- cross-posted to:
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- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- selfhosting@slrpnk.net
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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I feel this. 5 years ago I was a radar engineer making ~200k/yr. Today I’m unemployed and just submitted an application to a law school. I love technology and I’d love nothing more than to continue working in STEM fields, but I just cant justify it when the torment nexus is the only project those in charge are willing to fund. I cant bring myself to continue letting the rich harm people with technology I make, hopefully I can at least get involved with the law and try to create conditions where people in the future can work on tech without building the torment nexus
I am also an engineer (data platforms). I similarly thought the only other field I might enjoy is law. I like complicated, technically-you’re-wrong kind of shit. I also don’t want to work for these giants anymore. Fuck them.
I once had an alternative dream, where I believed I would start my own business one day. I really wanted to live off my own contributions to the economy, with (eventually) enough spare time to actually be with my kids more often.
Now it feels like everything is a fucking scam. I need to go to paper-mill college just to impress the dumbass class of billionaires, so that I can make them more money via their capital machines. This would be my path to building enough wealth such that I can take on the risk of starting a new business. A risk that is all too risky, right now. I have kids to feed. Costs of everything going up, and who knows what’s to happen after the AI bubble pops.
I feel kind of trapped.
I feel you. I’m so fucking sick of the scam based economy we (I’m assuming you’re also in the US based on the vibe of your comment; apologies if I’m wrong) live in. I don’t have a family, I can only imagine how much more difficult things are right now for people who do.
It makes me feel like the only path forward in terms of improving any facet of human life is to push the kleptocrats and oligarchs currently running things out of power. That’s honestly one of my goals going to law school; I want to work in politics in some fashion and try to change that. I see some of the anti-oligarchy politicians that have had success or at least a lot of news coverage lately and that gives me some hope for the future. I absolutely hate the idea of being a politician, but I hate the idea of allowing the people currently in charge to remain in charge even more.
I feel extremely lucky to have been able to retire when I was laid off after 30 years at the telecom company I used to work for.
The guys who are still there have been on a roller coaster of crazy in the last couple of years.
I think we might need a support group for disillusioned tech workers.
There’s a tales from tech support on lemmy. Would that suffice?
I started my job just a few years prior to this AI boom. With a shitty company and now AI on top, I’m really trying to think of other jobs I would be okay at/with doing.
It’s hard having two decades of experiences in a domain I suddenly find myself at odds with. Reading about others having the same qualm reassures me that I’m not going crazy. On the other I feel drawn further into an untenable contradictory position.
Once in a while I give in. It’s typically when I’m faced with a non trivial problem I realize will take me days of learning before I have any chance of tackling it. My colleagues start suggesting it or share some slop to “help out”. So I think fuck it I’ll study later for now AI will solve it I need this ticket closed asap. I fire up a “decent” paid model and I start feeding it context. Every time it’s a nightmare. Hours of trying stuff that doesn’t stick, of questioning, of arguing with a chat bot, of wading through “here are the facts” and “good catch” and “I owe you an apology”. It’s not a shortcut it’s a fucking dead end. Then the bitter aftertaste can only be cleansed with cold hard time consuming actual learning.
I am so glad to hear that I am not the only one who finds AI coding to be an almost futile exercise. I spend more time talking to the damn robot trying to get it to fix problems than I would if I had just done it more slowly and deliberately in the programming language I am familiar with, or just circumvented the automation effort and done the task manually. All three seem to take about the same amount of time.
At least after hours of arguing with a bot and burning tons of money and energy you have a pile of code you can’t understand without paying a chatbot.
But will the chat bot understand itself? It’s fun when you start questioning the LLM line by line about its own slop in the same session and it starts flagging all sorts of things it did wrong. Why didn’t it write it correctly in the first place? Or is the fix wrong? Who knows? People I guess. The model is fed on knowledge but whether it will activate in response to your prompt and be restored unadulterated is a coin toss.
No, but it will gladly pretend to understand it. For a price.
That’s a problem, but the bigger issue is how the commercial models are tuned to tell you that you are never wrong.
Or, more to the point, telling people who don’t know what they’re talking about that they’re never wrong.
We see the appeal to middle and upper management.
7 months ago I quit my job for this reason. I thought long and hard about it even bought a ranch. I have joined another team, but one that is pretty critical of ai. They aren’t anti ai, but using it needs to have good reason. I figure this is my last bastion and I’ll ride this.
Got room for one more at the ranch?
Absolutely, but you’ll have to help me tend to the yaks, and hike through the mountains every so often to forage for food and set up new sensors. :)
I saw the yakherds riding Honda motorcycles all over Gansu. Seems like a blast.
I need to watch this
Won’t let me upload directly. Here’s a link: https://imgur.com/a/FwoVHO2
When I see people begin their Anti-AI arguements with “it’s bad for the environment” I tune out completely. These motherfuckers have been driving gasoline powered vehicles around for decades, and are totally fine with natural gas fired power plants.
Fuck off.
Theft of ideas and IP?
Buddy, do you not fucking understand how society has improved over the last 10 thousand years? We even have a saying for it, “standing on the shoulders of giants” which as a saying/concept has been around for about the last 800 fucking years, and was made or remembered famously from Issac Newton in 1675.
If we didn’t use the ideas and learning from those that came before us, we’d still be living in caves.
Do you know what’s more recent than that saying? The entire concept of Intellectual property. Which has only been around a bit more than 500 years.
Buddy is complaining about giving money to large companies, then you look at their linked in profile and see a job history that includes Dropbox, Scribe, and a for-profit healthcare company.
It’s amazing how passionate bootlickers are about text prediction and the capturing of the commons.
The billionaires aren’t going to love you backv bro.
You’re doing the same shit on 100 different technologies that existed before LLMs but only this is a step too far?
Use your critical thinking skills.
Why are they worth so much?/Non are making any money. Its all just a scam and nobody wants to be left holding the bag.
When I see people begin their Anti-AI arguements with “it’s bad for the environment” I tune out completely. These motherfuckers have been driving gasoline powered vehicles around for decades,
So, we’re starting with this:
and are totally fine with natural gas fired power plants.
…and a complete assumption about the author’s opinions. One that is in direct contradiction to what they’ve said in the article. I shouldn’t need to elaborate on why this is a bad start.
Then you discount IP theft as a concept, when caring for creator’s works (and encouraging more) is what IP was invented for. And yeah, it’s grown massively out of control. There’s a reason Cory Doctorow and many others have suggested that concern for copyright is the wrong reason to hate AI. But if you ask me, you still can hate AI for that when it comes to small creators, who cannot meaningfully weaponize the broken aspects of it. And those creators are precisely who AI companies disproportionately steal from.
Lastly, you end your comment the same way you started it, only now it’s even more like the meme. The entire post is about how they quit their job because they now felt staying was unsound from both ethical and practical perspectives. That is a direct example of them following their morals.
I believe the arguments you make here are bad, but the condescension dripping off your post – especially when you’re attacking the author for hypocrisies that aren’t even real – is much worse. That’s Reddit behavior, and it’s not helping anyone.
Nah, these data centers are not even worth talking about being bad for the environment compared to almost everything else we do. Trying to use that as a primary focus here is just people looking for an excuse to hate the technology.
https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/comparing-water-footprint-ai/
Here’s a beautiful article comparing the AI industry to Cattle farming. AI data center water use is measured in tens Billions of liters, while the beef industry is measured in Quadrillions.
You already shot down your own IP argument, I don’t need to help you there. AI companies don’t disproportionately steal from small creators, They may have done more of that in the first few iterations, but the datasets simply don’t do that anymore. There’s no need, they can train it on clean data, then just pull live from the web for specifics now.
I am dripping condescension because it’s fucking stupid. There are plenty of horrible things happening in the world today, AI datacenters are so far down the list that they do not deserve the amount of effort people are putting in to hate them while far more significant things go un-recognized. The reason for this? Because people are being misled, and instead of figuring out things themselves they take the shit they read at face value.
I’m going assume your link is coming to a good conclusion. I find the idea that cattle farming produces a lot of greenhouse gases to be very believable, and so I will take that as a given. But even with that in mind, the argument doesn’t hold.
First, people can be mad about two things at once. We don’t have to pick between being upset about one contributor of climate change versus another, we can just be upset at both. Besides, I think it’s safe to say that cattle farming is a better use of resources than AI is. Like yeah, sure, I think it has some serious excesses. There’s animal welfare issues, the aforementioned climate problems, and just the general problems of rampant and negligent industrialization writ large. But even after all that, it’s still feeding people. AI doesn’t have that silver lining,[1] so the comparison is unfair as well as unnecessary.
As for the IP argument, no, I didn’t shoot my own argument down. Please do not mistake my good faith self-examination for a failure. Like I said, it’s still perfectly viable to hate AI for that reason, and I explained why — just because there are better reasons doesn’t make that one invalid. I have no idea why you’d think AI companies aren’t still training on small creator’s works en masse though.[2] To me, that’s wrong at face value, but to explain:
Training is one of the biggest things that AI companies are constantly pushing for, because they believe that’s the primary vector by which the technology has (allegedly) improved. It’s one of the biggest sources of the environmental problem. And even if that wasn’t among their top priorities, why would they stop? Scraping is cheap. Several of them committed massive acts of literally-illegal piracy to do it. They’re clearly willing to jump hurdles for even a theoretical benefit, so why quit? Why ever quit?
With regards to your anger: Alright, yeah, I understand that. I disagree, for a variety of reasons that are probably obvious by now. To me, you’ve either been mislead, or – knowing how AI sometimes affects people – you may have used AI yourself and become somewhat dependent on it. I dunno. But I’ve been mad about stuff before and said rude shit because of it, so I can relate.
I think the helpful thing to be reminded of in this context, then, is that if you want to convince people, this can’t be how you try. People do not take well to “telling it how it is,” or any other form of tough-love style argumentation. They get defensive. It’s completely counter-productive and only helps to alienate people from you. Which is a pain in the ass, I know; slowing down to say something kinder has huge friction, while venting what you actually feel is satisfying. But unless venting is the goal, you want the former. Gentle words and impersonal, non-accusatory language can go a long way; even if people get mad it you for that, they’re still more likely to introspect after.
I’m sure you disagree about this, but debating the utility of AI would be a topic unto itself, so I’m leaving it out for now. ↩︎
Though I’m not sure you actually do believe that! I mean, you’re saying “just pull live from the web for specifics now,” and… what do you think I’m talking about, if not that? What’s “clean data” to you? Comments like these, where we never consented? That’s not clean to me at all. ↩︎
Using data about data centers from 4 years ago. Haha I guarantee you googles data center snare using more water now. Also one is food one is not, and the this is also bad argument is stupid.
If my current employer goes bust and I lose my job (which doesn’t seem unlikely right now), I think I’m out. I’ll have about 1.5 years to reinvent myself somehow. But at this point I can’t really see myself working in tech for the rest of my life.
Same. If I lose my job I think I’m going to become an electrician instead. That or work on a farm or garden center.
You’re going to be competing with everyone else that’s deciding to suddenly become an electrician plus all the existing master electricians. Good luck.
Electrician sounds kind of cool, but the union route (in the US) seems like a pretty serious commitment.
Real
Sounds like an opportunity for malicious compliance.
Auth is down? AI did it.
This is the sign I needed to call in sick for the next few days. This shit is so tiring.
