A lot of people are giving Tesla shit here, but surely there should be regulations in place to ensure something like this isn’t allowed to be released for public use?

All of big tech is really worried about this.

• Apple is worried about its own science output, with many of their office heavily employing data scientists. A lot of people slate Siri, but Apple’s scientists put out a lot of solid research.
• Amazon is plugging GenAI into practically everything to appease their execs, because it’s the only way to get funding. Moonshot ideas are dead, and all that remains is layoffs, PIP, and pumping AI into shit where it doesn’t belong to make shareholders happy. The innovation died, and AI replaced it.
• Google has let AI divisions take over both search and big parts of ads. Both are reporting worse experiences for users, but don’t worry, any engineer worth anything was laid off and there are no opportunities in other divisions for you either. If there are, they probably got offshored…
• Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go, but they’re still plugging AI shite in places no one asked for it, with many divisions now severely down in headcount.

If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there’s a real concern that they’ll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn’t sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.

From a company perspective, it’s a common sentiment. Google and Amazon have mantras around trying to stay agile and relevant despite being behemoths, and both have arguably kept into boomer tech territory the second they made a poor CEO hire. Microsoft had their Ballmer era, and while Nadella did a lot of good at Microsoft they’ve had a lot of failures in established divisions to be soaked up by AI and sales.

I think that all of big tech has struggled over the last 3 years. Sacrificing employee skill for shareholder value has ultimately moved them all into IBM territory, whereas the cool tech is happening at startups again. If AI is a bust, and another company comes along and eats their lunch in their established markets like consumer devices, web tooling, or cloud computing, they’re in real danger of another huge set of layoffs and resetting their businesses to only core profit-making ventures. What I think we’ve seen companies shift towards death, Day 2, rotting from the inside, or whatever your business calls stagnation.

Definitely not a US thing. Here in the UK I don’t think I’ve worked 9-5 for over 20 years…

I work in AI as a software engineer. Many of my peers have PhD’s, and have sunk a lot of research into their field. I know probably more than the average techie, but in the grand scheme of things I know fuck all. Hell, if you were to ask the scientists I work with if they “know AI” they’ll probably just say “yeah, a little”.

Working in AI has exposed me to so much bullshit, whether it’s job offers for obvious scams that’ll never work, or for “visionaries” that work for consultancies that know as little about AI as the next person, but market themselves as AI experts. One guy had the fucking cheek to send me a message on LinkedIn to say “I see you work in AI, I’m hosting a webinar, maybe you’ll learn something”.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and some companies are doing some legitimately cool stuff, but the actual use-cases for these tools where they won’t just be productivity enhancers/tools is low at best. I fully support this guy’s efforts to piledrive people, and will gladly lend him my sword.

Why would a company decide to grant you a working visa when you will primarily be remote? Furthermore, why would the government grant you a visa when you could, in theory, work from your own country?

There is one reason I think onsite works, and that’s for relocation.

If you are from the US and you want to move to the UK, how do you intend to move via work if your work is remote?

I love remote work, but I’ve not heard a rebuttal for this other than “don’t let foreigners move here” or “let’s let people move based on their level of education”.

The corporate jobs aren’t much better. The pay is great for tech workers, but no amount of money makes the 10% yearly cull, the added layoffs, and micromanagement easier.

To your last point, though, you’d be surprised at how hard it can be as a very experienced candidate from outside the US to land a role in the US. I have had multiple HM’s that have wanted to hire me for my experience in their market, but they have been forced to take domestic candidates or to run weeks of interviews with external candidates to rule out that a foreigner should get a tech role.

I can somewhat understand this. I have IBS, and most people with a bowel issue will tell you that IBS is basically your doctor saying ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Instead of getting help from your doctor, you go online and you hear about people finding relief through taking weird supplements, or eating only rice, or taking pre and probiotics of varying types. None of it has any proof, but it’s better to try something than to struggle - and sometimes you’re lucky or you find some short-lived relief.

The difference is that there often isn’t evidence for these things working, whereas there is plenty of evidence out there that says that chiropractors are doing legitimately dangerous practices to your body. The difference is that someone is trying to make a profit from this lack of knowledge.

I’ve told this story before, but newborn chiropractors are a thing, and many new parents will take their BABIES to get their neck and back snapped around. It’s frankly fucking disgusting.

The same goes for pregnancy, where you essentially gain a deficiency because you’re building another person inside you.

To be fair, the English invented English, so they kinda called most things in that language what it’s called…

The soccer/football argument is a little silly. It’s been called football in the UK, and many parts of the world for the better part of a full century. Call it soccer if you want, many counties have their own translation for football, or they use a different word when they have their own version of football that they like.

Like most big tech companies, they’re actually several divisions all competing with each other. Lately, the AI divisions have latched on to the hype and they’re pushing their wares to other divisions, often with enough clout to keep those in security/privacy quiet. Integrating LLM’s is also a great way for a middle manager type to curry favour with the bosses, and to build little empires for themselves.

There have been several instances where people have released ebooks that are fully AI generated, and are basically scams with no real content or information.

Outside of the “Microsoft bad” comments, this is a prime example of why big tech companies need to stop promoting AI leads to a position where they are able to have influence over initiatives outside of AI.

The worst thing to happen to basically every product/service in tech right now is AI. It’s made Google unreliable in the eyes of normal people for the first time in decades, it’s destroying trust in Amazon content across reviews and Kindle, it’s adding features to Facebook that no one ever wanted, etc.

It’s like this in many countries. In the UK we’ve never had to deal with people being held in contempt of parliament, but in recent years we’ve seen corruption and a blatant disregard for “rules” that would have made politicians sick a decade ago. It’s at a point where the UK has considered a constitution to ensure that anyone caught being openly corrupt or breaking the rules can be arrested.

Many right-wing politicians have shown that the rules have been lax for a very long time, and IMO it’s a sign that perhaps we as a society need to seriously look at how we stop the right (and perhaps even the left) from abusing their power without consequence.

Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops,

I’d love a source for this. To my knowledge, most people that build to Linux hosts still use OSX.

The article says what part of Amazon it was for. It’s for logistics, not AWS, which is a separate division.

It’s surprising how being stuck on music from your youth is common. While I do listen to new bands, I was reminded the other day that Futures by Jimmy Eat World is almost twenty years old.

Alexa has had AI backing its services for the better part of a decade.

Source: I worked on some of it.