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i think jts unfair that only employees get to wash their hands

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accumulating hog stories

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Who has the George Lucas tweet

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i can't stop thinking about this scene from the new koth season it drives me insane

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i wish cars were open source

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this is the only time google's stupid ai has ever made my life better in any capacity

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the one time i tried to be high on shrooms in public it was in olympia i walked into this coffeeshop and ordered a medium thai tea and the barista says, “are you sure you dont want a large? everything is the same price.” and in my bewilderment i looked up at the drink board and literally everything was $2.65

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Soyjack condiment containers in the antique mall.

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hello my twenty five thousand most trusted advisors what am i ordering from the indian restaurant tonight

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Throwback to the funniest message I've received in my life

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Y̼̤̰͔͉̩̟̙̔O̞̖̙̗͓͆̉ͧU̯̺̫̗͂ͅ ̪̞͈̠̰̭̞̹̦͆̿̐͐̍̃͐̽C̘̪̹͎̲̱̔̿̑̆A͑̍ͮ̒ͨͅN̤̼̊̌'̪̪̲̱̜͎͛̔͒T͓͖̔ͩ̈́́ ̬̩̘̞͓̤́ͯ́̀̅͛D̗̈̌͌̄ͮͬ̇̚Ö̮͕̺̝̭̝̖́́̿͆ͮ ͖̫͍̊͛��T̙̠̲͚̜̥̘̍̈́͌͊̈́H͔͇̠̜̍̌̌̀̉Ă͔̪̭̲̏̾̆͑T̬͕̟͓̫̩̎̔̿ ̰̱͎̪̼̪͆̐́O̦̪ͭ̆̇ͩ̓̊ͤ̂N̯͈ͨ̆̉̐͂̊̂ͣ ̘̯̽ͭ͊B̠̜̘̪͓̯̟͓̿͂̊͆R̟̙ͣ̿̀̃̅Î͍̮̜̝͔̟̱̱ͅM̤̪̬͉͖̰̙̹ͨ̋S̠͉̱̯̾͒̔̊̚T̟͙̲̞̜̩̑͛̿ͥͧO̗̠̊̋ͤͣͣͦ͌͆N͙̭ͣͪÈ̗̯̹ͥͩ

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Christian Brutal Sniper

Okay hope you scared

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have christian brutal sniper pull the car around

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AI Coding Is Horseshit And This Is The Emperor's New Clothes

A child could tell you this, but I'm also going to. I studied natural language processing in college and work with AI for my day job.

The American dream is to have someone else work for you while you kick your feet up on your desk and smoke a big cigar or whatever. Your relationship to labor has changed - you now have the capital, you invest it, and you let the eggheads figure out how to make your number go up. Or you have someone else pay you rent because you bought the building before they could.

If we lived in a just society, we would all be working four hours a day and not give a shit about any of this. Instead, we have tractors with DRM and an economy built on ransacking other countries 100 years ago and making their residents work for us for pennies.

Now, though, thanks to the likes of Sam Altman and others, white-collar goblins with underdeveloped critical thinking skills can get a small taste of the bourgeois high life. You can tell your e-homunculus to do something while you go do your daily gacha pulls or whatever.

Or can you? Keep reading to find out!

What AI Coding Actually Does

ChatGPT, Gemini (remember when it was Bard? I liked Bard more), Claude Code, whatever else, are all basically the same. They are a dumbass you can tactically deploy to write unit tests while you go get coffee. For anything else, they are quite unskilled, and mask their incompetence with constant flattery. That's right - AI is already doing what your annoying coworker does.

I Call Anecdotal Evidence to the Stand

I recently (three months ago, as of the writing of this post) asked the computer to write some unit tests for me while I went to get coffee. It gave me a large amount of tests for what was actually a pretty small function, and managed to write a dependency injection so poor that it would clobber the actual things it was mocking. I brusquely pointed this out to it, and it responded with a cavalcade of flattery and a promise to do better. Verbatim:

Ah, that's a very good point! You're right. We should store and restore the original value:

I would hear this many, many times. You're so right, let me adjust that. Great catch! Let's fix that. We, us. You and me, right? We're a team! I'm your buddy! I alternate between professorial instruction and shameless flattery, which is what buddies do! My know-it-all tone sounds like the real thing if you don't know any better!

You need me.

I really started to see why people get so dependent on ChatGPT. You don't need emotional intelligence, or any intelligence really, if you just ask people questions about themselves and give a lot of compliments. For extra points, toss in same vaguely flattering phrases that sound too specific too apply to anyone else but in reality apply to 99% of the global population. That Barnum Effect goes crazy.

If you look at the OpenAI press releases, they're touting their product as something that can write an entire website for you. It can do that if you want to ship a static site and don't care 2 months down the line when it breaks and you need to figure out why.

There's a popular software adage that comes to mind, Kernighan's Law:

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

If you don't know what you're doing when you have the AI write your code, how will you even start to fix it? You will be proffering the error stack trace to the AI like a child, a supplicant at the altar of stupidity. "I frew up. Can you fix it please?" Like that wretch who let Replit delete his entire prod database. It was vaporware investorbait so nothing of value was really lost, but still.

You can also hire a person to fix your import error for 10x the price. This is already happening everywhere AI has gotten its unctuous graspers on the written word, from copywriting to coding. The feet-up cigar-chompers have realized their mechanical toadies are incapable of fixing their own mistakes, and hire some people who have jumped on the "AI mistakes are sneaky and pervasive" bandwagon in the hopes of snagging a cigar of their own someday.

Effects of Vibe Coding

Vibe coding is where you describe the "vibe" of the code you want, and have the monkey do it. Vibe coding is fine for small throwaway tasks, like a one-off script to grab data for something your boss asked you to visualize. (Just hope it gets the API response parsing correct).

Generally, though, if you use it for everything, it smooths your brain over with a large trowel. Why even bother to understand something, if you can dump it into the chat window on the right of your editor and say "explain please?" I realize it's ironic to say this in the age of copy-pasting things from Stack Overflow, but to be fair, any programmer who unthinkingly does that is also not a good programmer.

Slop Jockeys in the Wild

Being stupid is fine if you keep it to yourself. Although I enjoy the feeling of writing good, robust code, I'm not someone who self-actualizes through work, and so people around me slowly lobotomizing themselves and writing bad code doesn't really bother me because it's not my entire life. What DOES bother me, though, is when people's modes of interacting with AI leak into how they interact with others.

I had a Slack thread with other coworkers. We tagged a PM in the top message because he needed to give input. He arrived as the thread had a whopping 5 messages, and posted a 200-word AI summary of the conversation directly in the thread. "Hi all, is this a good summary of the conversation?" We had to read the AI slop summary and figure out whether it was correct based on what we were talking about, rather than him reading five messages.

I ran a hiring interview where someone said "I actually don't write code manually much anymore, I just have ChatGPT do it," right before writing the most insane dogshit I've ever seen. For some reason, they did not get the job.

If AI Bad, Why Have So Much Money?

You got me there. AI is actually good because there's so much money invested in it. Rich people are rich because they deserve it. And kings are kings because God wants them to be king.

Just kidding. People are pouring money into AI because they're convinced it'll be profitable later. And since it hasn't really gotten profitable yet, there's pressure.

OpenAI made 12.7 billion dollars this year. That's a profit, right? No. AI models are improving because people are just throwing more time and hardware at basically the same solution, and that costs a lot. OpenAI needs ten times that to turn a profit. Bloomberg published an article recently, saying with an excited tone "By 2029, OpenAI says they'll start making money."

I wish everyone got to play by those rules. Hey boss, just keep those paychecks coming. I'll get to work in four years. Trust me.

Microsoft has automated the historically human-powered writing of terrible Windows code with AI, for dubious reasons and even more dubious success. Good piggies need to demonstrate to investors that their product is worth something now, now, now.

And then the enshittification happens.

Is AI the New Age of the IDE?

If an article's headline is a question, the answer is usually "no."

There's some basis to that question, at least. IDEs do things that you would have had to use your brain for before, that make your life easier than just using Vim in a shell. Things like "go to definition" and "highlight this variable red if it hasn't been declared yet" are not technically necessary to write code, but still nice to have. The difference is the level of abstraction from your understanding of the code.

At the risk of stating the obvious, a Word spelling and grammar-checker is different than hiring a ghostwriter. You don't see people writing breathless articles saying "Is Hiring Ghostwriters The Future Of Pulp Fiction?"

However.

If the question is "Is Getting Someone Else To Work For You The Future Of Work?" the answer is more of a "no shit." The myth of the hard-working, bootstraps-pulling entrepreneur has always, always survived off this kind of labor. We've just found another thing to poorly automate.

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