This part really stuck out for me:
This is the latest example of a strange marketing strategy by AI companies. Instead of selling products based on helpful features and letting users decide, executives often deploy scare tactics that essentially warn people they will become obsolete if they don’t get on the AI bandwagon.
If hype doesn’t work, try threats!
Which is how you know they have a good product that they have full faith in.
when they have to blackmail, threaten, coerce, and force people to accept their product.
“The Sky Is Falling! Buy My Magic Umbrella!” is a classic hypeman’s trick.
For some odd reason, this calls to mind an emotionally immature parent trying to get their toddler to eat vegetables… no reason at all…
Just that the vegetables in this case are actually fastfood and gummibears.
Threats work well for scams. People who couldn’t be bothered to move by promises of something new and better can be motivated by fear of losing what they already have.
It’s really unfortunate psychology is looked down upon and psychologists are viewed as some “soft” profession. Zuck is a psychology major. It’s been 2 decades, most of the radical changes in which were not radical in anything other than approach to human psychology.
BTW, I’ve learned recently that in their few initial years Khmer Rouge were not known as communist organization to even many of their members. Just an “organization”. Their rhetoric was agrarian (of course peasants are hard-working virtuous people, and from peasantry working the earth comes all the wisdom, and those corrupt and immoral people in the cities should be made work to eat), Buddhist (of course the monk-feudal system of obedience, work and ascese is the virtuous way to live, though of course we are having a rebirth now so we are even wiser), monarchist (they referred to Sihanouk’s authority almost to the end), anti-Vietnamese (that’s like Jewish for German Nazis, Vietnamese are the evil). And after them taking power for some time they still didn’t communicate anything communist. They didn’t even introduce their leadership. Nobody knew who makes the decisions in that “organization” or how it was structured. It didn’t have a face. They only officially made themselves visible as Democratic Kampuchea with communism and actual leaders when the Chinese pressured them. They didn’t need to, because they were obeyed via threat (and lots of fulfillment) of violence anyway.
This is important in the sense that when you have the power, you don’t need to officially tell the people over which you have it that you rule them.
So - in these 2 decades it has also came into fashion to deliberately stubbornly ignore the fact that psychology works over masses. And everybody acts as if when there’s no technical means to make people do something, then it’s not likely or possible.
The code reviews will continue until morale improves.
Is his message: “let us scrape your code or go away, and we gonna scrape it anyway” note: scrape = steal
Expectation: High quality code done quickly by AI.
Reality: Low quality AI generated bug reports being spammed in the hopes the spammers can get bug bounty for fixing them, with AI of course.
“Managing agents to achieve outcomes may sound unfulfilling to many”
No shit, man.
real messages: embrace AI, because i still need to grift from investor’s money, because AI is just a hype"
But you forget how stupid venture capitalists have become.
Funny thing to say after using their code to train the shitty-ass AI. Developers don’t need AI, but AI certainly needs developers.
AI also needs a lot of other shit to run even at a basic level. Networks, and systems… A dedicated nuclear power facility on three Mile Island.
AI can’t run without so many people plugging in the servers, and power, and installing the operating systems… The list of supporting characters is long.
What if we… Just… Stopped supporting the companies that were pushing AI?
I don’t trust Copilot to make basic suggestions, let alone edits, on an html file.
CEOs, embrace torches and pitchforks.
Copilot is shit.
I’m looking out in the street. I see a lack of torches, pitchforks, or any pressure on corporate interests.
Don’t worry, they’re gonna eat themselves doing shit just like this. It’s not a matter of if, but when.
“AI” has it’s uses (medicine, engineering, etc.), but 99.99% of the snake oil they’re selling are just gimmicky cash grabs. Classic cases of Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Let them burn their money, I say. Fuck it. Just sit back and enjoy the fire.
Hard agree. AI is not currently at the stage that CEO’s think it’s at. A few years down the road there’s going to be a hard crash, when the problems overthrow the benefits and they realize they are just throwing money away. Sadly this also will be accompanied with a IT/Software “sinkhole” because many who were competent in the field will have moved on to the next thing as the jobs wern’t there anymore.
Something similar happened with the Nursing field during COVID, prior to the event, there was a steady if not overflow of medical professionals, but when COVID occurred they started being treated like tools, medical facilities started having to pay mad amounts of money on traveling staff that jumped from facility to facility due to it to even partially make up for it as many left the field. Jump to today, the problem still exists, an educated field like IT or nursing can’t have an event that results in tons of people leaving the profession, as you can’t just snap your finger and get that knowledge back. It will take years to regain that trust and get people back into the fields again.
AI is not currently at the stage that CEO’s think it’s at. A few years down the road there’s going to be a hard crash, when the problems overthrow the benefits and they realize they are just throwing money away.
I think they’re aware which is why they’re posturing with BS statements such as his. They wouldn’t need to force it on people if it were actually as good as they want people to think it is. They want to cash in now because they know the house of cards will crumble sooner than later.
I predict it will be even more somewhat lesser skilled white collar type office jobs. Like insurance adjusters and other insurance policy related jobs come to mind. AI will completely fuck this up. There will be massive lawsuits and these companies will go out of business. Same thing with other industries. Once they realize the massive fuckup they made, they will try to switch back but no one will be there available to come back. And then they are fucked. The more industries this happens to, the worse the crash will be as it affects many diverse industries. It’s a huge recipe for disasters, like Great Depression style. And with trump’s tarrifs to fan the flame, we are well on our way.
it has a cascading effect, its already affecting state university in the west in enrollment, because they dont see a future in thier degree, they are either not choosing to come to a particular 4 year university, or looking at other universities in other areas.
Don’t worry, until Trump gets his insurance adjusted by an LLM trained on real data about him (won’t happen), he’ll make executive orders exempting the LLM users from legal action.
also - love the Johnny Mnemonic inspired username.
Even more fun, the stock market is propped up by Nvidia and AI companies buying their chips. If AI crashes, it’s a new financial crisis. And if the market crashes, the layoffs at far were just a warmup.
they already laid off so many people, when it does crash, it will. do they expect the programmers/devs they dint fire to hold thier company over til thier next grift, with so little people.
This is exactly what happened to manufacturing and chip making of 40 years of “free trade”. We lack the skilled staff for these jobs.
Continuing on the nursing topic, well before covid there was a shortage of nurses, then the media blitz convinced many people to get degrees… There were so many looking for work that wages plummeted.
It’s all a shell game. The goal is to make the labor suplly huge so they can dictate wages, which they did.
They did it with programmers overthe last ten years… Now nobody can find a job.
I’m shocked! Shocked I tell you!
travelling nurses seems to be the way to go, to earn bank. being a staff at a hospital or medical center doesnt seem attractive, unless your in a really backwoods state like a red one, where they let nurses fall to the cracks to be hired. Also the pandemic, people during thier university years wernt learning anything so they were also fucked from the start, since everything was online and not in person, thats why im seeing such bad reviews in universities in my area. the first 2 years is pretty much crucial to determine your strength in your degree, and then some experience, which was probably non existent during covid, like with labs and research.
Something similar happened with the Nursing field during COVID, prior to the event, there was a steady if not overflow of medical professionals, but
What drew me to this collection of a full sentence and another fragment spliced in wasn’t the comma splice: it was the perfect example of beggaring the question.
I’m still not sure whether the bad writing was accidental or an attempt to divert from the false premise.
At no time has there been sufficient medical staff.
yes, but we will be burdened with the consequences somehow. we will be the ones to pay the price, as always.
Be the change you want to see.
You can’t point this out! People will flip the responsibility to you!
That always seems to happen. I’m too broke to buy a pitchfork, and too pyrophobic for a torch, sorry.
Be patient. Pyrrhic victories of your enemies are not to be gobbled. They are to be savoured.
Copilot is shit.
Exactly, my company provides license for copilot and I use it, and while it has some highlights most of the time it actually is more a nuisance than help.
It especially annoys me because it hijacks autocomplete based on types with is own that frequently has subtle bugs, so now if I have it enabled I need to be on guard all the time. With the traditional autocomplete I could just trust it to be correct.
This is my experience. It saves a bit of typing sometimes but that’s probably cancelled out by the time spent correcting it, rewriting nonsense it produced, and reviewing my corworkers PRs that didn’t notice the nonsense.
You have to put it in Ask mode so it doesn’t touch your code also ChatGPT models are free so if you want to ring up an AI bill use the Claude and Sonnet models.
i wonder if this the reason why its so bad on the phones, it autocomplete with words that arnt even close to what you are typing.
You can turn off the copilot autocomplete in the ide and JUST use agent/edit/ask mode
Copilot is shit
Yes and no. I find its terrible at solving more complex problems but its great at writing out tests for a function/view that covers every flow. My team went from having like 40% (shit) coverage to every PR having every case tested (inb4 they’re not good tests, they are good)
With that being said, fuck CEOs and fuck AI. At least you could (mostly) escape the blockchain hype
Get out or what? GitHub?
I don’t understand this insistence that all developers must use AI.
If AI made a developer better, why insist, wouldn’t the vibe coders outcompete all others?
Wouldn’t they need non AI coders to train things?
Or is it because this snake oil pitch only works when everyone does it so no one notices it’s detrimental effects?
Studies show AI coding tools make the task slower. It only makes people feel they’re faster, but reality is different. So it’s the snake oil pitch. Nobody can know it doesn’t really work and they keep throwing money at it in an increasingly more desperate “fake it till you make it”. Because, if this thing implodes, it’ll take a large part of the market and economy with it to do a rerun of the 2008 financial crisis.
It’s because we’re expensive. That’s the long and short of it.
10 developers in Silicon Valley can run you $1-$2m in salary alone (it’s more expensive with benefits added).
The industry constantly conspires to keep the salary of software engineers down. It does it cyclically too. In 2008 I was told I would have no problem getting a 6 figure job when I graduated by 2013. Of course the economy had other ideas. Same thing with the dot Com bubble.
I currently make double what I did 10 years ago. It doesn’t actually matter much as inflation and a divorce has had my costs balloon just as much, but it’s still loads more than any other job out there.
They’ll get what they want, one way or another. Then when none of their shit works they inevitably come back begging us and we request better pay and benefits again, because we know they do this. They don’t learn, much like those reliant on AI.
10 engineers in the Bay Area would easily be 2-3 million without additional benefits or support personnel
Yeah, you’re probably right. If they had my level of experience they’re easily pulling in twice what I do as a rule of thumb
GitHub is being pushy? Fucking GitHub?
Should we tell him git doesn’t actually need GitHub? That it existed just fine before it and will continue to exist after it?
Ima tell him…
At some previous jobs, the newer devs would sometimes confuse the two. Its a real thing.
Me I lived through svn, mercerial, and file vault. So glad we ended up with git as the protocol.
Hell you can set up a git + file server and just use it without any Hub (Hob/lab/berg) if your bare metal enough. It works.
You can literally run a single command to setup a remote git repository on a server that has ssh.
Yep! And some emulators only do dev work that way now. N*ntendo made sure of that.
Like, really? God I feel stupid if it’s that easy
Yup
git init --bare test_repo.gitIf you can ssh into it, you should be able to add that just like any other remote to your local git.
You can clone local repos from your filesystem as well. There’s really not a lot of magic to it which is what makes it so cool.
sorry if I’m extra stupid with these questions, but how you add that as a remote then?
git remote add origin ssh://<<username>>@<<host>>/path/to/test_repo.gitArticle talking about it https://mikelev.in/futureproof/git-without-server-local-filesystem/
The Linux kernel still works off emailing patches. If such a large project doesn’t need a central repo, you don’t either.
I use self-hosted Forgejo because it’s convenient, that’s it.
It does technically have a central repo, but not the “forge” tooling around it.
I do think I’m going to move my personal shit to self-hosted Forgejo too though. One project of mine is going to be closed source (don’t boo me, there’s literally no demand for “free” in that market, the target market generally isn’t interested in programming or hosting) and I don’t want the business logic side of it to magically end up in their AI models despite me refusing to allow them. Couldn’t care less about any of the other stuff, I’m not doing anything super high tech or special.
Yeah, there’s git.kernel.org, but work happens on the mailing list, not there. If you just want a copy, you can get it there, but that’d about all there is too it.
I mean I would’ve preferred Hg.
But to the point, I think GitHub has been instrumental in the success of Git.
Sadly a lot of us are stuck with GitHub. Enterprise loves it because it has “Metrics”, and most companies aren’t about to jump ship over something like AI — especially when so many of them are already doubling down on AI in other areas.
And now we understand why MSFT buying github a some years back was a really big deal actually, and not just some kind of mostly neutral, generic expansionary business move.
Yes, this isn’t just about profits for these companies.
It’s about control. They want to prove that they own us, and they’re right more often than not because of useful idiots.
Bro you are literally not necessary, not even the best at what you do. See everyone on codeberg.
Codeberg is so nice.
But who else is going to micromanage and bully the employees and strut around self-importantly doing jack shit? /s
Replace CEOs with AI
I’m wondering about why they got fooled. Have they noticed that LLM can do a better job than them and they think that this will also translate to software engineering?
My understanding is CEOs are mostly good at schmoozing with other CEOs and investors. A lot of investors operate on vibes, so having a CEO that can vibe with other rich bros can open pathways to funding. That’s about it. Everything else they do is a liability or could be better handled by someone with relevant expertise.
Also, we probably shouldn’t be driving most of our productivity based on the vibe check of a few rich boys.
Your last sentence is spot on but it doesn’t capture the full weight of the impact rich people vibes have on the world. The perceived value of every stock, and by extension the economy as a whole, is almost exclusively a vibe check of rich guys. There is no objective information about a company that is more indicative of that company’s success than how rich people feel about it.
And since Rich people are just interested in having the biggest number, they only invest in lines that are going up every quarter.
Mutual funds are doing the same thing, and since they’ve convinced the rest of us to invest our retirements into stocks instead of pensions, we’re all fucked when it fails.
also convincing the board of directors to not get rid of them.
replace CEOs with people
What employees?
Codeberg rules
Already done. I moved everything to Codeberg a year or two ago. I strongly recommend it to anyone looking for safe, non-corporate, community-oriented version control. It’s also German and non-profit.
i urge people do do this but also donate to them too <3
Some CEO: gasp GUYS I found a new blacklisted word! Quick add non-profit to the Ai-Moderation. How dare they not pay me infinitely!
It’s funny how so many people make big businesses and think they are the GOAT when in reality the true GOAT is Linus Torvalds.
The Github CEO didn’t even “make” the big business. He was appointed by Microsoft after they purchased it and their first pick for CEO of Github resigned after 2 years.
Agreed. And he is very humble about it in interviews.
