Was in a meeting yesterday where some evangelists of vibe coding were present and it made me not want to be in the meeting or have anything to do with the project :/
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Tech isn’t dead.
But it is dying.
Being killed by itself.
@urlyman The fun thing is that tech is everywhere. Digitech, that is.
@kawentzmann until it isn’t. Because it fell over but got up on crutches and then fell over again and couldn’t get up
…As I seem to be in the mode of making sweeping generalisations in order to try and express a ‘truth’. (When am I not?)…
We are swimming in tech. It’s the water in our goldfish bowl, or as Godfrey Reggio put it “the air that we breathe”: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113996024501236433
The solutions to our predicament do not lie in tech.
The addiction to the *power* that tech lets us wield is how we got here.
What tech can do is facilitate us in navigating somewhere else. As long as it keeps that intent in focus
…So far, the sheer scale of the power we wield has not been in focus at all. Hence our obsession with an “energy transition”.
That phrase exemplifies our misunderstanding
…Overwhelmingly, we transform kinetic energy into waste heat. For 300 or so years we’ve been doing this with a deep time store of carbon that puts extraordinary power potential a few furnaces and levers and buttons away.
Earth’s a big place, so we can do this a lot before we notice. And now we’re noticing.
But what we’re not doing is integrating the implications of fucking with an entire ecosystem that’s exquisitely evolved for the last few millennia
…Our scene setting is for a ’cene that lasted about 1/1000th of the time it took to make the hydrocarbon set of the stage we think we’re on.
Except we aren’t. We’ve left that stage https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113418092160261128
…In aggregate we haven’t integrated the implications of this at all. (Yes, that includes me working in tech.)
Which is why countries like the US (but not its government) talks to itself about ‘transitioning’ to ‘clean’ energy on the assumption that the *power* it’s been wielding continues on a different minerals substrate.
Not political power. Power in the sense of energy throughput per unit of time
…What if we did transition? In the sense of stopping using all fossil fuels by replacing all of their *utility* with renewables made with fossil fuels… except magically not made with fossil fuels? 🤔
Unless we actually decide not to grow power use (energy throughput per unit of time) and mandate the governance to ensure that (tough work), we would still be addicted to growing power…
The inability to •maintain• code is going to take down vibe code-driven organizations extremely hard, especially those who are using synthetically-generated code straight out of the prompt.
@paninid I hope so. The irony is that the case was made for it precisely from a *maintenance* perspective 🤦♂️
…I just don’t want to be involved with people obsessed with looking past what LLMs are an accelerant of in order to be ‘productive’.
It is fucking soul destroying, on the way towards being existence destroying
…It’s that “because we can” engineer mindset. Which is how we got here
…The people in question are not actual doers on the project. They’re too busy making bank at being über-productive elsewhere but wanted to drop their pearls of wisdom
…I’m now officially a grumpy old man.
But the people evangelising ‘vibes’ were my kind of age or older.
On the upside, there aren’t enough old tech curmudgeons, but the ones who most have their curmudgeon shit together are less than half my age. They can see that my generation built a tower of shit
