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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

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Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#171

Post by protocolture »

exceptione wrote: post #10

I think this is the best part of the essay: > But then I wonder about the true purpose of AI. As in, is it really for what they say it’s for? > There is a vast chasm between what we, the users, and them, the investors, are “sold” in AI. We are told that AI will do our tasks faster and better than we can — that there is no future of work without AI. And that is a huge sell, one I’ve spent the majority of this post dec…

It says absolutely nothing about anything. Its like 10 fearmongering tweets in a blender.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#172

Post by code51 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #132
sockgrant wrote: post #14

“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…

I'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.

I'm surprised these pockets of job security still exist.

Know this: someone is coming after this already.

One day someone from management will hear about a cost-saving story at a dinner table, the words GPT, Cursor, Antigravity, reasoning, AGI will cause a buzzing in her ear. Waking up with tinnitus the next morning, they'll instantly schedule a 1:1 to discuss "the degree of AI use and automation"

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#173

Post by sheepscreek »

dcre wrote: post #158
SoftTalker wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.

The tools have reached the point where no special knowledge is required to get started. You can get going in 5 minutes. Try Claude Code with an API key (no subscription required). Run it in the terminal in a repo and ask how something works. Then ask it to make a straightforward but tedious change. Etc.

Just download Gemini (no API key) and use it.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#174

Post by 01100011 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #132
sockgrant wrote: post #14

“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…

I'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.

It's time to jump on the train. I'm a cranky, old, embedded SWE and claude 4.5 is changing how I work. Before that I laughed off LLMs. They were trash. Claude still has issues, but damn, I think if I don't integrate it into my workflow I'll be out of work or relegated to work in QA or devops(where I'd likely be forced to use it).

No, it's not going to write all your code for you. Yes your skills are still needed to design, debug, perform teamwork(selling your designs, building consensus, etc), etc.. But it's time to get on the train.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#175

Post by overfeed »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #151
overfeed wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your probably bosses think it's worth it if the outcome is getting rid of the whole host of y'all and replace you with AWS Elastic-SWE instances. Which is why it's imperative that you maximize AI usage.

So instead of firing and replacing me with AI my boss will pay me to use AI he would've used..?

No one's switching to AI cold turkey. Think of it as training your own, cheaper replacement. SWEs & their line managers develop & test AI workflows, while giving the bosses time to evaluate AI capabilities, then hopefully shrink the headcount as close to 0 as possible without shrinking profits. Right now, it's juniors who're getting squeezed.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#177

Post by renegat0x0 »

faceball2000 wrote: post #39

What about surveillance? Lately I've been feeling that is what it's really for. Because our data can be queried in a much more powerful way when it has all been used to train LLMs.

- Companies had to go in that direction. You cannot just fall behind AI gold rush

- These solutions are easier for people, and therefore will win in the long run

- these solutions benefit companies because of the surveillance data they have access to now. They always had some data, but now they collect and process even more

- those who control AI will be the kings of the future, so naturally everyone will be running toward this goal

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#178

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

code51 wrote: post #172
SoftTalker wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.

I'm surprised these pockets of job security still exist. Know this: someone is coming after this already. One day someone from management will hear about a cost-saving story at a dinner table, the words GPT, Cursor, Antigravity, reasoning, AGI will cause a buzzing in her ear. Waking up with tinnitus the next morning, they'll instantly schedule a 1:1 to discuss "the degree of AI use and automation"

> Know this: someone is coming after this already.

Yesterday, GitHub Copilot declared that my less-AI-weary friend’s new Laravel project was following all industry best-practices for database design as it storing entities as denormalized JSON blobs in a MySQL 8.x database with no FKs, indexes, constraints, all NULL columns (and using root@mysql as the login, of course); while all Laravel controller actions’ DB queries were RBAR loops that did loaded all rows into memory before doing JSON deserialisation in order to filter rows.

I can’t reconcile your attitude with my own personal lived experience of LLMs being utterly wrong 40% of the time; while 50% of the time being no better or faster than if I did things myself; another 5% of the time it gets stuck in a loop debating the existence of the seahorse emoji; and the last 5% of the time genuinely utterly scaring me with a profoundly accurate answer or solution that it produced instantly.

Also, LLMs have yet to demonstrate an ability to tackle other real-world DBA problems… like physically installing a new SSD into the SAN unit in the rack.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#179

Post by kohlerm »

Very good article. With regards to the guy being a designer, he is IMHO still correct with regards to layouts. Currently LLMs ares till pretty clueless about layouts. Also SWE is much more then coding. Even in the coding area there is much more room for improvement. The idea that you would not need Software Engineers soon, is brain dead.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#180

Post by red75prime »

portanus wrote: post #122
highfrequency wrote: post #107

The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. What that means is that if you work in a certain context, for a while you keep seeing AI get a 0 because it is worse than the current process. Behind the scenes the underly…

We don’t argue that microwaves will be ubiquitous (which they aren’t, but close enough). We argue that microwaves are not an artificial general barbecue, as the makers might wish were true. And we argue that microwaves will indeed never replace your grill as the makers, again, would love you to believe.

Your reasoning would be fine if there were a clear distinction, like between a microwave and a grill.

What we actually have is a physical system (the brain) that somehow implements what we know as the only approximation of general intelligence and artificial systems of various architectures (mostly transformers) that are intended to capture the essence of general intelligence.

We are not at the microwave and the grill stage. We are at the birds and the heavier-than-air contraptions stage, when it's not yet clear whether those particular models will fly, or whether they need more power, more control surfaces, or something else.

Heck, the frontier models have around 100 times lower number of parameters than the most conservative estimate of the equivalent number of parameters of the brain: the number of synapses. And we are like "it won't fly".

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