from ramblings of a 2025 technophobe who is somehow a software engineer
i've been trying to summarize my takes on genAI but it's really difficult without making up counter strawmen for all the strawmen i saw so i will just. not write it as a proper blog post.
but i will say:
no i don't want stronger copyright, but corpos should not get free shit.
the ecological argument was, last i checked, coming down to nitpicking the other side's maths, sometimes to the point of ignoring the energy spent on model training. but i don't have good contributions here. we're ending up on an Exodus ship from a Becky Chambers book at this rate anyway. i don't think anyone who is being listened to on an international level cares. fucking sad
probably goes without saying but this is my opinion not my employer's i thought i should include this somewhere in case they do realize i have socials and blog
with that out of the way i think my main problem is
i think talking to a computer is miserable and sad
i think we're not at a level where any computer can just figure out what it needs to do. if we were, i would be fired, probably, right. surely gpus are still cheaper than central european meatsacks. so explaining and linking relevant resources still needs to be done.
but this is something i just don't have any amount of joy for. i can't get excited about explaining to a computer where it should look for similar tests i've already written. or about why a certain decision was made 4 years ago which is now hard to reverse without affecting customer workloads.
this is all stuff that i would gladly, endlessly, explain to a person, as much as needed. i am terrible at being a corporate machine cog because i find this to be enriching, hopefully to both sides. and then we can go, with that coworker, to a coffee to talk about other things in life. movies we saw, things that we're up to. which is probably the most enriching part of my days at the office. i don't need a promotion if i can just be a helpful bean who knows the codebase too well and then gets to hang out over a cup of something nice. but i cannot get excited about teaching a computer, which will, quite instantly forget everything we talked about, and leave no mark on me whatsoever.
i think this is one core problem for me. and the other core problem is that fundamentally, i enjoy coding in a programming language. i embrace vagueness and misunderstandings in natural language. but not in programming language, which probably explains why i fucking hate bash scripting. i mean what do you mean everything is a string. why can't we just do function calls with well defined parameters what the fuck are you doing
so anyway what i mean is. if i wanted to spend all day writing in natural language, i would apply for a manager job, not this