#AI

Mike· 14 hours ago

I can no longer trust any new software

The current rage in “decomp,” which is an insulting term to anyone who has ever actually decompiled something, has seemingly instantly affected/infected all my hobbies.

Self hosting? Decades-old software is out the window thanks to the latest vibe-coded dredge to be abandoned next week.

Music? Your favorite synth or groovebox has a new firmware! Rejoice in its ability to rejuvenate old, abandoned, and locked-down hardware... or dismay at the new ways to brick beloved tools while devouring a small Kansas town?

If you peruse Reddit, you’ll notice how different communities embrace this in different ways. Self-hosting has its AI advocates but largely is frustrated and done being excited about new stuff. But musicians are tech doofuses a lot of the time, and I don’t think the people delighted at the new vibe-coded firmware for the Novation Circuit are really even thinking about how it was made or what the consequences are.

I’d love to be excited about software that lets me use old and abandoned IoT devices, curb the spying by my TV, or even let farmers escape the thrall of John Deere, but it’s not really a great trade, is it?

Mike· 2 days ago

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All other problems aside, this is what I hate the most (at this particular moment)

It's no secret to anyone who reads it that Aftermath is not a pro-AI site (and why would anyone who covers video games be pro-AI?). I think they've now written two articles that sum things up for me quite well.

First, as a tech hobbyist who slaps Linux distros on random machines, runs a server for media and utility software, and records music on whatever hardware I can, the jackasses making computers expensive are the devil incarnate. They don't even like computers. They didn't type games into their Commodore from magazines. But they're more than happy to make Jensen Huang mega-rich at the expense of us nerds.

Secondly, as a so-called "knowledge worker," I greatly resent the idea that a glorified autocomplete can do my job. The work is the work. I get automation — my employer is giving a lot of benefits to workers based on our ability to "work smarter, not harder." But that just plain does not involve GenAI in any case that matters. Writing emails, parsing results, providing my interpretation of data, even building fucking Figma files. These things horrify me, because nothing original or insightful is going to come out of the stochastic word generator, and because that is the work. If you're already lucky enough to not be breaking your back or serving retail customers or whatever at work every day, offloading your responsibilities to the machine is just shirking the things you do have to do.

Mike· 4 months ago

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AI Layoffs and sowing the seeds of your own destruction

Here’s a list of companies who have done layoffs directly attributable to AI. Obviously most are in technology, which is distressing as that’s where so many of my friends are.

What’s possibly more distressing is the enthusiasm some of these people are showing for shooting their own feet off. I just don’t get it. No more junior developers, no more maintainable codebase, and eventually as some of them have already seen, no more job.

Side note: maybe I should get off cloudflare (1,000 employees)

Mike· 2 years ago

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The tortured artist stereotype

I hate it, but it has to come from somewhere. Sometimes Van Gogh gets blamed for it and maybe that's not without merit.

What am I in most people's eyes? A nonentity, or an eccentric and disagreeable man -somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.

All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.

This is my ambition, which is, in spite of everything, founded less on anger than on love, more on serenity than on passion.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven toward these things with an irresistible force.

I guess at least he had the opportunity to achieve that calm and harmony, though he was by most accounts not wealthy or even comfortable. Modern life should afford more of this than the early industrial revolution, but we're spending our technological efforts teaching computers to paint the sunflowers instead of ourselves. Yes, I'm still ranting about that, and shit like this is not gonna make me stop anytime soon.

Also: I think the piece about love vs anger is important: it's lost so often because he's still thought of as "disagreeable."

Mike· 2 years ago

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I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad

Tears for Fears is doubling down on using AI for the new live album cover. This is a little disappointing from a band I have a lot of respect and no small amount of love for. Perhaps they think they're not falling into the usual trap because they've paid someone. Never mind that person has scammed them with one of the most typical images on the internet, whether human- or machine-generated. It's likely, given they haven't done a basic image search, that they're just old guys who don't know the state of things. And maybe they really don't care. It's a live album from a legacy act. But call me old fashioned or a commie or whatever, I think artists should support other artists.

Hayao Miyazaki saying I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself

The summary of my feelings on LLM-generated "art": There are so many things that machines can do to make our lives easier — and they should be doing them, so humans can be free to make things like art.

Mike· 3 years ago

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4,000 of my closest friends

If you were on the internet in the early days of the web, you probably remember Cat and Girl. You might even be surprised that it's still going.

Here's its author discovering it's been used to train generative AI. And here's an interview she gave to the Markup. Big sighs are about all I have here.