Zompist Bboard Again

rotting bones wrote: ↑Mon Nov 03, 2025 8:12 pm To repeat myself, a better coding LLM than ChatGPT, CodeQwen, runs on my PC. Let's find out how many million times I have to repeat this point before it sinks in.

Genuinely baffled by this. Who is supposed to be denying this? What astonishing gotcha do you think you're pulling?

Regarding architecture, you understand that humanity doesn't care, right? What's wrong with the conservatives is

Since I mentioned software architecture, I suppose this is supposed to be addressed to me? I have no idea what this attack is supposed to mean either. I wasn't talking about conservatives.

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Nov 03, 2025 3:38 pm The sad irony is that if I do some programming for myself these days, it's usually Javascript, because it's usually related to my websites.

Javascript isn't a bad language really, and I think there could be good front-end framework. It just so happens the popular ones aren't so good.

malloc wrote: ↑Mon Nov 03, 2025 7:57 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Nov 03, 2025 5:02 pmAI is not going to replace human workers -- the AI companies can't even turn a profit at this point (unless they, e.g. Google or Microsoft, have their fingers in non-AI things)!

Sure but tech industry leaders believe it can replace us. I am just genuinely curious what they expect to happen once they've achieved their goals, even if such goals prove impossible in practice.

I don't think there's really an endgame. They figure out it's good for them if they spend less on human workers; the rest is someone else's problem and they figure it'll sort itself out eventually. At least that's what happened with moving jobs overseas.

More cynically, there are plenty of advantages to economic hardship and a depressed job markets.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue Nov 04, 2025 2:20 am

malloc wrote: ↑Mon Nov 03, 2025 7:57 pm Sure but tech industry leaders believe it can replace us. I am just genuinely curious what they expect to happen once they've achieved their goals, even if such goals prove impossible in practice.

I don't think there's really an endgame. They figure out it's good for them if they spend less on human workers; the rest is someone else's problem and they figure it'll sort itself out eventually. At least that's what happened with moving jobs overseas.

More cynically, there are plenty of advantages to economic hardship and a depressed job markets.

According to strict Marxism, bosses don't really know what they're doing-- they are just playing their part in a dialectical drama that leads to Marxism. I don't agree but I think Marx has a point: no one is really thinking this stuff through. They aren't conworlding; they're reacting to their immediate problems. And a CEO always thinks labor is too expensive.

When I was growing up, theorists pointed out that the more prosperous ordinary people were, the bigger the market, thus the more money there was to be made. That actually fit with how the economy worked at that time. Companies were run by managers-- ownership was a wide class that couldn't control individual companies.

Was there some master plan to move back to plutocracy? I don't think so, but there was a lot of pressure to take steps in that direction, and they added up. (And let's not forget that there was a lot of pressure in the other direction too. As I've said before, conservatives lost their mind precisely because they feared losing power forever.)

Similarly there's no master plan now, just a mixture of hoping to reduce headcount, and a fear of missing out.

Wasn't sure how to respond to malloc's question, but then Ares Land and zompist put it better than me.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Mon Nov 03, 2025 8:12 pm To repeat myself, a better coding LLM than ChatGPT, CodeQwen, runs on my PC. Let's find out how many million times I have to repeat this point before it sinks in.

A better coding device than any LLM sits, or more often reclines, next to my laptop.

I just noticed a message from earlier this month in the Teams chat channel for GitHub Copilot related topics at my work reminding one to not just trust the output of LLM's, as the poster noted that one of his comments had been unexpectedly changed to something completely incorrect which he had never even asked for in the first place.

I personally don't trust LLM's at all, for one. I trust my own brain far more, so it should be clear what I choose to rely on.

alice wrote: ↑Tue Nov 04, 2025 2:27 pm A better coding device than any LLM sits, or more often reclines, next to my laptop.

I know the leftist blogosphere has reached this consensus, but reality disagrees with this assessment. LLMs are quite good at coding short scripts (say, less than 50 lines), especially when you can tell at a glance if an output is wrong. This ability can be boosted with the help of SE agents like Cursor.

CEOs might be nincompoops, but they are sharp nincompoops. There's a reason why many of them are issuing a directive that before any plan is turned down, teams have to submit a written justification explaining why it can't be implemented using LLMs.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Nov 03, 2025 4:58 am One important thing to note is that bubbles don't really burst anymore. That sort of thing happened in the comparatively saner days of 2001. Now, I mean, crypto is as high as ever, housing prices are still insanely high. I expect AI companies to keep on being valued insanely high.

The only people I know who have gotten rich from trading in my lifetime are those who have bet on Bitcoin, Tesla and now Nvidia. People can't afford enough groceries, and the market thinks we need more cryptocurrency trading, self-driving cars and LLMs. Meanwhile, the market ruthlessly crushes people trying to make precisely the things we need. Market glazers tell them they are losers and parasites, while calling anyone working against the market "fascists" and "Communists". It has been like this all my life.

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Nov 03, 2025 9:38 pm Genuinely baffled by this. Who is supposed to be denying this? What astonishing gotcha do you think you're pulling?

Regarding:

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Nov 03, 2025 5:02 pm AI is not going to replace human workers -- the AI companies can't even turn a profit at this point (unless they, e.g. Google or Microsoft, have their fingers in non-AI things)!

Like I explained, the dumb tech CEO strategy might work by putting more competent alternatives out of business. The argument that LLMs are too expensive doesn't work because I can run CodeQwen at effectively zero (edit: additional) cost.

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Nov 03, 2025 9:38 pm Since I mentioned software architecture, I suppose this is supposed to be addressed to me? I have no idea what this attack is supposed to mean either. I wasn't talking about conservatives.

It's not exactly an attack. It's addressed to the whole software architecture conversation. I'm basically saying it's folly to expect society at large to approach coding from an architectonic point of view. You can't expect everyone to share your values.

I'm completely exhausted. Kept falling asleep all day today.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Tue Nov 04, 2025 7:16 pm Like I explained, the dumb tech CEO strategy might work by putting more competent alternatives out of business. The argument that LLMs are too expensive doesn't work because I can run CodeQwen at effectively zero (edit: additional) cost.

The tech world can't simultaneously be taken over by OpenAI and the half-trillion-dollar investments it's demanding, and be taken over by zero-cost desktop LLMs.

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Nov 03, 2025 9:38 pm Since I mentioned software architecture, I suppose this is supposed to be addressed to me? I have no idea what this attack is supposed to mean either. I wasn't talking about conservatives.

It's not exactly an attack. It's addressed to the whole software architecture conversation. I'm basically saying it's folly to expect society at large to approach coding from an architectonic point of view. You can't expect everyone to share your values.

Did I say I expected society at large to be interested in my views on software? You are the one who seems personally insulted that the world has not adopted your ideology.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Nov 04, 2025 7:28 pm The tech world can't simultaneously be taken over by OpenAI and the half-trillion-dollar investments it's demanding, and be taken over by zero-cost desktop LLMs.

Linux is free, but Microsoft can still convince other companies to invest in Windows. All the marketing team needs to do is keep the weights secret and invent shiny packaging to commodify it.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Nov 04, 2025 7:28 pm Did I say I expected society at large to be interested in my views on software?

I felt like the conversation was trending towards using your view of software as justification for the idea that the LLM investment plan can't possibly succeed. That is the context in which expecting the universalization of values is folly.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Nov 04, 2025 7:28 pm You are the one who seems personally insulted that the world has not adopted your ideology.

It depends on whether you count actions as "ideology". I'm insulted by murder. I'm accusing all supporters of the market of being complicit in murder. Reading any unbiased history will explain why. The most recent work I'm reading is The Figure of the Migrant by Thomas Nail.

Apparently nothing I say makes sense, so my basic message is: "Idiocy pays in a capitalist economy. That's why we should change the capitalist economy."

I don't know why this is so difficult to understand. If Plan A leads to bad outcomes, it's common sense to go with Plan B instead. My basic message is what I was saying here, for example:

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Nov 02, 2025 6:43 pm

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun Nov 02, 2025 12:36 pm (Maybe after the Trump administration degrades food quality enough, we'll have no choice but to use AI just to keep society running.)

We may all die from climate change, but at least it'll be sunny!!1!

My statement about marginal incompetencies:

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun Nov 02, 2025 12:36 pm It's a dumb idea, but it might still work depending on the marginal incompetencies of various groups.

Refers to this:

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat Nov 01, 2025 1:47 pm There could be many reasons why the dinosaur model continues to be used: they haven't cornered the market enough to pivot from the crowd pleasing infrastructure, they haven't fully figured out how to deploy it across all the hardware, the non-technical tech bros are holding out for AGI, or maybe the people in charge don't understand their own business model yet. Happens more often than you'd think.

When I say the market fails in sensible allocation:

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat Nov 01, 2025 1:47 pm The market has not made sensible allocations once in my lifetime.

I'm talking about stuff like this:

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun Nov 02, 2025 12:36 pm I know people without degrees trying to start small businesses. It's impossible in this environment. Small producers should be subsidized by the government based on popular demand.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Tue Nov 04, 2025 6:51 pm The only people I know who have gotten rich from trading in my lifetime are those who have bet on Bitcoin, Tesla and now Nvidia. People can't afford enough groceries, and the market thinks we need more cryptocurrency trading, self-driving cars and LLMs. Meanwhile, the market ruthlessly crushes people trying to make precisely the things we need. Market glazers tell them they are losers and parasites, while calling anyone working against the market "fascists" and "Communists". It has been like this all my life.

...

All of this seems straightforward to me.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Tue Nov 04, 2025 9:22 pm All of this seems straightforward to me.

And I don't disagree with any of that. There's a lot of sympathy for socialism on the ZBB, so I think you'd have trouble getting someone to really disagree with you on those ones!

rotting bones wrote: ↑Tue Nov 04, 2025 7:16 pm It's not exactly an attack. It's addressed to the whole software architecture conversation. I'm basically saying it's folly to expect society at large to approach coding from an architectonic point of view. You can't expect everyone to share your values.

Society at large doesn't care about code, or at least shouldn't. I know it kind of does right now, but that's an anomaly, in my view.
Anyway, thank the gods, the situation isn't as bad as you put it. People do care about software engineering.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Tue Nov 04, 2025 9:22 pm Apparently nothing I say makes sense, so my basic message is: "Idiocy pays in a capitalist economy. That's why we should change the capitalist economy."

I don't know why this is so difficult to understand.

The only thing you seem to hate more than people not accepting your views, is people accepting your views.

You think capitalism is bad, great! You and most of this board and two billion other people in the last couple centuries.

My basic message is what I was saying here, for example:

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Nov 02, 2025 6:43 pm

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun Nov 02, 2025 12:36 pm (Maybe after the Trump administration degrades food quality enough, we'll have no choice but to use AI just to keep society running.)

We may all die from climate change, but at least it'll be sunny!!1!

All of this seems straightforward to me.

It's not. The statement above looks like AI boosterism, absolutely identical to the hype coming from Elon Musk or Sam Altman. E.g.

MIT Technology Review wrote:In an essay last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argued that the accelerating capabilities of AI will usher in an idyllic “Intelligence Age,” unleashing “unimaginable” prosperity and “astounding triumphs” like “fixing the climate.”

You are not condeming capitalism by literally echoing a techbro capitalist's AI worship.

I'm open to the view that under fully automated gay space communism, AI could be a useful tool. We do not live in that world. We live in a plutocracy where AI will, on balance, make things worse.

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Nov 05, 2025 2:17 am

rotting bones wrote: ↑Tue Nov 04, 2025 9:22 pm Apparently nothing I say makes sense, so my basic message is: "Idiocy pays in a capitalist economy. That's why we should change the capitalist economy."

I don't know why this is so difficult to understand.

The only thing you seem to hate more than people not accepting your views, is people accepting your views.

You think capitalism is bad, great! You and most of this board and two billion other people in the last couple centuries.

Really? The whole Nazi brigade left?

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Nov 05, 2025 2:17 am

My basic message is what I was saying here, for example:

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Nov 02, 2025 6:43 pm

We may all die from climate change, but at least it'll be sunny!!1!

All of this seems straightforward to me.

It's not. The statement above looks like AI boosterism, absolutely identical to the hype coming from Elon Musk or Sam Altman. E.g.

MIT Technology Review wrote:In an essay last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argued that the accelerating capabilities of AI will usher in an idyllic “Intelligence Age,” unleashing “unimaginable” prosperity and “astounding triumphs” like “fixing the climate.”

You are not condeming capitalism by literally echoing a techbro capitalist's AI worship.

I'm open to the view that under fully automated gay space communism, AI could be a useful tool. We do not live in that world. We live in a plutocracy where AI will, on balance, make things worse.

If literally saying I will be poisoned doesn't sound like sarcasm to you, I don't know what to tell you.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Nov 03, 2025 4:58 am One important thing to note is that bubbles don't really burst anymore. That sort of thing happened in the comparatively saner days of 2001. Now, I mean, crypto is as high as ever, housing prices are still insanely high. I expect AI companies to keep on being valued insanely high.

If you want disagreement, something did dry up. The money for startups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V9yPGdubHQ

rotting bones wrote: ↑Wed Nov 05, 2025 2:28 am

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Nov 05, 2025 2:17 am You think capitalism is bad, great! You and most of this board and two billion other people in the last couple centuries.

Really? The whole Nazi brigade left?

The Nazis also thought capitalism was bad!

rotting bones wrote: ↑Wed Nov 05, 2025 2:28 am

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Nov 05, 2025 2:17 am You think capitalism is bad, great! You and most of this board and two billion other people in the last couple centuries.

Really? The whole Nazi brigade left?

Aside from Nort, there don't seem to be any of them left here.

Richard W wrote: ↑Wed Nov 05, 2025 8:44 am
The Nazis also thought capitalism was bad!

That depended on whom they talked to. They mostly followed the standard far right strategy of telling the rich that they would help them against the poor and telling the poor that they would help them against the rich. During the times when almost everyone at least paid lip service to being anti-Nazi, this allowed almost everyone to portray other people as being like Nazis on economic policy.

If anyone is an admitted Nazi or fascist, why are they still allowed to be on this forum?