They are so desperate to push this and it’s pretty obvious why. Companies have dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into AI like it was going to revolutionize literally everything and are now forcing it on people to make up for the fact that they were wrong. Don’t get me wrong, AI has its uses, but their whole “solution for everything” mentality is really starting to backfire and they are just trying to make a profit off their investments. Basically “we spent way more money on this than we should have so you better use it or else.”
Edit: In addition, every company is trying to be the one that’s on top when the bubble pops which is only making it bigger and last longer which will only make it worse when it does actually pop. It’s a problem they created and are sustaining themselves, and if they back out now it could be just as catastrophic as letting the bubble pop.
Don’t get me wrong, AI has its uses, but their whole “solution for everything” mentality
They are trying to somehow undo or redo personal computers.
To create a non-transparent tool that replaces the need (and thus social possibility) to have a universal machine.
The difference between thinking robots and computers as we have them is that thinking robots take some place in the social hierarchy, and computers help everyone who has a computer and uses it.
Science fiction usually portrayed artificial humans, not computers, before actually, ahem, seeing the world as it turned out.
It’s sort of a social power revolt against intellectual power (well, some kind of it).
Like a tantrum. People who don’t like how it really happened still want their deus ex machina, an obedient slave at that, that can take responsibility at that. Their 50 years long shock has receded and they now think they are about to turn this defeat into victory.
only making it bigger and last longer which will only make it worse when it does actually pop
I think that’s deliberate. There are a few companies which will feel very well when the bubble pops, having the actual audience as their main capital, while their capitalization and technologies are secondary. The rest are just blindly led by short-term profits.
I don’t get it. AI is a tool. My CEO didn’t care about what tools I use, as long as I got the job done. Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done? They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
AI make money line go up. It’s not clueless, he’s trying to sell a kind of snake oil (ok, not “snake oil”, I don’t think AI is entirely bad).
Snake oil is also not entirely bad. The placebo effect actually works.
It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.
If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.
tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care
Because unlike with the other tools you use the CEO of your company is investing millions of dollars into AI and they want a big return on their investment.
GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft is forcing AI on all the employees
Honestly I’ve been recommending setting up a personal git store and cloning any project you like, I imagine the next phase of this is Microsoft making a claim that if Copilot ‘assisted’ all these projects, Microsoft is a part owner of all these projects - in a gambit to swallow and own open source.
loads of self hosted alternatives if you so require it
They all need to be sued for unethical “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish” practices again
best I can do is rusty dull guillotine
nah rusty and a blade that is serrated… make way more mess. As an aside the guillotine was designed for theatre, the mechanism actually makes that loud noise on purpose! Pointless to kill someone without a bit of theatre don’t ya think
I am surprised they aren’t embracing it… I would. You immediately get some vague non person to blame all your failures on.
Employers aren’t loyal enough for the average person to care about their companies well being.
I agree, let them generate massive tech debt cause right now the majority of my current clients have hired me to clean up their AI slop.
is it bad for their users? oh hell yes it is. Is it great for me an other consultants/freelancers? hell yes it is. Best thing that’s ever happened to my wallet recently are vibe coders. I love those dumb prompt monkeys.
Because like AI, your CEO is a tool.
I think part of it is because they think they can train models off developers, then replace them with models. The other is that the company is heavily invested in coding LLMs and the tooling for them, so they are trying to hype them up.
Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done?
Not just that… why do they have to threat and push for people to use a tool that allegedly is fantastic and makes everything better and faster?.. the answer is that it does not work but they need to pump the numbers to keep the bubble going
They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
Accurate description of most managers i’ve encountered.
Curious when the last time business insider quoted a labor leader without a CEO or capitalist shill quoted in the same article. A US private equity group Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) acquired a majority share in the parent corp in 2020. They’re also selling ads for development in the west bank under yad2 https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/germany-media-giant-axel-springer-advertises-israels-illegal-settlements-in-the-west-bank-through-its-classified-ads-website-yad2-incl-co-comment/
I’m a professional developer and have tested AI tools extensively over the last few years as they develop. The economic implications of the advancements made over the last few months are simply impossible to ignore. The tools aren’t perfect, and you certainly need to structure their use around their strengths and weaknesses, but assigned to the right tasks they can be 10% or less of the cost with better results. I’ve yet to have a project where I’ve used them and they didn’t need an experienced engineer to jump in and research an obscure or complex bug, have a dumb architectural choice rejected, or verify if stuff actually works (they like reporting success when they shouldn’t), but again the economics; the dev can be doing other stuff 90% of the time.
Don’t get me wrong, on the current trajectory this tech would probably lead to deeply terrible socioeconomic outcomes, probably techno neofeudalism, but for an individual developer putting food on the table I don’t see it as much of a choice. It’s like the industrial revolution again, but for cognitive work.
So glad I’m a giant fuck up and went to school for coding but never did anything with it, at least I don’t have to deal with finding a new job now because fuck all this AI shit.
If your job involves any analysis, you’re next. Once they work out the remaining robotic kinks, labor intensive jobs are cooked. You will not escape.
Oh I’m quite aware of that I just bought some time, my other hobbies being music, video art and graphics design all of which AI has already taken a giant shit all over.
Cue the calls for us to man up and pull ourselves up by the bootstraps.
… Ok!
CEO = Marketing with a different title. Trust the words out of their mouths the same.
(bring the pitchforks straight to my door)
He’s kinda right. You would be a fool not to use AI now and again. No, I do NOT mean vibe coding, that’s a fucking joke. ChatGPT (only one I’ve used) got me around a couple of sticky points when I was last scripting with PowerShell.
If you’re stuck on a thing, why not see what an LLM will spit out? Last time I tried that it came with a non-working script, of course, but I picked some useful bits out and wrapped up quickly. Learned a new path I hadn’t known or considered! From what I gathered reading Slack, our devs were using it in that manner. Nobody was dumb enough to trust the output, but again, AI can often get you over a hump.
All these stories we see about AI making coding take longer are about dipshits that lean on it too hard without actually knowing what they’re doing, or naively trusting the output, or heaven-for-fucking-fend, both.
Yes, you still have to be able to actually write code. No, it won’t replace developers. However, if AI can speed up a devs work, and it looks like it can, we’ll need fewer devs.
Does github copilot include attributions and licenses from projects it copy paste code from or it’s just stealing and pretending like nothing happened like all other AI ?
does “embracing AI” means replacing all these execs with it? or is it “too far”?
No, they’re all super special and have an “instinct” that a robot could never have. Of course the same does not go for artists or anyone who does the actual work for these “titans of industry”.
*by “instinct” we, of course, mean survivorship bias based on what is essentially gambling, exploitation, and being too big to fail.
Moved from github to gitlab when it was acquired by Microsoft. Moved from gitlab to codeberg last month because I don’t need a behemoth with dozens of services I never use to store my 3 shitty code files.
Broke: selfhost Forgejo (what Codeberg runs on, for those who don’t know) because nobody looks at my code anyway
Woke: access my Git repo directly through SSH because I don’t need any other feature anyway
Move to Codeberg (esp. if you’re European) - but please don’t forget to donate something as well. If we don’t pay for actual freedom, we won’t be able to keep it.
I agree with you 100% but theres also a small strange humour in the wordage of paying for freedom.
Freedom isn’t free, it costs a buck 0’five
It’s a play on “free as in beer …”. We’ve seen all too well that paying with our data isn’t the way to go.
Also note that it’s for open source projects only.
All projects should be.
The underlying software forge Codeberg uses, Forgejo, is self-hostable. I’m sure some web hosting business will get around to providing a managed hosting offering eventually.
just saying codeberg and forgejo is right there and doesn’t have ai rubbish.
I see Microsoft don’t need developers and those who work there are morons. That’s how I read what Github CEO said.
Bro you are literally not necessary, not even the best at what you do. See everyone on codeberg.
Codeberg rules
But who else is going to micromanage and bully the employees and strut around self-importantly doing jack shit? /s
What employees?
Replace CEOs with AI
I’m wondering about why they got fooled. Have they noticed that LLM can do a better job than them and they think that this will also translate to software engineering?
My understanding is CEOs are mostly good at schmoozing with other CEOs and investors. A lot of investors operate on vibes, so having a CEO that can vibe with other rich bros can open pathways to funding. That’s about it. Everything else they do is a liability or could be better handled by someone with relevant expertise.
Also, we probably shouldn’t be driving most of our productivity based on the vibe check of a few rich boys.
Your last sentence is spot on but it doesn’t capture the full weight of the impact rich people vibes have on the world. The perceived value of every stock, and by extension the economy as a whole, is almost exclusively a vibe check of rich guys. There is no objective information about a company that is more indicative of that company’s success than how rich people feel about it.
And since Rich people are just interested in having the biggest number, they only invest in lines that are going up every quarter.
Mutual funds are doing the same thing, and since they’ve convinced the rest of us to invest our retirements into stocks instead of pensions, we’re all fucked when it fails.
also convincing the board of directors to not get rid of them.
replace CEOs with people
Codeberg is so nice.
