William Pietri

Earlier this week I read a compelling first-person account of AI-induced skill decay but couldn't remember where. Mastodon was the first place I looked, so let me put it here: https://becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys.tumblr.com/post/810086608414146560/the-real-impact-of-ai-at-university-level-that

This is the sort of pedantry with which I am delighted.

Just learned about this. What a legend. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41650345

My modest proposal: we ban indirect monetization. If you get something of value, either it's a gift or you pay for it directly. So no more ad-supported services, no more selling people's data, no more things where you are the product.

Has anybody seen any good articles about vibe coding from addicts in recovery? I see people talking about it being addictive, but in the "gosh I love smoking" style you see from people talking about addictive games. I'd love to see it from the perspective of somebody who deeply understands addiction because they've had to move away from one.

I think I've figured out why the incidence (and centrality) of assholes is so much higher on the right. What conservatives have proven to be most concerned with conserving is systems that run on trauma. Patriarchy. White supremacy. Oligarchy. None of these work without abuse. Without people excited about abuse. That is, assholes.

current mood

One of the things I liked about UPS was that when you had a delivery problem you could call and speak to somebody who a) understood that it was a problem, and b) could fix it.

That seems over. Their slow, clunky, and unreliable website now has a low-grade chatbot, and all the support people have been replaced by grotesquely over-polite people who apparently can do nothing but tell you why it's fine and/or your fault and send you back to the website. Maddening.

It occurs to me that LLM "AI" may be the perfect technology for this era.

The ancients anthropomorphized what they didn't understand, from Odin and Zeus down to spirits of glen and glade. As we slide into this post-rational age, many sanewash a deranged, decaying old man because they can't stand to think of vast powers driven by a swirling coalition of personality defects and obsessions.

So it seems almost reasonable that people are treating corporate megascale autocomplete as djinn, as confidant, as guru, as nascent god. But only almost.

We need a name for the phenomenon when a person, out loud or written, seems so inauthentic that you're pretty sure they're just spouting LLM-generated slop.

Reverse Turing?
Meat Bot?
Borged? Chipped? (As in have you been...)

What are your ideas?

In my darker moments I suspect AI coding will win out not because the code is any good, but because so many of my fellow developers are used to working in large, no-good code bases they won't even notice the problems.