Of course, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! Most of my points are also included in your list.

First of all, programming is what I really do enjoy the most. So, it doesn’t make any sense at all to not do this anymore. “But you could use your now free time to do something much cooler and more valuable!”, others might reply. Fuck no, I don’t want to waste my time with other shit that doesn’t fulfill me, why on earth would I want to do that?

All this hallucination reduces quality badly. In my experience, it’s also happening much more rapidly than I expected. Even though developers are still supposed to own and understand whatever has been generated under their name and even be responsible for that, the sad reality is that teammates often blindly trust the AI output. “But I asked the AI and it told me that $this was impossible”, “I’ve no idea either, but the AI just generated it” are responses I get more often. What really makes my angry is when I point out a flaw and suggest an alternative and this is the reaction. It happened several times that just trying it out and seeing it clearly work to proof my point only took me half a minute, but people still did something handwavy else instead.

The learning effect is drastically reduced. The more time I spend on a topic, the better the odds that whatever I learned actually makes it over into long-term memory. It’s like if a collegue just says “do it like that” or “this solves your problem”, but neither explains the why or how. Somehow, people are still convinced that it’s a completely different story when you replace the human counterpart with a computer program in this equation.

Skills are unlearned. It’s like with automation in general, just much worse. You end up in a state where you’ve no clue how anything works under the hood or how to actually find out important information that are needed to solve your problem. You’re screwed when a process breaks out of the blue. Even though it can become also rather terrible, with classical automation you’re typically still be able to decipher how exactly the thing was supposed to do something.

The energy consumption is sooo high, I absolutely do not want to be a part in burning down our planet. I’m sure I find (and probably have long found without knowing) other ways to contribute to worsen our climate crisis.

The scraper part is already covered in detail in your list. :-)

I’m convinced that license and copyright violations are only played down or even refused entirely because companies want to make big money quickly. With the work of others of course. Their double standards are obvious, they still try to actively keep their own stuff secret and out of any training sets. At most for internal use only. Virtually noone in charge is interested in good long-term solutions. Short-term for the win, when disaster eventually strikes, the causers are long gone, the responsibilities in other hands.

Vendor lock-in is something that lots of folks are only realizing very slowly. It’s completely crazy to me. This drug dealer routine should be well-known by now. It’s fucking everywhere. Yet, people are always surprised when they found themselves caught in it.

Adding new AI stuff only increases complexity. But complexity is the enemy that everybody should fear and reduce as much as possible. Of course, this is not limited to AI at all. And everywhere I look around, people in charge looooove to make things way more complicated than they ever need to be. Yet, simplicity is the real art and much harder to achieve.

I don’t understand why we have to go back full force to the ambiguity of natural languages. This alone should be more than enough to realize what a stupid idea all that is. Linked to that is that the “instruction set” is interpreted differently with newer model versions. I mean, is has to be. Why else would somebody want to upgrade in the first place than to get more Powerful™ Features™?

Some people argue that with AI the democratization is empowered. However, in my view, the exact opposite is the case. Models are getting so large that you can basically not run them locally or even train them. So, you have to rely on whatever the vendor offers you and runs for you. In the end, this only gives the owners more power, the multi billionaires. Not exactly what I understand by democratization.

Finally, technology assessments are missing completely. Or they are faked such that mostly only the (questionable) benefits are listed. But all the negative impact is just ignored.

Let’s keep some popcorn around for when this all explodes. :-)

Another AI rant:

One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

The problem is, they jump hosts all the time.

https://movq.de/v/f967b8cfb0/s.png

Maybe it’s time to add automated blocking after all … God, I’m too lazy for that. 😞

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gemini liked your opinion very much. Here is how it countered:

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

• AI as a Force Multiplier: AI should be treated as a high-speed drafting and brainstorming tool, not an authority. For experts, it offers an immense speed gain, shifting the work from slow manual creation to fast critical editing and verification.
  
• The Rise of AI Literacy: Users must develop a new skill—AI literacy—to critically evaluate and verify AI’s probabilistic output. This skill, along with improving citation features in AI tools, mitigates the “gaslighting” effect.
  

The fear of skill loss is based on a misunderstanding of how technology changes the nature of work; it’s skill evolution, not erosion.

• Shifting Focus to High-Level Skills: Just as the calculator shifted focus from manual math to complex problem-solving, AI shifts the focus from writing boilerplate code to architectural design and prompt engineering. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans for creative and complex challenges.
  
• Accessibility and Empowerment: AI serves as a powerful democratizing tool, offering personalized tutoring and automation to people who lack deep expertise. While dependency is a risk, this accessibility empowers a wider segment of the population previously limited by skill barriers.
  

The legal and technical flaws are issues of governance and ethical practice, not reasons to reject the core technology.

• Need for Better Bot Governance: Destructive scraping is a failure of ethical web behavior and can be solved with better bot identification, rate limits, and protocols (like enhanced robots.txt). The solution is to demand digital citizenship from AI companies, not to stop AI development.

@prologic@twtxt.net Where do I stand on “Chat Control”? How long of a response/rant do you want? 😅 It’s a disaster. As I understand it, they want to spy on me directly on my devices before encryption even happens – jfc, no, fuck off. And since there are so many devices, they want to automate the scanning, which is the worst idea you could possibly have.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Not sure, if this observation is correct. I know so many techies who also use every latest shit and automate their homes which is scary as hell to me.

all-automation can play a major key role in many things, but somehow the way manually doing things is much more entertaining …

Someone has started to run git pull on one of my repos – once every two minutes. This is a very pointless endeavour. I push new code a couple of times per month.

So far, this isn’t causing any issues. I think this is just a regular human being who misconfigured some automation. And I hope this doesn’t mean that the “AI” bots have finally discovered my page …

Just like we don’t write emails by hand anymore (See: #a3adoka), we don’t manually write Twts or update our twtxt.txt feeds. Instead, we use modern Twtxt clients that conform to the specifications at Twtxt.dev for a seamless, automated experience. #Twtxt #Twt #UserExperience

Nobody writes emails by hand using RFC 5322 anymore, nor do we manually send them through telnet and SMTP commands. The days of crafting emails in raw format and dialing into servers are long gone. Modern email clients and services handle it all seamlessly in the background, making email easier than ever to send and receive—without needing to understand the protocols or formats behind it! #Email #SMTP #RFC #Automation

Can you automate the drawing with a script? On X11, you can:

#!/bin/sh

# Position the pointer at the center of the dot, then run this script.

sleep 1

start=$(xdotool getmouselocation --shell)
eval $start

r=400
steps=100
down=0

for step in $(seq $((steps + 1)) )
do
    # pi = 4 * atan(1)
    new_x=$(printf '%s + %s * c(%s / %s * 2 * (4 * a(1)))\n' $X $r $step $steps | bc -l)
    new_y=$(printf '%s + %s * s(%s / %s * 2 * (4 * a(1)))\n' $Y $r $step $steps | bc -l)

    xte "mousemove ${new_x%%.*} ${new_y%%.*}"
    if ! (( down ))
    then
        xte 'mousedown 1'
        down=1
    fi
done

xte 'mouseup 1'
xte "mousemove $X $Y"

Interestingly, you can abuse the scoring system (not manually, only with a script). Since the mouse jumps to the locations along the circle, you can just use very few steps and still get a great score because every step you make is very accurate – but the result looks funny:

🥴

Why I Blog and How I Automate it (2023)
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Btw @andros@twtxt.andros.dev ; The automated feed you put together for Hacker News… Does it at any point rewrite parts of the feed as it goes along? 🤔 I’ve had to unfollow it because I’ve found in practise it makes a twt, then seems to modify that same twt (observed by content manually) at least twice. This ends up becoming effectively an “Edit” and essentially duplicate (looking) posts 😢

AI problems, top to bottom:

1: Open AI nerds, believe fine tuning a language model algorithm, will eventually produce an AGI god.

2: Subpar artists and techbros who can’t code, convinced AI image bashing and vibe coding, will help convince the dumber parts of Internet, they are a real deal.

3: Parasites, using AI to scam people, because they just want passive income, selling crap, made by an automated process.

Side: Adobe&co, killing Flash/old web, pricing new artists and developers out, to face learning curves of free tools, or use AI, peddled as solution.

Setup QEMU Output to Serial Console and Automate Tests with Shell Scripts (2019)
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yeah! I’ve passed the critical point at factorio… I managed to automate blue science, trains and oil production… now it’s a great fun again…

Automating Interactive Fiction Logic Generation with LLMs in Emacs
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Autonomous Agent: Automate phone calls with AI voice agents
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Replit (YC W18) Is Hiring Engineers to Automate Coding
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Automated malware analysis: Mail server -> Cuckoo https://tribalchicken.net/automated-malware-analysis-mail-server-cuckoo/

Starting a couple of new projects (geez where do I find the time?!):

HomeTunnel:

HomeTunnel is a self-hosted solution that combines secure tunneling, proxying, and automation to create your own private cloud. Utilizing Wireguard for VPN, Caddy for reverse proxying, and Traefik for service routing, HomeTunnel allows you to securely expose your home network services (such as Gitea, Poste.io, etc.) to the Internet. With seamless automation and on-demand TLS, HomeTunnel gives you the power to manage your own cloud-like environment with the control and privacy of self-hosting.

CraneOps:

craneops is an open-source operator framework, written in Go, that allows self-hosters to automate the deployment and management of infrastructure and applications. Inspired by Kubernetes operators, CraneOps uses declarative YAML Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to manage Docker Swarm deployments on Proxmox VE clusters.

I wonder if bento has slightly missed the key to being a total genius approach to host management. ok hear me out. each node periodically pulls configuration from a coordination node that hosts a binary cache. the admin may make changes and pre-build them maybe kick off an update task manually if they want, but the point is there’s an automated checkin. for my case, the device I have available for coordination isn’t really capable of hosting a binary cache for any of my other machines. the nix store for my dev machine is larger than the entire disk of the coordinator! and due to the yearly heat my best machine can’t be reliably powered on all the time. so i started thinking to myself, “self, what if instead of having a central coordinator we fetched configuration from a reliable git mirror (maybe git+torrent some day) and consume it as a flake. the source could even be swapped out using a flake registry (so you don’t even have to commit to self-hosting anything other than a json file). then managed hosts only have to be setup to consume the registry and the shared flake (which registers the update agent) and DONE?”

… So it’s gonna be either a:

• Find a way to do a Chroot install a la Chad Arch Linux way, on a portion of the disk space while I’m Ssh-ing in and then whip out the old debian installation if all goes well.
  
• or a YOLO automated/unattended install.
  

Either way, I’m ready to deal with the eff up! Because I’ve never done none of that before… 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net I think those headsets were not particularly usable for things like web browsing because the resolution was too low, something like 1080p if I recall correctly. A very small screen at that resolution close to your eye is going to look grainy. You’d need 4k at least, I think, before you could realistically have text and stuff like that be zoomable and readable for low vision people. The hardware isn’t quite there yet, and the headsets that can do that kind of resolution are extremely expensive.

But yeah, even so I can imagine the metaverse wouldn’t be very helpful for low vision people as things stand today, even with higher resolution. I’ve played VR games and that was fine, but I’ve never tried to do work of any kind.

I guess where I’m coming from is that even though I’m low vision, I can work effectively on a modern OS because of the accessibility features. I also do a lot of crap like take pictures of things with my smartphone then zoom into the picture to see detail (like words on street signs) that my eyes can’t see normally. That feels very much like rudimentary augmented reality that an appropriately-designed headset could mostly automate. VR/AR/metaverse isn’t there yet, but it seems at least possible for the hardware and software to develop accessibility features that would make it workable for low vision people.

A Modest Robot Levy Could Help Combat Effects of Automation On Income Inequality In US, Study Suggests
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News: What if the U.S. placed a tax on robots? The concept has been publicly discussed by policy analysts, scholars, and Bill Gates (who favors the notion). Because robots can replace jobs, the idea goes, a stiff tax on them … ⌘ Read more

I maintain keys for my email addresses.. but like most in this thread i almost never receive encrypted emails.. other than the BTC exchange i use that sends automated mail encrypted.