i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil
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@davidgerard what they have in common is their ability to select for people with holes in their social-political consciousness who can be persuaded to dismiss arguments about social externalities.
@jplebreton also ~100% of crypto bros fell for the chatbot
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@jplebreton also ~100% of crypto bros fell for the chatbot
@davidgerard @jplebreton crypto bros are about the hustle. GenAI is the current hustle.
Same group of guys will move to whatever the next big thing is. If there is no next big thing when GenAI investment collapses, they'll be the guys either jumping out windows or consolidating their money depending on whether they were able to sell at a high or not
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@jplebreton also ~100% of crypto bros fell for the chatbot
@davidgerard building a grift around a product that will tell you literally anything you want to hear is inevitably going to be way more broadly persuasive than crypto's "get rich doing nothing (actually you have to work a shitty and obviously evil telemarketing job)" pitch. so it's not too surprising that the crypto venn circle is mostly nesting inside the llm circle.
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@cap_ybarra @davidgerard There's a wide swath of techies that succumb to the allure of "usefulness". Crypto is easy for them to see through, because it has no fundamental use case that justifies its expense.
LLMs, on the other hand, have many apparent uses. Not only that, but techies love using tech to solve non-tech problems--often because they don't understand those problems, so assume the solution can be easily solved with tech. LLMs present themselves as the "anything solution", and it can badly do so many things (but: it does do them) that many techies just point at all the things it can do and go, "See how useful it is!"
LLMs are Dunning-Kruger wet dreams.
And what I'm learning is, so, so, SO many professional programmers are actually shitty programmers that can't even tell the difference between error-ridden slop and maintainable code.
@Azuaron @cap_ybarra @davidgerard "SO many professional programmers are actually shitty programmers that can't even tell the difference between error-ridden slop and maintainable code."
This also explains the existence of nodeJS and every js-frontend framework out there.(Only half joking, i think the causality goes the other way: "everyone uses react, must be good programmming skill" -> everyone measures their skill on crap -> machines produce the crap -> machine output is great!
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i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil
@davidgerard I think its because it has the potential to generate cat pictures (or any equivalence thereof) which crypto can't. It's something extremely concrete.
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i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil
@davidgerard Cryptocurrency thrives on greed. Vibe coding thrives on imposter syndrome.
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i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil
@davidgerard They've been easy fooled by proposing it as revolutionary change that you can't be behind. Driven by bribeing a handful of relevant influencers.
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i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil
@davidgerard it’s not really the same comparison though is it because crypto you had to invest in it you had to go out of your way to use it but with AI it’s kind of just sprinkled and everything so I don’t really see your point
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i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil
I think it is partly to do with the brainrot from years of seeing "tech advance quickly" even the anti-AI people were early on mostly assuming that this tech was legit gonna be replacing artists etc.
I must admit I have myself become disabused of this notion now. We are long past the days of seeing video game graphics and mobile phones advance every year. Some technologies are just dead ends or cap out early on like fridges. Turns out LLMs are a dead end tech and the corpos are just horny to replace us with them.
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I think it is partly to do with the brainrot from years of seeing "tech advance quickly" even the anti-AI people were early on mostly assuming that this tech was legit gonna be replacing artists etc.
I must admit I have myself become disabused of this notion now. We are long past the days of seeing video game graphics and mobile phones advance every year. Some technologies are just dead ends or cap out early on like fridges. Turns out LLMs are a dead end tech and the corpos are just horny to replace us with them.
@chrysanthos yeah, they really obviously hit the top of their s curve in 2023 and *everything* since then is logarithmically more effort for small linear gains
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@chrysanthos yeah, they really obviously hit the top of their s curve in 2023 and *everything* since then is logarithmically more effort for small linear gains
@davidgerard Even people like Cory Doctorow still have a serious case of the "tech libertarian brainrot". It's a real problem with the techhead world. You'd think with how much Star Trek we all watched growing up we would've learned that message about technology must not mature faster than morality.
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@davidgerard Cryptocurrency thrives on greed. Vibe coding thrives on imposter syndrome.
@JessTheUnstill @davidgerard It's not imposter syndrome if... you know what, I'm not going to finish the thought
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I think it is partly to do with the brainrot from years of seeing "tech advance quickly" even the anti-AI people were early on mostly assuming that this tech was legit gonna be replacing artists etc.
I must admit I have myself become disabused of this notion now. We are long past the days of seeing video game graphics and mobile phones advance every year. Some technologies are just dead ends or cap out early on like fridges. Turns out LLMs are a dead end tech and the corpos are just horny to replace us with them.
@chrysanthos @davidgerard I'm guessing some (not all) of the priming to replace workers is related to post-Covid remote work, revival of unions, etc. The seeds of spite were fresh in the memory.
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i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil
It has niche use cases that are truly beneficial but that's not what's driving it.
If you want pervasive surveillance and autonomous systems where the inaccuracy is considered a benefit and a sledgehammer with which bludgeon your creative talent into submission or poverty, this is the tool for you!
Damn the environmental impact!
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i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil
@davidgerard LLM agents are tapping into people's desire to have obedient minions who will RP a world that responds to personal control, without the messy complexities of human minions
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@cap_ybarra @davidgerard There's a wide swath of techies that succumb to the allure of "usefulness". Crypto is easy for them to see through, because it has no fundamental use case that justifies its expense.
LLMs, on the other hand, have many apparent uses. Not only that, but techies love using tech to solve non-tech problems--often because they don't understand those problems, so assume the solution can be easily solved with tech. LLMs present themselves as the "anything solution", and it can badly do so many things (but: it does do them) that many techies just point at all the things it can do and go, "See how useful it is!"
LLMs are Dunning-Kruger wet dreams.
And what I'm learning is, so, so, SO many professional programmers are actually shitty programmers that can't even tell the difference between error-ridden slop and maintainable code.
@Azuaron @cap_ybarra @davidgerard
"LLMs are Dunning-Kruger wet dreams."
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i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil
@davidgerard @cstross because crypto was tech. AI is “magic”.
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i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil
Money-motivation vs Laziness. Fewer of the former, more of the latter.
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i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil
@davidgerard Both are about throwing insane amounts of hardware at crappy code, financed by rubes who understand neither?
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i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil
@davidgerard
I think, a "cultural" aspect plays into this. Before Bitcoin (and probably still, tbh) almost nobody had any idea what a "cryptocurrency" is even supposed to be.
AI otoh has been a significant part of very popular stories for decades. When people hear "AI" they have an instant idea what they imagine that to be. An idea that has been culturally reinforced so strongly, that the idea itself disguises the reality of what the so-called "AI" before them actually is and does.
