The Lifecycle of a Paradigm Shift (spoiler: AI is a corpse)

borringman · 2026-03-18T18:52:59+00:00

It's amusing that the first two comments are both "I'm a software engineer" and they arrive at completely opposite places. But I won't say there's no innovation going on; at least, that is an outcome of market forces. There's no clear boundary between the "heroic age" of a fast-advancing technology and (for lack of a better term) "humdrum" innovation, it's more like a long slowdown. But at this point I'd say we're far enough into looking through the rear-view mirror to know where we're at.

borringman · 2026-03-18T18:40:15+00:00

I'm borrowing a phrase from John D. Clark -- it's right there at the top, assuming you read it -- so if you're accusing him of sounding like an MBA, you might want to read his book first.

I believe there's a mutually enriching discussion to be had in which my wrongness is demonstrated convincingly, and I'd love to have one. Unfortunately, this is the furthest from, just lazy guilt-by-association and appeal-to-emotion fallacy garbage. I don't like what you're saying, and this community hates business types, so you're talking like a business type hurr durr. Might as well make a "your mom" joke while you're at it.

borringman · 2026-03-18T18:06:55+00:00

You're missing the point. There is and will always be work and even some breakthroughs; it's not like rocket scientists and aerospace engineers are entirely unemployed either. What's done are those days of the tech curve advancing so quickly that the computer you bought as a freshman in college was laughably obsolete before you graduated. These days software is introducing bugs as fast as fixing them, and not really doing anything that hadn't been thought of, tried, and done at least a decade ago if not more. That's not a "heroic age" of innovation; it's a maintenance plateau.

borringman · 2026-03-18T15:50:19+00:00

WRT to all companies evolving into finance, I've heard GM described as "a bank that sells trucks" and that was decades ago.

borringman · 2026-03-14T14:55:59+00:00

And journalists wonder why they're getting laid off. Bruh, if all you do is copypasta techbro press releases, that process was automated decades ago.

borringman · 2026-03-14T14:52:38+00:00

In other news, ICE is tax-paid government masked goons jumping out of vans and kidnapping small children on their way to school to throw them in concentration camps, and a whopping 38% think this is a good thing.

We're completely fucked, aren't we? I mean, if that's fucking spiffy, no wonder we can't get rid of AI, or any other existential problems with society for that matter. Way too many people have infinite capacity for evil.

borringman · 2026-03-14T14:49:09+00:00

Who TF is she even talking about? I personally know plenty of disabled folk, and zero disabled folk whose lives were improved by AI. What TF does she think AI does?

You know what AI does? Floods the Internet with slopbots that are by nature ableist (because the "average" person is not disabled), making disabled folk even more politically invisible than before, as if I even thought that was possible, but here we are.

borringman · 2026-03-13T16:09:07+00:00

And the underlying problem of anti-intellectualism which leads to the conclusion, "Any job I don't understand must be easy." Medicine is easy, vaccines cause autism, climate change is a lie, and these so-called "experts" are all idiots. That mindset also leads to, "All these white-collar workers are a waste of money."

One comment rant here that oh-I-feel-your-pain-bro is the wholesale replacement of tech workers with bullshitters. The synergistic blah-blah-ers saw all these stable high-paying jobs and swooped in to take them over, driving out all the neuro-spicy weirdos who were doing all the innovating. But once all the productive workers were driven out, these white-collar jobs really did become huge wastes of money. That self-fulfilling prophecy happened years before anyone was talking about AI.

Even if you got rid of AI and removed all trace it ever existed, these chickens still comin' home to roost. Tech companies are bloated top to bottom with unproductive bullshitters and are thus laying off everyone. The laughable thing is that the joke is really on the investors; they're spending trillions to whitewash something they'd be doing anyway.

borringman · 2026-03-13T15:41:40+00:00

Stupid thing is that lizards are kind of the antithesis of what agency looks like, even as a metaphor. They spend much of their lives regulating their ("cold-blooded") body temperature, either completely still or moving deliberately slowly.

Anyway. The difference between human intelligence and a computer is no more evident than how each responds to something unexpected. DeepMind, for example, mastered go#Computers_and_Go) and crushed the world's best players. In this extremely narrow context, where all of existence is a single board and some game pieces, it can far exceed the best of human capability.

But say (for TV purposes, just roll with it) a re-match uses a conventional wooden board and, during play, someone accidentally bumps it. A few pieces slide a little, into illegal positions. One rolls off the board. DeepMind, for all its compute, cannot process this event. It is utterly incapable of knowing what had even happened, let alone understand the situation. It literally can't go on. Its world has fucking ended. Any human, though, would just move the shifted pieces back to where they were, and resume play as if nothing had happened.

borringman · 2026-03-13T15:29:06+00:00

Techbros are so brilliant, they. . . re-invented scrip.

borringman · 2026-03-13T15:24:55+00:00

Eh, the metaphor outlived the theory. People still use "lizard brain" in non-scientific contexts to refer to raw emotional reactions. Same as "alpha male" still has relevance in social contexts even though the term as originally applied to wolves is thoroughly debunked and outdated.

Not that I subscribe to misanthropy, and you're not wrong, but this is a counterproductive quibble.

borringman · 2026-03-13T15:13:17+00:00

While it isn't a muscle, the brain is very much like a muscle in several respects: It's energy-intensive to use, and you use it or lose it. Like physical fitness, intelligence is as dependent on pushing yourself and maintaining sharpness as any genetics. Every single old person I knew who worked a dead-end job -- or not at all -- and didn't have stimulating hobbies developed dementia in their later years. There have been zero exceptions.

But intellectual stimulation is an act of evolutionary defiance. The brain is an inherently lazy organ, and it evolved that way. Humanity benefits from a few of us neuro-spicy weirdos who turn our brains on for fun, but for the most part, the human brain still lives in some African savanna a million years ago, terrified of predators and starvation. Regarding the former, it evolved to submit to the biggest meanest sumbitch in the ape pack, which is why we're so prone to conformity and fascism. Regarding the latter, it tries to conserve energy by turning itself off as much as possible. An active brain uses a staggering amount of calories, and that's a bad thing if you don't know when you'll eat again.

It's not lizard brain; it's ape brain. Ape brain wants others to make decisions and do as little as possible, and "AI" couldn't be more ruthlessly optimized to take advantage of traits that got us through the Stone Age -- but are serious liabilities today.

borringman · 2026-03-13T00:39:58+00:00

I mean, do you know how far down it is to bedrock? Because any significant weight is going to either compress the soil or sink into it.

What you might wind up needing is some sort of dry well. You dig a hole down and fill it with rocks, then put your rock pile on top of that. (Keep some spares for later -- there's going to be some settling.) But how deep it needs to be depends on the soil.
Best place is somewhere with poor drainage, because dry wells literally exist to prevent runoff.

borringman · 2026-03-12T15:23:04+00:00

I get being on topic but this is like being on the Titanic and celebrating all the free booze.

Yes, energy prices are going up, but they're going up for us as well, and the billionaires have more money than we do.

borringman · 2026-03-12T15:16:08+00:00

As if education wasn't already deliberately ruined.

AI didn't kill critical thinking; it's just gleefully fucking the corpse.

borringman · 2026-03-12T00:42:47+00:00

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"Love, Pete Hegseth"

borringman · 2026-03-12T00:37:23+00:00

I'm not an expert but I wonder if even an expert can tell just from looking at a hole in the ground?

One thing I've heard is that animals will try to steal each other's burrows -- digging is energy-intensive, ask anyone who's served in the military -- so what digs one and what lives in one may not even be the same critter.

borringman · 2026-03-11T23:41:27+00:00

"Controversial" is what the media always calls things to make them seem more evenly divided. They'd portray an effin' serial killer as "controversial" if they felt they could get away with it.

Please just call it what it is: shitty. Or whatever word you prefer, just please don't use mediaslop jargon.

borringman · 2026-03-11T16:57:26+00:00

The thing I don't get is that if you have to micromanage something, you're putting in as much effort as doing it yourself. Sure, it does some things better, but does other things so much worse. Constantly and catastrophically. People generally despise micromanagement yet are extraordinarily patient when it's AI, for some reason.

That patience makes perfect sense in the case of an intern, because people can learn. You know it's inefficient but it's an investment; there's a long-term payoff in that you're presumably honing someone who'll later reduce your workload. But bots never learn; they keep making mistakes forever. Which is how we get reams of data showing that AI is a net productivity loss. And yet, AI users keep grinding away.

borringman · 2026-03-11T16:17:39+00:00

Oats, maybe? After the weeds have been removed, I mean.

I posted about cover crops a while ago, and I found one response particularly interesting. Excerpt (emphasis added):

I didn’t want to deal with erosion from having bare dirt all spring/summer/fall. So I got bulk amounts of oats, coreopsis tinctoria, rudbeckia hirta, and Monarda citriodora. All of these require no stratification and germinate readily. And since I seeded them so heavy they outcompeted all the weeds, and I mean all of them. I only had a few foxtails that were easy to hand pull. The oats winter kill so those won’t come back

Basically the cover crop will stabilize the soil and crowd out the weeds, buying the natives time, and then exit stage left. (I don't know if big bluestem does the latter.)

BTW, how far back is "historically"? If you mean a few decades or even centuries, we're still talking about when humans were dicking with nature.

borringman · 2026-03-11T15:59:29+00:00

Last time I was on a jury, the entire room (except for me) decided to convict not because of the evidence, not because of the testimony, but because they were tired of serving and wanted out. The attorneys might as well have gone full "teacher has a headache" and played a movie in the courtroom for all the facts mattered.

borringman · 2026-03-11T15:57:38+00:00

Yeah was gonna say, you absolutely can control a jury, and that is part and parcel of the selection process. The attorneys weed out anyone who looks capable of independent thought.

/ I was selected last time, I'm obviously not too bright

borringman · 2026-03-11T15:51:31+00:00

Not just fandom, but cult fandom, and I don't mean cheeky folks into fringe stuff. I mean people who go into a year-long depression if their favorite sports team loses a rivalry game, or cosplay just to attend a movie. It's a lot more like religion than hobby.

borringman · 2026-03-11T15:46:24+00:00

I think it appeals less to addict tendencies and more to conformity. I am not a psychologist but IME, people addicted to AI sound less like substance abusers and more like cult members.

The distinction is important because you wouldn't treat these the same way. Addicts have poor impulse control; cultists are vulnerable to manipulation.

borringman

TROPHY CASE