Deciding to try and make a blog again was a weird decision. On the one hand, I have a lot to say (you probably already know this if you came from mastodon) and on the otherhand literally anything anybody posts to the public gets used to train ai. It's a bizarrely precarious scenario to find yourself in. How do you post about cool stuff to show colleagues and friends without it just getting looted? Sigh.
I guess the solution is to just talk about it, and try to entice folks to come see it in person or over a webinar or a meeting or something - which is a high bar these days. You look at the news and suddenly:
It seems you can't really look anywhere without someone screaming about ai. Either it's good, or it's bad, or something inbetween. It's the end times, and nobody will have a job anymore, we're all gonna live in tents outside of walmart, or we're all going to exist in perpetual luxury, 1st class airline seats and robots to wait on us hand and foot. I kinda remember something similar when cloud came around - and I don't mean to infer that it was all unicorn rainbow-shits and glitter back then. 2005 was fucking horrible for sysadmins - everyone had to cope with amazons marketing folks telling us we were all useless and we should willingly shuffle our way to the glue factory for 'processing'.
It was similar with bitcoin, right? Everyone tried to hamfist it into every nook and crannie, smashing the square peg into the circle hole with the gallagher mallet. It .. didnt... really work. It's still around, kinda but it wasnt this massive world changing thing that it was supposed to be - and I'm not sure this ai stuff is gonna be either. I mean, if you are willing to fucking slog through bullshit you can MAKE it kinda useful, but it's a far throw from like, 'stable enterprise grade anything'.
You gotta think of this stuff like gir from invader zim. Eager to please, chock full of knowlege, silicon is faster than neurons - but completely batshit insane and will straight faced tell you that gasoline is a great topping for pizza.
It's quite the darwinian irony: if you know what you are doing, and you can call bullshit on the stupid things, then occasionally they may show you something cool you didnt know you could do - like, did you know that you can write an ENTIRE BASH SCRIPT, shove that thing into an env var, then call the env var inside a for loop? THAT is pretty fucking cool, and lets you do some INSANELY POWERFUL SHIT. Had no idea! Learned it by hitting gpt.. 3? 3.2? in the face with a brick over and over again. However - if you DO NOT know what you are doing, then it'll tell you dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda is the best possible way to get your sound working in your fresh new arch linux install.
These things were trained on reddit and 4chan and somethingawful and fark and thousands of listservs.. and yahoo answers. FUCKIN YAHOO ANSWERS. If you ask the right way, they will tell you how babby was formed.
I figure, if you can make them useful while they are around, in a sensible way, not drink the kool-aid, or be a fanboi - fine. At some point they're gonna do what all big businesses do and overnight 10x the pricing so they can absolutely wreck everyone who has grown addicted to them. Every github ci/cd pipeline that uses that shit will catch fire, businesses will explode, support bots will vanish - it'll be interesting for sure.
I have been using them in narrow circumstances - I need a command line script to monitor an ip that hosts a bunch of services, to see how quickly it comes back up, and what order the services return in. 15 iterations of it later, i have a good working copy. Dumb, harmless sysadmin/devops level shit. Doesnt expose ports, doesn't handle data, doesnt 'control anything' - it can go completely off the rails and nobody gets hurt. Make it write some javascript or css maybe. If you've spent a career reading other peoples code and making corrections, but not writing it all for yourself from scratch you have trained your brain to operate in that mode, and reviewing short segments of slopcode is functionally identical to looking at someones php theme for wordpress, cringing a lot, then fixing it to make it work correctly.
We're gonna be stuck with this shit for a while, and it's gotten to the point where it's practically unavoidable, at least for now. Whenever the bubble bursts and it all falls apart, stuff will change (I hope), but Nik was right. It seems that you have to put on a show. If you talk shit about ai in front of the wrong people, doors close in front of you - and for exactly the reason that Nik mentions - you're gonna make people look stupid, and they know that right off the hop, and they will 100% pull contracts and ghost you to avoid being made fools of. I read his post and it instantly occured to me why I had such trouble in my 20s - I just 'expected my superiors to know more than me', and was surprised and kind of annoyed when I found out they didn't - and expressing that was an affront to them. It's the same now but with ai - if you have a boss or a colleague or a contract customer who is 'all in' on the stuff, and you roll up and explain 'no, the fuckin clanker spicy autocomplete cant actually do shit, and here are 5 reasons why it'll set your business on fire' - you just made them look like an idiot, and you will be made to suffer.
On the same hand - if you want to legitimately help people slog their way through this muck, you will have to 'git gud' - at least to some degree - to be able to speak to this stuff with any authority. Some people are lucky in that they can completely un-yoke themselves from dealing with it, but others are handcuffed, shackled, stapled and glued to it in some capacity and it is inescapeable. It's just unfortunate that the people who are prisoners of the stuff are also getting shamed for being prisoners of the stuff.
To close: venting is good. it'l helps you blow off steam. just try and make sure that you dont blast your friends and colleagues with that steam cuz getting a scald from steam sucks ass. Or - better yet - forget everything I wrote and just scroll down and click the tank.