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@lina Y2K made it necessary to pay programmers more than management. Generally a lot more than management. Old programmers, often. Women programmers, a fair bit. People cutting the cheques got traumatized.

Some of those people have COO and CFO titles now. They still believe axiomatically that money exists to confirm the social hierarchy, not to create efficiency through accurate prices.

AI is a way to enforce the social hierarchy by appeal to the oracle. And to never pay programmers again.

@lina

#alttext

"We're being told to use [Al] agents for broad changes across our codebase. There's no way to evaluate whether that much code is well-written or secure—especially when hundreds of other programmers in the company are doing the same," a UX designer

@lina We also had code-generation tools, called compilers, that took input from a highly formal language with its own task-optimised syntax and semantics, and when these so called compilers generated something that didn't exactly match what was specified in the input, we would consider this an enormous problem.

In fact, compiler faults would be so uncommon that it wouldn't even be one of the error causes anyone normally thought of, but sometimes people would joke about it being the cause.

@lina

Had to sit through an AI booster talk yesterday I couldn't get out of. At one point, the speaker was like "AI can write boilerplate code for you, accessors and modifiers, and other boring stuff, change names..."

I'm like "Bro, emacs has done that for decades"

@lina
It’s a cult. The rich must get richer.
It’s a cult. Their ideas must be good.
It’s a cult, If not, the world must be made shittier for it to be true.
It’s a cult.

@lina All of these refactoring tools are proprietary or internal to the companies (and dependent on their setups) though.

So you need a company with $10 million in spare to design such a tool and apply it.

Saying LLMs don’t improve the situation here is completely removed from reality!

@lina
Some folks in that company forgot how to do that and are now using the slopmachine for LSC... *sigh*

@lina not to mention the accountability issues AI introduces

@lina There goes determinism.