@ludicity I miss the old days when it was decided an app needed AI. So a data scientist made a simple linear regression, and we would add it to the app. Then, BOOM, singularity achieved. At least from an executive perspective. I always had a good laugh at them, but at least the ML did something. The only good thing I'll say about LLMs is copilot will write my unit tests. Which is why I am now arming myself for the robot revolution. As this will be considered a capital crime by them.

@ludicity Very enjoyable read, thank you.

I wish there was some mention of the energy costs / climate impact of the tech tho, which TBH is what worries me the most.

@ludicity this was a fun read. Thank you for articulating many of the thoughts I was struggling to convey. It’s a weird time to see all of this happening

@ludicity I don't know that unhinged rants really help convince anyone who's not already sick and tired of that shit, but as an avid reader of yours, I have to admit it does wonders as a mean of venting frustration by proxy (and it's always good to feel like you're not alone...)
Cheers for that!

@ludicity extremely funny and well-written! I will send this to my colleagues in my company that's slamming the door on its foot repeatedly trying to get in on the AI craze (i am in hell)

@ludicity I love reading this. It hits very hard, and on the right place. Thank you !

cc @lkanies

@ludicity good thing "GenAI experience sharing session", and helpful brainstorming with my team and management is not tomorrow. :blobsalute: . I can't wait to hear about all the use cases we found. This article is wrongthink

@ludicity At last, an informed and balanced critique that potential adopters of AI everywhere were waiting for (but didn't know). Thank you.

@ludicity Good stuff and pretty much where I’ve been for a while now. The grift around LLMs is infuriating. With a few exceptions, I immediately distrust anyone who talks about “AI”.

@ludicity Thanks for a refreshing & entertaining reality check on the AI grift.

I'm a grumpy old semi-competent Scrum-averse Database Guy (mmm, lovely schemas ...) grinding through the twilight years of my career in the bowels of the data mines, keeping Broken Old Shit running because nobody can afford to fix things properly, while waves of functionally pointless & financially/environmentally disastrous LLM slurry flood in around us.

So good to know we're not alone in our weary scepticism!

@ludicity Excellent post :ablobcatattention: I completely get your point - as someone who spent over a decade in data warehousing, seeing "enablers" suddenly pushing data lakes as a solution to everything (completely without ACID in the beginning) gives me similar feelings :ablobcatcoffee: Industry is poisoned with Gartner's blabber and various kinds of techbros catch up quickly :blobcatdunno:

Thanks for writing this :blobcatfingerguns2:

Someone get the burn cream, stat, ‘cause AI bros got roasted in the hot and spicy (well, unsure on hot but definitely ghost pepper spicy) take on the generative #AI hype train by @ludicity 🔥🌶️👏😂 https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

@ludicity pure brilliance, thanks. I’m going to paraphrase your student cheating idea next time some upper management ignoramus suggests it in a faculty meeting.

@ludicity I want to say, this piece has the single best title I’ve ever read, and thank you.

@ludicity as someone in cybersecurity, I can say that you are correct that zero trust has meaning, but that meaning is not how people who develop products treat it.

@ludicity If you don't mind me nitpicky (!): there's a typo in "What are are doing as a society?"

I never know whether to mention these or not, since not fixing them doesn't really affect readability or meaning but does cost attention to address 😅

@ludicity

👏

@ludicity 😂😂🤌🤌💯

@ludicity reads the title: oh, this is gonna be good

2 paragraphs in: yeah I'm enjoying this

@ludicity This is both excellent and the funniest thing I have read in a long time.

Bless you and your Iron Man reference you magnificent creature.

@ludicity a truly magnificent post. 👏

Thank you.

@ludicity

I know most CIOs at Corporations of Significant Size are the same, but dang if you aren’t describing the one at the one I work at.

@ludicity
It's making a few of us in venture space laugh, but I have to be careful who I share it with, as the cool-aid in this case could harm those not drinking...

@ludicity

Your podcast's name made me laugh harder than any joke I heard in the last year. My god.

@ludicity The LLM output of the articles sounds a bit passive-aggressive, can you adjust a bit your prompt for the blog post?

Ok, that joke was tasteless, what I literally hate is that EVERYTHING under the sun nowadays is called an AI. You know, things that 5–10 years would just go by “algorithm”. Or “heuristic”. Today for marketing purposes the same f%cking two if statements are already “AI”.

@ludicity I'm just here like, I want to learn the basics of the systems because the math seems cool and I want to make a bot to play an old game poorly. :V

I really do hope the industry gets over itself soon, the amount of inertia this forest fire of a dump has is terrifying.

@ludicity I may not vibe with the style, but it’s a great article anyway. Thanks!

@ludicity "I don't actually know what 'zero-trust' architecture means, but I've heard stupid people say it enough that it's probably also a term that means something in theory but has been sullied beyond all use in day-to-day life."

Yeah, that's spot-on actually. Zero-trust used to mean "don't allow anybody to do something just because of their IP address" - i.e. place zero trust in the network. Now it somehow means more VPNs. No, I don' t know either.

@ludicity Thank you. I am not a software person at all, but this answers all my suspicions about AI, and tells me I was right.

@ludicity 🫡

@ludicity as the only local support for 150+ users I'm fed up with users and managers trying to sell me "AI".. and I'm getting angrier and more confrontational every time, now I just ask them "how much energy and water was wasted in what you just did?"

But lovand behold! This is the future!!

Fuck that noise

@ludicity Love it. A reasonable take.

@ludicity > if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)

My God. Yes. YEEESSSSSSSSSS

@ludicity THANK YOU.

@ludicity Your rants are a beacon of sanity in a bleak world of technology circle jerking.

@ludicity Gosh this read is cathartic as fuck

@ludicity While I haven't managed to turn my 35+ years in IT and software development into a credible (or marketable) body of experience, I do recognize the same rusty lamppost every time I make another revolution on the carousel.

I suppose, one day, our corporate leaders will achieve their dream of eliminating workers, er, sorry, Operating Overhead, from their profit machines, er, Businesses. But I can't ignore the fact that I've heard this tune before.

@ludicity that try/catch line was absolutely fucking majestic

@ludicity “How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit?”

Almost word for word what I keep saying at work 🤣🤣🤣

@ludicity
I hear it in the dark when no one is around.
"Just Use Postgres, You Nerd. You Dweeb."

@ludicity you’re talking about the #MBA class. They all need to be pile driven so deep into the earth they melt from the core temperature. And our universities are cranking them out faster than any other *profession*
Thousands and thousands of psychopathy degrees awarded annually. It’s an existential crisis.
https://kolektiva.social/@LeftistLawyer/112326717492717772

@ludicity Good read.

"...these tools aren't good enough (yet) to assist me with this seriously."

LLMs will never have the ability to design software or help designing it, as they cannot be creative (there's no thought process involved).

Training them more and more or adding more computational resources will not change this. It's a bit like with Mr. Creosote in the Monty Python sketch.

@ludicity totally lost it at Synergy Greg. Going to use that a lot from now on.

@ludicity Cathartic read! Thank you 🙏

@ludicity Your post perfectly covers all the various misgivings I felt as this AI snake-oil rush kept gaining speed. Appreciate it a ton. I hope you have a wonderful and joyous week ahead.

@ludicity Thank you for taking the time to so eloquently express this.

@ludicity "average person speaks 10 phonemes per second" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person speaks 0 phonemes per second. Synergy Greg, who lives on blockchain & speaks over 10,000 phonemes per second, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

@ludicity fucking hilarious. 10\10

@ludicity

@ludicity man, this rules so much. Thank you.

@ludicity That point about organizations that i) cannot reliably manage a CRUD application thinking ii) that rolling a LLM into their stack is gonna revolutionize their warez is *fantastically* spot-on

@ludicity 😁 Masterpiece of wry understatement 👏😁

@ludicity LOL

"spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly."

@ludicity BEST. POST. EVER.

Thank you.

@ludicity I appreciate the segment about you visiting a less developed nation and how that made you feel about how funds in tech are distributed.

@ludicity
This really was a fun read, thank you!

@ludicity I cannot describe how cathartic I found reading this, bless you

@ludicity Indeed! “That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable.”

@ludicity I (unwittingly) designed a Tshirt just for you...

@ludicity I really like your writing style. Hearing someone articulate these things is very cathartic

@ludicity it’s “zeitgeist” FWIW

@ludicity (also I can attest the “quietly understood” portion is often explicit.

Depends on which company has more power, but “we’ll give you a deal on our software so you’ll pretend to use it, and you write about it on your blog five times and once in a YouTube video” isn’t uncommon, and in writing as a “marketing agreement”.

If you’ve ever wondered why all the startups use each other, well, this makes them appear to have customers when it’s all VC money)

@ludicity banger of a blog post, I greatly enjoyed reading it

@ludicity yesssss

@ludicity I love it. It's cathartic to read somebody's rant and think "Thank the Gods, it's not just ne"

@ludicity Metafilter is having fun with you blog post.

https://www.metafilter.com/204248/But-We-Will-Realize-Untold-Efficiencies-With-Machine-L

@ludicity Nice work. Thank you! I particularly appreciated this line: "Why don't you remain competitive by fixing your shit." I can relate to that.

@ludicity Very enjoyable read. Thank you for writing this 🙏🌻

@ludicity eloquently put - thanks for sharing

@ludicity I recently read the first few paragraphs of a "UX expert" talking about how "the age of conscious AI is upon us" and how technology is no longer a "tool" but a "companion".

It was all I could do to stop myself from rage-throwing my computer across the room.

If people like this are truly the "UX experts" today, god help us all.

@ludicity "Everyone is talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation, but most companies don't actually have any internal documentation worth retrieving"

Any internal documentation they had was in the heads of people who walked out the door with the last RTO mandate, or were escorted out when management decided to replace them with "AI".

@ludicity epic post, impeccably written 🙌

@ludicity Tech lawyer here, one step removed from the hype frontline but we swim in the slip stream (“AI Regulation”). If you need someone to get you off the murder charge, a few guys in my team would probably work pro bono 😂

@ludicity nice callouts on blockchain and quantum computing ... and I’d like to add all the little darlings of the dot-com and post dot com (Java, Ruby on Rails etc) that seem related in that “grinning idiot avatar trying to make lots of money” thing you talk about

@ludicity

Other than being a touch more positive on the machine singularity than I am personally, this was a good distillation of what I've been ranting about myself.

@ludicity LOL. I just got permabanned from /r/singularity for posting this.

@ludicity thank you for this, such an enjoyable read. So many truths business doesn't want to hear.👏

@ludicity brilliant and funny.

@ludicity As a survivor from the AI hype bubble of the 1980s, I feel your pain. Our company was producing tools which did something fairly modest but genuinely interesting; but the grifters promising things which could not then and still cannot now be delivered so poisoned the space that the whole market collapsed and we -- and a lot of other small companies producing modest but genuinely interesting tools -- were swept away.

@ludicity
"How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit?" - I feel this so much

@ludicity very refreshing and entertaining read, thanks!

Also yes zero trust is meaningless now because everyone claims THEIR sso/kpi/whatever is "zero trust". They all have different definitions of it

@ludicity Oh fuck yeah, this is my style! Love it.

@ludicity Loved your article! You eloquently express many of the feelings I have about the whole LLM hype; I just feel that my managers are going to be less enthousiastic about your... colourful language.

@ludicity I love the sentences right after each heading. Thanks for the fun time! :))

@ludicity I don't even know where to start here. Our org has absolutely power-shovelled well north of $100M into internal AI product development and exactly 0 of them are in any kind of operational state, let alone production.

One team's been working on deploying a single linear regression for about 4 years, and are still trying to morse code "data fucked, product owner quit, bomb our location" back to the parent org.

Also have about a 1:300 DE to DS ratio which tells you all you need to know.

@ludicity as someone else who is entirely sick of this shit, I would like to join your wrestling faction

@ludicity thank you for providing a perfect response for every single topic that starts with "how about implementing AI"

@ludicity fantastic. I got sick of the entire money grub direction of the silicon crowd in the 90s and decamped to the Midwest to problem solve clothing. Pretty relaxing. Good luck with the theater adventure! Mmm costumes!

@ludicity @adrienne > You can hear it too, on freezing nights under the pale moon, when the fire burns low and the trees loom like hands of sinister ghosts all around you - when the wind cuts through the howling of what you hope is a wolf and hair stands on end, you can strain your ears and barely make out:

> "Just Use Postgres, You Nerd. You Dweeb."

@ludicity "[It] turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable."

BOOM 💥

@ludicity This was hilarious and felt so good to read. Really hoping for another AI winter just so the hype train ends

@ludicity The impression I've gotten of the state of the tech is that it's more like a spinal cord than a brain, but executives think so little of sapience itself that they can't tell the difference... and, since they resent the idea of needing employees, don't want to hear that there is one.

@ludicity Lol dude I love your writing style, have been binge reading your blog since an hour and wow after years it feels coming across an actual human being in tech.

Such a respite from the usual corporate "thought-leadership"

@ludicity O thank you. Alas that the grifters haven't the wherewithal to understand their sin.

@ludicity loved reading this, your writing styles really funny and engaging, thanks :ablobcatenjoy:

@ludicity amazing. Thank you for that.

@ludicity from the bottom of my heart: thank you for this. A shred of sanity in an ocean of degeneracy.