Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)

I shouldn’t let it, but it continues to bug me how easy it is for people to position themselves as “AI critics” with small doses of mildly worded criticism while being complete cheerleaders in practice, with the courses or consulting they sell or the software they make.

“Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a Lot”

https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-dependence-addiction

> Researchers have found that ChatGPT "power users," or those who use it the most and at the longest durations, are becoming dependent upon — or even addicted to — the chatbot.

Possibly related: what I wrote a couple of years ago on how LLM chatbots function like a mentalist's con

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

Keep hearing reports of guys trusting ChatGPT’s output over experts or even actual documentation. Honestly feels like the AI Bubble’s hold over society has strengthened considerably over the past three months

This also highlights my annoyance with everybody who’s claiming that this tech will be great if every uses it responsibly. Nobody’s using it responsibly. Even the people who think they are, already trust the tech much more than it warrants

“Starship Was Doomed From The Beginning - by Will Lockett”

https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/starship-was-doomed-from-the-beginning

SpaceX's Starship looks like a genuinely flawed design

“Under Trump, AI Scientists Are Told to Remove ‘Ideological Bias’ From Powerful Models | WIRED”

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-safety-institute-new-directive-america-first/

Literally what I and so many others have been warning about. Using LLMs in your work is effectively giving US authorities central control over the bigotry and biases of your writing.

One thing many software developers, especially web, seem incapable of understanding is that a tool can provide a productivity benefit to the dev individually—improve the developer experience if you will—while at the same time having a catastrophic effect in the software product as a whole.

Devs didn’t learn this with React and I personally doubt LLMs will be any different.

We’ve had three years of github copilot and two of chatgpt, both promising magical productivity gains for software dev, and the only change noticed by regular users is that everything keeps getting shittier, but now with more useless chatbots

The software industry keeps talking about increasing productivity without giving a damn about whether any of it works. Everybody keeps adopting magic solutions and becoming so much more productive even as the software itself just keeps getting shittier.

https://c.im/@matdevdug/114137494259127155

@nolan I'm sure you're being bombarded with replies

But, brushing past the issues with the software industry that are enabling problematic use of LLMs: it's understandable that coders feel conflicted about them, even if you assume the tech works as promised, because you've just changed jobs

You've gone from thoughtful problem-solving to babysitting

Monitoring automation will never be an engaging activity

And, in the long run, a babysitter gets paid much less an expert

@nolan What most people don't get is that critics like me are the optimists in this scenario. A future where the fundamental issues with LLMs will lead them to causing more problems than they solve, resulting in much of it being rolled back after the bubble pops is the least bad future for dev as a career.

Because monitoring automation is a low-wage activity and an industry dominated by that kind of automation requires much much fewer workers than one that's fundamentally built on expertise.

It's a bit easy to get discouraged these days, huh?

@datarama I don't think anybody benefits from being in these loops 😝

I'm just grumpy because I used to be a big admirer of this person before they became an LLM cheerleader. I honestly shouldn't have posted anything

Most of the funding for all three major browsers essentially comes from search businesses and much of the rest comes from sources with similar dynamics

Those dynamics are changing. Regulators have come to seeing much of the browser landscape as anti-competitive. Companies are largely in the process of demolishing web media as an industry in an effort to replace them with chatbots, LLM answers, and closed social media silos.

Like others I’m bit worried about the shifting landscape for browser vendors, in terms of the incentives for funding changing. Maintaining and improving a browser engine is a task akin to that of a whole-ass OS. It requires extraordinary funds and I don’t think it’s controversial to say that both WebKit/Safari and Firefox are underfunded

The worst case scenario would be a repeat of the NN4/IE disinvestment duopoly era, a nightmare period after IE had effectively won but before the rise of Firefox where the only browser that wasn’t genuinely outright awful was IE Mac.

Except this time browsers are much more complex software

Now we have a situation where it’s much more cost-effective for tech cos to leverage a cozy relationship with the US administration to shut regulators down, both in the US and globally than it is to either change their platforms to be more consumer-friendly or keep funding open platforms

This means that all of the incentives are lined up to make drastic changes in the browser landscape much more likely over the next 4-5 years

And the conclusion I keep coming to is that the sensible thing to do is to shift hard away from client-side JS except where it’s absolutely essential (e.g. for accessibility reasons). This is despite being a guy whose web dev career for the past decade or so has mostly centred on JS

Obviously none of this needs to happen. Tech cos could demonstrate vision and increase funding as a long term hedge against the also increasing dysfunction of appstores, but that feels unlikely

So, the question on my mind: what’s the best strategy for us small-fry under these circumstances?

It’s clear what a sensible long-term web dev strategy looks like for most of the industry, but much of that same industry is hell-bent on doing the opposite: build bloated software based mostly on a fragile JS-oriented ecosystem, while simultaneously using LLMs as an excuse to both de-skill the industry and shrink the workforce down to a size that can, effectively, be drowned in a bathtub if they so much as dare to attempt collective bargaining

CSS and HTML, even if you assume that they are equally complex as JS, have very different failure modes that make them more resilient. Too much JS is also a big problem in many other ways, such as costs and punishing constrained platforms such as mobile phones

The problem is that the industry does not agree and keeps ratcheting up the average JS payload and keeps hiring based only on skills in React and completely disregarding CSS and HTML