Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I advise being very cautious about consuming Zitron’s posts, but the same is true of Piper. Many coders are using chatbots, but I don’t know of evidence that it makes them more productive since the “where is all the AI code?” study last year (especially when we consider the whole software lifecycle and not just lines of code pushed to codeberg).
The paragraph about “what if you assume that all these pathological liars and PR hacks are not lying, wouldn’t that imply something amazing?” reminds me that she is not trained as a journalist.
He has got a dramatic and vitriolic style, but as dgerard says, he has also dug through the numbers. I see lots of criticism of Ed’s style, but not nearly so substantial criticism about the hard numbers he has come up with. The LLM companies put out contradictory and obfuscated numbers, and taken naively they seem to contradict Ed’s numbers, but as Ed has shown, many, many times, when you start trying to un-obfuscate them they start looking really bad for everyone betting on LLMs.
So more and more coders are coming around to “actually AI code is okay”… but as we’ve seen repeatedly with LLM generated content, it is very easy for people to “Clever Hans” themselves and convince themselves LLMs are contributing more than they actually are, so I am not going to trust anecdotal reports.
I take Zitron’s takes with a massive grain of salt, but I think the fundamental difference between him and rats is that for him, AI is just another technology. He’s looking at the figures, seeing the adoption, and not premising his arguments with the supposition that Anthropic’s Claude is literally gonna escape and kill us all.
Piper says she’s fine with paying $100/month for Claude. OK, but how large is the total addressable market for that kind of monthly expenditure - especially in a world where costs are rising? I’ve seen people stating that because they personally spend $200 on streaming services, increasing that load by 50% monthly is no big deal for them. But streaming services are much more mainstream than AI agents, and crucially, adding another subscriber to them is basically zero-cost for the provider on the margin. Not so with AI! The more people use them, the more they cost for the provider!
We’re seeing “pricing adjustments” from both Anthropic and Microsoft, which sure doesn’t align with the idea that they have a huge inference pricing margin cushion. Everything is gonna get more expensive - fuel, chips, employees (who are gonna be expected to be compensated for their own rising costs). Just based on what I’m reading in the news titls the analysis over in Ed’s favor.
hello hello AI coverer here, Ed brings the numbers, which is insanely valuable work, and he’s at the stage where people just tell him shit now (it’s a great stage to be at), and Piper is a fucking idiot as usual