I doubt you are addicted to information. I highly suspect like many users of digital technology who are able to consume near infinite streams of said, that you are like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface or that some underlying truth will be revealed through identifying patterns in the information.
I dont think you would need someone to publish that your hair was on fire on the web before you would believe it.
The wasteful part is that repeating the behavior (addiction or not) can become self-repeating even in the absence of the fix. Also one has to realize that at least in the case of news there is very little every day and most of what is distributed is rehash, or ancillary, or bloated and repeated to sell ads. You can go without watching or consuming news on the internet and not miss much for a pretty long time.
As far as tech goes, it moves very slow you can take a couple years off a software eng job and come back and not much has changed with very few exceptions. (Yes LLMs were one)
When you are done staring at your phone/computer at the end of the day reflect on whether or not you got anything really worthwhile out of it and put it in perspective. The signal vs noise ratio is not in your favor and getting less so every day.
I personally stare at my phone alot for the same reason as many people do. Im bored. But I dont do it at the expense of anything else Id rather do.
There’s so much more information to consume than news — or worse, tech news. Every day I find new things to learn about physics, history, geology, paleontology, biology… and not just things we discovered today, but decades and centuries worth of findings.
There is so much more to learn than any one person could even skim in their lifetime, even if you ignore absolutely all news. And heck yeah, it’s addictive.
I have been a professional SWE for 30 years, I was also paid to write software when I was in middle school in the early 80s. I quit to do other things before high school.
I am not pro AI nor anti AI. since machine learning is not an interest of mine and is not programming I simply have no interest in it.
im also not interested in being a consumer of machine learning products as it relates to my profession.
If I need solutions coded with automation code generators are much faster and reliable. i write them all the time.
The only benefit I derive as a consumer of machine learning at this time is to avoid using the degraded and near useless google search engine for minor lookups of trivia I dont commit to memory. And I do value this very much given the pathetic state of internet search.
As an engineer I can do everything I need and want to do and dont need help building systems. People who do frequently need help enjoy machine learning consumerism more than I do.
As far as what I want in regards to machine learning in the workplace is to be allowed to do my job and not be bothered to use a bunch of junk I dont need.
and the noise around LLMs is annoying and I am anti building data centers and destroying general purpose computing over some corporate lust for power just because an LLM can string a few sentences together.
I am also vehemently against the massive theft of copyrighted content to train LLMs and view LLM output as a form of obfuscated theft.
This is kind of obvious but, definitely something that should be on people's minds as things keep getting weirder.
It was bad enough when mobile phones were not forced to be dealt with as "general purpose computers", and instead were allowed to remain proprietary hardware/software combinations controlled by the tech oligarchy.
But now that RAM is not financially viable to deliver to consumers due to the obscene appetite of the LLM crowd, and fabs are developing custom silicon for the dumbest things of all "training LLMs", we are seeing at least the beginning of what it mean for "personal computers" to become emaciated to the point where chip companies can no longer justify making them for such measly profit and how difficult they will be to sell at such high prices if they incorporate high cost components.
We arent fully there yet but we are heading in that direction. The laptop Im typing this on cost 1600 dollars 8 months ago and now retails for 4 thousand dollars. In 6 more months it will either not be available or retail for 8 thousand.
Given that LLMs are convincing less experienced coders that code is a waste of time to write, the generational/knowledge gap that will create over time in the industry, software engineering could in essence become a niche reserved only for elites (if it will even be allowed) and end user software/hardware knowledge will be discouraged and considered threatening to the establishment.
Although there is a large knowledge base on the Internet (right now) the Internet is now under relentless and growing assault from AI bot farms referred to as agents, which are simultaneously making it less and less practical to maintain web sites and internet infrastructure due to increased costs, which could create a "lights out" situation for online documentation as the internet is choked off and dies in favor of MCP clients and servers which hide functionality behind obscure interfaces and website content ceases to be economically sustainable.
This will usher in a human "dark age", where the cost of information will be zero but the truth of anything if it existed previously will become unavailable to all but the very wealthy especially if it contradicts LLM sources. Otherwise, non AI sources of information will be stomped out and authoritarianism will rule over all government and peoples, unleashing perpetual war, famine and genocide.
All of this seems quite shaky anywhere given humanity's reliance on Taiwan remaining politically stable and secure, which is far from a given. That so much of what's necessarily for the basic building blocks of what runs modern society is concentrated in one place with a ticking timebomb nearby is quite reckless.
I think China's waiting until the US is so broke it can't raise the money to rescue Taiwan. Based on the 40T debt, 2T deficit (not counting the 1.3T mid-term election bribe) and recent bond market jitters, that could be quite soon.
The problem China has is that as long as they depend on exports, they depend on the US consumer. If the US consumer stops spending, there is nobody else to pick up the slack.
But the US consumer is also quite self-centered. They will happily torch alliances and neighborly relations over perceived personal benefits. I doubt the US consumer would lift a finger for Taiwan. It will be a combination of weakness and indifference.
The US already depleted its missile stockpile, these missiles cannot be replaced because the US needs Rare Earths. China doesn't have to wait, the US defeated itself already
1. There are more open-source hardware devices available today than ever before. Your demand to legally "force" your pov is just authoritarian.
2. LLMs are obviously useful- it's not dumb to train them.
3. Coding is now democratized- it is now easier than ever for anyone to write a program
And while compute likely is being overinvested in now (i.e., the price is artificially inflated, supply is being dramatically increased, etc.), the likelihood that this is a temporary shortage and, in the event of 'hype' deflating, an impending surplus -- I don't think we yet have to fear the inability for one to personally compute.
To be honest, aside from medicine and whatnot, what real benefit is AI bringing?
I use it to accelerate my development and it’s great, but as far as this is concerned, how many vibe coded apps do we need as a society? And for the quality of information it’s a junkyard overflowing.
I built a strategy agent and ran through a bunch of ideas, positioning them etc. even though the AI has a good sense of that, and for a moment I believed it to have good direction, man I was mislead. I took a step back and realized this thing has NO FKING IDEA. It almost derailed me and what I need to be doing. It was very convincing and took introspection to get back on track.
Its creative writing skills are idiotic and it’s emotional intelligence garbage.
It’s a bubble everyone and save for medical advancements, the rest is a mirage. Even if companies accelerate some temporary economic advantage, the real tangible value to humanity seems to be few and far between.
But it’s cool and everyone is masterfully debating the next big model advancement.
They invented self-healing concrete far superior to anything we use today and it took us 2000 years to realize we’re really smart morons. Romans built things to last, we build it to crumble.
> how many vibe coded apps do we need as a society
well I had AI program three things for me yesterday:
1. custom CSS for a website I read a lot so it conforms with readability research
2. crawl a Tumblr account of a comic book artist, download their comics, and assemble them into a PDF I can print and bind into a book myself
3. pull the code of a charity fundraiser website that is terribly written, refactor it, centralize the theme, and update it for the next fundraising campaign, and deploy it
About an hour of my weekend to do this. Each of these projects was a weekend before that.
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