> You can try to find Wally (Waldo), as in the well-known game Where's Wally. He is partially visible, but if you click on him, he will appear in full and wave at you.
Honestly, I could do a lot worse than finding myself in agreement with Rob Pike.
Now feel free to dismiss him as a luddite, or a raving lunatic. The cat is out of the bag, everyone is drunk on the AI promise and like most things on the Internet, the middle way is vanishingly small, the rest is a scorched battlefield of increasingly entrenched factions. I guess I am fighting this one alongside one of the great minds of software engineering, who peaked when thinking hard was prized more than churning out low quality regurgitated code by the ton, whose work formed the pillars of the Internet now and forevermore submersed by spam.
Only for the true capitalist, the achievement of turning human ingenuity into yet another commodity to be mass-produced is a good thing.
It's kind of hard to argue for a middle way. I quite like AI but kind of agree with:
>Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society,
The problem in my view is the spending trillions. When it was researchers and a few AI services people paid for that was fine but the bubble economics are iffy.
You’re reading it wrong: rather, AI hype had been common (but not the majority position) in tech contexts for a while, especially from those that have something to sell you.
What you derogatorily call normies are the rest of the world caring about their business until one day some tech wiz came around to say “hey, I have built a machine to replace all of you! Our next goal is to invent something even smarter under our control. Wouldn’t that be neat?” No wonder the average person isn’t really keen on this sort of development.
> AI hype had been common (but not the majority position) in tech contexts for a while, especially from those that have something to sell you.
There's a whole lot of that for quite a long time targeting normie contexts, too; in fact, the hate in normie contexts is directly responsive to it, because the hype in normie contexts is a lot of particularly clumsy grifting plus the nontechnical PR of the big AI vendors (which categories overlap quite a bit, especially in Sam Altman’s case), and the hate in normy contexts shows basically zero understanding of even what AI is beyond what could be gleaned from that hyper plus some critical pieces on broad (e.g., total water and energy use, RAM price) and localized (e.g., from fossil fuel power plants in poor neighborhoods directly tied to demand from data centers) economic and environmental impacts.
> What you derogatorily call normies
I am not using “normie” derogatorily, I am using it to contrast to tech contexts.
The most typical reactions I see outside of techie and arty spaces where people are most polarised about it are:
- annoyance at stupid AI features being pushed on them
- Playing around with them like a toy (especially image generation)
- Using them for work (usually writing tasks), to varying degrees of effectiveness to pretty helpful to actively harmful depending on how much of a clue they have in the first place.
Discussion or angst about the morality of training or threats to jobs doesn't really enter much into it. I think this apathy is also reflected in how this has not seemingly affected the sales of this game at all in the months that it has been reported on in the video game press. I also think this is informed by how most people using them can fairly plainly see they aren't really a complete replacement for what they actually do.
They don't call normies derogatorily, they just use it as proxy for "non-tech people"
> “hey, I have built a machine to replace all of you! Our next goal is to invent something even smarter under our control. Wouldn’t that be neat?” No wonder the average person isn’t really keen on this sort of development.
Nope, most are just annoyed from AI slop bombarding them at every corner, AI scams getting news of claiming another poor grandma, and AI tech industry making shit expensive. Most people's job are not in current direct threat of being employed, unless you work in tech or art.
You mean for work? Because on my spare time this month I've been working on a RISC-V emulator, an hand-rolled green thread implementation and now a microkernel, and I'm having the time of my life.
I'd take a 50% pay cut to work so close to the hardware in my day job, if there was any demand whatsoever.
I bet there's Waldo hidden somewhere... good luck!
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