I learned today that the board of directors at this huge multinational non-tech company I’m at wants 80% of people using AI, and has a target for lines of code written by AI.

Both of those are insane.

The lines of code one is extra double insane. People knew lines of code was a shit metric in like the 90s.

You have to be careful at low skill/knowledge levels, because it’ll happily send you down a crazy path that looks legitimate.

I asked it how to do something in oracle SQL, because I don’t know oracle specifically, and it gave me a terrible answer. I suspected it wasn’t right so I asked a coworker who’s an old hand at Oracle, and he was like “no that’s terrible. Here’s a much simpler way”

I found it’s useful for code where I know like 70% of what I’m doing. More than that and I can just do it myself. Less than that and I can’t trust and diagnose the output.

I’d rather have old fashioned stack overflow and tutorials, honestly. It’s hard to actually learn when it just gives answers.

I don’t have the means or motivation to do research now from the couch, so I’ll concede you may be correct. However, I think it might be even safer to take those same billions of dollars and invest them in mass transit and other infrastructure changes. That would mean fewer car accidents, less pollution, nicer spaces, healthier people, healthier economies, etc. private car ownership cannot be the long term solution. If it’s not an outright dead end, it’s certainly a side street instead of high speed rail (if you’ll pardon a strained metaphor).

Self driving cars are a great idea, but they aren’t a fix everything solution, they just one part of an overall solution.

Why are they a great idea? What are they making better? How is it worth the real and opportunity costs?

Self driving cars have always been a stupid solution to the wrong problem.

We shouldn’t be investing billions in them. We should be investing billions in creating livable spaces that don’t need cars so much. Then people will be happier and there will be less pollution.

But I guess that’s not profitable so I guess we’ll just do idiotic garbage that gets people killed.

Many people are bizarrely emotionally invested in eating meat.

It’s funny because some of those people are also “fuck your feelings!!” types, while being a ball of poorly controlled emotions themselves.

Private car transit scales badly. Public transit is a well understood solution.

Out-groups to bind, in-groups to protect. That’s it. Often on a purely emotional level. Having the out-group be just out and about living life feels wrong to that kind of person. There has to be hierarchy, they feel.

They vote for their material interests in the same sense that a man walking at night with sunglasses picks the best path. He thinks it’s obvious but he really needs to take the sunglasses off and maybe get a flashlight. He’s walking a stupid path and will probably fall into a ditch.

Fox News is probably the sunglasses in this metaphor.

Elon Musk should be abolished.

Yeah if AI was actually good you wouldn’t need to mandate it. No one was like “everyone here must use Google search”.

Companies fill up with idiots and parasites. People who are adept at thriving in the role without actually producing value. Google is no exception.

Assuming what you’re saying about the harms of consuming pornography, is it the state’s responsibility? Is it a top priority? Do we trust conservatives to implement a solution in good faith?

The answer to all of those I think is no.

There’s no analogous ID check for violent media, so far as I know.

There could be a raging wildfire and I would hesitate if a Republican said “let me deal with it”. They are fundamentally untrustworthy.

That’s on top of the deep irony of the same party that goes on about “small government” and “parents rights” is typically the same one pushing draconian anti-porn laws. It’s a joke. “A government small enough to fit in your bedroom”. Their motivations are so corrupt I am extremely skeptical of anything they propose.

Will anyone learn from this? Will any of the people who were wrong lose credibility? Doubtful.

Saint Luigi preserve us.

I’m sure there are companies that are at least more good than bad. Teachers pay teachers. Meetup. Bandcamp before they sold. That’s all I have off the top of my head. But even so capitalism invites cruelty, and the best intentions can easily wither under the pressure to make more money.

I work for a very large company involved in medicine. They make machines to do like blood work. That’s fine. People need that. But they treat many of their workers like trash. I don’t get paid for holidays and get the legal minimum sick leave per year. Their mission isn’t especially evil , but their behavior sucks.

I think a good step would be if people could admit the companies they work for are making the world worse. I’ve met some people who work for Google who do some backflips about how no the company is good and definitely they’re good people and it’s not the $300k salary talking.

6th grade is reading for plot. It’s able to read the story and understand that the hobbits brought the ring to Mordor, and Aragorn fought in Gondor.

Anything about symbols, themed, subtext, unreliable narrators all comes later.

Managers are often idiots in over their heads. AI is really aggravating that problem.