I'm honestly looking at leaving the industry. I've been in data science for 5 years and it's fucking burned me out. Now every job is babysitting and mopping up the shit of these useless 'AI' tools and the worst part is, NONE of it is new tech - it's all shit we already had but more expensive.

I'm trying to be optimistic I guess.

2008 was like.... really bad, but at least none of the houses actually burned down during the subprime mortgage crisis. A subprime AI crash will have MASSIVE stock market effects and leave us with farms full of useless GPUs.

Yeah I think this is basically like crypto, but somehow Musk, Altman and Amodei managed to actually gain major traction with extremely rich (and extremely stupid) money perverts.

They mainstreamed a bunch of insane fringe tech-cultism and rammed it into everybody's faces.

At this point LLMs are effectively a fetish - they're an obsession masking the fact that there is no 'artificial intelligence' and nobody has any meaningful path towards it.

Yeah, I mean that's why I said *we're* gonna be the ones who end up hurting.

People like Sam Altman and Wario Amodei will be able to find themselves a parachute.

I don't think they're even gambling, it's just a ponzi scheme.

They keep begging VCs for more and more cash to build these massive data centers, and I think a lot of them are planning to bail when hyperscaling inevitably fails to magically make it profitable.

Like, I don't care about their profits or whatever, fuck capitalism etc etc, but like.... this is worrying shit.

Like, it's probably not gonna be AS bad as 2008, but it could genuinely be approaching that scale.

This is fuckin Enron shit.

They're burning massive, massive stacks of cash building these tools, but they have NO explanation of how nay of this is supposed to create value.

And this matters because their shares are a massive part of the stock market. They fall, and we're all gonna break bones.

Like, let's set aside the theft, the environmental devastation and the chaos it's caused in the job market.

We shouldn't put aside those things, but... let's do that just for now...

NONE of the AI companies, nor the startups built on top of them are making any money!!

I suspect they were just a way for companies to show off what their engines could do, but since they're probably quite strenuous to actually implement and for no real benefit or even spectacle (it's not THAT impressive to see a mirror really...), they just got ditched.

What's with that? Did game devs more or less universally agree that working mirrors are not worth the rendering cost?

This isn't like, a criticism or anything, I just think it's weird how many games had working mirrors in the early 2010s working mirrors compared to now.

There's no service that these people offer that wouldn't be cheaper to just pay for directly, and certainly no service they offer that requires a monthly subscription to maintain.

Look, I don't want to accuse anybody of exploiting the desperation of trans people in the UK.

I don't WANT to, it's just, y'know...

I kinda feel like I have to??