Description of the author at the end of the article had me howling. I’ll just leave it here for y’all to enjoy.

Amanda Caswell is the AI Editor at Tom’s Guide and one of today’s leading voices in AI and technology. A celebrated contributor to various news outlets, her sharp insights and relatable storytelling have earned her a loyal readership. Amanda’s work has been recognized with prestigious honors, including outstanding contribution to media. Known for her ability to bring clarity to even the most complex topics, Amanda seamlessly blends innovation and creativity, inspiring readers to embrace the power of AI and emerging technologies. As a certified prompt engineer, she continues to push the boundaries of how humans and AI can work together. Beyond her journalism career, Amanda is a long-distance runner and mom of three. She lives in New Jersey.

Just remember that lifetime means Plex’s lifetime, not yours.

True, but I’ve noticed that as a change in my personal circle, and as a recent change among people who acted different before becoming heavy AI users. I find it difficult to describe the effect, it’s like a disassociation with their surroundings like what supposedly happens when people join a cult. Quite suddenly it becomes very difficult to get through to them. It’s weird and scary.

I’ve seen people become more introverted and unable to participate in an open discussion. They bring an opinion but refuse to reason with actual arguments. If that doesn’t work out for them (it never does) they are offended and leave. Very odd behaviour.

I switched from Kubuntu to CachyOS last week, after 10 years or so. CachyOS is based on Arch, and did not disappoint so far, extremely fast, makes Ubuntu look old and sluggish. It’s really impressive. The basic installation was easy. The GUI package manager isn’t as polished but works. A little bit of terminal tweaking was required to install some packages (VMM and KRDC gave me some trouble) but the documentation was ok. Absolutely can recommend.

While this is good advice it only addresses the sender’s perspective of communication. What’s missing is how to deal with people who communicate with malicious intent. You’ll wear yourself out quickly on social media if you don’t learn how to protect yourself against that, and “THINK” is only half of the equation

I had a similar situation yesterday, albeit not with 26.04, but the previous version. After a regular update it reverted to software rendering. What fixed it was selecting the non-open Nvidia driver with “sudo software-properties-qt”. Initially the options were greyed out, this was fixed by removing all old Nvidia drivers, and then “sudo ubuntu-drivers install”. The default open driver stopped working for some reason.

That happens when you think you don’t need experienced software devs any more, because the AI can do everything now. A seasoned developer/devOp/admin would have known that the production environment needs to have different credentials from staging and these need to be protected. If that is not possible with railway then it’s simply not a good product to use and (again) a good dev/admin would have seen this in the initial evaluation phase. Not preventing AI access to the production environment from the start is the third grave mistake. However, there’s none of it in the “lessons learned” section of the article. You have learned nothing and are bound to repeat your mistakes.

How bizarre. That’s actually a thing. I’ve read the following quote in another article about tokenmaxxing:

“Scaling compute along with data can increase the size, complexity and therefore value of the result,” said Brian Verkley, director of AI data strategy at VAST Data. “A token represents generated business value. Therefore, I expect business value per token to continue to rise, along with AI usage.”

WTF, dude. Size and complexity does not equal value. You can shit out a massive dump of unmaintainable garbage code that has zero value. Incentivising your devs to like that will only produce exactly that, a massive amount of garbage.

And using a token only represents immediate business value for the providers of the AI, not for the consumer of the token. If the price payed for the token isn’t covering the costs then it’s not even a lot of value for the AI provider, apart from usage stats.

This is a doomsday cult.

Good analogy. I’m gonna steal that :D

I don’t doubt that it is possible to create good code when focusing on programming best practices etc. and taking the time to check the AI output thoroughly. Time however is a luxury most of the devs in those companies don’t have, because they are expected to have a 10x code output. And thats why the shit hits the fan. Bad code gets reviewed under pressure, reviewers burn out or bore out and the codebase deteriorates over time.

This approach to coding is exactly what creates the problem. They will find out the hard way if they can continue to be productive when something breaks and AI is not available for whatever reason. Does anyone know how to fix it? Is the documentation sufficient to understand what the AI did?

Like a digital piñata

Well… Given that the average person neither knows what data they are effectively giving US and Chinese companies, nor does anything against it, this poll is asking the wrong questions. Massive amounts of data collected for every single individual via ad-based surveillance (US) and IOT devices phoning home (China) is the reality we live in today. But the average person does not know about it and therefore can’t even grasp what is done to them. They don’t trust them, but they hand over the data anyway. This is basically a poll amongst cows in the slaughterhouse.

I have a suspicion they are focusing on short-term goals, because that is what those people usually do. For example, it’s probably hard to explain who should watch all the ads and buy all the advertised products when Facebook replaces their content and interactions with bot slop. They didn’t think this through. This isn’t some kind of visionary 4D chess. But it does not matter to them. When wasting 80 billion on a VR project that was doomed to fail from the beginning does not matter, nothing does.

“opprobrium”… an element in the periodic table? Right next to copium I suppose?

If we’re not talking about the super rich, because there is only a few dozen of them, and they have their own parallel universe… it’s usually mannerisms, language clues (in articulation and content), but of course also signals like expensive clothing and accessories. Also the places where they meet. This opens the door for all kinds of grifters who emulate behaviour and style to get into those circles. Jeffrey Epstein is an (in)famous example for this.

There is an aspect mentioned in there which hits the nail on the head for me. I’m not a game developer, but a developer nonetheless, and this ongoing AI debacle is taking a toll on my mental health too. I know very well that LLMs are not going to replace me, and that most of it is just hype, ignorance and stupidity by people who don’t have a clue about what’s involved in software development.

But that’s beside the point really. What hurts is the blatant disregard of human skills and craftsmanship which are necessary for making good software, and this a level of disrespect to me and my profession which is hard to swallow. Furthermore, the uncertainty and mayhem created in the industry over what is basically a lie (there is no intelligence in AI) makes it really really difficult now to work. It’s a massively frustrating shit show of delusional people and I’d rather become a goat farmer.

I had this happen when a game at random times filled up the available memory so quickly that it froze completely before any OOM watchdog could catch it.

Same here. Can’t add much to the conversation though. All this stupid AI babysitting and bullshitting sucks the fun out of my profession. For a while now I felt it might be time to leave the tech sector entirely. Unfortunately that’s the only thing I’m comfortably good at.