Programming

or an environment destroying disaster

It is an environment destroying disaster. The fact that AIs have some use-cases doesn't change that fact. Underneath all the small conveniences you experience as a developer, it will always be busy destroying the environment.

So the question is more, are all those small conveniences worth accelerating our destruction of the climate even further?

It’s either the coolest modern tech or an environment destroying disaster.

It could be both of these and the latter would be way more important because we have to live in the environment.

" I'm kind of sick of this side to the argument even though it's mostly just people trying to fight insane push from board rooms, wanting everyone to adopt the tools.

Pretty typical behavior from the higher ups. We go through this every hype cycle. Someone develops an air nailer, while we've been using hammers, and now everything needs to be fastened with a nail. Even though a nail is often not the correct fastener.

We went through the same thing with "the cloud". I remember how every company was going to gleefully dismantle their data center and all the system admins were going to be unemployed. At least if you listened the talking heads and salespeople. Neither of those actually happened. But "the cloud" certainly changed things. If nothing else, it brought enterprise grade IT solutions to orgs that don't have the capital to build and maintain data centers.

I get really skeptical whenever someone starts claiming a particular tech solution is a silver bullet. And LLM's are no silver bullet. But they're not going away either, whether the naysayers like it or not.

Yeah, same here

I needed to calculate some statistics from log files and that would have taken me ages - mostly because my sed-/awk-fu is lacking

But with AI I got a script in half an hour - after correcting it a few times - and it is reasonable ok enough for the job

I tried to refactor a really large spaghetti state machine with AI, but they're all failing, because it's too large

It's nice to get boiler plate code written, but when it comes to overview of logic on a large project, they obviously can't keep up

As you said, it's a tool. But just like with any tool, you shouldn't use it for every use case

I swear, people either think it's a wish granting genie or a worthless hallucinating scam. There is zero room for actual rational discussion. It's either magic and perfect or the exact opposite and a curse. It's either the coolest modern tech or an environment destroying disaster. Either we should invest all our money in it, or none.

That just seems to discussions about anything on the modern day Internet in general. Whenever I talk to programmers in real life, the discussions tend to be nuanced with people acknowledging both the pros and cons.

The problem is the return on investment. LLMs are incredibly resource intensive at current scale. Sure you get to skip some boring tedious work that LLMs are good at but you use up a massive amount of resources just to get there.

I completely agree.

I totally respect that people hate every inch of it or are blown away by it. There are plenty of arguments for either sides.

What I don't respect is both what you mention, but also the poor manners and aggression in discussion about this. Here in the fediverse it's mainly the anti crowd going ballistic but elsewhere I've seen proponents be rude as well.

I'm very passionate about many things, things that I believe would make the world better if more people agreed with me, but that doesn't make me go into every thread that mentions meat-eating or car-driving to throw a hissy fit. Because not only will no-one ever change due to someone harassing them, but also it's fucking rude and not how I want to live my life.

Obviously I'm in this thread throwing a hissy fit about hissy fits but you know, don't tolerate intolerance etc...

Full context of the first quote:

Those who believe we’ve been in an incrementally escalating software crisis since at least 2007.

Our current software crisis – we’ve had a few – has been ramping up since the US gave up on regulation after the 2007 crash. Instead of reforming and regulating finance, the US decided to let the finance industry take over all of its industries, which hasn’t been great overall, but for software it’s meant that “quality” stopped mattering.

• Well-funded startups capture market share with subsidised products.
• Big tech is a cluster of oligopolies and monopolies.
• Internal software projects are driven by their potential effects on stock prices (“UGC! No, Web 2.0! No, blockchain! No, AI!”).
• Customer lock-in is a standard tactic.

There is little to no downside to poor software quality. The upside of doing the job well is limited compared to tactics like lock-in, dishonest subscription models, and monopolies

If his principal complaint is industry consolidation and consumer abuse, then the browser situation is not a great counterexample.

Tbf an LLM does a lot of things poorly but enforcing accessibility standards to a higher degree that most websites should be easy for it.