"AI" is a failed technology, in the sense that it's neither fit for purpose, nor a likely path to its stated end goal of "AGI", but a lot of people's profits currently depend on pretending it's not.
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@skavish I have never used "AI" in my professional or personal life and have no intentions of doing so.
@Gargron @skavish That's what Linus mentioned in his kernel list post:
"AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.
It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no
longer in question today.There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will
actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of
those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used
it."The other thing that makes me think this ain't going anywhere is Fabrice Bellard's work on tsac and similar and his toys often seems a little ahead of the curve imo.
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"AI" is a failed technology, in the sense that it's neither fit for purpose, nor a likely path to its stated end goal of "AGI", but a lot of people's profits currently depend on pretending it's not. I am curious to see how long the hype will last once the Nvidia ouroboros ends and money stops being pumped into marketing.
@Gargron
They'll only stop once they've persuaded enough ordinary investors to buy in that the AI jerks in charge can cash out and leave the system to crash on top of people who can't afford it, or be bailed out by governments, sadly... -
"AI" is a failed technology, in the sense that it's neither fit for purpose, nor a likely path to its stated end goal of "AGI", but a lot of people's profits currently depend on pretending it's not. I am curious to see how long the hype will last once the Nvidia ouroboros ends and money stops being pumped into marketing.
@Gargron by “AI” do you mean the current LLM/GPT nonsense?
While intelligence is never artificial, machines don’t actually learn, and the term “artificial intelligence” was coined in the 1950s to get grant money from intelligence agencies, the body of work marketed as “AI” has produced some useful heuristics and algorithms. LLM/GPT is *not* an example of the good stuff; ethically and climate-wise it’s horrific.
Since 1988, I’ve hoped for good things from causal inference. Still waiting
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@mellowfish That's... just your opinion. Agentic coding (I don't think you can call it "engineering") is heavily subsidized by big AI companies right now, and that's going away sooner or later. The software world will have a painful wake up call from all the spaghetti code being pumped out right now.
@Gargron It probably writes better code than you do at this point. Anyone who calls it spaghetti code TODAY has no clue what it’s capable of.
There’s a reason mathematicians are freaked out. Their heads aren’t in the sand
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@Gargron @skavish That's what Linus mentioned in his kernel list post:
"AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.
It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no
longer in question today.There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will
actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of
those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used
it."The other thing that makes me think this ain't going anywhere is Fabrice Bellard's work on tsac and similar and his toys often seems a little ahead of the curve imo.
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@skavish @Gargron It's weird to note that you have admitted he has expertise in software engineering, which would give him all the qualifications in the world to be able to tell spaghetti code from any other form of pasta ... and yet you seem to insist that if it's made by AI he's NOT qualified to make such a judgment.
Which means you think AI produced code is magic somehow and is not in fact spaghetti when it looks like spaghetti to a software engineering expert.
@crazyeddie The AI bros have been selling the line for a while now that readable source code is nice to have, but not particularly important, because of how fast you can start over with the same prompts. So like, basically the prompts are the real source code. The fact that they give different results from one run to another, or because of a change to the LLM, is just a nuisance we deal with in order to reap the wonderful benefits of vibecoding -- obviously, having to run the prompt twice is the same as when you had to delete build artifacts and recompile your whole app, sometimes, in the old ways.
So @skavish thinks @Gargron is a fool for reviewing the actual code, when he should be looking at CLAUDE.md and maybe some tests or whatever
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"AI" is a failed technology, in the sense that it's neither fit for purpose, nor a likely path to its stated end goal of "AGI", but a lot of people's profits currently depend on pretending it's not. I am curious to see how long the hype will last once the Nvidia ouroboros ends and money stops being pumped into marketing.
It isn't failed, it works quite well in many cases as a matter of fact. Reverse-engineering example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIe3eDfGKUo
The marketing is annoying, but the tech has legitimate usecases and is here to stay (perhaps not to the extent the companies want us to believe).
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you are either keeping your head in the sand or so ideologically committed to your position that you refuse to look at reality. neither is a particularly promising strategy for the future.
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@skavish @Gargron We live in very... Curious times at the moment.
There's a massive hype to adopt something that many don't want to adopt, nor should they have to do so, but equally there's a hype train that says 'do this thing or else...'
There's a middle ground where you can use it quietly, and not use it quietly, and it really doesn't matter.
It's the either siders I'm concerned about.When those that hate it hear about it 24-7 it's like passive smoking. It sucks, it's bad for you and you wish you could escape it.
Equally when you use it for something meaningful and before you've had a chance to explain, you've been shut down because tolerance is 'agree with me or else' that equally sucks.I haven't stated which side of the fence I fall on, and I won't here without being asked. I'm not here to persuade or dissuade, just to make a point.
Moderation is good.You can see my thoughts by looking at my personal posts.
Both of you in this conversation have made your decision and that's OK, but there's nuance in everything and dismissing either side out-of-hand means you aren't thoughtful enough to know where that nuance lies.
You = general you, not you two personally.
I see a lot of love and hate recently, sadly more hate than love, more intolerance than tolerance, and that's not really the fedi I signed up for.
If we could step back about 6 years and show one another just a tad more respect, the world would genuinely be a nicer place to live in.@FreakyFwoof @skavish @Gargron While I agree with your ethos of neutrality here, the reality is most people who present a 'neutral' opinion are just concealing a pro or anti opinion, in your case after checking your profile, you have a recent long post praising the AI agents and data centers you are using. So ostensibly that *is* a pro opinion, you are promoting AI to your followers. Using it 'quietly' would be doing exactly that: not posting about it, nor shushing those who take anti stances.
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@crazyeddie The AI bros have been selling the line for a while now that readable source code is nice to have, but not particularly important, because of how fast you can start over with the same prompts. So like, basically the prompts are the real source code. The fact that they give different results from one run to another, or because of a change to the LLM, is just a nuisance we deal with in order to reap the wonderful benefits of vibecoding -- obviously, having to run the prompt twice is the same as when you had to delete build artifacts and recompile your whole app, sometimes, in the old ways.
So @skavish thinks @Gargron is a fool for reviewing the actual code, when he should be looking at CLAUDE.md and maybe some tests or whatever
@clayote this is a strawman. I never said readable code doesn't matter, that prompts are the source code or that reviewing code is pointless. quite the opposite.
I use AI agents to build real software (bigger codebase than mastodon btw), and code review, tests and engineering discipline are still essential. the difference is that I don't assume the output has to be spaghetti just because an agent wrote it.
you are arguing against a caricature of how you imagine people use these tools, rather than how they can actually be used.
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"AI" is a failed technology, in the sense that it's neither fit for purpose, nor a likely path to its stated end goal of "AGI", but a lot of people's profits currently depend on pretending it's not. I am curious to see how long the hype will last once the Nvidia ouroboros ends and money stops being pumped into marketing.
@Gargron I like to ask pro-AI folks, "Where is your closest data center?" "How many acres of land did it use?" and "How much electricity will it consume?"
Many will not know the answers.
Here is a drone fly-over of a data center that's currently under construction and about 30 minutes from me. It answers many of the details everyone should be familiar with, whether you live by one, or simply utilize the technology.
https://youtu.be/52x2qBh4vsM?si=-9w4JBOBP3h1wlgO -
@skavish @Gargron It's weird to note that you have admitted he has expertise in software engineering, which would give him all the qualifications in the world to be able to tell spaghetti code from any other form of pasta ... and yet you seem to insist that if it's made by AI he's NOT qualified to make such a judgment.
Which means you think AI produced code is magic somehow and is not in fact spaghetti when it looks like spaghetti to a software engineering expert.
@crazyeddie you are missing the point. his engineering expertise isn't in question. he explicitly said he's never used AI. so how can he confidently judge what AI-generated code looks like when the tools are used effectively?
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@clayote this is a strawman. I never said readable code doesn't matter, that prompts are the source code or that reviewing code is pointless. quite the opposite.
I use AI agents to build real software (bigger codebase than mastodon btw), and code review, tests and engineering discipline are still essential. the difference is that I don't assume the output has to be spaghetti just because an agent wrote it.
you are arguing against a caricature of how you imagine people use these tools, rather than how they can actually be used.
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Dunno, I think being "a maintainer and engineer on one of the largest open-source software projects" gives Linus expertise on whether or not AI is useful for working on such projects.
CC: @imhotep@infosec.exchange @skavish@welley.social
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@Gargron counterpoint: we are well past the point of no return for agentic engineering. There will always be purists who insist on writing code by hand but we aren’t returning to that being the default even after the bubble pops. And I think quiet use of AI as glue will propagate more or less unseen through a lot of tech until it is the expected/desired thing vs a bolted-on buzzword.
Are there myriad problems with both of these? Of course. But that much is not “failure” in any meaningful sense.
@mellowfish @Gargron You really should clarify what “past the point of no return” means to you.
Agentic LLMs for code generation (“engineering” is far too generous a term) will continue to EXIST, yes, because we can’t un-invent something. But I think its impact on software work is immensely overblown. Just as we’ve always had shitty, unmaintainable software, LLMs will continue to ensure that we will have shitty, unmaintainable software, but at an even higher volume. A lot of code doesn’t need to be anything more than shitty, unmaintainable code to be somewhat useful (cf: *motions at shitty software that already surrounds us*), but that doesn’t make them suddenly not shitty and unmaintainable, and generally a poor business investment for people who depend on reliable, maintainable software.
I think this makes a good counter-counterpoint: https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/llms-arent-inevitable
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if you’ve never used it, then yes, you’re not in a position to judge what it looks like when used properly. being an experienced engineer and maintainer gives you plenty of expertise in software engineering, but it doesn’t magically give you first-hand experience with a tool you explicitly said you’ve never used.
you can absolutely argue that you don’t want to use it. that’s a different claim.
Dude, never used cocaine, but can tell you for certain that it is bad, and will mess up your life. Please stop pushing your poison on us.
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@clayote LLM output depends heavily on who is using it. a bad engineer will produce bad code with an LLM, just faster. a great engineer can use it to produce great code, faster.
@Gargron may have reviewed plenty of LLM-generated code. that doesn't mean he has seen what these tools can do in the hands of someone who knows how to use them. that is precisely my point: if you have never used the tools yourself, you are judging them from the outside, without understanding what you're missing.
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@mastodonmigration cocaine is a substance with well-documented effects. AI is a tool whose results depend heavily on how it's used. the analogy doesn't work.
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@clayote LLM output depends heavily on who is using it. a bad engineer will produce bad code with an LLM, just faster. a great engineer can use it to produce great code, faster.
@Gargron may have reviewed plenty of LLM-generated code. that doesn't mean he has seen what these tools can do in the hands of someone who knows how to use them. that is precisely my point: if you have never used the tools yourself, you are judging them from the outside, without understanding what you're missing.
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It isn't failed, it works quite well in many cases as a matter of fact. Reverse-engineering example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIe3eDfGKUo
The marketing is annoying, but the tech has legitimate usecases and is here to stay (perhaps not to the extent the companies want us to believe).@golemwire Where is *your* closest mega-data center? How much electricity does it use? How much land was conceded to build that AI data center? What is the dB level hum at the edge of the facility? How much water is needed to cool it?
Let's start with that first, before we start swinging our pro- AI dicks around.
