I keep recommending this book, because it's a very humorous look at all the possible ways the universe may end, but you should check out Katie Mac's The End of Everything, Astrophysically Speaking. While the Big Crunch is still a theory, it's not a highly favored one in her view. Far more likely to current thinking, heat death will take us, where everything in the universe becomes so spread out that there's not enough matter in any one place to keep generating energy, in extremely simple terms. But there's also some extremely interesting options, like vacuum collapse. Or other "starts somewhere and travels at the speed of light, leaving nothing in its wake" options.

A shockingly light-hearted read, for a book about how everything in our universe will one day cease to be.

The KGB is kinda like the mafia. I think the "former" is only in public. There is no "former" KGB agent in reality. The official title may have died, but deep down, The Putinator is still KGB through and through. His actions pretty much spell that out.

Precisely. It's the sanctimony of their argument that hits wrong. It's coming off like they think they're providing humanity some great service, but they're prioritizing the payment rather than the information. I'd have more respect for them if they just flat out said, "Pay us, bitches." At least that cuts through the bullshit.

I feel like we've lost some fundamental understanding of what information is, if the profit is more important than the information. I get that people want to be paid, but there's a big disconnect when things are set up to be free to crawl, then these same companies bitch to high heaven when the AI companies crawl, and pitch a bitch if a user manages to access the content via the same methods the crawlers do.

Something is broken in this process, and I'm not convinced its the web or the underlying technology that's broken.

I think where we are is a weird culmination of sales-speak along with minor practical advances leaving us with a weird perception by the C-suites that AI is taking over, while in reality the real work is still being done by humans.

Our company has executives going to AI summits that preach AI in everything, all the time, for every reason. These people usually work for AI companies, and desperately want AI to have access to current codebases so that they can get more training data from stable, long-term codebases outside of the usual internet haunts. Fair enough. But executives hear the sales pitch, and despite decades of being lied to by every sales person they've ever met, buy it hook, line, and sinker. So companies implement AI tools, and push it on the coders. Good companies let those coders use the tools as they see fit. And yes, sometimes it can suggest some decent snippets, but completing methods and functions from prompts is usually an insta-fail. However, if you ask our executives, we're doing about 40-50% AI generated code. In reality, it's probably 40-50% AI suggestions, while less than 3% of those suggestions can be used without directly editing the output in fairly drastic ways. Is it helpful? In some limited cases, yes. Is it writing code outright? I certainly wouldn't say the "slightly better than five years ago" auto-complete style suggestions are really writing code. It does sometimes save me a few minutes on a longer snippet that needs similar functionality repeated for different variables or function names, but it's not writing code. It's saving me five to ten keystrokes every couple lines of code. As fast as I usually type, that's not as big a time saver as it may sound up front.

But since someone in the background decided that needed to be called AI, we're an AI coding team. And everything we write is being credited to AI at around 50% by the executives, because they're paying to use AI.

I look for some larger company, at some point, to actually believe the hype and try to push fully AI generated code to production. That should lead to some fun fireworks for a few days unless something really drastic changes between now and then.

I'm sure the legal department has some EULA style click-through nonsense that will say the human that clicked through is ultimately responsible for all the AI's purchases, so it'll essentially boil down to what happens the first time one of these goes completely off the rails and orders somebody way more of something, or something they had no intention of ordering to begin with. When that goes to court, we'll see if there are any protections for the end-user that was dumb enough to trust an AI to shop for them, or if the courts have been properly stacked and instructed by the current administration to say, "Fuck them, protect the AI company."

I hope there isn't enough uptake to make this a long-term viable thing, but unfortunately, people are pretty dumb when it comes to AI and seem willing to hand over anything for automation if they think it can save them a second. Consequences don't seem to register until they're slamming people in the face, so I'm sure it won't be long until we find out if this will stand up to legal scrutiny or not.

You never struck me as a Juggalo before. But apparently magic's all up in this bitch.

The drug pushers don't get to collect data from those first few hits the way this AI will. This headline just as well read, "360 Million Indians just got hardcore tracking systems for free for a year." The AI game is at least 50% about data collection, and this is a prime example of a company that knows PRECISELY what it's doing. If they can possibly addict a few along the way, great, but that's not the main purpose.

Having spoken in real-world circumstances with several acquaintances that have worked at the local Amazon warehouse, you may be speaking of a past iteration of Amazon, but you're certainly not talking about the present as far as those particular jobs are concerned. From what I'm told now, it's a grindhouse where you run the risk of being fired every second you are there, while being pushed to move faster always. They were going to be shining knights of capitalism in this area when they built the facility, now they're looked at like the bane of the working class, while the city leadership cheers them on.

Correction: Wealth is morality. Greed is God. Profit is all. All other concerns are a nuisance.

On the bright side, they picked the right time to do it. Competition is fierce in this particular race.

Salesforce has entered the chat.

I'm glad to find out that the crapflood apocalypse won't be limited to online banter. Now my voicemail can be inundated with it too. Not that the non-stop "Your car's warranty is about to expire" and "We're just waiting on your final details to issue you your 50K dollar loan" voicemails were getting lonely or anything, but hey, gotta use up that capacity somehow.

When nerdy sites like slashdot were filled with flamewars over whether Amazon was a good or a bad actor on the web. Haven't seen any good faith actor arguments in their favor in a few years now.

Great. When does it get funny again?