Post #1991756

2026-04-28 13:46 UTC

So if you wonder how I kept my shit together when Blackboard torched itself, it came from the perspective of nuclear safety analysis. Nobody was going to die, nobody was going to be hurt, the entire web service indistry wasn't going to be wiped out, and the worst thing that could happen is a few people would be inconvenienced for a few hours and there might be minor data loss of instructional material. Important in the local context but meaningless when compared with human safety and environmental protection. Skill and diligence are underrated. They may not save you when all hell breaks loose but more often than not they turn a disaster into a near miss. We ignore the deskilling and low/no-responsibility aspects of AI at our collective peril.

Replies (1)

@arclight@oldbytes.space 2026-04-28 16:17

Note that this isn't a "back in my day..." post as much as a description of how easy it is to get screwed over by _deterministic_ tools in an environment you mostly control. Modern systems have so many layers abstraction between an admin and the actual hardware, there are so many hidden points of failure and latent vulnerabilities that a) it's understandable that someone with tenuous employment (i.e. contractor held to a Jira ticket clearance rate or time window) would turn to a chatbot especially if chatbot use was now a KPI and a mandate, and b) if we couldn't avoid Blackboard-level disasters in an age of deterministic tools and more mentally tractable architectures, what makes anyone believe a chatbot can do any better today? We've painted ourselves into a corner chasing velocity and scale and layer upon layer of abstraction and the same people pushing all this are now pushing the magic expensive pirated text extrusion engine as a solution. Do you honestly need all that to build a stupid web page? "If I want to meet my KPIs and keep my pittance of health insurance I do." I can't fault that logic but seriously wonder why more tech workers haven't invested more of their energy into unions and guillotines. That supposes there's any discretionary energy and support networks left and that anything can survive the decades of libertarian propaganda. I suppose the silver lining in all this is with chatbots, you don't need to organize and recruit saboteurs to fight back; the whole system has evolved to tear itself apart on its own.

Open ##1991757