And so has been every other paradigm shift in human existence.
AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
251–260 of 467 posts
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#252Good article. Now would anyone tell me how do I short AI?
You short a big tech stock of your choice. They’re all up to their eyeballs in this and if it pops the entire tech sector will crater
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#253My new thing with articles like these: just search for the word "water". I think that what is really behind the AI bubble is the same thing behind most money, power, and influence: land and resources. The AI future that is promised, whether to you and me or to the billionaires, requires the same thing: lots of energy, lots of land, and lots of water. Datacenters that outburn cities to keep the data churning are big,…
After reading the article but before seeing this, I adopted that policy. So true.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#254“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 think the question is whether those ai tools make you produce more value . Anecdotally, the ai tools have changed the workflow and allowed me to produce more tools etc. They have not necessarily changed the rate at which I produce valuable outputs (yet).
When using AI to find faults in existing processes that is value creation (assuming they get fixed of course).
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#255What’s wild to me is how comment sections on articles like these have strong Tower of Babel vibes
That can’t be good
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
A contrarian opinion - I also didn't jump the train yet, its even forbidden in our part of company due to various regulations re data secrecy and generally slow adoption. Also - for most seasoned developers, actual dev activity is miniscule part of overall efforts. If you are churning code like some sweatshop every single day at say 45 its by your own choice, you don't want to progress in career or career didn't push…
While I think that is true and this thread here is about senior productivity switching to LLMs, I can say from my experience that our juniors absolutely crush it using LLMs. They have to do pretty demanding and advanced stuff from the start and they are using LLMs nonstop. Not sure how that translates into long term learning but it definitely increases their output and makes them competent-enough developers to contri…
> Not sure how that translates into long term learning
I don't think that's a relevant metric. "learning" rate of humans versus LLMs. If you expect typical LLMs to grow from juniors to competent mids and maybe even seniors faster than typical human, then there is little point to learn to write code, but rather learn "software engineering with artificial code monkey". However, if that turns out to not be true, we have just broken the pipeline producing actual mids and seniors, who can actually oversee the LLMs.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#257“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 really haven’t tried them.
You are doing yourself a huge disservice.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
The moment your code departs from typical patterns in the training set or ("agentic environment") LLMs fall over at best (i.e. can't even find the thing) or do some random nonsense at worst. IMO LLMs are still at the point where they require significant handholding, showing what exactly to do, exactly where. Otherwise, it's constant review of random application of different random patterns, which may or may not satis…
This has not been my experience as of late. If anything, they help steer us back on track when a SWE decides to be clever and introduce a footgun.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. How are we building _for_ ourselves when we literally automate away our jobs? This is probably one of the _worst_ things someone could do to me.
This is kind of a myopic view of what it means to be a programmer. If you're just in it to collect a salary, then yeah, maybe you do benefit from delivering the minimum possible productivity that won't get you fired. But if you like making computers do things, and you get joy from making computers do more and new things, then LLMs that can write programs are a fantastic gift.
> But if you like making computers do things, and you get joy from making computers do more and new things, then LLMs that can write programs are a fantastic gift.
Maybe currently if you enjoy social engineering an LLM more than writing stuff yourself. Feels a bit like saying "if you like running, you'll love cars!"
In the future when the whole process is automated you won't be needed to make the computer do stuff, so it won't matter whether you would like it. You'll have another job. Likely one that pays less and is harter on your body.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#260What’s wild to me is how comment sections on articles like these have strong Tower of Babel vibes That can’t be good
Yeah, it feels like everybody is replying to some argument they hear in their head and not what this guy is actually saying. Yikes