The list of technologies that have not become a front for consolidation of resources and power appears below:
Something tells me whatever counterexamples I give you you'll twist to somehow fit this silly narrative.
AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
391–400 of 467 posts
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#392Earlier 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…
It's just not true, it is not ready. Especially Claude, where if you check the forums everyone is complaining that it's gone stupid the last few months. Claude's code is all over the place, and if you can't see that and are putting it's code into production I pity your colleagues. Try stopping. Honestly, just try. Just use claude as a super search engine. Though right now ChatGPT is better. You won't see any drop in…
This is far too simplistic a viewpoint. First of all it depends what you're trying to do. Web dev? AI works pretty well. CPU design? Yeah good luck with that.
Secondly it depends what you're using it for within web dev. One shot an entire app? I did that recently for a Chrome extension and while it got many things wrong that I had to learn and fix, it was still waaaaaay faster than doing it myself. Especially for solving stupid JS ecosystem bugs.
Nobody sane is suggesting you just generate code and put it straight into production. It isn't ready for that. It is ready for saving you a ton of time if you use it wisely.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 gril…
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!
As I understood it, if you used the esoteric functions of the microwave, you COULD cook food like it was cooked on a range, but it required constant babysitting of the microwave and reinput of timers and cook power levels.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Then you can roast the meat pieces in a closed glass vessel It sounds like this is steamed meat, as opposed to roasted. Your cooking time seems to match a quick search for steamed chicken recipes: https://tiffycooks.com/20-minutes-chinese-steamed-chicken/
"irradiated meat"
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The moment your code departs from typical patterns Using AI, I constantly realize that a-typical patterns are much rarer than I thought.
Yeah but don't let it prevent you from making a novel change just because no one else seems to be doing it. That's where innovation sleeps.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
All I see it doing, as a SWE, is limiting the speed at which my co-workers learn and worsening the quality of their output. Finally many are noticing this and using it less...
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.
My bosses aren't pushing it at all. The normal cargo-cult temptations have pulled on some fellow SWEs, but its being pretty effectively pushed back on by its own failings, paired with SWEs who use it being outperformed by those who dont.
> edit for spelling
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#397Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fundamentally I think the job of engineer is to translate a business or real life scenario into logic. This is true for any kind of engineer, and is not restricted to software. I held and continue to hold that software engineer shouldn't be constrained to any specific language. And extrapolate to the entire engineering field, the engineering profession will continue to exist because to first translate a business or r…
I agree with you. In the industry today I feel there there are software engineers and there are programmers. The engineers design, architect, and invent. The programmers do the rote work. Of course it's not black and white, but that's at the extremes of the spectrum. I'm hoping that AI programming pushes more people toward the engineering side and as it takes over the rote work side. There will be people far to the p…
It does push people and not gently.
But it does open up engineering to do much more on otherwise under engineered areas and open up entire new fields.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#399The list of technologies that have not become a front for consolidation of resources and power appears below:
I'm about as cynical as they come, but it has to be said that something like 99.9999% of all fundamental technologies are completely public at this point. Humans in the ancient past were unlikely to be that dramatically different in terms of present humans in terms of intellectual ability, but were held back by a lack of knowledge. For instance, we still use steel - and for 99% of humanity's existence nobody knew how…
- 99.9999%
Wow! That's a great many indeed. Can you just name 1 though? Just 1?
Let's start with fire, certainly making and controlling fire is a skill that uses knowledge, a "technology". Go from there, try to find one technology that did not find itself in the service of power, for consolidating resources, etc..
Don't get me wrong, I think might, both intellectual and physical, should serve the purposes of benevolence and valour. I'm not complaining, I'm taking note of reality.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
Automating away software engineering entirely is nothing new. It goes all the way back to BASIC and COBOL, and later visual programming tools, Microsoft Access, etc. There have been innumerable attempts to do somehow get by without need those pedantic and difficult programmers and all their annoying questions and nit picking. But here's the thing: the hard part of programming was never really syntax, it was about hav…
> Modern AI tools are just the next step to abstracting away syntax as a gatekeeper function, but the need for precise systemic thinking is as glaringly necessary as ever. Syntax is not a gatekeeper function. It’s exactly the means to describe the precise systemic thinking. When you’re creating a program, you’re creating a DSL for multiple subsystem, which you then integrate. The subsystem can be abstract, but we usu…
The difference is that human language is a much more information-dense, higher-level abstraction than code. I can say "an async function that accepts a byte array, throws an error if it's not a valid PNG image with a 1:1 aspect ratio and resolution >= 100x100, resizes it to 100x100, uploads it to the S3 bucket env.IMAGE_BUCKET with a UUID as the file name, and retries on failure with exponential backoff up to a maximum of 100 attempts", and you'll have a pretty good idea of what I'm describing despite the smaller number of characters than equivalent code.
I can't directly compile that into instructions which will make a CPU do the thing, but for the purposes of describing that component of a system, it's at about the right level of abstraction to reasonably encode the expected behavior. Aside from choosing specific libraries/APIs, there's not much remaining depth to get into without bikeshedding; the solution space is sufficiently narrow that any conforming implementation will be functionally interchangeable.
AI is just laying bare that the hard part of building a system has always been the logic, not the code per se. Hypothetically, one can imagine that the average developer in the future might one day think of programming language syntax in the same way that an average web developer today thinks of assembly. As silly as this may sound today, maybe certain types of introductory courses or bootcamps would even stop teaching code, and focus more on concepts, prompt engineering, and developing/deploying with agentic tooling.
I don't know how much learning syntax really gatekeeps the field in practice, but it is something extra that needs to be learned, where in theory that same time could be spent learning some other aspect of programming. More significant is the hurdle of actually implementing syntax; turning requirements into code might be cognitively simple given sufficiently baked requirements, but it is at minimum time-consuming manual labor which not everyone is in a position to easily afford.