as someone who has worked in the tech field for well over 20 years at this point this is going to be a very controversial prediction and I imagine many won’t agree with me but LLMs, at least in their current state, will go the way of the buffalo.

I’ve seen many tech fads come and go, library fads, device fads, concept fads, product fads, etc, etc, etc. in their current states many companies are now realizing that AI isn’t speeding up their processes or production. What they see now is that they’re slowing things down and creating massive tech debt. “Vibe coding” simply doesn’t work and anyone who does it consistently at any company should be immediately fired. Many places are now hiring contractors to fix their AI created tech debt and I see that as a sort of temporary field to get into for freelancers. Advertise your services to repair damage done by AI. You’ll get work. I get emails weekly from my contacts looking for someone to go into a place and refactor or replace what someone has “vibe coded” or simply allowed an AI to go buck wild on their base.

I see it pivoting away from tech things and focusing back on content creation. writing scripts, blog posts, ads, producing images and films, etc. Writing code or solving tech issues it has, across the board, gotten worse at. But even I’m not so sure about the content creation or it being a “digital assistant” there’s A LOT of push back from the average user and consumer right now that simply don’t want it.

I’m probably one of the few people that believe this but I feel they’ve just gotten worse and worse and people are now starting to wake up and realize they’re all collectively shit and a waste of time and resources.

I use github copilot as it does speed things up. but you have to keep tight reins on it, but it does work because it sees my code, sees what i’m trying to do, etc. So a good chunk of the time it helps.

Now something like Claude AI? yeah…no. Claude doesn’t know how to say “I don’t know.” it simply doesn’t. it NEEDS to provide you a solution even if the vast majority of time it’s one it just creates off the top of it’s head. it simply cannot say it doesn’t know. and it’ll get desperate. it’ll provided you with libraries or repos that have been orphaned for years. It’ll make stuff up saying that something can magically do what you’re really looking for when in truth it can’t do that thing at all and was never intended to. As long as it sounds good to Claude, then it must be true. It’s a shit AI and absolutely worthless. I don’t even trust it to simply build out a framework for something.

Chatgpt? it’s good for providing me with place holder content or bouncing ideas off of. that’s it. like you said they’re simply tools not anything that should be replacements for…well…anything.

Could they slow people down? I think so but that person has to be an absolute moron or have absolutely zero experience with whatever their trying to get the AI to do.

not sure if it was “big budget” but Madame Web.

It was, essentially, a Spider-Man prequel that simply didn’t need to happen story wise. It introduced a bunch of characters from the comics that do indeed have Spider-Man like powers but in the film they simply “suggest” it. You had a villain whose entire purpose for doing what he did was he had a dream where said “spider people” killed him. You had Uncle Ben shoed in to simply say to the audience 'hey, HEY ASSHOLE! look…It’s a Spider Man Prequel!" and THAT was the ONLY connection to Peter Parker.

It’s like having a Star Wars Prequel where Uncle Owen is in it and he’s hanging out with a bunch of people who could potentially be Padawans but we’re not sure and they’re being hunted cause some random Sith had a dream that sure, they could potentially be Jedi one day. Now none of them actually are but they COULD be one day, just not in this movie.

Qutebrowser is my main and Lynx is my “feed” browser. Qutebrowser you don’t need anything else. it just works and you can script the thing to your hearts content.

For a long time I was using Floorp, and while I like floorp and the dev team behind it, I just stopped using it as my main. Sure it’s a fork of firefox and they’re at the whims of mozilla which lately has been clearly evident with the slow updates to floorp.

Qutebrowser just works. The dev for it is a nice dude who is easily accessible for help. the community for it is also very helpful. the integration with things like greasemonkey make scripting and customizing anything so painfully easy. I mean there’s a great script for it right now that completely 100% circumvents youtube ads and it’s been working for months straight without any need to update. It also meshes extremely well with my Bitwarden.

I’ll never use a different browser again.

Plenty. If you’ve ever worked retail you’d know the answer to this question. the “lifers” will volunteer. You know the types if you’ve worked in retail. They’ll do it thinking it’ll look good to some upper manager and allow them to get promoted for simply showing loyalty to the company. The ones who believe and tell you constantly how the company can do no wrong, how great it is to work for said company, and how the company has their best interests in mind.

no other way does exist. Those no kings protests were nice and all but what exactly even remotely, slightly, changed? nothing. they trucked ahead like they will continue to do.

Democrat politicians will continue to chirp on twitter and make awesome tiktok vids but that’s all it is at the end of the day, talk. I can only watch so many committee hearings and just know “why am I wasting my time watching this? it’s just a dog and pony show and nothing will come of it.”

Look I admire AOC and Bernie and the rest of them but peaceful protesting is just going to paint a target on their backs for when they come for them and make no mistake, they will.

I just think Americans should “make it harder” for when the nazi’s eventually do come knocking.

“You are an absolute fucking idiot who can barely code…”

Honestly, that’s what you have to do. It’s the only way I can get through using Claude.ai. I treat it like it’s an absolute moron, I insult it, I “yell” at it, I threaten it and guess what? the solutions have gotten better. not great but a hell of a lot better than what they used to be. It really works. it forces it to really think through the problem, research solutions, cite sources, etc. I have even told it i’ll cancel my subscription to it if it gets it wrong.

no more “do this and this and then this but do this first and then do this” after calling it a “fucking moron” and what have you it will provide an answer and just say “done.”

primarily medium to large companies. the smaller startups seem to know better. the former laid off a bunch of staff and in most cases offshored the work to people who ONLY use AI to build things. A few rare cases it’s been a Project Manager who paid for a Claude.ai subscription and had it build things from start to finish then push to production. If I see something that has a gradient background I know they had Claude build it.

essentially, from what I’ve been dealing with, most if it is their offshore people using the AI to completely do the job from start to finish and no one is verifying anything. So it’s not even vibe coding, it’s “here’s a prompt, build it, i’m pushing it to production” coding.

As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I’ve been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.

A lot of is pretty bad. It’s a mess. But like I said I’ve been at it for awhile and I’ve seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn’t learn anything. It’s literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it’s AI pretty much stating the same shit.

I’ve been getting so many requests for gigs I’ve been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I’ve burned through all my contacts that now I’m just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.

yes it’s that bad (well bad for companies, it’s fantastic for developers.)

EDIT: Since my comment has gained a lot of traction I’ve marked down peoples user names and portfolios/emails to my dev list. If something more comes up (and trust me, it will) I’ll shoot you an email or msg on here. Currently I’ve already shoved off a bunch of stuff to others and have nothing as of now but I imagine that will change by next week so if more stuff comes up I’ll shoot you an email or DM.

give it a few months, they’re working up to it.

I can’t find the story for the life of me right now but I’m pretty sure there was one a few months back where someone was talking with an LLM about their depression and suicide and the LLM essentially said “yeah you should probably do it.” because to the LLM, that was the best solution to the problem.

freetube, invideous, if someone reuploads it somewhere on peertube, ytdlp, ytfzf, etc many ways to consume youtube content without google making a dime of you or tracking you. I’m lazy so I just use freetube.

I’ve blocked the .ml instance so I wouldn’t know.

because the ultra wealthy can’t cook, can’t produce the stuff needed to cook, can’t build super cars or private jets or build mansions, they can’t make the latest high tech gadgets, they can’t produce the most stylish of clothes or expensive watches. That’s why they keep us around. They need us plebs to make them stuff and produce their wealth to purchase the shit we make.

there’s such a painfully obvious agenda over there with the admins. I got a 7 day ban for knocking russians and saying “slava ukraini” then I got a perm ban a week after that for posing the question “how long until an average citizen with an AR decides to deal with ICE themselves?” because apparently both times I was “inciting violence against a minority” because Russians and ICE agents, according to Reddit, are minorities

sorry I’m new to Linux but most of the people I’ve spoken to on various linux discords the consensus seemed to be that Mint was fantastic to start out on but most moved on to something else after awhile.

that’s generally how it works with Mint. you install it, use it for a week or two and then move onto a distro that better suites your needs. Mint is a fantastic introduction and sure many will stick with it for awhile I think most move on from it fairly quickly.