Want to wade into the sandy, spooky surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. The spooks are well underway.)
For a while it looked like devs would resist the slop, but now it looks like the slop is winning. It is pretty depressing. I am thinking about leaving tech altogether.
Now it seems like a lot of meetups are all about AI, and if the topic is not AI, someone brings it up: Can AI do this, did you use AI, etc, etc.
Years ago I thought, I like writing hobby software but I donāt think I would enjoy it as a career. And so, I do not work (at least directly) in software development.
If only I knew the armour-piercing fin-stabilised discarding sabot I was dodging there.
@rhamph @EFreethought I donāt think I would enjoy much of anything done for work under capitalism.
Practically everything has to compromise for profitability and exploitation.
That is no way to live or build a society.
@rhamph @EFreethought Iām glad I retired from professional software development just before LLMs came on the scene. Now I program the old-fashioned way as a hobby.
However I recently was sent an ai-generated report of bugs and vulnerabilities in one of my projects and I have to admit that it is genuinely useful.
Cool testimonial bro.
If that was all GenAI was being (aggressively and incessantly) pushed as you probably wouldnāt be seeing terms like cognitive surrender and technofeudalism being thrown around as often, and this lemmy instance would still mainly be about dunking on SFBA quasireligious get-smart-quick scams.
the fuck was the point of this post
Iāve been squeezed out of physics academia after years of ordinary career pressure and obstacles that arenāt very interesting or pertinent to this thread. The fact that the insitutions and the community have no resistance to slop, thatās why Iām not even trying to go back.
What are you doing now? I feel like after I graduate Iām gonna have to find a new field.
Writing fiction and expository material to build emotional stability while looking for the next thing to do.
Not the most encouraging answer, I know, but so it goes.
Best of luck to both of you in your searches for cleaner pastures!
@EFreethought @BlueMonday1984 not even just meetups, having dinner with programmer friends also mostly revolves around AI. Sure, some of it is talking negatively about it. But a few years ago weād talk politics, hobbies, personal life etc. and now thatās overshadowed by AI talk. Itās just invading every space. Luckily still less so with my non-tech friends.
I donāt think I ever saw this. The only indication would have been a major dev org like the FSF, OSI, SFC or somebody hitting Microsoft with a really aggressive lawsuit over OpenAI. They would have had a slam dunk and it would have set the tone for the way the rest of the world reacted, I think.
Instead it was just āwow cool toy.ā That was when I realized the real politics of Foss wasnāt just a couple of bad actors like Eric Raymond but a full on rot.
I wish I had a plan B, but Iāve devoted my life to being a software engineer and have no idea what else I could do .
Yeah. Iāve sort of resigned to my world being ruined and everything I ever worked on stolen and sold back to my bosses for the rest of my career.
I just wish there were some way to inflict some fraction of this pain on the people responsible, the people who go to work every day to ruin mine.
Honestly, canāt blame you - with how utterly techās surrendered to the slop machines, and how its actively sabotaged attempts to resist them, Iād be looking to leave as well.