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jclulow commented on AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study   cnbc.com/2025/08/28/gener... · Posted by u/pseudolus
ajkjk · 2 days ago
It is in their interest to find explanations for reductions in labor that don't assign the blame to corporate greed.

For example, a call center might use the excuse of AI to fire a bunch of people. They would have liked to just arbitrarily fire people a few years ago, but if they did that people would notice the reduction in quality and perhaps realize it was done out of self-serving greed (executives get bigger bonuses / look better, etc). The AI excuse means that their service might be worse, perhaps inexcusably so, but no one is going to scrutinize it that closely because there is a palatable justification for why it was done.

This is certainly the type of effect I feel like underlies every story of AI firing I've heard about.

jclulow · a day ago
How is firing a bunch of people because you made a machine that you believe can do their jobs not textbook corporate greed? It seems like the worst impulses of Taylorism made manifest?
jclulow commented on I Am An AI Hater   anthonymoser.github.io/wr... · Posted by u/BallsInIt
petralithic · 3 days ago
Which artists care about coding AI like Copilot? All the ones I talked to simply do not care. Regarding economic means, I asked them whether they'd care if they lived in a post scarcity society where they could make art all day and not have to worry about their material needs being met, ie they're rich, and it turns out if that were the case, they didn't care about what people did with AI, be it image generation or code generation.
jclulow · 3 days ago
Where can I sign up for the post scarcity society? Asking for my artist friends.
jclulow commented on I Am An AI Hater   anthonymoser.github.io/wr... · Posted by u/BallsInIt
oasisaimlessly · 3 days ago
What was the original word?
jclulow · 3 days ago
"horny"
jclulow commented on The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful   iflscience.com/the-wow-si... · Posted by u/toss1
this_user · 3 days ago
Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species. You don't get to the top of the food chain by being nice, you get there by murdering all of the competition and plundering all of the resources. And if you were trying to be nice, someone else would have just wiped you out.

The big question is if a species can eventually reach some point of collective enlightenment where they leave these primitive impulses behind. But based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.

jclulow · 3 days ago
Certainly if they're like us, and travelling to new worlds, they'll be imperialistic and colonial. They'll plant a flag, because we obviously weren't really making use of the planet, not _really_, and attempt to civilise the natives through something between cultural erasure and genocide.
jclulow commented on Porting Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 Server Board with AMD Turin CPU to Coreboot   blog.3mdeb.com/2025/2025-... · Posted by u/pietrushnic
oDot · 14 days ago
Can someone explain AMDs motivation in opening what is traditionally (tightly) closed firmware?
jclulow · 14 days ago
I would turn this on its head: it's not clear what the value in it being closed would be.

AMD make CPUs (and other silicon products). The more people who can take the software required to initialise those CPUs and put it to new and novel uses (some of which are going to be open source) the more CPUs they can sell. One imagines there would also be benefits in just getting your code and documentation out there in the open, with respect to having less NDAs and support legwork to have to slog through with customers who buy a lot of your silicon. If the code is open, they can probably just use it.

jclulow commented on Dotfiles feel too personal to share   hamatti.org/posts/dotfile... · Posted by u/speckx
bongodongobob · 24 days ago
Nah. Other people need to use them too. You just don't do that kind of stuff managing a fleet of servers. Keep it standard. Automation is yet another thing to manage and maintain. I keep all of my servers completely standard.
jclulow · 24 days ago
Surely you can put your own dotfiles into your own account on that machine, though, without impacting other people?
jclulow commented on PSA: SQLite WAL checksums fail silently and may lose data   avi.im/blag/2025/sqlite-w... · Posted by u/avinassh
zaarn · a month ago
ZFS isn’t viable for SQLite unless you turn off fsync’s in ZFS, because otherwise you will have the same experience I had for years; SQLite may randomly hang for up to a few minutes with no visible cause, if there isn’t sufficient write txg’s to fill up in the background. If your app depends on SQLite, it’ll randomly die.

Btrfs is a better choice for sqlite, haven’t seen that issue there.

jclulow · a month ago
This isn't an inherent property of ZFS at all. I have made heavy use of SQLite for years (on illumos systems) without ever hitting this, and I would never counsel anybody to disable sync writes: it absolutely can lead to data loss under some conditions and is not safe to do unless you understand what it means.

What you're describing sounds like a bug specific to whichever OS you're using that has a port of ZFS.

jclulow commented on That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose   theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/dustincoates
hbarka · 2 months ago
I wonder if the coming AI Customer Service chatbots will be programmed with “sludge” as part of their operating procedure or can we expect an Asimov-like set of ethics from it where it will optimize to be as helpful to the best extent possible. Software does not need an attitude and it won’t get tired either.
jclulow · 2 months ago
I wouldn't expect ethics to emerge as a feature any time soon. If anything, it will be easier to have the machine do the wrong thing as the machine does not get squeamish.
jclulow commented on Go is a good fit for agents   docs.hatchet.run/blog/go-... · Posted by u/abelanger
behnamoh · 3 months ago
> concurrency

by that logic Elixir is even better for agents.

also the link at the bottom of the page is pretty much why I ditched Go: https://go.dev/blog/error-syntax

The AI landscape moves so fast, and this conservative, backwards looking mindset of the new Go dev team doesn't match the forward looking LLM engineering mindset.

jclulow · 3 months ago
I don't use either Go or LLMs, but isn't the point of LLMs that they write the tedious boilerplate for you? What's the value in a small syntactic improvement if the computer is generating it all anyway?
jclulow commented on You can choose tools that make you happy   borretti.me/article/you-c... · Posted by u/zdw
jwr · 3 months ago
I agree with "choose tools that make you happy", I disagree with the implied premise that all "obscure" (not very popular would be a better description) tools have value purely because they make me happy.

I have used (and continue using) many tools and solutions that are not popular. Some of them make me happy, some do not. All of them bring practical advantages.

Not every good tool will become popular, and many popular tools are not good.

jclulow · 3 months ago
Yeah I agree with the positive part of the thesis; i.e., that it's alright to like things, and it's alright to pick things in part because you are a feeling sentient person and you should have nice things.

I think the corollary that people, when looking also at the data or at constraints, are acting irrationally or its sophistry or whatever is bunk, though. Plenty of people do actually engage in some amount of evaluation, and it's intellectually lazy to disregard that because they may have also made an aesthetic or otherwise personal decision on some level as well.

I use a bunch of niche software, and it's difficult or impossible to completely separate my aesthetic preferences from the concrete reasons I also have for doing so -- my aesthetic preferences and my joy in using certain things actually stem from those concrete benefits in some cases!

u/jclulow

KarmaCake day2429January 10, 2012
About
Queer. ADHD. Engineer. UNIX person. Australian-American. Member of the illumos core team. Building a new machine at Oxide Computer Company!

jclulow on GitHub | jclulow on Libera Chat | https://sysmgr.org

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