I am so frustrated that pretty much everyone is blind in this world. So may loud voices about the "harms" of AI, but what is happening with this tool is TOTALLY NORMAL in a TRADE BASED SOCIETY.

TOTALLY NORMAL!

Companies wanna trade these tools, thus make money at all costs. Users wanna use them to trade, make money. Videos, books, whatever the shit.

The incentive is THE SAME. Big or small groups of people.

There is NO SURPRISE!

Totally normal.

No way we can fix this, or the billions of other issues, unless we change the structure of our society. Sounds daunting but only if you are thinking about it simplistically and in a sci-fi way.

Imagine if we start a Universal Basic Income scheme, also provide the needs of people as trade-free. Housing, food, healthcare, etc.. Free people from this society, so they can be less idiotic and less driven to make profit out of everything. This is a realistic way forward.

That's how you can try to change the infinite blanket of shit that everyone grows on top of.

It drives me INSANE that people do not see this simple fact, that people are consuming idiots in a trade-based society, so ofc they will abuse every tool for trading purposes.

It has been the case for thousands of years.

So yah, I am sick of those who speak about AI slop, destruction of the environment, climate change, etc., but NEVER mentioning the trade-based society that creates all of these.

It's like talking about lung cancer without mentioning smoking at all. And not connecting it with the Tobacco industry. And then hop, back to trade.

This is the world we live in....and won't change in any significant way unless we understand where our problems originate.

#trade #society #ai #aislop #slop #fedi #fediverse #money #TradeRuinsEverything #capitlaism

I have a lovely coworker who expresses himself like LLM chatbots. As far as I know he isn’t using them in the offending exchanges, including because he does it orally and in short Slack messages. But the tells are there: overly cheery in a context that doesn’t warrant it, bullet points everywhere (although rarely exactly three, another LLM tell), repeating most of what I said to him (although it can make sense in some contexts).

If I hadn’t seen him in a videoconference I’d have more doubts, although video generation has gone a long way. More importantly, this is what I mean when I say I don’t want to be “tainted” by interacting in natural language with a computer system. My personal expression style hasn’t changed since I started using programming languages to make computers do my bidding, and yet sustained exposure to LLM output, whether you requested it or it was imposed on you, can do that for you.

I feel like “expressing oneself like a chatbot” should be an insult, and so I’m staying as far as possible from these abominations.

#AI #LLM #Chatbot

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@liztai/116461957884227955

A little reminder that the Western world (read 'White people") is not the entire world and that things can be perceived very differently elsewhere.

Let's decolonize our brains.

#ai

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾

2026-04-24 22:07:29

How #AI is used in hospitals in China. Much of the AI developed and used there are rarely talked about, as they're integrated into the industry to make society run faster and smoother. There's no denying there are fears of job replacement due to this, however, but there are also tangible benefits.

#Deepseek recently released its v4 model which is said to be independent of CUDA?

It's not that AI progress is better in China. It's that the approach is different, and society seem to benefit more as a result as it's not hoarded by the top or gated so that only those with more money have access.

I am pretty grateful, for example, that I can use #Qwen and #Deepseek for my basic needs. Only paid model I have is Gemini and that's for work.

2026 is the year the software industry transitions from artisan to industrial, analogous to the transitions that happened with weavers in the 1820s, typists in the 1980s, typesetters in the 1990s, travel agents in the 2000s,

The transition for weavers took 60 years. The transition for travel agents took 15. He estimates 5-7 for software. That seems too long to me. I expect I will be an "agent orchestrator" before the end of 2026, and I'm not some top-level software engineer working at a top-level company, so if I'm going to be doing it, probably 80% or 90% of software engineers are going to be doing it by the end of 2026. I think maybe the new rule is, whatever Andrej Karpathy is doing at the beginning of a year, I'm going to be doing by the end of the year? (And it will be mandatory.)

He says history is very clear on what happens when a craft goes from "artisan" to "industrial": quality of life is destroyed for people that remain because wages go down and demands go up, and quality of life is destroyed for the people who don't make it through the transition and are laid off. He calls this the "the quality of life collapse". "The quality of life collapse" is what awaits software engineers. For those who make it, the "agent orchestrator" job will be lower pay, will have no perks, and will include being woken up at 3 AM because an agent hallucinated an API change.

Quality of life goes up for consumers and factory owners profit handsomely. Here, the factory owners are companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, etc. Artisans never make the transition to factory owners. Artisans may make it to factory supervisor, but they pretty much never make it to factory owner.

He (Pratik) then says, "The question nobody asks":

"I keep coming back to something that doesn't get discussed. Factories produce more textiles at lower cost. That's unambiguously good for consumers. But software isn't textiles. Does a tenfold increase in software quantity, with corresponding decreases in quality, security, and maintainability, actually improve anything? Or do we just get ten times more technical debt, ten times more half-broken products, and ten times harder debugging when agents hallucinate library versions and nobody notices because everyone's validating outputs they don't fully understand?"

First of all, people do discuss this, although not anybody where I work and maybe not anybody where he works. But I have seen discussion out on the internet. You can have AI agents code-review other AI agents. You can ask for security and ask AI agents to do security audits. All the things you do with humans engineers to make more reliable software, you do the analogous thing with AI agents. All the tools like staticaly typed languages, static analysis tools, formal methods, and so on, can be used in the AI agent world. Some argue they work better, because if the Lean proof of the correctness of a piece of code is 5 or 10 times larger than the code itself, in a world of human engineers, that makes the correctness proof uneconomical, but in a world where AI agents can produce thousands of lines of code in minutes, it's a non-issue. If the tremendously greater mental effort required to prove the correctness of the code is just more tokens, it might be a non-issue. So provably correct software may eventually be vastly more common in a world full of AI agents than a world full of human engineers.

"The factory optimizes for throughput. Artisan software optimized for correctness. Those aren't the same thing, and treating them like they are might be the most expensive mistake we make. But maybe we're ready for the Ikea of software world, and hand made furniture will still exist but not everyone will be able to afford it. Or maybe artisan software will just be better verified? Because, who wants to type 10k loc when they can get it generated in few seconds."

Him saying "Artisan software optimized for correctness" made me laugh. No it doesn't! Not where I work and not in, I'm sure, the vast majority of software companies. You have a large codebase that dozens of engineers have contributed to over the years, each under tremendous time pressure to implement features. That makes the resulting codebase messy -- hopefully not too messy, but still far from "optimized for correctness".

Software that is really and truly "optimized for correctness" is the software that controls the flight control surfaces of airplanes. Software that NASA puts on spacecraft and sends to distant regions of the solar system. That software takes vastly longer to produce than commercial software, at vastly higher cost. That's what it truly means to be "optimized for correctness".

In the upcoming world of AI agent-driven software, "optimized for correctness" might eventually become a standard feature, if formal methods verification become standard practices. That might take a long time, because that is so far from the way humans develop software now, and people initially will simply translate human engineering practices into the AI agent realm.

The software factory age: Why 2026 may be the end of artisan coding

#solidstatelife #ai #genai #llms #codingai #agenticai

"The rise of industrial software".

Should we think of ourselves as entering an "industrial" era of software? The term seems odd since I've been hearing the term "software industry" my whole life (it seems like). But Chris Loy explains what he means by this:

"For most of its history, software has been closer to craft than manufacture: costly, slow, and dominated by the need for skills and experience. AI coding is changing that, by making available paths of production which are cheaper, faster, and increasingly disconnected from the expertise of humans."

"Traditionally, software has been expensive to produce, with expense driven largely by the labour costs of a highly skilled and specialised workforce. This workforce has also constituted a bottleneck for the possible scale of production, making software a valuable commodity to produce effectively."

"Industrialisation of production, in any field, seeks to address both of these limitations at once, by using automation of processes to reduce the reliance on human labour, both lowering costs and also allowing greater scale and elasticity of production. Such changes relegate the human role to oversight, quality control, and optimisation of the industrial process."

"The first order effect of this change is a disruption in the supply chain of high quality, working products. Labour is disintermediated, barriers to entry are lowered, competition rises, and rate of change accelerates."

"A second order effect of such industrialisation is to enable additional ways to produce low quality, low cost products at high scale. Examples from other fields include: industrialisation of printing processes led to paperback genre fiction, industrialisation of agriculture led to ultraprocessed junk food, and industrialisation of digital image sensors led to user-generated video."

"In the case of software, the industrialisation of production is giving rise to a new class of software artefact, which we might term disposable software: software created with no durable expectation of ownership, maintenance, or long-term understanding."

"In the early twentieth century, scientific advances were expected to eradicate hunger and usher in an era of abundant, nourishing food. Instead, hunger and famine persist. In 2025, there are 318 million people experiencing acute hunger, even in countries with an agricultural surplus. Meanwhile, in the wealthiest nations, industrial food systems have produced abundance of a different kind: the United States has an adult obesity rate of 40% and a growing diabetes crisis. Ultraprocessed foods are widely recognised as harmful, yet the overwhelming majority of Americans consume them each day."

"Industrial systems reliably create economic pressure toward excess, low quality goods."

The rise of industrial software

#solidstatelife #ai #genai #codingai #technologicalunemployment

Howto block AI bots with fail2ban (Apache)

This blocks AI bots with fail2ban, the list of bots comes from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt/refs/heads/main/robots.txt

First, log cli­ent IP and user agent into a sepa­ra­te log file:
<VirtualHost <ipv4> [ipv6]:443>
[…]
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/<vhost>-error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/<vhost>-access.log combined
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/useragent.log "%h %{User-agent}i"
[…]

Now, crea­te a jail in ‘/etc/fail2ban/jail.local‘
[apache-ai-crawler]
enabled = true
port = http,https
logpath = /var/log/apache2/useragent.log
bantime = 86400
findtime = 10
maxretry = 1
filter = apache-ai-crawler

And, of cour­se, the fil­ter its­elf (‘/etc/fail2ban/filter.d/apache-ai-crawler.conf‘)

[Definition]failregex = ^<HOST> .*AI1Bot.*$
^<HOST> .*Ai2Bot-Dolma.*$
^<HOST> .*Amazonbot.*$
[…]

Rel­oad both apache2 and fail2ban, and you are set.
#AI #fail2ban