Taking some days off work, and trying to write again. Tried the other day and failed. The original article was partially written around four days ago. Life happened, with all its excuses and road bumps. Will there be will to overcome this?
Context #
It’s been a while since I wrote my last article. The fireworks that characterize our days have kept coming. There’s little to say of all that. There’s little to no ability to comprehend this whole affair of wars and damnation. It all just appears depressing, but one must have faith.
This whole experience has overwhelmed an already troubled mind. Expecting it to
produce code to be proud of, or to write, is just fantasy. Thus a form of
anhedonia is being manifested towards work. The Benedictine(Ora et labora,
pray and work, or laborare est orare, work is to pray) motto appears to be
less true, day by day, in this case.
I’ve been quite open about this, and my team lead has been a great support, and I can’t thank him enough for it. Of course, my sublime boss has also been supportive, but she’s not the one trying to not get me fired.
Glossary/References #
Some concepts used during the article.
Cognitive Surrender #
A concept borrowed from https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-surrender/.
Cognitive offloading is delegating to the AI and still owning the answer. Cognitive surrender is when the AI’s output quietly becomes your output and there is nothing you feel is left to check.
Tech Debt #
A widely known concept in the IT world.
Wikipedia reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt.
Cargo Cult #
I struggle to describe the concept, need to give it more thought. Basically is a misunderstanding of a given effect, by erroneously attributing the cause. Like these Pacific Islanders thinking it was the airports that brought the “cargo” from the skies.
Please check Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
Stemming directly from religious teaching of equality, and its resulting sense of injustice, is what is generally known as ‘Vailala Madness’, or ‘Cargo Cult’. . . . A native, infected with the disorder, states that a great number of ships loaded with ‘cargo’ had been sent by the ancestor of the native for the benefit of the natives of a particular village or area. But the white man, being very cunning, knows how to intercept these ships and takes the ‘cargo’ for his own use … We have seen grave harm to the native population arising from the “Vailala Madness,” where livestock has been destroyed, and gardens neglected in the expectation of the magic cargo arriving. The natives infected by the “Madness” sank into indolence and apathy regarding common hygiene, with dire effect on the health of the community.
— Norris Mervyn Bird, Pacific Islands Monthly, 1945
On my dirty work(Software Development) #
Over the last few months, the large scale adoption of LLMs has put an interesting twist. This concept of “cognitive surrender” is posing a serious problem to the world. The lack of curiosity was never a recognized pandemic, but nowadays we are fuelling it, and are taking a debt, we might not be able to pay.
What do I observe? People being people. With the never ending succession of stupid deadlines and unwarranted pressure to meet them, people start taking shortcuts. These shortcuts manifest in the fabulous “tech debt”.
Quoting from Wikipedia:
Technical debt (also known as design debt or code debt) is a qualitative description of the cost to maintain a system that is attributable to choosing an expedient solution for its development.
The worst part is that this is being accepted as positive. Prototypes aren’t production ready. They are great to start, but you wouldn’t ship medical devices with required assemblage of boards and cables, on off the shelf prototyping electronic boards, with little to no testing. NO REAL TESTING.
This isn’t new. In the old days, people would be creative and tell
tales of their ignorance to an even more ignorant crowd. Nowadays it’s just
complete hallucination. The LLM Cargo cult is born, and I’m
not talking of Rust crates. People used to just grab a commercial
proprietary solution or some open source software package to solve problems,
without considering implications. Nowadays the evolution is to do no research,
ask the magic chat, and repeat the previous recipe.
The problem is when it dies. Be it yourself, another person, a web service, or your whole business.
When it hits the fan, what do people do? Normally, turn off and on, and pray to some unseen force.
This shouldn’t be the case. This illuminated soul should be capable of diagnosing the system, and understand what happened. If not, you’ve failed in hiring this person, or in not providing proper training. When you hire people to develop and maintain some infrastructure, they better understand it or have the ability to.
If not, why have them in the first place?
This is the same as hiring a person who watches a TV show with firemen, and expect for some reason to save people when the building starts to burn, and not panic.
On the point, LLM systems don’t “understand” anything. If you haven’t reached this part, you should consider it.
On life #
Living through the social media era, when people started to have “opinions” on just about everything, I felt that we weren’t doing any better than our predecessors. I remember finding people, with no superior or even secondary education, being able to be more articulate and sophisticated in their arguments, than many PhDs I’ve met lately.
This isn’t because universities are producing invariably worse, but the problem is in the raw material. People are also being victims of this “Cognitive Surrender”, in a process that lately has been driven by falling literacy rates.
I’ve no numbers to support my argument. I’m forced to believe that the common man in the 90’s would have read, truly read and analyzed, as many books in the span of a few years, than most masters walking around, in their thirties. This has got to do with culture, a vanishing culture in which we traded idealism for pure materialism.
The bourgeois culture of the last twenty years, of using a search apparatus, LLM powered or not, to force a validation of ones misconceptions, makes debates sterile. People do not care to understand something more, or to be with other people. They just care to signal they are superior, when clearly they are slaves to their own delusion.
My recent experience has been trying to discuss any matter with people set in their ways, because of their perceived class. Youth with micro companies being ardently right wing, because they think of themselves as business magnates. Defending the most obtuse practices, while professing catholic values. When faced with the inconsistency, they back pedal, but never truly wanting to pursue the issue beyond the recorded position.
This isn’t isolated to this case. I see the same on “rational” people and technology. The related “buzzwordmania” is on the rise as well. People who’ve never read or thought about the words of any philosopher, pseudo quoting them. I’ve seen extremes quoting the others on contrary beliefs.
It would be like having a Benfica fan quoting a Sporting fan about “how Sporting is superior to the other”, or the other way around. Honestly, I know fuck all about football. I just know there’s a rivalry Benfica/Sporting.
Conclusion #
I’m tired, I’ve barely edited this, but I’m publishing it. It’s horrible, and I hope it infects some useless scraper.