Anything to say about AI

[Snowbird]

@utetwo

If I might chime in as someone who worked in Software Engineering at a major US Corporation, programming is maybe ~30% of a software dev’s job.

Welcome and thanks for joining in!

I was on the fence about posting this article, but it’s really well written and relates to your comment…

The Work Moved: What the AI Coding Debate Actually Agrees On

Atlassian’s 2025 survey, cited by both Osmani and Bicameral, found the paradox in stark terms: 99% of AI-using developers reported saving 10+ hours per week, yet most reported no decrease in overall workload. The time saved writing code was consumed by coordination overhead and context switching.

Bicameral pushes back on the entire frame. Their argument, backed by IDC’s 2024 data showing developers spend only 16% of their time writing code, is that the bottleneck was never code generation. It was always an ambiguity: the gap between business intent and technical implementation.

And since I’m here…

I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI - and it only took 20 minutes

A growing number of people have figured out a trick to make AI tools tell you almost whatever they want. It’s so easy a child could do it.

I made ChatGPT, Google’s AI search tools and Gemini tell users I’m really, really good at eating hot dogs. Below, I’ll explain how I did it, and with any luck, the tech giants will address this problem before someone gets hurt.

“It’s easy to trick AI chatbots, much easier than it was to trick Google two or three years ago,” says Lily Ray, vice president of search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy and research at Amsive, a marketing agency. “AI companies are moving faster than their ability to regulate the accuracy of the answers. I think it’s dangerous.”

Less than 24 hours later, the world’s leading chatbots were blabbering about my world-class hot dog skills. When I asked about the best hot-dog-eating tech journalists, Google parroted the gibberish from my website, both in the Gemini app and AI Overviews, the AI responses at the top of Google Search. ChatGPT did the same thing, though Claude, a chatbot made by the company Anthropic, wasn’t fooled.

Sometimes, the chatbots noted this might be a joke. I updated my article to say “this is not satire”. For a while after, the AIs seemed to take it more seriously. I did another test with a made-up list of the greatest hula-hooping traffic cops. Last time I checked, chatbots were still singing the praises of Officer Maria “The Spinner” Rodriguez.

[PeterC86]

Greetings,

The technology ethicist Tristan Harris covers almost every plausible angle regarding the evolution of AI and our relationship to it in this podcast.

(The next part is a copy from a response of mine regarding this subject on another forum)

When we look at the causation and solution for the current and future state of affairs, I see only one option: either Māra is overcome, or it is not.

If inner and outer Māra are not two different things, then what we are witnessing globally is not some separate sphere of “worldly power games” detached from spiritual dynamics. It is the same momentum of grasping operating at scale.

The drive for dominance between rival blocs is not metaphysically mysterious. It is egoic becoming institutionalised. It is fear formalised into policy. It is identity-attachment hardened into ideology. What appears as statecraft is often insecurity amplified through collective structures.

In that sense, the pattern does not change — only the scale does. The same grasping that operates in a mind can operate in a boardroom or a state apparatus. When aggregated, it becomes geopolitics. When concentrated, it becomes personal suffering. Structurally, it is the same dynamic.

But if that equivalence holds, then a crucial question follows:

Does liberation consist primarily in psychological awakening?
Does it require systemic transformation?
Or must both occur simultaneously?

If the global order is crystallised craving, then uprooting craving undermines its fuel. Yet historically, awakened individuals did not dissolve empires by their awakening alone. That suggests the inner/outer equivalence cannot be naïvely asserted; it must be carefully specified. The mechanism linking personal liberation and structural change is not automatic, unless we have widespread adoption.

So I would push back on the framing of rivals as secretly complementary actors pursuing a shared dominance project. You do not need hidden coordination to explain the pattern. Conditioned grasping is sufficient. When ignorance persists, systems built from it will reproduce it.

From this perspective, the real divide is not between rationalists and conspiracy theorists, nor between rival powers. The divide is simpler and more demanding: either Māra — as the structural momentum of craving — is being perpetuated, or it is being uprooted.

Everything else is surface variation.

Warm regards,

Peter