@b0rk About searching getting increasingly worse, there's another side of this I've thought was interesting.

A non-negligible amount of people no longer ask their technical questions on public forums, they ask their favorite chatbot. These questions, and their answers, are not publicly displayed for other people sharing similar struggles to search for.

@b0rk I think that the way we perceive the Internet is still in a state of flux and 20 years from now we'll look at now the way we look at the early 2000s web2.0 the way at the time we looked at the early '90s geocities era when we looked weird at the earlier Usenet era and so on: a rather quaint but ultimately doomed to be obsoleted way to use this technology. In any case, there's a strong generational component, see the origins of the "Eternal September" meme.

At this point I feel it's all unescapably converging towards the amorphous yet omnipresent hose of semi-worthless data that's the backdrop of most cyberpunk media. But who knows?

@b0rk Anecdata from a freelance dev here: currently on a project for a ~$10 billion revenue company. Not a week goes by without a mail from some layer of management encouraging people to "use more AI". Entire teams are forced to come up with "user facing AI features", with no regard to what those teams are doing. There are mandatory AI sessions on the regular. New hires spend more time talking to copilot than to the rest of my team.

Things are changing very rapidly...

@b0rk
As someone who recently graduated and been looking for a job, I've recently tried out Claude code and such because it seems there's an expectation now that I should get good at that.

When I do, I find the experience to be impressive and almost overwhelming with what it can do & how quickly. But then I get a sinking feeling that... I just don't want to be doing this. If I knew in university this is what I'd be doing I'd have kept programming as a hobby and gone into something else.

@b0rk It's a huge bummer. The technology IS cool and does present a huge advancement in our ability to interface with natural language.

I think it's important to frame it, instead of "can it do x?", as "sure, it can or might eventually be able to do X, but at what cost?" LLMs can and should exist and be accessible, and small open source models you can run on commodity hardware DO exist.

The problem is the eschatological venture capital death cult that's made LLMs their hobby horse,as always

@b0rk TIL my hosting provider is raising prices because the companies pushing AI have so much money they can buy up so much disk, ram and chips to drive up prices for everyone.

I am of those pressured to use it to stay employed & if I'm being honest it's destroying my health because even when it works for me, I know it is built on a pile of harms including increased carbon emissions which makes my child's future worse. :(

@b0rk It’s almost heartening to see history repeat (or rhyme), and I can report so:

Automation — and this is one, boy is it one — has a classic Gartner Hype Curve and like most industrialisation-Luddite* tensions, it ends up with more work / more jobs, not less / fewer.

*per the cliché, not the historical reality?

But first you have to discover if the automation is:

A. replacing a task that it can’t replace
B. making an existing task exist, but faster
C. making the impossible possible, a whole new task

Bosses (been there, 2000s) will spend a couple of years getting you to bang away at type A, until it proves impossible

They’ll want some good news out of that, and hopefully you’ll have a type C to show them. But first they’ll have to figure out how to fit it, which they will, if they’re good.

And type B will be a bit of a minority — the weird truth is though, that the type A stuff will stop getting done anyway because the world turns, and priorities shift … enpoopifies maybe

Real professionalism comes when irreplaceable practices are institutionalised and valued. Think plane safety, but only for jets. Train safety is higher at the top end too.

But you CAN automate: When trains go driverless, they convert DECADES after the hype and predictions were made. And then they embed all the process and procedure into the automation.

We gotta be more like that in IT.

@b0rk my workplace provides my department with licenses for Copilot and chatgpte. We're encouraged to use it as much as possible. (If the business data in my presentation is falsified by the LLM, though, who gets the blame, me or openai?)

Amusingly, we had to take training classes on using it. It's a conversational chatbot. Why provide training on talking to a robot when they never provided training on talking to my human coworkers? Lol

@b0rk The origin of writing https://dustycloud.org/blog/a-letter-from-2016-to-2026/ is my bitterness that a decade ago, we heard a lot of promises that "don't worry, we'll automate away the boring stuff, you can focus on being creative!" and now people seem resigned to "well, all that creative stuff, I don't do it anymore"

Honestly, for me, not doing the creative stuff is giving up on the things that bring me the most happiness in life. And we know that what LLMs are bad at right now is anything that is genuinely new... they're very good at doing things that have been done before.

So, celebrate those who continue to be creative, I think. Because ultimately, even the vibecoders / vibeartists rely on their work to advance things.

But it's depressing to me to see the promises of what life would be like vs what it's now like.