One of the big, national grocery store chains here has managed to create a webpage, where:
In effect, the webpage is practically unusable for actually browsing through products. They’re probably missing out on hundreds of thousands in sales, for something that could be fixed for like 50 quid.
Yeah, they have to fight it tooth and nail, because it threatens how they want to do business on a conceptual level. But I also cannot see how they would argue this case.
If another webpage said those publishers are a right cunt (written by AI), that would be defamation for sure. So far, Google was allowed to say those publishers are a right cunt, because they were quoting another webpage.
If they’re not doing that anymore, if they’re not even paraphrasing what another webpage said, but just making own claims, then that’s their own responsibility.
In theory, I could imagine a ruling that says that paraphrasing doesn’t have to be accurate at all times, but in practice, this would be absolute bedlam. Any webpage could publish the wildest misinformation and just say that, oops, they were paraphrasing.
So, even if they can get such ruling through, there would need to be law changes sooner or later, which explicitly make it illegal again.
Did not expect that kind of law change from such an aggressively Conservative government. I guess, there is ample reason to put the NIMBYs into overdrive, though…
Don’t think, Grok was a thing yet back then…
I do feel like AI art has entered the boomer stage of the hype cycle, as in Trump et al use it prominently, so the kids start to think, it’s
.
But I also feel like the blog post conflates two aspects. It’s not just about AI art, it’s also about every goddamn brainfart being turned into AI art.
No one needs to see a t-rex giving a thumbs-up or similar.
That’s what people are tired of, for sure. In the before times, the person would’ve chuckled at the thought and then forgotten about it. It took long enough to create an image of it, that they had time to realize that no one cares.
That barrier is now removed, so you definitely see posts online with just the dumbest brainfart turned into pixels.
Did you maybe accidentally turn on the “drunk” mode at the top?
deleted by creator
I imagine, this is more about software devs than sysadmins. Sure, you’ll hire a couple more sysadmins to help with the massive user growth during the pandemic. But especially combined with loans basically being made free in the same time, it’s suddenly worth hiring a bunch of devs to build the Next Big Thing™.
Once those loans start costing again and the user numbers fall off, you quickly have lots of devs that you can’t find tasks for, that are worth doing.
Yeah, the big thing is that management has no sense how little coding you actually do in a software engineering role. You spend so much more time understanding requirements, understanding how you can resolve roadblocks within your organization and understanding what the hell the code does that was previously written.
In particular, the last part is something that will most definitely take longer for vibecoded programs.
The code is often needlessly complex, because:
But you also just don’t have human beings that made all the detail decisions and can tell you why they’re important. In vibecoded code, all of these detail decisions are accidental and only ‘proven’ in so far as the given accidental state that the code is in, happens to not explode in reality. If you need to tweak anything about it, you’re completely blind as to what’s actually important and what’s just in there, because the AI figured, it’s the most likely thing to autocomplete there.
I mean, even then, they could increase the price per token, if they want to hand out fewer tokens for the price paid.
They could make this work like a prepaid SIM card, where you charge it with e.g. $10 and then you can use it until the $10 are used up.
Instead, they make it work like in-game currencies in scammy free-to-play games. Except that they didn’t choose a confusing conversion rate, for some reason…
Yeah, I imagine that they did try. But it’s not just the intentionally misleading announcement post, they also have 5(?) different subscription tiers, which get different changes from this. And one of the subscription tiers is actually called “Pro+”, so that does not mean “Pro and more expensive tiers” like I wondered. And they have this ridiculous intermediate currency to make things even more confusing.
Their offering itself is overly complex and confusing…
Man, they couldn’t have communicated this more confusingly, if they tried.
Which is a crime, by the way, when you sell it together with a product you hold a monopoly for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
So, did they use AI tools to type “LGTM” 400 times or nah?
But yeah, I also find that frustrating. Management just looks at terrible metrics like PRs closed or lines of code produced.
It’s not even novel that you can produce terrible code very quickly. Decades ago, our industry learned that it isn’t worth it, because you suffer for it later. Now the game is altered slightly and management demands that we throw all these learnings out the window.
Well, base prices stay the same. They seem to just be billing more per usage on top of that…
If there’s no reason to hold the feature code back (i.e. its integration doesn’t break anything), then it’s much easier for development to ship the feature and disable it with a feature flag. Otherwise, you have two versions of the code, which means changes need to be integrated in both versions, which is largely just pointless busywork.
I mean, there’s still some download managers around, for example:
But yeah, I imagine this functionality is now largely integrated into the apps that want to trigger the download. The advanced downloading functionality can just be a library and then the respective apps just need to strap a UI on top.
The only real advantage of a dedicated app, is that the other app’s APK size can be smaller, which isn’t too big of a deal anymore.