Transcript

Title text: This is how you all fucking sound

[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]

Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]

Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]

Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]

Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.

Still Vreni on Bluesky

  • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
    23·
    9 hours ago

    What do you mean clear advantage has not actually been established?? Im getting weeks worth of stuff done in hours, like it’s self evident how powerful AI is. If you use it to make deepfake porn instead of making you better at your job, that’s a human choice. If you make a half decent effort, AI makes you an order of magnitude more productive. It’s pretty freaking amazing, like how the automobile was a massive improvement over a horse and buggy.

    • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
      2·
      6 hours ago

      I get your point. There’s real benefit here. The question is if the benefit really outweighs the real costs, once they start charging for the actual resources used.

      One reason we expeirence it differently is that some of us were already an order of magnitude more productive than average, without AI.

      AI is a great tool for catching up. It slurps up popular patterns and spits them out, sometimes in novel contexts.

      For everyone who used AI to catch a productivity technique(s) they had not yet encountered, I can see how it feels life changing.

      I suspect we have a wave of realizations coming from folks whose token costs get too high, and realize they can get 95% of the AI productivity gain they experienced, with zero use of tokens - just by copying and pasting the patterns and tools AI already introduced them to. We don’t talk about that aspect enough - genuine acceleration is happening, and some of those folks will stay more productive after the AI hype wave ends.

      Of course, there’s a whole other category of folks genuinely benefitting from AI because they need needlessly verbose language output to bullshit their dumb bosses. I don’t currently have a dumb boss, so I’m not making use of that. But I 100% will start, if needed. Lol.

      • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
        21·
        6 hours ago

        Well yes that’s the case with me i was never trained in coding just started out as a low level employee in an accounting department teaching myself how to do vba scripts in excel to do basic stuff and now im building data pipelines and web UIs with claude to automate reconciliations and rollforwards that used to take me a week without using Claude. I also have friends who are senior devs real master programmers, and yes they can do everything I do with claude faster and better.

        But, while one claude agent isn’t faster than them, they have the ability to run a dozen agents at once getting 10x the work done they used to. Instead of paying ten good programmers $100K/yr each to be his code monkey slaves and not think too luch for themselves, they pay claude $2,500 a year to be ten codemonkeys and not think too much for itself.

        It really is as game changing as the automobile was. That doesn’t mean an idiot can’t drive it off a cliff like they literally can with a car, and horses had some self preservation instincts that would save an idiot from riding over a cliff, but the answer is to let these idiots drive themselves off a cliff with AI, not to ban a new technology that helps a lot if you’re not an idiot about it.

        • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
          1·
          3 hours ago

          Well yes that’s the case with me i was never trained in coding just started out as a low level employee in an accounting department teaching myself how to do vba scripts in excel to do basic stuff and now im building data pipelines and web UIs with claude to automate reconciliations and rollforwards that used to take me a week without using Claude.

          Very cool. Welcome to the trade! I can tell you caught the passion for it! Lol.

          With or without Claude, you’re a developer now.

          If I can offer some advice: Don’t let anyone tell you which tools to use. And also never let anyone tell you that all the magic is in the tool.

          But, while one claude agent isn’t faster than them, they have the ability to run a dozen agents at once getting 10x the work done they used to. Instead of paying ten good programmers $100K/yr each to be his code monkey slaves and not think too luch for themselves, they pay claude $2,500 a year to be ten codemonkeys and not think too much for itself.

          Oh, yes. For the places that were already getting by on slinging CRUD (create/read/update/delete) calls, I can see how this is a game changer.

          Although, the pattern I see over and over is that the boss-man buys cheap code for a few years, then pays ultra-premium prices for a consulting company to dig them out of their costly mess of spaghetti code.

          They usually repeat this every few years.

          These AI tools are promising to solve that, but so did Web 2.0 frameworks, and so did memory safe languages, and so did COBOl and BASIC. All of them helped, and none of them really solved the good/cheap/fast trade-off.

          That doesn’t mean an idiot can’t drive it off a cliff like they literally can with a car, and horses had some self preservation instincts that would save an idiot from riding over a cliff, but the answer is to let these idiots drive themselves off a cliff with AI, not to ban a new technology that helps a lot if you’re not an idiot about it.

          Lol. Yes!