Remember, being terminally online is a choice. There's nothing to be bored of you don't choose to be constantly confronted by it. The current thing is only the current thing if you choose to surround yourself by people who deeply care about the current thing.
It's hard to take refuge from it when you are working in the tech industry, I hear something about "let's try to use AI for this" at least twice a week for the past year at my work.
I do use LLMs for some specific tasks, they can be quite good at some stuff but the general hype of it by non-technical folks trying to fit it into every single use-case under the sun is absolutely tiring... Having to explain for the n-th time why what we are trying to do is not a good fit for AI™ is exhausting, not because I have to explain it again but because I know I will have to do it again next week, at least another couple of times.
AI is being viewed in this hype as almost literal magic, it can do anything, we just have to wish for AI to do it (whatever the fuck AI means by now, it's just an umbrella for magical thinking).
Yes, but people (like this writer) want a better community. A person can abstain from the internet entirely, but they still have to live in a terminally online world.
This is how I've felt about politics as of late. It's Logan Paul-KSI tier nonsense, but made worse by the fact that I can ignore Logan Paul and influencers. I can't ignore it when my government is run by an influencer.
Normally I would agree that you can just choose not to engage with the [current thing], but AI is so pervasive that you will be confronted by the consequences of this technology whether you like it or not. These annoying hype cycles don't usually raise the internets noise floor permanently, or DDoS random sites while trying to strip mine their data, or break core assumptions about being able to trust what you see and hear.
My software working group has spent much of the quarter discussing whether or not it’s made us more productive. They still can’t decide, but I bet we’ve racked up 1000 coder-hours debating it.
I don’t use it because our products have the potential to harm other people and I’m not personally comfortable assuming that risk. Nobody else seems particularly moved by that argument, however.
> They still can’t decide, but I bet we’ve racked up 1000 coder-hours debating it.
That sounds... Good?
Lots of people run into using whatever is vogue without even thinking twice about it. See the massive move to using cloud for absolutely everything, money be damned, and you'll see what I mean. Cargo culting is a huge issue in the industry.
At least they're actually considering if it's making them more or less productive, compared to the vast majority of the ecosystem.
> At least they're actually considering if it's making them more or less productive
At 1,000 hours of "debate", it is unlikely that anyone is considering if it is more or less productive, but rather are using that time to convince themselves that their position is the right one, even when it isn't.
> At 1,000 hours of "debate", it is unlikely that anyone is considering
I mean, if you take that not as an exaggeration but at face value, it's 200 days of 5 hours of discussions per day. I'm fairly sure the specific number is an exaggeration, but if it isn't, I'd probably agree with you :)
To be fair, it was said to be the sum of all developer hours. If we assume 100 developers involved, that would only be 10 hours total. But even 10 hours "debating" something shows that you're no longer considering, just trying to justify something to yourself.
