That was a great read.

The point of all of this is to say: the tech utopia fantasy is truly dead to me. The image of the cool, hippie, leftist Silicon Valley tech is wrong.

I feel this in my soul, because I was that leftist hippie who got into tech because he believed all this shit and getting disillusioned over time was just fucking painful and made me hate those goons with a passion.

The straw I have left is that I’m not alone and that more people realize this and we make our own communities again that don’t suck. There’s still a long way to go, and Fedi has its own problems, especially when it comes to kick out the racists, sexists, and other bigots, but I try to stay positive that we’ll get there. At least to a degree.

(I mean, we have Awful and it’s an example that you can keep the bar nazi-free if you want to.)

There are many good reasons to be critical of copyright, especially because it has been abused so much. Allowing big tech grifters unlimited access to everything everyone ever puts online because they promise to “democratize art” when all they really do it feed it into their spicy autocomplete engines which then flood the internet with AI sludge is not one of them.

Especially when the same fucking people then do a 180 and want protection for the shit their roided Clippy puked out.

So this is apparently something AI companies now think is smart to advertise with. Don’t know who’d willingly consider this something targeted at them, but here we are.

I’m a senior software engineer

Nice, me too, and whenever some tech-brained C-suite bozo tries to mansplain to me why LLMs will make me more efficient, I smile, nod politely, and move on, because at this point I don’t think I can make the case that pasting AI slop into prod is objectively a worse idea than pasting Stack Overflow answers into prod.

At the end of the day, if I want to insert a snippet (which I don’t have to double-check, mind you), auto-format my code, or organize my imports, which are all things I might use ChatGPT for if I didn’t mind all the other baggage that comes along with it, Emacs (or Vim, if you swing that way) does this just fine and has done so for over 20 years.

I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower.

If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.

AI is deepening the previously parasocial relationships we had with our favorite anime characters from passive linear media, into powerful new, interactive relationships.

I think this is legitimately the first time that I’ve seen someone speak about parasocial relationships not only positively, but also suggesting that, hey, we should remove the human element even more from it because it’s not creepy enough as it is.

Let’s be real here: when people hear the word AI or LLM they don’t think of any of the applications of ML that you might slap the label “potentially useful” on (notwithstanding the fact that many of them also are in a all-that-glitters-is-not-gold–kinda situation). The first thing that comes to mind for almost everyone is shitty autoplag like ChatGPT which is also what the author explicitly mentions.

I’m still waiting for even one argument for the usefulness of AI image generation that isn’t fucked up. Just one.

Grok seems so support nudity and deepfakes too according to some news articles I’ve seen because of course nothing screams more free speech than plastering the face of your favorite actor or political opponent into a porn scene, so now let’s see how long it takes the first bluecheck fucker to try and create CSAM with it, because I suppose that’ll be the point when it gets too hot even for Elon.

Same, tbh. I went on their subreddit expecting a shitstorm but the announcement sits at like 85% upvotes with mostly positive replies.

What kind of bizarro world have I stumbled into?

At least the top-level comments seem to be split.

This will grant us “the arrival of an alien intelligence.” Those are Schmidt’s literal words.

Speaking of alien intelligences, my new Silicon Valley blood magic startup has come up with the idea of ritually sacrificing virgins in the hope of summoning Great Cthulhu or Azathoth, as they might have some ideas of solving the climate crisis.

Not a cult btw.

I swear if I hear “being against AI is ableist” one more time I’m gonna lose my shit. Disabled artists have existed for as long as art itself, and the only ableism here is AI-brained fuckwits using disabled people as an escape goat by suggesting they are unable to create things from their own effort and need spicy autocomplete to do so.

Edit: fuck it, I’m keeping the escape goat!