains. I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable. And it's just... not. People want to be challenged, they want to read human material, they want to listen to human music. Sure those like crappy Spotify fake artists might ma…

How did you get that impression?

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#246

Post by amalcon »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #244
amalcon wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did claim that it was political: > Its just the thing that upsets me the most about your everyday liberal professional, how much they hate AI just because Trump is pro AI That's what I'm refuting here -- that people here dislike AI just to be contrary to Trump. This is implausible. And trying to lecture a life long New Englander who currently lives within the MBTA zone on what the culture is like in the northeast…

I'm not sure why my experience differs from yours. When I was in the northeast recently I got into heated arguments with people, one person said they "hated Waymo" and refused to elaborate (but also said they used AI everyday for work), another said flat out that technology is evil, so I asked them if poor people should go without electricity. Then they restricted their argument to AI is evil, and that was a more nua…

If you were in NYC, some of this may be a Boston/NYC difference. NYC is much more anti-Waymo (which I interpret mostly as an extension of being much more anti-car in general). There are also substantially different cultures between the two re: art and finance, which may have reflected on the AI questions.

I don't think you can decouple Trump from himself in this way without a concrete explanation. If some factor causes one to dislike something just because Trump likes it, then that same factor would influence voting. We have numbers for voting. When there are lots of other plausible explanations than Trump, the onus would be on you to demonstrate why more people are taking reverse-psychological cues from Trump in a place where more people also voted for him. Gesturing at "culture" doesn't do that.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#247

Post by mh- »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #204
phil21 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you could live your life and not notice they are there. And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones. Fads that would pass. While the younger generations lived an entirely different lifestyle. I’m personally seeing the same. I resisted AI being a “thing” for a long while, but since I’m around a lot of teens and young adults it was a choic…

> " And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones. " Ironic how LLM promoters like to hallucinate citations, much like the tools they espouse.

"Internet 'may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it'" - Daily Mail, December 2000

I recall seeing similar sentiment in other publications throughout the late 90s.

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrocomputing/comments/1m6i4ui/art...

(Apologies that this was the best image host I could find for it)

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#248

Post by eudamoniac »

keeganpoppen wrote: post #223
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - "Add these domains with these mailboxes to an SMTP server running on my homelab, forward all incoming and outgoing via mxroute" I laughed reading this. Have you actually tried it? I recently tried to get Claude (Opus) to give me a setup for a simple SMTP relay with Postfix. I had to constantly fight it not to include completely unnecessary components and configurations like Dovecot or just override my requirement…

[flagged]

Here's the thing. I've been an AI denier and skeptic since the beginning. I've softened. This is my reality on the ground:

I am tech lead on a front end project that is typescript with react and everything else as bog standard as possible. In the last year the backend devs have been pressured to be full stack, so have been submitting AI PRs to my repo with Claude. The PRs mostly 'work', but invariably have major problems that wouldn't make it through a code review in the before times.

Front end JS on a CRUD app is the literal best scenario for AI. Professional senior devs are using it, and it can kind of work, but still not really.

I've given it the old college try myself recently, and it is at the same time astonishing and disappointing. Yeah it can do a lot, but there's always something wrong with it. The 'something' is not always a bug; it can be a design issue, performance issue, unused code, duplicate code, etc, thus many people don't notice the problems. But I think for those of us who prided themselves on quality, the stuff doesn't work well enough to use. For those who leaned more towards speed, they're overawed. I am concerned for my career, yes.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#249

Post by eudamoniac »

hliyan wrote: post #65

This part toward the end of the article resonated with me: > If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times now I suspect we will see this phenomenon more and…

My F100 corporation has answered this problem by removing code review entirely. Thankfully it's not Boeing or anything important. Yes I am looking desperately for a new job.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#250

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #156
dtj1123 wrote: post #94

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…

I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world. Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out? Especially as somebody that's no longer in the software profession and so doesn't have 40 hours a week to just sit there and crank out code, agentic AI is a technological leap on the level of search engines, bulletin boards or compilers. You can literally just open Claude Code, say: - "A…

>> Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out?

Every time there's a new model This Changes Everything. Every single time.

Every time someone points out a limitation of LLMs it's always the same refrain: "Have you tried the latest? Because they're so much better now!". Except this happens with every single model generation. Every time the new models are so good that it's a seismic shift, a step change, a paradigm shift. It's like the finest curve asymptoting ever upwards, a few billions of training cost at a time.

But- to where? AI keeps getting so groundbreakingly better and we're still stuck in the same old world, except now you can...

... port your unmaintained app from 2017 to modern Android? Why was your app unmaintained? What is the societal and technological upheaval that will come from automating such low-stakes tasks? For such huge costs?

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