Technology

It's changed the price of RAM, that much is assured.

The story itself is pretty ridiculous. He starts with a conclusion, and then looks for stories to support that narrative. What should happen, is first establish criteria to measure if an AI project has been successful or not and then measure projects against that criteria. Instead the author uses anecdotal stories of projects he has heard failed, so it must all wrong.

Not one mention of the advances in medical research using AI, because it goes against his narrative.

The whole world is lying because that's how we get fucking money. What a stupid hole we've dug ourselves.

I'm so happy everyone in the comments is engaging in a thoughtful and informed manner and not just spouts uninformed nonsensical talking points from both sides to see who can shout the loudest.

I mean, the article actually says that they are not lying.

But the truth they are telling is that this kind of tools is like Yuuzhan-Vong assistants in Star Wars NJO era. It's just further in the direction of auto-complete and recommendations.

That's good. It also means that a real job can't be "done by AI".

It's another kind of data compression, in a very fundamental and general way.

It accelerates the most things that shouldn't be done at all. Boilerplate code that's written again and again because of wrong processes, which are taught as standard way of thinking and doing development. Other things that could be a higher-level programming/markup language or a library. Just a frontal way of solving things that were done by hand.

That's useful, one can't do everything by hand.

Just - things that require real human decisions, understanding, responsibility, choice, or semantic and semiotic context that has formed in the course of one's own life for like 20 years - that they can't do. And that's what forms a professional. They can extrapolate stuff that doesn't matter.

Here's a link to the exact same post on Cory Doctorow's (tracker-free) blog: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/#i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again

Work keeps insisting we use it and I keep telling them to fuck off.

I get more done than my colleagues BECAUSE i don't use the not-actually-AI "AI" tool.

I can't say AI hasn't changed how I work, it has. Instead of going to Google, vendor docs, or the manpage for whatever code or system I am working on I will ask Claude or Gemini to take a stab at building the initial pass of the code or to look up what some cryptic error code means for me. Or even a better way to write some code that I think can be more concise.

The key I think is I never let it make the final decisions for me. The workflow is always look up information > shows it to me > ask for permission to do the thing > do the thing.

But none of that is "changing everything" in the way executives and the Sam Altman's of the world want to profess. It is just a sometimes more efficient for me way of doing the same thing I was doing before.

A lot of people I have seen that crow about how they are using AI to change their work lives are just doing really fancy Github workflows and actions to automate something they used to still do manually for some reason. They rarely are doing anything that couldn't be done with the time to research and test without AI.

AI would be great if(currently its mixed for me,and whats the best thing you can do ATM ):

• The Datacenters didnt drain like 3 oceans and half of the power grid(or used solar energy + air cooling only,the only way to solve this is Local LLMs currently or specific AI solutions that isnt ChatGPT or Gemini and so on. )
• the LLM is not trained on copyrighted data(non-public domain) and not Paying the artists or not ask the original creator to train on their work.(Local LLMS partially solve this,and this requires specific LLMS too.)
• People did not use AI mindlessly to write Code for you(well i think this requires the user to use their brain)

and so on...
and AI should stay as a "TOOL", not a full replacement for human work like most sane people do.
edit 1:
i forgot to mention AI is a big contributer to the AI crisis.

I've seen nothing that AI can do that justifies the economic or ecological cost.

@floofloof

I can only speak to my own area of expertise, biotechnology

and it appears that AI is in fact changing everything and doing so fast eg

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aej8512

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec2657

Honestly, I didn't jump on the AI hate train like everyone else did. And I was wrong. I literally only use it to make profile pictures on steam to make a sekiro photo. Other than I literally can live without it.

And at this point all of the damage it is doing to our communities; I am angry at this point that people in positions of power are blatantly ignoring the people they represent who say they don't want this. This is almost as bad as the epstein corruption. Just blatantly lying to our faces and ignoring frustration.

Not just ignoring it but trying to grift to their supporters that these 'contrarians' aren't Americans and flew in. I'm so unbelievably sick of conservative influence in my home country just using lies as a real mantra. Because everyone around me values money over anything else and it seems like they genuinely are dissonant and don't understand this is a bubble waiting to burst unlike anything we have ever seen.

AI is changing everything. Its not a lie, its absolute truth.

The problem is the changes are fuckawful terrible for everyone and everything.

AI has been helpful for my job, sure, but the cost in terms of societal damage is so great it makes me wish AI were never created.