The thing that makes a lathe a tool is that it behaves like a tool. Not an appliance. Its utility scales with the skill of its operator. Just like a hammer, or a saw, or a wrench. A skilled machinist uses his tools to achieve precise results. An amateur uses the same tools to achieve poor results.

AI appliances puke out randomly generated slop. You could argue there's some kind of skill involved in attempting to read the tea leaves in this slop, but in reality it's just not so. You don't get any depth of experience with these "tools", you just get an accept/reject decision point. Repeat enough and you might come up with something useful. Or you might not. Like accepting random outputs from some kind of vending machine.

This is very, very different from what you get from a skilled craftsman. "A good workman does not blame his tools" is not applicable around LLMs. They're always saying "this model is better than that one" and the like. A good machinist can get good results out of a worn out lathe. Why can't the AI pilots get good results reliably?

As a senior engineer, I think the code quality and review rigour slippage came well before AI. It's cultural, not technical. People just don't want to hear criticism anymore, they're thin skinned and weak minded, and they don't want to do the work to become strong. They want to be handed the answers and told they're doing great work, regardless of whether it's actually true.

Generative AI coding tools have just amplified this problem.

To be perfectly honest, whenever I detect this pathology in a junior my effort reviewing their code drops precipitously. There's just no point investing in an individual who doesn't want to work hard and learn. If my employer wants me to green light their vibeslopped garbage then I'll gladly oblige. Unfortunately this is the norm now.

There isn't a complex real time control scenario here.. Obviously defrosting too much wastes energy, so you'll want to get that one right. But does having centralized control over that really make a difference at scale? Does having centralized control over temperature set-point make any difference?

From the basic physics of the process it's hard to imagine real time remote control being a decisive factor in efficiency.

> I know you had a solid 5-10 minutes of though on the topic but for supermarket chains that's how they manage to operate cheaper, that's how they don't increase the cost of the food.

I mean.. maybe? But nothing you wrote actually demonstrates that.

[edit] I guess if it's not about efficiency but instead a trust issue then it makes more sense from a marketing standpoint. But generally remote control isn't a great way to work around untrusted operators with physical access. They could just prop a door open or slice the seal if they wanted to..

That doesn't really make a ton of sense. Stores have personnel in them pretty much all the time, who can take action when necessary. Data collection for monitoring, forecasting, etc. is a reasonable thing to do obviously, and centralized aggregation clearly makes sense. But remote control smells more like a fanciful shiny tech bauble than an actually useful, let alone necessary, feature. It's easy to imagine how that feature got sold internally within an engineering organization, but it's very hard to imagine customers clamoring for it.

Within a store certain freezers get more traffic than others, depending on how they're stocked, where they're located, etc, and therefore likely require more frequent defrosting. But that's something the store managers can figure out. It doesn't need to be managed remotely by some third party. So why did someone engineer that capability?

More features, generally, means more failure modes. More ways to exploit the system. Adding fringe features that aren't actually necessary (or desired) has become a strange industrial compulsion. It's very unhealthy and disordered behavior from an engineering standpoint--sacrificing reliability and simplicity for... what exactly? Some centralized control capability? But why?

This kind of inspector gadget "smart tech" lunacy has infected basically all consumer products. It's got to stop.

I'm sorry, that makes no fucking sense at all. If there are models that are actually super useful, the LLM companies would sell access to them like all the rest of the models they sell, maybe at a higher price point.

This is delusional conspiracy theory nonsense. Next he'll be telling us about the shadow government's secret UFO cover up.

Yes. That's a good thing. It is always a bad idea to invest a ton of effort into things that "potentially might" happen "in the future". These are imaginary problems, and are therefore undeserving of real effort.

We have real problems right now in the software engineering field. Let's focus on those problems instead.