Mastodawn

william light 1d ago

Cindʎ Xiao 🍉 8964

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@patrickcmiller/116749455911829582

Once again, "it's useful for programming" is being used as cover, to justify the continued existence of this company and industry.

The money that we pay toward coding assistants extends the runway this industry has, to continue positioning itself as "indispensable" and "inevitable", while destroying labour rights, open knowledge, and the environment in the meantime. That money is actually critical for that runway, because coding assistants are one of the only high-margin products these companies have.

Programmers don't like to think about this, and like to pretend that this technology is neutral and that we can use it regardless of the underlying ideology. This is completely burying our heads in the sand.

I'm just not interested in participating in any of this.

gaytabase 2d ago

@cxiao it's just not even good at programming. i really really tried to get good results just this year and it's still shit.

Yes, but you have standards... "Industry" does not

It's almost comical how quickly talk of "best practices" completely evaporated when there was an easier way for pseudoengineers to pretend they know things

gaytabase 2d ago

@luxliquida @cxiao doesn't matter, it costs too much to replace developers with it.

and everyone who has adopted it has started having outages. can't hide from it forever.

Their goal isn't to reduce business costs, though

Its twofold: disenfranchise labor (which costs them power) and justify their investment portfolio (which increases personal profit)

The latter is especially funny to see... When someone has an irrational attachment to finding problems that use a specific solution and the real reason ends up being, "I invested in Microsoft/IBM/etc"

gaytabase 2d ago

@luxliquida @cxiao what do their goals have to do with the fact that their clients won't pay for what they offer at anywhere near what it costs to run?

@dysfun @cxiao 🤷‍♀️

@dysfun @cxiao My only point was that business decisions are rarely rational and usually based on the biases and incentives of the people running then

But we're apparently just talking past each other right now, so I'll leave it there

Dave Rahardja 2d ago

@dysfun @cxiao Even if it’s good, it is harmful.

degenerating degenerate 1d ago

It's complicated using coding AI, along with gold, it can produce shit... often because it tries to do the minimum to satisfy what you asked. So what you ask, requires some care, like a prosecution lawyer asking a hostile witness.

What you might leave unsaid, it will skip. It will leave unsaid things that it has skipped, until you ask it from a new context. For example it will be satisfied to not even build-test let alone create a meaningful test suite and confirm it before claiming everything solved.

Even when it produces something good, you have to manually iterate on it today asking a new context to do a security audit etc.

Even so... it's a huge boon once you get used to how to drive it.

gaytabase 1d ago

@hopeless @cxiao no.

degenerating degenerate 16h ago

@dysfun @cxiao Good luck with that approach :)

⠵⠻⠷⠕⠭ 🍥🍉⚪🌹2d ago

@cxiao Why does this also feel like it's a massive backdoor being shoved into everything. (See eg; Indian surveillance smartphone app that thankfully got quashed, North Korean OS, etc.) #surveillance

@z3r0fox @cxiao 'cause it is. Look at the palantr manifesto. They pretty much state they're trying to change soft power into hard power to control us all. They want a dissenting tweet to automatically disable purchasing power; to algorithmically corral us.

@cxiao are coding assistants high margin profit? If the Claude / copilot stuff is anything to go by, that's hemorrhaging money as well.

Dave Rahardja 2d ago

@cxiao Agreed. And additionally, every time you (I) use AI for coding, we diminish the value (both monetary and societal) of human software developers.

We cannot use AI to code without also funding the use of AI to do *everything else they do*. They are the same industry. We either abstain, or we are complicit in all facets of this current industry.

Gabriele Svelto 1d ago

@cxiao honestly I'm not even sure it really is high-margin. The new per-token pricing models that are being floated around are astronomical. I take that as a sign that the costs are enormous which means that the margins are low at best, if not negative like for everything else. However it gives those companies a way to show they are producing some sort of revenue, and they're using this to attract more capital to burn.

degenerating degenerate 1d ago

> I'm just not interested in participating in any of this.

The thing it is spectacularly useful for programming... whatever other realities you can say about it, because it is good at that, from now on people will use it heavily. If the AI business implodes, they will just use it locally (which would be a better thing).

If you can't find a way for your ego to coexist with it, outside of some boutique spots, and those only for a while until the decision-makers at their customers get wiped out, gigs will start to be hard to find.