New piece from Brian Merchant: The AI jobs crisis is here, now

As its title implies, its about the wide-ranging job losses caused by the rise of AI.

I agree btw, it will be a big rep damage like how NFTs damaged the idea of cryptocurrencies, and in the same note you saw how a lot of pro-cryptocurrency people disliked NFTs just because they saw this backlash (and the more naked grift of NFTs) coming.

That’s for sure. Given the circumstances, I suspect that its gonna damage the overall public image of software development - beyond suggesting software dev to be full of AI bros, the rise of vibe coding has thrown the software industry’s vibes-based management into sharp relief, making its dysfunctions much harder to ignore.

New thread from Baldur Bjarnason, taking aim at AI coders and vibe coders alike:

Laughing at “AI” boosters worrying “vibe coding” is becoming synonymous with “AI coding”. Tech is vibes througout^[sic]. Vibe management. Vibe strategy. Vibe design. Coding has been a garbage fire for decades and, yeah it’s a vibe-based pop culture from top to bottom and has only been getting worse

Code that does what the end user wants is already the exception. Software is managed on vibes throughout. Anybody who goes huffy because the field OVERWHELMINGLY responds to “vibe coding is using AI to create code that you don’t care about” with “so all coding, gotcha!” has not been paying attention

“Vibe coding is all AI coding” feels true to most because not caring about what happens after it’s pushed to the final victim is already the norm. The only change from adopting “AI” is they now have the freedom to no longer care about what happens BEFORE as well.

“Not everybody in software dev is like that! Some coders genuinely care and put in the work needed to make good software”

True, but I feel confident in saying that next to none of those are leaning hard into “AI coding”

The target market for “AI” is SPECIFICALLY people who don’t care

Giving a personal sidenote, I expect “vibe coding” will stick around as a pejorative after the AI bubble bursts - “AI” has already become synonymous with “zero-effort, low-quality garbage” in the public eye, so re-using “vibe code” to mean “crapping out garbage” isn’t gonna be a difficult task, linguistically speaking.

From Bluesky, an AI slop account calling itself “OC Maker” (well, that’s kinda ironic) has set up shop, and is mass-following artists with original characters (OCs for short):

Shockingly, the artists on Bluesky, who near-universally jumped ship to avoid Twitter stealing their work to feed the AI, are not happy.

It also helps that digital clones are not real people, so their welfare is doubly pointless

This is that “A computer can never be held liable” image writ fucking large. Jesus Christ.

This is completely orthogonal to your point, but I expect the public’s gonna have a much lower opinion of software engineers after this bubble bursts, for a few reasons:

• Right off the bat, they’re gonna have to deal with some severe guilt-by-association. AI has become an inescapable part of the Internet, if not modern life as a whole, and the average experience of dealing with anything AI related has been annoying at best and profoundly negative at worst. Combined with the tech industry going all-in on AI, I can see the entire field of software engineering getting some serious “AI bro” stench all over it.

• The slop-nami has unleashed a torrent of low-grade garbage on the 'Net, whether it be zero-effort “AI art” or paragraphs of low-quality SEO optimised trash, whilst the gen-AI systems responsible for both have received breathless hype/praise from AI bros and tech journos (e.g. Sam Altman’s Ai-generated “metafiction”). Combined with the continous and ongoing theft of artist’s work that made this possible, and the public is given a strong reason to view software engineers as generally incapable of understanding art, if not outright hostile to art and artists as a whole.

• Of course, the massive and ongoing theft of other people’s work to make the gen-AI systems behind said slop-nami possible have likely given people reason to view software engineers as entirely okay with stealing other’s work - especially given the aforementioned theft is done with AI bros’ open endorsement, whether implicitly or explicitly.

The same goes with DuckDuckGo, because the venn diagram of programmers and AI bros is apparently a circle.

Either they’re lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.

I’m thinking the latter - Silicon Valley is full of true believers, after all.

Update on the University of Zurich’s AI experiment: Reddit’s considering legal action against the researchers behind it.

In terms of actually being useful, an AI data center is also worse than a boat.

Consider humans your competitive advantage.

Words to live by.

ZITRON DROPPED

Less a standard piece and more “Ed Zitron goes completely fucking apeshit for 26 minutes” this time around

Stumbled across a piece from history YTer The Pharaoh Nerd publicly ripping into AI slop, specifically focusing on AI-generated pseudohistory found on YouTube Shorts.

Most data centre electrical equipment is only made outside the US. President Trump’s tariffs exempt electronics — but that expires 9 July. If it isn’t extended, then US data centres are screwed — no new buildouts, and huge maintenance problems for existing data centres. [Verdict]

Trump had the opportunity to do the funniest thing by setting them for the 4th of July.

At least the data centres are paid for by private companies and not bank loans. This means the bubble pop won’t cause a banking crisis too.

That’s waiting until rampant deregulation puts everything in place for another 2008 style crisis

"How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”

Its a silicon-based insult to life, it can’t be conscious

New piece from the Wall Street Journal: We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All (archive link)

The piece falls back into the standard “AI Is Inevitable™” at the end, but its still a surprisingly strong sneer IMO.

And sadly, it wasn’t somebody’s porn alt.

Wow Trannyporno really put that depraved woman in her place

That can’t be a real username. That fucking can’t.

New thread from Dan Olson about chatbots:

I want to interview Sam Altman so I can get his opinion on the fact that a lot of his power users are incredibly gullible, spending millions of tokens per day on “are you conscious? Would you tell me if you were? How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”

For the kinds of personalities that get really into Indigo Children, reality shifting, simulation theory, and the like chatbots are uncut Colombian cocaine. It’s the monkey orgasm button, and they’re just hammering it; an infinite supply of material for their apophenia to absorb.

Chatbots are basically adding a strain of techno-animism to every already cultic woo community with an internet presence, not a Jehovah that issues scripture, but more something akin to a Kami, Saint, or Lwa to appeal to, flatter, and appease in a much more transactional way.

Wellness, already mounting the line of the mystical like a pommel horse, is proving particularly vulnerable to seeing chatbots as an agent of secret knowledge, insisting that This One Prompt with your blood panel results will get ChatGPT to tell you the perfect diet to Fix Your Life