llms allowed them to glide all the way to the point of failure without learning anything

well, i see a large category of infrastructure problems (that will be 99% civilian use anyway - and not only transport, also telecomms, you can even put healthcare training in there) that is solvable by pouring money at them, and now it’s politically convenient to let it rip even among pro-austerity neoliberals. if you want an example of what can this do, look at eastern eu countries and how they changed after funding went in

which ones? germany has government spending at 48% of gdp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_spending_as_percentage_of_GDP so 5% of gdp for defense will be closer to 1/10 of all government spending

going by 2024 numbers, russians putting third of government spending to defence would be closer to 13% gdp

It all depends on how it all will get managed, but there are already longer term infrastructure projects that now got some funding and now also it counts under 5% NATO target. I think that more resources will go towards rail infrastructure, bridges are just more illustrative, but still for a couple of these village 7 ton level bridge there will be one 30 ton bridge in town nearby that will get overhauled

in eastern nato countries there is logistical problem because army suddenly switched from 40 ton tanks to 70 ton tanks, for example, and old bridges or rail can’t support them. this is just one of many small examples that add to that problem, and of course 99% of the time the stronger bridge will be used by civilians

there shouldn’t be billion dollar startups

maybe check from openai didn’t clear

well it’s spacecraft, not aircraft, duh

80000 hours are the same cultists from lesswrong/EA that believe singularity any time now and they’re also the core of people trying to build their imagined machine god in openai and anthropic

it’s all very much expected. verbose nonsense is their speciality and they did that way before time when chatbots were a thing

bro tried to recruit jihadists in roblox (failed) and now screenshots from this all are a matter of public record 💀

For slightly earlier instance of it, there’s also real time bidding

taking a couple steps back and looking at bigger picture, something that you might have never done in your entire life guessing by tone of your post, people want to automate things that they don’t want to do. nobody wants to make elaborate spam that will evade detection, but if you can automate it somebody will use it this way. this is why spam, ads, certain kinds of propaganda and deepfakes are one of big actual use cases of genai that likely won’t go away (isn’t future bright?)

this is tied to another point. if a thing requires some level of skill to make, then naturally there are some restraints. in pre-slopnami times, making a deepfake useful in black propaganda would require co-conspirator that has both ability to do that and correct political slant, and will shut up about it, and will have good enough opsec to not leak it unintentionally. maybe more than one. now, making sorta-convincing deepfakes requires involving less people. this also includes things like nonconsensual porn, for which there are less barriers now due to genai

then, again people automate things they don’t want to do. there are people that do like coding. then also there are Idea Men butchering codebases trying to vibecode, while they don’t want to and have no inclination for or understanding of coding and what it takes, and what should result look like. it might be not a coincidence that llms mostly charmed managerial class, which resulted in them pushing chatbots to automate away things they don’t like or understand and likely have to pay people money for, all while chatbot will never say such sacrilegious things like “no” or “your idea is physically impossible” or “there is no reason for any of this”. people who don’t like coding, vibecode. people who don’t like painting, generate images. people who don’t like understanding things, cram text through chatbots to summarize them. maybe you don’t see a problem with this, but it’s entirely a you problem

this leads to three further points. chatbots allow for low low price of selling your thoughts to saltman &co offloading all your “thinking” to them. this makes cheating in some cases exceedingly easy, something that schools have to adjust to, while destroying any ability to learn for students that use them this way. another thing is that in production chatbots are virtual dumbasses that never learn, and seniors are forced to babysit them and fix their mistakes. intern at least learns something and won’t repeat that mistake again, chatbot will fall in the same trap right when you run out of context window. this hits all major causes of burnout at once, and maybe senior will leave. then what? there’s no junior to promote in their place, because junior was replaced by a chatbot.

this all comes before noticing little things like multibillion dollar stock bubble tied to openai, or their mid-sized-euro-country sized power demands, or whatever monstrosities palantir is cooking, and a couple of others that i’m surely forgetting right now

and also

Is the backlash due to media narratives about AI replacing software engineers?

it’s you getting swept in outsized ad campaign for most bloated startup in history, not “backlash in media”. what you see as “backlash” is everyone else that’s not parroting openai marketing brochure

While I don’t defend them,

are you suure

e: and also, lots of these chatbots are used as accountability sinks. sorry nothing good will ever happen to you because Computer Says No (pay no attention to the oligarch behind the curtain)

e2: also this is partially side effect of silicon valley running out of ideas after crypto crashed and burned, then metaverse crashed and burned, and also after all this all of these people (the same people who ran crypto before, including altman himself) and money went to pump next bubble, because they can’t imagine anything else that will bring them that promised infinite growth, and they having money is result of ZIRP that might be coming to end and there will be fear and loathing because vcs somehow unlearned how to make money

congratulations on offloading your critical thinking skills to a chatbot that you most likely don’t own. what are you gonna do when the bubble is over, or when dc with it burns down

chatbot DCs burn enough electricity to power middle sized euro country, all for seven fingered hands and glue-and-rock pizza

But but, now idea man can vibecode. this shit destroys separation between management and codebase making it perfect antiproductivity tool

it’s not ai taking your job, it’s your boss. all they need to believe is that language-shaped noise generator can make it work, doesn’t matter if it does (it doesn’t). then business either suffers greatly or hires people back (like klarna)

and also chatbot-generated bug reports (like curl) and entire open source projects (i guess for some stupid crypto scheme)

god fearing catholic tiktokers elected pimp, flipper, and gangster for a president. where the fuck do i live

idk if cult owned far right rag has that much pull (it’s not washington post, owned by bezos)