The attack on competence:
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The attack on competence:
The attack on competence | deadSimpleTech
The competent LLM-using engineer will, in general, find themselves treated by management as though they're exactly as bad as the people who refuse to use LLMs at all. The engineers who push out pull request after pull request and line upon line of code without any thought given to maintainability, codebase conventions or such trifles as *whether the fucking thing works at all* are lauded, while the competent, careful people who ship carefully considered, working code (with or without LLM assistance) and clean up the messes find themselves sidelined or redundant. The reasons are often as stupid as the fact that a competent engineer, even using an LLM, will tend to prompt less and consume fewer tokens than the incompetent ones. The fact that the product breaks goes unmentioned. One can quite easily draw the conclusion that, far more than competence merely being an indifferent to management, incompetence is actively wanted and competence actively punished.
deadSimpleTech (deadsimpletech.com)
Absolutely nails where we are: the investor class (who neoliberalism has enshrined as planetary overlords) *fear* competence in any non-investment value producing role, and LLMs have smoothed their brains to the point where they think they can survive without competent underlings. Hence prioritizing their apocalypse bunkers and funding the far right instead of demanding sound governance.
@cstross
Incompetent AI -
@cstross The overwhelming blind arrogance involved is pretty stunning too. I’m currently on a river cruise and I think exactly no members of the crew could be replaced by AI, nor any of the folks working that I’ve interacted with (even indirectly) on this vacation.
Maybe (maybe!) an air traffic controller or two could, but frankly I doubt that.
@wordshaper I'll believe AI can take over air traffic control when someone convinces me that an AI can talk down a trainee pilot on their first flight in a small Cessna when their instructor has a heart attack at the controls (as has happened). Or deal with a 9/11 style hijacking situation where the hijacker's aims are unclear.
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The attack on competence:
The attack on competence | deadSimpleTech
The competent LLM-using engineer will, in general, find themselves treated by management as though they're exactly as bad as the people who refuse to use LLMs at all. The engineers who push out pull request after pull request and line upon line of code without any thought given to maintainability, codebase conventions or such trifles as *whether the fucking thing works at all* are lauded, while the competent, careful people who ship carefully considered, working code (with or without LLM assistance) and clean up the messes find themselves sidelined or redundant. The reasons are often as stupid as the fact that a competent engineer, even using an LLM, will tend to prompt less and consume fewer tokens than the incompetent ones. The fact that the product breaks goes unmentioned. One can quite easily draw the conclusion that, far more than competence merely being an indifferent to management, incompetence is actively wanted and competence actively punished.
deadSimpleTech (deadsimpletech.com)
Absolutely nails where we are: the investor class (who neoliberalism has enshrined as planetary overlords) *fear* competence in any non-investment value producing role, and LLMs have smoothed their brains to the point where they think they can survive without competent underlings. Hence prioritizing their apocalypse bunkers and funding the far right instead of demanding sound governance.
@cstross That's a good article to read even if you're not interested in its perspective on use of LLMs.
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@wordshaper I'll believe AI can take over air traffic control when someone convinces me that an AI can talk down a trainee pilot on their first flight in a small Cessna when their instructor has a heart attack at the controls (as has happened). Or deal with a 9/11 style hijacking situation where the hijacker's aims are unclear.
@cstross yeah, even if air traffic control is more automated, it still won’t be by AI, and they’ll still need people because a lot of the job needs people. And that says nothing of housekeeping, the food service folks, bus drivers, airline pilots, maintenance, builders, or electricians.
AI only automates the stuff that we could just skip doing in the first place. Which pretty much sums up the people who are thrilled by it.
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The attack on competence:
The attack on competence | deadSimpleTech
The competent LLM-using engineer will, in general, find themselves treated by management as though they're exactly as bad as the people who refuse to use LLMs at all. The engineers who push out pull request after pull request and line upon line of code without any thought given to maintainability, codebase conventions or such trifles as *whether the fucking thing works at all* are lauded, while the competent, careful people who ship carefully considered, working code (with or without LLM assistance) and clean up the messes find themselves sidelined or redundant. The reasons are often as stupid as the fact that a competent engineer, even using an LLM, will tend to prompt less and consume fewer tokens than the incompetent ones. The fact that the product breaks goes unmentioned. One can quite easily draw the conclusion that, far more than competence merely being an indifferent to management, incompetence is actively wanted and competence actively punished.
deadSimpleTech (deadsimpletech.com)
Absolutely nails where we are: the investor class (who neoliberalism has enshrined as planetary overlords) *fear* competence in any non-investment value producing role, and LLMs have smoothed their brains to the point where they think they can survive without competent underlings. Hence prioritizing their apocalypse bunkers and funding the far right instead of demanding sound governance.
@cstross I remember a Paul Graham tweet from years ago that boiled down to "AI will allow entrepreneurs to realize their dreams without the hassle of having to deal with humans in the process"
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@wordshaper I'll believe AI can take over air traffic control when someone convinces me that an AI can talk down a trainee pilot on their first flight in a small Cessna when their instructor has a heart attack at the controls (as has happened). Or deal with a 9/11 style hijacking situation where the hijacker's aims are unclear.
talk down a trainee pilot on their first flight in a small Cessna when their instructor has a heart attack at the controls
Oh god, can you imagine one of those sycophantasms trying to talk someone through that? "You're absolutely right, Dave, I should have told you to lower the landing gear before attempting a landing. That's on me."
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The attack on competence:
The attack on competence | deadSimpleTech
The competent LLM-using engineer will, in general, find themselves treated by management as though they're exactly as bad as the people who refuse to use LLMs at all. The engineers who push out pull request after pull request and line upon line of code without any thought given to maintainability, codebase conventions or such trifles as *whether the fucking thing works at all* are lauded, while the competent, careful people who ship carefully considered, working code (with or without LLM assistance) and clean up the messes find themselves sidelined or redundant. The reasons are often as stupid as the fact that a competent engineer, even using an LLM, will tend to prompt less and consume fewer tokens than the incompetent ones. The fact that the product breaks goes unmentioned. One can quite easily draw the conclusion that, far more than competence merely being an indifferent to management, incompetence is actively wanted and competence actively punished.
deadSimpleTech (deadsimpletech.com)
Absolutely nails where we are: the investor class (who neoliberalism has enshrined as planetary overlords) *fear* competence in any non-investment value producing role, and LLMs have smoothed their brains to the point where they think they can survive without competent underlings. Hence prioritizing their apocalypse bunkers and funding the far right instead of demanding sound governance.
@cstross This was both a super clear way of describing the problem and a super depressing details because I'm struggling to find a time in history where the investor class (or their close relations the nobility) have ever been rebuked without fire and bloodshed.
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R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
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@cstross This was both a super clear way of describing the problem and a super depressing details because I'm struggling to find a time in history where the investor class (or their close relations the nobility) have ever been rebuked without fire and bloodshed.
@RoseRaven The last rebuke happened circa 1933-48, with the New Deal in the USA, the Welfare State in the UK, and the Marshall Plan in Western Europe. 80-odd years ago. It was only "bloodless" because of (a) the Russian Revolution(s), and (b) WW2 giving a pair of horrible examples of failure modes. So we're definitely due for a re-run …
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@RoseRaven The last rebuke happened circa 1933-48, with the New Deal in the USA, the Welfare State in the UK, and the Marshall Plan in Western Europe. 80-odd years ago. It was only "bloodless" because of (a) the Russian Revolution(s), and (b) WW2 giving a pair of horrible examples of failure modes. So we're definitely due for a re-run …
I viewed the WW-2/revolution as the blood price for that rebuke.
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The attack on competence:
The attack on competence | deadSimpleTech
The competent LLM-using engineer will, in general, find themselves treated by management as though they're exactly as bad as the people who refuse to use LLMs at all. The engineers who push out pull request after pull request and line upon line of code without any thought given to maintainability, codebase conventions or such trifles as *whether the fucking thing works at all* are lauded, while the competent, careful people who ship carefully considered, working code (with or without LLM assistance) and clean up the messes find themselves sidelined or redundant. The reasons are often as stupid as the fact that a competent engineer, even using an LLM, will tend to prompt less and consume fewer tokens than the incompetent ones. The fact that the product breaks goes unmentioned. One can quite easily draw the conclusion that, far more than competence merely being an indifferent to management, incompetence is actively wanted and competence actively punished.
deadSimpleTech (deadsimpletech.com)
Absolutely nails where we are: the investor class (who neoliberalism has enshrined as planetary overlords) *fear* competence in any non-investment value producing role, and LLMs have smoothed their brains to the point where they think they can survive without competent underlings. Hence prioritizing their apocalypse bunkers and funding the far right instead of demanding sound governance.
I have never read such a succinct distillation of late-stage capitalism as is contained above:
"The investor class is obviously extremely varied across the world: any class that encompasses both Elon Musk and a petty landlord in New Zealand obviously has to be. The one commonality that they have is that they make the bulk of income from the collection of economic rents: from controlling access to a scarce resource and charging for it. As much as a silicon valley venture capitalist might claim that they aren't in the business of collecting rents, that is precisely what they do: they control access to investment capital and collect rents in the form of partial ownership of a company in exchange for making it available to entrepreneurs who want it. Naturally, as with all renting arrangements, this means that they find themselves with an awful lot of arbitrary power over the people whom they choose to make it available to, which they consistently abuse. Now, the thing about collecting rents is that it requires very little in the way of skill, talent or competence: it simply requires that the state apparatus of violence colludes with you in making people pay you money. Beyond a certain capacity for violence and cruelty, all that matters is that you can buy, inherit or steal the assets that you then choose to rent. It's no surprise, then, that rent-seekers tend to be stupid, narrow-minded and unimaginative."
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The attack on competence:
The attack on competence | deadSimpleTech
The competent LLM-using engineer will, in general, find themselves treated by management as though they're exactly as bad as the people who refuse to use LLMs at all. The engineers who push out pull request after pull request and line upon line of code without any thought given to maintainability, codebase conventions or such trifles as *whether the fucking thing works at all* are lauded, while the competent, careful people who ship carefully considered, working code (with or without LLM assistance) and clean up the messes find themselves sidelined or redundant. The reasons are often as stupid as the fact that a competent engineer, even using an LLM, will tend to prompt less and consume fewer tokens than the incompetent ones. The fact that the product breaks goes unmentioned. One can quite easily draw the conclusion that, far more than competence merely being an indifferent to management, incompetence is actively wanted and competence actively punished.
deadSimpleTech (deadsimpletech.com)
Absolutely nails where we are: the investor class (who neoliberalism has enshrined as planetary overlords) *fear* competence in any non-investment value producing role, and LLMs have smoothed their brains to the point where they think they can survive without competent underlings. Hence prioritizing their apocalypse bunkers and funding the far right instead of demanding sound governance.
@cstross Robert Heinlein rolling over in his grave.
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The attack on competence:
The attack on competence | deadSimpleTech
The competent LLM-using engineer will, in general, find themselves treated by management as though they're exactly as bad as the people who refuse to use LLMs at all. The engineers who push out pull request after pull request and line upon line of code without any thought given to maintainability, codebase conventions or such trifles as *whether the fucking thing works at all* are lauded, while the competent, careful people who ship carefully considered, working code (with or without LLM assistance) and clean up the messes find themselves sidelined or redundant. The reasons are often as stupid as the fact that a competent engineer, even using an LLM, will tend to prompt less and consume fewer tokens than the incompetent ones. The fact that the product breaks goes unmentioned. One can quite easily draw the conclusion that, far more than competence merely being an indifferent to management, incompetence is actively wanted and competence actively punished.
deadSimpleTech (deadsimpletech.com)
Absolutely nails where we are: the investor class (who neoliberalism has enshrined as planetary overlords) *fear* competence in any non-investment value producing role, and LLMs have smoothed their brains to the point where they think they can survive without competent underlings. Hence prioritizing their apocalypse bunkers and funding the far right instead of demanding sound governance.
RE: https://oldbytes.space/@eobet/116662568650506881
@cstross seems GDT nailed it with his "natural stupidity" comment...
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I have never read such a succinct distillation of late-stage capitalism as is contained above:
"The investor class is obviously extremely varied across the world: any class that encompasses both Elon Musk and a petty landlord in New Zealand obviously has to be. The one commonality that they have is that they make the bulk of income from the collection of economic rents: from controlling access to a scarce resource and charging for it. As much as a silicon valley venture capitalist might claim that they aren't in the business of collecting rents, that is precisely what they do: they control access to investment capital and collect rents in the form of partial ownership of a company in exchange for making it available to entrepreneurs who want it. Naturally, as with all renting arrangements, this means that they find themselves with an awful lot of arbitrary power over the people whom they choose to make it available to, which they consistently abuse. Now, the thing about collecting rents is that it requires very little in the way of skill, talent or competence: it simply requires that the state apparatus of violence colludes with you in making people pay you money. Beyond a certain capacity for violence and cruelty, all that matters is that you can buy, inherit or steal the assets that you then choose to rent. It's no surprise, then, that rent-seekers tend to be stupid, narrow-minded and unimaginative."
@OvertonDoors @cstross, hmm, “inherit or steal the assets that you then choose to *let*”, surely, else you'd be paying rent to yourself.
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R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic
