There is a massive automation push going on. And it's naive to think that it doesn't work at all.

At the very least you can use it to get quick answers that would normally require more skilled googling than most people can do.

Those kind of productivity boosts quickly turn into layoffs and reductions in force.

And remember good enough is always good enough when you have no competition because you haven't been enforcing antitrust law in decades. Yes the quality of AI generated products might be shit but you're going to have to buy something at some point to live and you're going to have to buy it from one of seven companies because they own basically everything.

And if a competitor does start to come up they will either be run out of business or bought and there's nothing anyone can do about it because we're not going to start voting for politicians who will enforce antitrust law. Even if you do your neighbors don't.

Both the theme of the story and the AI brain fart. And I suppose the suckers who voted for the YOB, too, while I'm at it?

*sigh*

s/This is/These are/

"These is not the wild coincidences you were searching for."

Not finding any funny, so forced to look for the low-hanging fruit? "Today's Slashdot: These are not the jokes you were looking for."

That's it? All the funny that Slashdot could handle these days? This story had great potential for laughs, but...

But not via Facebook or the cesspool formerly known as Twitter. Assassinated and left, respectively. Slashdot used to be a pretty good source of Funny, but that must have been before the AI sock puppets took over the Internet.

Just kidding. Most of the sock puppets are too stupid to be AI-based slop. But they are apparently giving me a fixation on or some kind of obsession with their vacuous enshitification?

Even though I don't even know what sort of humor I was hoping for on this story, I'm sure AC's brain fart was not it.

Just read another book with something about why anonymity encourages people to become worse people over time... Must have been in the Facebook-related stuff.

Me? I didn't even want to use GitHub but Claude.ai made me do it.

They still have those? I would have thought that everything was sent electronically by now, and nobody hand-entered anything except for bank tellers and other people who are dealing face-to-face with customers.

Then again, I remember how hard it was to do an international wire transfer a few months back, and how my bank faxed paperwork back and forth to their back office, so I guess that's plausible.

The unfortunate thing, though, is that for the most part, any use of AI to do that stuff is a mistake, because you should be shifting the burden of data entry (and thus the burden of correctness) to the customer by doing everything electronically to the maximum extent possible. The fact that banks use paper forms in the first place is the flaw, and replacing the person who types the contents of the form with AI is just replacing one error-prone, bank-at-fault process with another, when they should be shifting the liability for error to the customer. This also has the advantage of reducing the likelihood of error, because the customer had to fill all that info in on the form in the first place, so you have one opportunity for error instead of two. This also has the advantage of usually making it easier for the customer, because the customer doesn't have to do stuff in person. And so on.

And is it your thesis that teh EU can enforce their will? Because someone will. Or is it your thesis that the EU should be isolationist and rely on their superior qualities to bring the world to a different conclusion, ruled by that moral superiority?

Whether you like or dislike the USA, do you believe that there are no reasons ever for military involvement? Example, After WW2, and the late 1940's, the USSR and China were very expansionist, the US stood in their way, in a series of proxy wars. If this happened with the EU as the top dog, should they just allow that to happen? And if they stood in teh way, would the US be able to sustain what the USA did?

the questions and answers are not as simple as many believe, Would you like to live under Russian or Chinese influence as opposed to having the USA involved?Another tough question.

Another tough question - is the EU capable of withstanding the integral issues and mindsets that brought forth the National Socialists and their resulting genocide? There were even genocidal actions in the 1990's.

Am I wrong for being concerned, or has the EU changed so much that it will never happen again.

Do you have concerns about left wing extremists?

And you know - every word you write drips with hatred for the USA. I ask questions b asked on the fact that no country is immune from perfidy, and you write more invective.

So this has become pointless, if you don't think you hate the USA, you have been brainwashed.

Show me this software that you consider usable enough to replace more than about 5% of what a software engineer does.

maybe partly, but the reality I know as someone who reads a lot of penetration testing reports, is big supposedly mature organizations end up putting useful credentials (as in not just some QA mock enviornment nobody cares about in CI/CD stuff) in their git commits, all the freaking time.

Cloud security is a s*** show a lot of places, even places with mostly capable people, it only takes one idiot or one careless person to really mess things up badly. That is the problem with PaaS/SaaS model generally.

Depends on what you mean by AI. If you mean specialized trained models that do very specific things (e.g. optimizing just-in-time component purchases or using computer vision to make robots work more effectively, making stock picks, spotting tumors on scans, and optimizing ad spend to get the best results), then yes. If you mean LLMs, I think you missed the mark with your list (except maybe ad creation; that's plausible).

LLMs are great for automating trivial work as long as there's no high financial cost for mistakes. Chat bots to help you search for products on a website better are a great example. Or LLMs to help you write the skeleton for new code or help you write unit tests (as long as you check the results). Or LLMs to help you look for bugs in code or review code before submission. Or LLMs to help you create prototypes of new software while deciding what approach you want to take. Or LLMs to quickly create artwork for fun, where you don't care if there are extra fingers.

LLMs are not great when there is high risk. Chat bots for airline customer service are a great example. Turning LLMs loose writing code without a competent programmer looking over its shoulder is another good example.

In between are the use cases where it functions adequately, but may not save much time, because the overhead of reviewing its work adequately is a sizable percentage of the time required to do the work by hand. Writing real-world production code is a great example.

Presumably it will get better over time. But whether it will ever reach a level of trust where we can turn it loose to write code and not carefully scrutinize that work, I couldn't say. Right now, there's too much risk of it saying that tests pass when they actually haven't been run, or worse, when the AI has decided to delete the tests so that they won't fail. There's too much risk of gaslighting across the board. There's too much risk of AI subtly misinterpreting prompts in extremely creative ways to give you results that look like they are correct but are actually wrong. And so on.

I'm going to assume for the moment that the C-suite at Meta are not complete and utter morons. So from this, we can conclude that Meta is firing people not because they actually believe AI will do their jobs, but rather because they don't have enough revenue to pay for their AI hardware costs, and they're hoping that they can get away with counting on their near-monopoly on social media to let them safely unstaff large parts of Facebook, Instagram, and other services in the short term so that they can build their data centers.

And while that might be true (because the DOJ let Facebook get way, way too big), that's a stock price disaster waiting to happen. It's risking throwing away the whole company to spend more money on Facebook's LLM technology, which might still never be good enough for them to actually make money at it. It made sense to do that work up to a point, because they could benefit from it internally for things like abuse detection. But trying to productize it without adequate rounds of funding is a mistake. If they truly think their tech is up to snuff, they should spin it off into a separate subsidiary and do rounds of financing to pay for the cost, with separate stock offerings.

Except it absolutely is Embrace-Extend...

It is embrace Linux, just so long as your are running it on their compute...It is extend Linux,they have already used their influence to stuff all manor of rather cloud-specific tooling into systemd, and successfully crammed that stack down on the broader community.

Finally it is extinguish in the software freedom sense the GNU side of GNU/Linux always cared about. Unless your are like beyond careful about every component you use, every bit of tooling you chose, and every other architecture decision you make the odds of anyone not a large enterprise being able to shift their application from Azure to some other cloud or their own compute/hosting is low. If you really do go the truly cloud agnostic route, you'll be giving up a lot of the value add features of the platform and paying a higher bill at the same time.

Depends on your definitions, I suppose. You could argue that engaging in blatant market manipulation and insider trading from the Oval Office for 16 months and only netting $750M in profits represents a failure. Someone more competent could have made a lot more.

And it's happening whether you want it to or not. It doesn't matter whether any of it works because they will make it work. Over half of Americans are white collar workers and the prospect of replacing them with automation is to tantalizing to give up.

Even if only a third of this crap works you're looking at permanent 20% unemployment on top of the typical 5% that the economy floats around. And that's pretending we are at full employment by pretending gig work is full-time work and ignoring underemployment and the millions of people who just gave up looking for work and the ever-increasing number of homeless people.

As a reminder world War II started with 25% unemployment.

I don't think there's a solution. We are just going to put too many people out of work and we're not putting everybody out of work all at once. This means the people who still have jobs are going to fight it out with the people who are now completely economically useless to society. In the middle will be the trillionaires consolidating their power.

I suspect eventually we will hand the nuclear launch codes to some religious lunatics and then it's game over. It is possible the trillionaires will simply create their techno feudal nightmare as well.

But I do not know how you overcome the concept of, if you don't work you don't eat. That is so deeply ingrained in people and there's nothing more infuriating than watching somebody stay at home playing Xbox drinking beer and getting laid when you're putting in 60 hours a week at a shit job you hate. No amount of logic or reason and no amount of telling you to start asking why you're working so hard for so little will change the emotional knee-jerk reaction or the ability for those trillionaires to point you at the unemployable and get you the fight with them crabs in a bucket style.

And this is before all the other social problems with employment collapsing, like how men traditionally are valued as providers and that role is becoming obsolete or how we have tons and tons of people who are just not ever going to be able to hack it academically but that we have absolutely no use for... Especially in a country that refuses to fund infrastructure which is pretty much all countries.

If somebody wants to suggest a specific way out of this trap besides just dismissing this as Doom and gloom I would be happy to hear it. I have noticed that people have stopped accusing me of being a luddite. It's too obvious that the storm is coming at this point to pretend it's not.

Everyone just seems to be hoping they die before the shit hits the fan. But I think it's coming too fast. Even some of the baby boomers aren't going to escape it anymore. You can't have shit like a data center in Utah sucking down more electricity than the entire state and not have consequences that are immediate and devastating for the surrounding communities