Notices by datarama (datarama@hachyderm.io), page 4

@inthehands (That is to say: Since software serves a purpose *beyond* existing, and we can fulfill that purpose without programming the software, then programming seems a lot more pointless than playing music - in music, the making of the music *is* the point, it is not a means towards that point.)

@aral I have never ever been so tired of tech in my entire life. It is all so, so depressing.

@Wolven If you want it to sound even more familiar to one set of workers, it bears mentioning that the Luddites largely worked at home and set their own schedules, and the industrialists wanted to stuff them into dreary, awful, prison-like buildings under strict managerial oversight.

@jamuraa @thomasfuchs I don't really think "office productivity" Microsoft is going to crash hard (much as I wish they would). They're too big.

I think the biggest loser in all of this is going to be Google. Classic web search won't work when the web is 99% LLM-generated crap - and neither will their "generative search experience" (which will then have an LLM generate crap *based on* LLM-generated crap).

@codinghorror Fun fact: In Norwegian, if you want to say something is crazy (in the sense of "chaotic" / "wild" / "out of control"), a common idiom is to say that it is completely Texas.

@HauntedOwlbear @Wolven Either this article has gotten something wrong, or this is self-parodyingly GDPR-violating behaviour.

(...the article reads as though the reporter actually interviewed Bard itself? If that is the case, we don't know how much of it is just hallucinatory botshit.)

@mattly @jenniferplusplus I am presently at my "I wish I was a baker or a barista" level of tech exhaustion. (The next levels are "I wish I was 12 years old" and "I wish I was a blackbird or a newt").

Tech is getting more horrific, software is getting more meaningless, and I'm getting old and bitter.

@mattly @jenniferplusplus I mean, isn't that the entire business model of generative AI?

@jenniferplusplus The big bet all of these companies are making is that, with a big enough model, it turns out to be possible to make software *without* understanding.

@goatsarah @FeralRobots I was 16 when I first used the internet in the mid-90s. I'd already been programming since I was a little kid with a C64, and it felt like the future was going to be great. I ended up spending most of my career as a CS teacher before transitioning back into industry a year ago. I like my job as a perfectly boring industrial embedded dev, but tech in general feels like a bleak Misery Optimizer.

If there's a full-scale tech backlash, the industry deserves it.

@phiofx A long time ago, in what seems like a different lifetime now, I was hired to teach a little group of children on the autism spectrum (ages 11-13) some basic programming. We used Python, and had lots of fun. But there was one thing that struck me as very, very different from when I was a coding kid.

The games and demos I made were pretty shitty, but they weren't *much* shittier than what pros did. And the size differential was tiny: there's only so much you can put on a 170 KB floppy.

@phiofx I spend my Thursdays at a friendly local hackerspace, which - in a sense - represents to me another, saner approach to "tech enthusiasm". An explicit rejection of the cruise ship, because you can't repair a cruise ship yourself, you also can't make it *your* cruise ship, and no cruise ships are community projects. We make DIY pen plotters, refurbish C64's, code weird crap and build keyboards and modular synths.

But that's very much *the opposite* of where the industry went.

@phiofx Although that particular dream has always been fundamentally tainted, a "techno-optimist" was something altogether different when that meant Steve Jobs talking about "bicycles for the mind" than when it means a bunch of fascistoid lunatics talking about "replacing the median human".

@phiofx I have no idea how to even begin doing this.

I work as an embedded dev, on things that have very little to do with Big Tech. I am happy with my work, my coworkers, and the company I work for. But still, I am so fucking disgusted with those sociopaths that there's a big part of me that just wants nothing at all to do with tech anymore.

Big Tech is moving rapidly in the opposite direction of what I think a wise tech ecosystem would look like.

@phiofx I don't know what it says about my current mental state that when I read that piece yesterday, I spent a few minutes just sitting in my chair just sobbing.

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/return-to-innocence/

@phiofx @jamesravey Footnote: HN has gotten worse, though. The bias has always been there, but it's changed quite a lot since back when Paul Graham would regularly come in and tell people about the value of philosophy and fine art, and a lot of the discussions were just people showing off the neat Lisp interpreter they'd built. Now it's all about extraction and disruption.

It's been especially awful recently, after the "robot cultist" segment of the userbase really got wind in the sails.

@phiofx @jamesravey ...and yet, even *they* thought Andreessen's weird manifesto was a bit much.

As I said, I don't know. Almost every tech worker I know in real life who reads the orange site thinks it is a fucked-up echo chamber for sociopaths.

@jamesravey @phiofx I honestly have no idea how representative they are. On the internet, it feels like HN-style tech bros are *everywhere*: Aside from HN itself, the commentariat at some of the older tech communities is also full of them (finding out that Slashdot still existed turned out to be more depressing than I had anticipated - and reading any Ars Technica thread about anything even peripherally related to humans and society is reliably infuriating).

@jamesravey @phiofx ...and yet, I don't ever meet any of them in real life. I'm a developer, and I spend a lot of time hanging out at the local hackerspace. Aside from "cool gadget", we often talk about the implications of tech on human rights, the climate crisis, the encroaching surveillance society, etc. Nearly everybody - even those on the political right - strongly dislikes Big Tech.

...and here on the internet, I don't see that many tech bros on fedi or eg. lobste.rs.