“I’ve been saving for months to get the Corsair Dominator 64GB CL30 kit,” one beleagured PC builder wrote on Reddit. “It was about $280 when I looked,” said u/RaidriarT, “Fast forward today on PCPartPicker, they want $547 for the same kit? A nearly 100% increase in a couple months?”
AI increases my power utility bill
AI takes my water
AI increases the price of GPUs
AI increases the price of RAM
AI makes my search results worse and slower
AI is inserted into every website, app, program, and service making them all worse
All so businesses and companies can increase productivity, reduce staff, and then turn around and increase prices to customers.
Increase productivity?
So companies can “appear” to increase productivity
As if. The only thing AI is to businesses is a lost bet. And they don’t like losing. So they’re betting even more, hoping some shiny “AGI” starts existing if they throw enough money into wasting other resources onto the AI bandwagon.
Lets not also forget that for a bunch of them, they want to completely replace lightning fast, simple UI with AI so they don’t need their own programmers, and your experience doing things is outright painful.
Isn’t capitalism a blast?
Right, what you said, but I’d remove the part where it increases productivity.
It’s a win-win with staff layoffs. Businesses that want to lay people off have a convenient scapegoat and AI companies receive undeserved praise.
A win-win for everyone but the employees, of course.
Seriously. The amount of time spent handholding the AIs no one asked to use more than offsets any supposed productivity gains.
What cracks me up is things they are doing that cost more (both money and resources) but don’t help at all. Like instead of the press for this or this you get an llm which can only send you to the exact same options. Adding it to IDE’s where by and large it does stuff you could get with a variety of addons.
IMHO, most people’s time usage perception tends to be heavilly skewed toward weighing higher the time taken in the main task - say, creating the code of a program - rather than the secondary (but, none the less, required before completion) tasks like fixing the code.
Notice how so many coders won’t do the proper level of analysis and preparation before actually starting coding - they want to feel like they’re “doing the work” which for them is the coding part, whilst the analysis doesn’t feel like “doing the work” for a dev, so they prematurelly dive into coding and end up screwed with things like going down a non-viable implementation route or missing in the implementation some important requirement detail with huge implications on the rest that would have been detected during analysis.
(I also think that’s the reason why even without AI people will do stupid “time savers” in the main task like using short variable names that then screw them in secondary tasks like bug-fixing or adding new requirements to the program later because it makes it far harder to figure out what the code is doing)
AI speeds up what people feel is the main task - creating the code - but that’s de facto more than offset by time lost on supposedly secondary work that doesn’t feel as much as “doing the work” so doesn’t get counted the same.
This is why when it actually gets measured independently and properly by people who aren’t just trusting their own feeling of “how long did it took” (or people who, thanks to experience, actually do properly measure the total time taken including in support activities, rather than just trusting their own subjective perception) it turns out that, at least in software development, AI actually slightly reduces productivity.
I disagree here. You can try to build everything out theoretically and then realize the issues once you have a massive thing that does not work. This is literally waterfall vs agile. Iteration is a proper way to do things. As far as AI im not sure it speeds up coding vs companies that will purchase the addons and programs that already can speed it up. I have seen so many companies push back on purchasing jet brains but it seems like ai spend is unlimited.
I think you’re confusing doing analysis before coding with doing all analysis before coding.
If you do Agile properly (so including Use Cases with user prioritization and User feedback - so the whole system, not just doing the fashionable bits like stand up meetings and then claiming “we do Agile development”) you do analysis before development as part of evaluating how long it will take to implement the requirements contained in each Use Case. In fact this part of Agile actually pushes people to properly think through the problem - i.e. do the fucking analysis - before they start coding, just in bit-sized easy to endure blocks.
Further, in determining which Use Cases depend on which Use Cases you’re doing a form of overall, system-level analysis.
Also you definitelly need some level of overall upfront analysis no matter what: have a go at developing a mission critical high performance system on top of a gigantic dataset by taking a purist “we only look at uses cases individually and ignore the system-level overview” approach (thus, ignoring the general project technical needs that are derived from the size of the data, data integrity and performance requirements) and let me know how well it goes when half way down the project you figure out your system architecture of a single application instance with a database that can’t handle distributed transactions can’t actually deliver on those requirements.
You can refactor code and low level design in a reasonable amount of time, but refactoring system level design is a whole different story.
Of course, in my experience only a handful of shops out there do proper Agile for large projects: most just do the kiddie version - follow the herd by doing famous “agile practices” without actually understanding the process, how it all fits in it and which business and development environments is it appropriate to use in and which it is not.
I could write a fucking treatise about people thinking they’re “doing Agile” whilst in fact they’re just doing a Theatre Of Agile were all they do is play at it by acting the most famous bits.
I really don’t think anyone is jumping in with zero analysis. Granted I have known some who will jump into something when its just a few words or even before its decided to go forward with a solution but over half the time what they do overnight provides decent info on moving forward or is helpful for gathering requirements. I mean im not blowing out my evening on a maybe but I respect the passion.
I would describe it as “insufficiently thinking about and researching the problems space”.
From what I’ve seen that’s very common because developers have a tendency to want to be hands-on rather than merely researching, myself include.
Even for the sake of figuring out inconsistent requirements or even just big gaps in the requirements, it’s a good idea to really think about it and cross check things.
Personally, the more I advanced in my career and the more complex and larger problems I had to tackle, the bigger the fraction of preparation time vs the fraction of coding time and I believe most very senior devs have the same experience.
Yeah I am beyond ready for the next new fad.
Cannabilism.
The next fad will be Thunderdome. Are you ready to go beyond that?