Category: ranting

Random thoughts, frustrations, ideas and opinions. Quality not guaranteed, consume only under adult supervision

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I assume such job descriptions do exist

I feel [it] might be much too complicated, unless somebody *wants* to explore using AI because their job description says “Look for actual useful AI uses”. In today’s tech world, I assume such job descriptions do exist. Sigh…

Linus Torvalds, in an email, “Re: [GIT PULL] io_uring fix for 6.17-rc5” [lore.kernel.org], on the Linux Kernel mailing list

Linus being Linus.

I don’t have any survey or stats to back it up, but I feel that we are turning the corner on AI hype. As I browse through my news feeds every morning the number of negative AI articles seems to be on the rise. Not negative in the “Gen AI is theft” or “Gen AI is just a way to fire people”. That is there, but that’s been there since the beginning. The AI companies and businesses adopting it are determined to push right through those issues.

No, this negativity is the disillusionment of the people, and companies, who are pushing. There have been articles about companies who laid off large swaths of people, only to have to hire them back. And of companies who said they were using AI but, in fact, were using cheep overseas labor. Then there was that study from MIT, that 95% of all AI initiatives at companies fail.

I think this negativity goes back to an idea that Cory Doctorow expressed back in 2023:

The universe of low-stakes, high-dollar applications for AI is so small that I can’t think of anything that belongs in it.

Cory Doctorow, in Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI [locusmag.com]

I posted about that back in January 2024, in The A.I. Bubble and Life-Changing Use Cases [confusion.cc], and I don’t think anything has changed. I think there is a lot of AI out there, a lot of it bloating software and services both useful and useless. Some small bit of it useful to some fraction of people. But I don’t think any of it comes close to achieving anything like a justification from the hype.

Microsoft is among the most avid pushers of AI. After the early and ludicrous investment in AI (I guess memories of “missing” the internet last a long time…), the have to push AI in every nook and cranny of their vast empire of software and services. Adobe is another company whose products I use and has baked in AI all over the place.

I just spent two paragraphs disparaging AI but I do find some of it useful. But I think Doctorow’s statement is accurate. Let me give you an example of what I mean.

In Adobe Express and Lightroom, the two products from Adobe that I use, there are a number of AI tools. Setting aside Firefly their image and video generating AI, there are tools to automatically mask an image in Lightroom – to select the subject, or the sky, the background, or a person/people and even specific parts of a person: facial skin, all skin, hair, eyes, etc. Once selected you can apply edits to this (or everything but what you selected). The AI masking is pretty good, it managed to select things I want most of the time. This is a great timesaver, or in my case, makes it so I can edit my photos in a way I would not previously. It takes too long to manually mask things, I only ever did very basic masking, but the AI tools spread things up a lot.

I find the useful set of tools in Microsoft’s software, their “Copilots” to be similar. The auto summary tool in Outlook that allows you to include a summary of a long thread of email in a meeting invite or when your forward the email to some poor unsuspecting colleague is great. But it’s giving most people to ability to do something that they never did, too often people forward long email threads to people with no summary or context, the dreaded “adding so-and-so” or “+someone” or, even worse, the cursed “++”. People are lazy, I’ve not even seen many using this auto summarization yet. But at my job we only just got access to it. I remain hopeful despite the complete lack of evidence.

One, more example: Apple Intelligence, oft maligned, has turned out to be useful on at least one occasion for me. My daughter sent me a recipe and asked me to get the ingredients she needed. The recipe was in ‘Mercian Freedom Units, and quaint as cups and tsps are they don’t sell shit in freedom units. So I copied the list into a note and asked Siri to convert it to metric. To my utter surprise it did it in one go and correctly.

But that’s it. This is the sum total of useful AI I have. Well, except for AI turning search engines into answer engines and killing the internet [confusion.cc]. All of this is automating low value, time consuming tasks. At best these tasks are menial and at worst they are left undone because the value is below the bullshit job threshold.

What about Vibe Coding?

I remain skeptical. If it’s just replacing the interns and college graduate coders with AI then it’s replacing menial work. And is just part of the corporate push to reduce jobs through automation. Nothing new about that. But I can’t see vibe coding as a good thing. The core idea of using a probabilistic generative AI to write code in a world where we have been pushing for more deterministic secure code seems to be going the wrong direction.

I read an article a week or so ago somewhere (maybe in The Economist, but I can’t find it again) about how the business who want to build or use AI needs to Victorian civil engineering for guidance. The story was that in the early days of modern engineering —building structures like bridges with steel— people didn’t have a full understanding of all the capabilities and properties of steel. And the quality of steel was highly variable so excessive caution and over-engineering was needed to ensure that bridges didn’t fall into rivers.

Unfortunately the way modern companies work I cannot imagine any company approving the investments in over engineering AI the way a Victorian bridge was over engineered. It would not be financially responsible to do more than the bare minimum. And I fear that without costly over engineering high-stakes use cases are out of reach. So we are left with low-stakes use cases. Are their high-value versions of those?

So far the people with “look for actual AI use cases” in their job descriptions have come up with low-stakes, low-value use cases. On aggregate these might be enough to justify AI, by improving performance and laying off vast swaths of the workforce in companies they might be able to generate some return on investment.

But eliminating jobs through efficiently and productivity has a downside. The Economist had a guest article last week on this. In “Two scholars ask whether democracy can survive if AI does all the jobs” make a chilling point:

[L]abour automation isn’t just an economic problem; it’s also a political one. Right now, democratic governments depend on their citizens financially. But in a world of AI-powered UBI, the opposite would be true. Imagine a world in which citizens are burdensome dependants of a state that no longer needs them for anything.

Raymond Douglas and David Duvenaud in “Two scholars ask whether democracy can survive if AI does all the jobs” published in The Economist, September 27th, 2005.

It is a chilling thought. And it reminds me that the only positive view of the future I know of across Sci-Fi is Star Trek, where Earth is some sort of Marxist utopia where scarcity has been “solved” and humans have all devoted themselves to “the betterment of humanity”.

In conclusion. Companies are going to spend trillions to make AI automate low-value work, ending bullshit jobs and making us all dependent on our governments to take care of our needs.

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ranting

No Plot

Life has no plot. No meaningful plot.

Daniyal Mueennuddin, preface to A Sportsman’s Notebook: Stories by Ivan Turgenev

You haven’t lost the plot. There is no plot. There was never a plot.

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ranting

Breaking the Internet

I started drafting this post back in early March. I never finished it in part because that draft became a trip down memory lane. I spent way too much time recalling the various incarnations of The Internet I have used over the years. But, it’s also because I had a hard time putting into words how exactly I see AI as threatening the Web.

My original opening was about Google’s announcement of AI summaries. I said:

I think the marriage of Gen AI with search is the end of this incarnation of the Internet. The Internet, as it is in my head. That version of the internet has been fading for a while but it’s what I think of as “The Internet”. Though I don’ think it’s the best version of The Internet.

And then blah blah blah about the text based pre-web Internet, Mosaic and Netscape, AOL, IRC, blogs, and so on and so forth. So, this post sat unfinished for months. Then, this week I read this article in The Economist: To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model [economist.com]. Maybe because they are focused on the economics of it, maybe because they are professional journalist, they have managed summarize the issue in a way that got me back to this post. Here is how they describe the threat:

As AI-powered search engines remove the need for people to trawl the web looking for sites with answers, they are stopping the flow of traffic to those pages. Those lost visitors mean lost money. The danger is that, as answer-engines take readers away, they are removing the incentive for content to be created. The technology that is opening up the web also threatens to kill it.

[…]

Human traffic—monetised with ads—is the economic fuel of much of the internet. A steady flow of traffic is also needed to build online communities. Wikipedia, whose visitor numbers have fallen by 8% in the past year by one measure, warns that AI summaries without attribution could deter people from contributing. Stack Overflow, a coding community whose traffic has more than halved, reports that fewer questions are being asked on its chat boards. Reddit, another giant forum, saw its share price fall by half earlier this year over concerns about bumpy search referrals.

The Economist, in To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model [economist.com]

I’m not sure the death of the ad supported internet is a bad thing. In fact, I would not shed a tear over the end of the ‘everything is free! But just look at this ad real quick. And this ad. And these ones here…’ model. I remember how newspapers and magazines became more and more ads and less and less content as their business model died. Now it seems every site one The Internet is doing the same. Remember kids; if you aren’t paying for it, you are not the customer…).

On the other hand, I’m not sure an everything is paywalled because capitalism is a beast which cannot be satisfied Internet would be a very nice place either.

As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for AI to summarise than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with AI companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. … Hundreds of millions of small sites—the internet’s collectively invaluable long tail—lack the clout to do this.

That paragraph sums up what I took like ten paragraphs to say while rambling about other versions of The Internet already lost. The multi-trillion dollar companies have already choked off most of the open, individual Internet. As AI drives the few remaining small-time creators off the open internet onto closed platforms and the everything else behind paywalls it’s going to be lonely place.

I still prefer the longer form of blogs to the short form videos of Instagram or Tik Tok, to the limited length text of X or Threads. But, most of the blogs I have followed over the past two decades have long been abandoned. Most are gone, 404’ed or domain squatted into un-being. Only accessible via the Wayback Machine. Some are still online but frozen in time. A few are still going, screening into the void.

I plan to continue. I’m just short of 25 years squatting here on Confusion.cc, navel gazing and ranting. I started this blog to keep in touch with people I knew in college while I, and other friends, were studying and traveling overseas. I not in contact with any of those people anymore. I doubt any of them ever read these posts, very few people do or ever have. I do post these to various social media sites (or apps these days), as that’s how most people consume the internet and maybe a few will read my rants. I don’t style myself a ‘content creator’ this is all just me sharing my thoughts and photography, and documenting my own journey: no ads included.

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ranting

Carpe Diem

This week I dropped my oldest daughter off in Melbourne to start her adventures in higher education. She’s just about to turn 17, and she is starting a Foundation Year program. An intensive year that replaces the final couple of years of high school or A-Levels or whatever your local final pre-college schooling is. Assuming she passes, she will go straight into the University next year.

I hope she has a great time. I believe, and have always told my daughters, that they should “get away from home” for college. Because, I saw what a difference distance made to the experience. When I was at George Mason I had a couple of friends who were local, in the sense that their family was a commute away not a trip away. They could go home any night for dinner, laundry or to fix their parent’s computer issues. And they did.

This created a situation where they never really left home. Parent want to see their kids, and free laundry (done for you!) and home cooking are a powerful sirens call for college kids. But, in the end, this created a situation where people struggled to cut the umbilical cord, where it was easy to put off adulting a little longer. In the end this was suffocating. I had one friend that realised this, and he transferred to another school several hours away. It made a world of difference for him. So we all came the conclusion that if you are going to go to college, go. Go far. Go far enough that you can’t run home on a whim or in an emergency, you can’t stop by for dinner or spend the weekend in your bedroom at home. You have to grow up and deal with it all yourself.

Now, I’m watching my daughter put into practice this oft repeated pearl of parental wisdom, and it’s hard. In addition to being my daughter, for the past few years she has been a great friend. Countless morning sitting at our local Starbucks during Covid lockdowns. Sitting at home and watching so many movies: sharing the classics —Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Thing, Alien, even 2001: A Space Odyssey— and discovering new classics. Hours of playing BotW and TotK, and Hollow Knight.

Being able to be a parent and also being a friend has been amazing.

So it’s with a little sadness —and a few tears— and a whole lot of excitement and joy that I said “bye for now” to her today. I wish her good luck, the best of luck. I hope she has a wonderful adventure, makes lifelong friends and some new core memories. But I can’t wait until she comes home on breaks to visit and we can sit at Starbucks or watch a new movie. I’m counting the days till her first break.

If you listen real close, you can hear them
whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? – Carpe – hear it? – Carpe, Carpe Diem, seize the day [Tori],
make your [life] extraordinary.

John Keating, in Dead Poets Society
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ranting

Hopper

IMG_7154

Saw this guy along the canal the other day.

I usually use Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile to take photos, but it has some issues. This photo was taken in the native iPhone camera app. The biggest issue with Lightroom is Adobe does not seem to be able to keep up with the iPhone hardware. I have a iPhone 16 Pro Max and it has 4 zoom setting, one for each of the three lenses it has plus an extra 5x zoom.

While Lightroom has, for a long time now, had three options: ultra wide corresponding to .5, Telephoto for 2 and Wide for 1. But, it’s been months now and no update to add the 5x option.

Adobe has been slacking for a while now. It took almost a year to release the iPad upgrade for Express, which broke my workflow. And now they are slacking on basic hardware features in Lightroom Mobile. What are they doing? They seem some obsessed with AI these days that they can’t push out basic app updates. Get your shit together Adobe, its a fucking subscription service, there should be updates every month or quarter at least.