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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

#271

Post by iammrpayments »

01100011 wrote: post #174
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.

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…

I don’t use AI for anything except translations and searching and I’d say 3 times out of 10 it gives me bad information, while translation only works ok if you use the most expensive models

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

#272

Post by lm28469 »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #268
lm28469 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel people were much more sensible about AI back when their thoughts about it weren't mixed with their antipathy for big tech. Why big tech ? Big corps in general have been fucking us over since the industrial revolution, why do you think it will change now lol ? If half of their promises had materialized we'd be working 3 days a week and retire at 40 already

>Big corps in general have been fucking us over since the industrial revolution And yet your computer, all the food you eat, the medicine that keeps you alive if you get sick, etc is all due to the organizational industrial and productive capacity of large corporations. The existence of large corporations is just a consequence of demand for goods and services and the advantages of scale, and they exist because of the…

Big "It exists hence we should not imagine any other alternative system, and you can't criticise it because you live in it" vibe.

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

#273

Post by thepuglor »

adrian_b wrote: post #238
ccppurcell wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a lot of hubris around microwaves. I remember a lot of images of full chickens being roasted in them. I've never once seen that "in the wild" as it were. They are good for reheating something that was produced earlier. Hey the metaphor is even better than I thought!

There are many years since I have switched to cooking only with microwaves, due to minimum wasted time and perfect reproducibility. And I normally eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients. Attempting to roast a full chicken or turkey is not the correct way to use microwaves. You must first remove the bones from the bird, then cut the meat into bite-sized chunks. After using a boning knife for the former…

I greatly appreciate this type of thinking. If you debone the meat yourself, do you make stock or use the bones in any way? You obviously care about personal process optimization and health factors, and I'm curious to what extent you are thinking of the entire food/ingredient supply chain.

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

#274

Post by balamatom »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #241

I feel people were much more sensible about AI back when their thoughts about it weren't mixed with their antipathy for big tech. In this article we see a sentiment I've often seen expressed: > I doubt the AGI promise, not just because we keep moving the goal posts by redefining what we mean by AGI, but because it was always an abstract science fiction fantasy rather than a coherent, precise and measurable pursuit. A…

Oh you sweet summer child...

>It ultimately seems to come to a more moral/spiritual argument than a real one. What really should be so special about human brains that a computer system, even one devised by a company whose PR/execs you don't like, could never match it in general abilities?

Well, being able to consider moral and spiritual arguments seriously, for one.

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

#275

Post by nkzd »

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…

> design and large scale changes to a codebase (though Codex is cracking the second one quickly).

Can you share some experience regarding Codex and large scale changes to codebase? I haven't noticed any improvements.

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

#276

Post by ahartmetz »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #250
atleastoptimal wrote: post #241

I feel people were much more sensible about AI back when their thoughts about it weren't mixed with their antipathy for big tech. In this article we see a sentiment I've often seen expressed: > I doubt the AGI promise, not just because we keep moving the goal posts by redefining what we mean by AGI, but because it was always an abstract science fiction fantasy rather than a coherent, precise and measurable pursuit. A…

People get very nervous about defending the value of the human brain "just because," I find. There is nothing logically wrong with simply stating that it seems to you that human beings are the only agents worthy of moral consideration, and that this is true even in the face of an ASI which can effortlessly beat them at any task. Competence does not require qualia. But it is an aggressive claim that people are uncomfo…

"As a member of my species, I think chauvinism in favor of my species is fine, and it's commonplace among all animals. Such behavior is also generally accepted, so it's easy not to feel too bad about it."

I think that's the most honest, no bullshit reply to that question. I've had some opportunity to think about it in discussions with vegetarians. There are other arguments, but it soon gets very hard to even define what one is even talking about with questions like "what is consciousness" and such.

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

#277

Post by balamatom »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #266
haritha-j wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AGI isn't difficult at all to describe The fact that there are multiple research papers written on the subject, as well as the fact that OpenAI needs an independent commission to evaluate this, suggest that it is indeed difficult. Also, "everything a human can" is an incredibly vague definition. Should it be able to love?

> Should it be able to love? We can leave that question to the philosophers, but the whole debate about AGI is about capabilities, not essence, so it isn't relevant imo to the major concerns about AGI

GP should've asked, "should it be able to kill?"

That way you ain't washing your hands by calling "philosophy" every concern that isn't your concern.

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

#278

Post by devjam »

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.

Nothing is in its "final form" today.

I'm a long time SWE and in the last week, I've made and shipped production changes across around 6 different repos/monorepos, ranging from Python to Golang, to Kotlin to TS to Java. I'd consider myself "expert" in maybe one or two of those codebases and only having a passing knowledge of the others.

I'm using AI, not to fire-and-forget changes, but to explain and document where I can find certain functionality, generate snippets and boilerplate, and produce test cases for the changes I need. I read, review and consider that every line of code I commit has my name against it, and treat it as such.

Without these tools I'd estimate being around 25% as effective when it comes to getting up to speed on unfamiliar code and service. For that alone, AI tooling is utterly invaluable.

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

#279

Post by endymion-light »

friendzis wrote: post #199
01100011 wrote: post #174

Earlier 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…

Quite frankly - the majority of code is improved by integrating some sort of pattern. a LLM is great at bringing the pattern you may not have realized you are making into the forefront.

I think there's an obsession, especially in more veteran SWEs to think they are creating something one of a kind and special, when in reality, we're just iterating over the same patterns.

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

#280

Post by balamatom »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #246
atleastoptimal wrote: post #241

I feel people were much more sensible about AI back when their thoughts about it weren't mixed with their antipathy for big tech. In this article we see a sentiment I've often seen expressed: > I doubt the AGI promise, not just because we keep moving the goal posts by redefining what we mean by AGI, but because it was always an abstract science fiction fantasy rather than a coherent, precise and measurable pursuit. A…

I don't see how one could separate LLMs from big tech. Could call them big tech language models.

The "Big Tech" is the AGI.

The LLMs are just the language coprocessor.

It just takes a coprocessor shaped like a world-spanning network of datacenters if you want to encompass language, without being encompassed by it. Organic individual and collective intelligence is entirely encompassed by language, this thing isn't. (Or has the scariest chance so far to not be, anyway.)

If we look at the whole artificial organism, it already has fine control over the motor and other vital functions of millions of nominally autonomous (in the penal sense) organic agents worldwide. Now it's evolving a replacement for the linguistic faculty of its constituent part. I mean, we all got them phones, we don't need to shout any more, do we? That's just rude.

Even now, the creature is causing me to wiggle my appendages over a board with buttons that have letters on them for no reason whatsoever, as far as I can see. Imagine the people stuck in metal boxes for hours getting to some corporate compus where they play logic gate for the better part of their day. Just so that later nobody goes after them with guns for the sin of existing without serving. Happy, they are feeling happy.

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