Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 soo 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.)

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    7·
    4 hours ago

    New-ish thread from Baldur Bjarnason:

    Wrote this back on the mansplainiverse (mastodon):

    It’s understandable that coders feel conflicted about LLMs even if you assume the tech works as promised, because they’ve just changed jobs from thoughtful problem-solving to babysitting

    In the long run, a babysitter gets paid much less an expert

    What people don’t get is that when it comes to LLMs and software dev, critics like me are the optimists. The future where copilots and coding agents work as promised for programming is one where software development ceases to be a career. This is not the kind of automation that increases employment

    A future where the fundamental issues with LLMs lead them to cause more problems than they solve, resulting in much of it being rolled back after the “AI” financial bubble pops, is the least bad future for dev as a career. It’s the one future where that career still exists

    Because monitoring automation is a low-wage activity and an industry dominated by that kind of automation requires much much fewer workers that are all paid much much less than one that’s fundamentally built on expertise.

    Anyways, here’s my sidenote:

    To continue a train of thought Baldur indirectly started, the rise of LLMs and their impact on coding is likely gonna wipe a significant amount of prestige off of software dev as a profession, no matter how it shakes out:

    • If LLMs worked as advertised, then they’d effectively kill software dev as a profession as Baldur noted, wiping out whatever prestige it had in the process
    • If LLMs didn’t work as advertised, then software dev as a profession gets a massive amount of egg on its face as AI’s widespread costs on artists, the environment, etcetera end up being all for nothing.
    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      3 hours ago

      This is classic labor busting. If the relatively expensive, hard-to-train and hard-to-recruit software engineers can be replaced by cheaper labor, of course employers will do so.