Why willn't thine bubble pop sooner
As usual, photo unrelated. I like photos in blog posts even if they aren't relevant because I'm a photographer and I have so much goddamn backlog. Here's a cicada, aka the perfect lifeform. Emerge from the ground, scream, fuck, shed your skin and become something new, etc.
Happy JulyReply, all. This post titled I'm just so bored of AI has been going around 1 and honestly same, man. I'm so tired. But!! I wanted to dig in a bit because it feels like the rise of "People are making this AI shit their whole personality" probably needs to be looked at more.
I've said this before (please enjoy the AI causes forever work post) but there was this noticeable shift in "AI" marketing in the last year or so that was directly targeting the weakest link of most organizations; the CEOs, and as a result CEO "AI Psychosis" has hit kind of an epidemic level.
The role of a CEO is usually either someone who owns a company and is financially dependent on its success, or (more often) someone who is beholden to shareholders 2 who desperately want their ROI; the "promise of AI" to increase productivity and reduce headcount or financial overhead (Wait sorry, hang on - I hate having to interrupt mid-thought but to be 100% clear: both of those are falsehoods as AI cannot replace institutional and procedural knowledge, nor is it cost-effective in the long run as token costs are non-standardized, but everything said about so-called "AI" has to also be caveated that at
best, it's a plagiarism machine that cooks the environment, leads to cognitive decline in its userbase, and contains no benefit for anyone other than to financially enrich some of the absolute
worstpeople in the tech industry) is too alluring for many to pass up, but the marketing and push of these platforms is structured
heavilyaround FOMO. "You will be left behind without this technology".
So the CEOs buy in whole-hog, force it in their tech stacks, and the next thing you know: layoffs, restructures, pivots in business model, etc etc etc.
It sucks horrendously, but I at least can understand where it's coming from. The cause and effect, the historical ignorance of C suite in terms of what the workers need / want / are doing, etc. All of it calculates properly, as much as a I personally hate it.
This thing is called a 'Beauty bush'; it flowers only about 2 weeks a year in the early summer.
Ok, CEO's - sure. Individuals though?
Devs messing around with AI, diving deep and letting it become their entire personality? I don't fucking understand that shit at all.
The human curiosity to try something, see if it works, break it, try again, learn something from it, like - if that's where it starts, I can KINDA get there. I've spent weekends fucking around with a Linux distro or trying to code something that was wayyy outside my scope - but if that process is only done to further the ends of the magic genie that does everything for you moving forward, you stop being curious. You rely on the genie more. You become a statistic in the cognitive decline studies.
I live in a weird place where I've worked in tech in numerous industries since like 2012 but only ever as a day job; my life at large (or "extra curriculars" as work would call it) has always primarily been in the arts; music, photography and gamedev, and all of which in a leftist/DIY bent, so the circles that I run in and the friend groups I have all sniffed out the horror of AI pretty fucking early on. You could say that I'm in a "yeaaaa fuck this shit" echo chamber but I much prefer that to what I see outside of these circles where people incuriously pass everything off to "Claude" and constantly become the dark version of "cat when no cat is required for a task" meme where "cat" is replaced with "AI causing problems".
Anyway, to Terence's point; I'd much rather talk about something else lmao. I miss when a cool tech project ended up on my radar and I didn't have to see if it was vibe coded smdh.
Thanks for reading. Got some more photos and art posts coming up this week but for now, here's your end-of-post cat who doesn't know what Gemini is and is better off for it:
Her name is Chi and she's hanging out next to the travel cage that's currently full of cactuses that we need to transfer to larger pots (the cage is for their protection because the cats will absolutely try to attack them)
In regards to the tonal whiplash, I agree with Terence 100% on the AI part but it does feel at odds with the rest of the post saying others should stop telling him how to behave.
He's not wrong! and I get that the point of the post is "please for fuck's sake let's talk about something else" but I knowwww there are bad faith reads of this "if I can't tell you that hanging around with people who smoke is bad for you, you can't tell me to stop using AI" etc etc↩The shareholders are also inflicted with this disease because they think it'll make them more money and thus put pressure on the companies they invest in to go harder on AI, it's a whole goddamn FOMO ecosystem