Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(December’s finally arrived, and the run-up to Christmas has begun. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Reposted from sunday, for those of you who might find it interesting but didn’t see it: here’s an article about the ghastly state of it project management around the world, with a brief reference to ai which grabbed my attention, and made me read the rest, even though it isn’t about ai at all.
Which, haha, is a great quote but highlights an interesting issue that I hadn’t really thought about before: if your training data doesn’t have any examples of what “good” actually is, then even if your llm could tell the difference between good and bad, which it can’t, you’re still going to get mediocrity out (at best). Whole new vistas of inflexible managerial fashion are opening up ahead of us.
The article continues to talk about how we can’t do IT, and wraps up with
It is probably healthy to be reminded that the software industry was in a sorry state before the llms joined in.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/it-management-software-failures
Now I’m even more skeptical of the programmers (and managers) who endorse LLMs.
Considering the sorry state of the software industry, plus said industry’s adamant refusal to learn from its mistakes, I think society should actively avoid starting or implementing new software, if not actively cut back on software usage when possible, until the industry improves or collapses.
That’s probably an extreme position to take, but IT as it stands is a serious liability - one that AI’s set to make so much worse.
For a lot of this stuff at the larger end of the scale, the problem mostly seems to be a complete lack of accountability and consequences, combined with there being, like, four contractors capable of doing the work, with three giant accountancy firms able to audit the books.
Giant government projects always seem to be a disaster, be they construction, heathcare, IT, and no heads ever roll. Fujitsu was still getting contracts from the UK government even after it was clear they’d been covering up the absolute clusterfuck that was their post office system that resulted in people being driven to poverty and suicide.
At the smaller scale, well. “No warranty or fitness for any particular purpose” is the whole of the software industry outside of safety critical firmware sort of things. We have to expend an enormous amount of effort to get our products at work CE certified so we’re allowed to sell them, but the software that runs them? we can shovel that shit out of the door and no-one cares.
I’m not sure will ever escape “move fast and break things” this side of a civilisation-toppling catastrophe. Which we might get.
Considering how “vibe coding” has corroded IT infrastructure at all levels, the AI bubble is set to trigger a 2008-style financial crisis upon its burst, and AI itself has been deskilling students and workers at an alarming rate, I can easily see why.
In the land of the blind the one-eyed man will make a killling as an independent contractor cleaning up after this disaster concludes.