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My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts · The Fly Blog
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts · The Fly Blog

The snark in this feels to me like he'd be a crappy senior engineer to work with. The real problems are people and ecosystem problems and I don't think getting faster at making code is going to solve those. It may even mask why we're not better and using other methods.

Don't disagree though that they're here to stay with large impact.

Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful.
We’re a field premised on automating other people’s jobs away. “Productivity gains,” say the economists. You get what that means, right? Fewer people doing the same stuff. Talked to a travel agent lately? Or a floor broker? Or a record store clerk? Or a darkroom tech?
But I’ve been first responder on an incident and fed 4o — not o4-mini, 4o — log transcripts, and watched it in seconds spot LVM metadata corruption issues on a host we’ve been complaining about for months. Am I better than an LLM agent at interrogating OpenSearch logs and Honeycomb traces? No. No, I am not.
#generativeai#softwaredevelopment
·fly.io·
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts · The Fly Blog
A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle
A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle
Lot of classic cycles I've learned about, this is just another one
A non-exhaustive list of previous values of N have been: Neural networks and symbolic reasoning in the 1950s. Theorem provers in the 1960s. Expert systems in the 1980s. Fuzzy logic and hidden Markov models in the 1990s. Deep learning in the 2010s.
#blag#artificialintelligence#history
·blog.glyph.im·
A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle
Where Is Everybody? Aliens and Fermi’s Paradox
Where Is Everybody? Aliens and Fermi’s Paradox
When I was ten, I believed in aliens the way other people believe in god. Every night, green lights swirled around the mountain behind my apartment. Sitting on the kitchen counter with my knees tucked into my chest, I would stare out the window mesmerized, certain that it was some kind of message.&a
#swarthmore#aliens
·swarthmorevoices.com·
Where Is Everybody? Aliens and Fermi’s Paradox
CloudTrail Logging Evasion: Where Policy Size Matters
CloudTrail Logging Evasion: Where Policy Size Matters
Permiso uncovered a subtle yet critical logging evasion vulnerability within AWS environments - mainly the differing size limitations of individual AWS CloudTrail logs versus the actual content being logged. By exploiting whitespace and other syntactic quirks, an attacker can create valid IAM policies that effectively bypass CloudTrail logging.
#computersecurity#blag#aws
·permiso.io·
CloudTrail Logging Evasion: Where Policy Size Matters
Compliance is the New American Dream
Compliance is the New American Dream
How risk aversion has shaped our schools, our government, and our global standing
One student at ASU said she viewed the humanities as a hobby that “you have to be affluent to take it on.”
The result is a generation of workers trained to anticipate what’s expected, not to invent what’s needed.
How do you cultivate curiosity? By embracing things beyond data and numbers (which again, are gorgeous in their own right) and by allowing people to explore things beyond optimization.
We don't need more people optimizing. We need people who can think. This means revaluing curiosity across institutions. It means reinvesting in education that rewards exploration, not just performance.
#work#compliance#trumpadministration#education#via:austin#usa#foreignpolicy
·kyla.substack.com·
Compliance is the New American Dream
The Era Of The Business Idiot
The Era Of The Business Idiot
Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The article revealed that — assume we believe him, and this wasn’t merely a thinly-veiled advert for Microsoft’s AI tech — Copilot consumes Nadella’s life outside the office as well at work. He likes podcas
I am deeply unconvinced that Nadella actually runs his life in this way, but if he does, Microsoft’s board should fire him immediately.
Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.
When you care only about shareholder value, the only job you have is to promote further exploitation and dominance — not to have happy customers, not to make your company "a good place to work," not to make a good product, not to make a difference or contribute to anything other than further growth.
We go to college as a means of getting a job after college using the grades we got in college, rendering many students desperate to get the best grades they can versus "learn" anything
Remote work terrifies the Business Idiot, because it removes the performative layer that allowed them to stomp around and feel important, reducing their work to, well...work.
The Business Idiot's reign is one of speciousness and shortcuts, of acquisition, of dominance and of theft.
And because the Business Idiot's career has been built on only knowing exactly enough to get by, they don't dig into Large Language Models any further than hammering away at ChatGPT and saying "we must put AI in everything now."
The media, captured by other Business Idiots, has become poisoned by power, deferring to its whims and ideals and treating CEOs with more respect, dignity and intelligence than anyone that works for them.
They don’t want to plan their kids’ birthday parties. They don’t want to research things. They don’t value culture or art or beauty. They want to skip to the end, hit fast-forward on anything, because human struggle is for the poor or unworthy.
This piece is not just 13,000 words long — it’s the result of the 800,000 or more words I wrote before it, the hundreds of stories I’ve read in the past, the hours of conversations with friends and editors, years of accumulating knowledge and, yes, growing with the work itself.
#edzitron#business#generativeai#capitalism
·wheresyoured.at·
The Era Of The Business Idiot