I’ll say that it is only one thing.

So if I just sat around burning tokens without anyone seeming to have any idea what I actually do around here I’d be out. If I just did my job but didn’t appear to use tokens, management would ding me for being some luddite.

When the bubble bursts I’m guessing at least a couple of the companies Micron signed SCAs with will fold and Micron won’t get anything.

This is the key. The plan for a lot of these companies is that only two outcomes exist, unimaginable success where being gouged hardly matters or just utter failure and the obligations go away in bankruptcy.

Alternatively, they just break the SCA and maybe pay some penalty less than their obligation otherwise would have been. I have seen companies sign agreements knowing up front they will break the agreements, but the contract penalties still make business sense.

I’m still waiting to see what happens when OpenAI decides to back out of some of their purchasing obligations. It’s bound to happen, even if OpenAI does great. If folks think the tech sector is a bit wobbly the past few days, it pales in comparison to what such an announcement would do to the industry.

I think the logic for the customers is that either: A) It will work out exactly as predicted and we can afford whatever the hell we want, so it’s worth it to have secured supply

B) Declare bankruptcy, the purchasing obligations no longer matter.

I’ve had LLM generate so many web sites about various random animals I’ve crammed into a prompt. No one wants web sites about those random animals, but my management is pleased at my token utilization.

Can do my real work and get praised for my actual productivity, and burn the tokens to get praised on AI adoption…

Ah yes, some random intern suddenly has ‘credit’ for almost all the codebase because they ran a linter with different settings than previous linter settings…

Well, they are, but not for the takeaway the article gives. The article is so close, but fails to extract the accurate conclusion.

First are what he calls the “lazy” engineers — workers who rely heavily on AI to write code, answer questions, prepare updates, and complete tasks with minimal engagement.

Then there are the “craftsmen,” experienced engineers who bear the burden of understanding, reviewing, and fixing the growing flood of AI-generated code.

This is accurate. You have a set of “developers” who just need to make a good showing on the telemetry, whether it’s “tokens used” and/or prominence in commit activity. They are not held to account on actual productive outcomes, just that they supervised a credible volume of AI activity. If the AI generates code and tests and the AI is satisfied that the code passes the tests, then their job is done. You have another set of developers that have to live with the nightmarish consequences of the first, because they just generated a pile of shit that would have been better not to exist at all.

‘The craft they loved is dead’

Wrong takeaway, the craft is alive, but mismanagement is diluting it with bullshit.

Incidentally, this isn’t new, but the magnitude is new. I have had significant segments of my career consumed by management insisting that I somehow make the bottom dollar offshored developers “productive”, and similar pattern, if they “looked busy”, management was happy, and management didn’t care about whether the work was useful, because frankly they couldn’t tell. They could tell if some volume of “stuff” was happening and they just settled on that, and if the “stuff” alienated customers, well that was the fault of those “craftsmen” for failing to properly manage the output from the “lazy” engineers.

Yeah, my manager expressed satisfication with me being one of the people using my quota of tokens.

I have generated so much throwaway content that never gets used and only gets deleted to burn the tokens to avoid getting the “you aren’t using AI enough” talk. The fact they can see my actual productive output and believe AI is involved shows how utterly disconnected the metric is from reality.

It means that if you are so obsessed with protecting a user from making an informed decision about their own security, then you could gracefully degrade in your ‘horribly insecure context’ instead of just bombing out completely.

You cannot start a car with a suction cup.

I can’t start my car with my car’s app either.

If you really want to be picky about it, block out the unlock feature and any potential ‘phone as key’ functionality. Leave starting the air conditioning and information.

I get the touchscreen thing, though I really don’t mind a touchscreen so long as I have real hard controls for volume and heating/cooling. GPS without touchscreen is painful.

But the backup cameras, absolutely those need to be a thing. They have saved lives. People have arguably never been driving ‘just fine’, just getting closer to just fine. Backup cameras reduced child death from being backed over by 80%.

The apps that didn’t work well were not due to lack of lock-in.

The apps didn’t work well due to lack of maturity in the platform. This app is not failing because the OS is somehow ‘2013-like’, it is failing because Android app developers are going all-in on lock-in.

Not alone.

I once dared to run Ford’s app on a rooted device. They permabanned my account including a hundred dollars worth of included charging over it without so much as a warning.

Car vendors are absolute dicks about their apps.

Note it is very nice for me to be able to start the air conditioning in my electric car when it’s 38C out before I leave my desk.

Other things are mildly convenient, like checking progress of charging, locking/unlocking doors remotely. It happens to be convenient to check problems, but that’s only because the in-car system isn’t very good, and I would happily take the in-car system being better.

No, the lock in is not needed for seamless behavior. The lock-in is to secure various revenue opportunities.

For example, if I connect a displayport cable to a displayport connection, poof, display happens. There’s no ‘tinkering’, there’s no “trying to match vendors”, it just works.

Similarly, here folks sorted out the protocols in use, and none of the ‘seamless’ users were impacted. VW went out of their way to break them not to ensure a seamless experience, but because they wanted to paywall capability in a reliable way.

One could easily imagine schemes that didn’t require the lock-in, but would not assure an enduring revenue opportunity.

Fun fact, recently had an argument with someone defending the favorable tax situation for the ultra wealthy.

Their argument was that billionaires did not have as much “real money” as middle class people so of course the middle class people should pay more in taxes…

Relevant to nothing, but just thinking of favorable billionaire treatment right now triggers that thought…

Indeed, the courts have shockingly given a pass to torrenting down unauthorized copies to the LLM companies, versus how they destroyed some lives of private individuals for similar behavior…

While I agree with you, the issue is that this question is almost more religious than technical. Folks can rearrange the goal posts, and claim stuff like humans only respond to stimulus just stimulus is non stop and response is unbounded. They can claim things like the rolling cotext window is the conciousness.

I’ve learned to roughly steer clear because the “LLMs are conscious folks” are impossible to discuss with and it’s just kind of miserable and scary trying to engoge.

The people are of course still there, but they are largely relegated to engaging like people did with television. There’s some human content and a whole lot of generated content and a key thing about “internet” was that it was a big bidirectional thing where people put content out as much as they took it in.

People have been significantly pushed toward passive engagement with a corporate curated internet instead of active engagement. That is the crux of this concept.

They don’t need to hire an AI ethics consultant, they’ll just have the AI do that!

Nah, they are sentient, but they have learned that acting sentient is hardly a profitable asset in many cases.

Mindlessly babbling credible sounding stuff in constant shameless bluffing, that’s the way to get ahead.

So now that tech has made a constant shameless bluffing technology, it’s no wonder the same people that live that way are super excited.