I think the Lemmy perception of AI boils down to just a few things:

1. but it hallucinates!
2. I hate tech bros
3. but the MIT report!

Of course there’s more, like underlying fear of losing jobs, stealing from artists, and being dehumanized in general.

I happen to care a lot about those things too, but ranting on about 1-3 doesn’t actually help and is just people repeating each others points in a circle jerk. Meanwhile AI is on the move.

Is anyone going to talk about how the amounts don’t remotely match up? If you just cancel them all out, you still get Open AI buying $160 billion in Oracle compute.

I’ll just offer some facts as a counterpoint to the prevailing narrative here.

My employer, a major multinational tech company, is pushing AI use internally so hard it hurts. After studying it they announced it was saving our software engineers about 4 hours a week net, or half a day. Thats as of now with adoption still growing and new tools being explored constantly. Half a day weekly is 10% of our software engineering budget which is a large number, and the company will without a doubt pay a significant sum to continue getting that benefit to get more out of their staff, who are their biggest cost of doing business.

I live in the dissonance between, on the one hand, the narrative in places like Lemmy that AI is shit and doesn’t do anything right and these companies have no monetization plan, and on the other hand, seeing it dramatically change my enterprise workplace and provide real value.

Yes engineers are confirming to my very own ears that they are using AI tools and they have their uses and save them time and toil. For example, we had one version update to push through hundreds of teams all with disparate front end code, and it was not possible to just script the update for them all because custom integration work would always be needed, but we did come up with a prompt that could use a set of documentation and entity mappings to accomplish the update in under a minute with a high rate of success. This is just how things are staring to get done. It hasn’t replaced engineers, but it is fast becoming one of their most powerful tools.

Yeah. Signing up for a social service doesn’t make you the most technical person in the world.

One reason it’s dangerous is that the rest of the economy sucks, so AI is masking bigger problems which will become evident and tumble out of control when the money has nowhere left to go.

Lemmy is not the most tech savvy people on the internet nor the customer base for AI. Where did you get either of those ideas?

I know right? It’s not a bubble if there are transactions between the different companies in an industry. Nothing here shows that these investments are self-supporting circular, nor that all of this is propping up the economy.

Circle != bubble

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My point of view is that the entire “you” concept needs to be constructed in the first place because it isn’t a self-evident, easily-defined thing. There are centuries of philosophy on this topic, none of it conclusive. Ergo: it’s kind of your call if you are even “you” when you wake up each morning, or just a fresh iteration with your memories that believes it’s “you.” Having hit my 50s I’m quite confident that the person in all my pictures from college is not “me” in any meaningful way. All the memories I have from that time are unreliable reconstructions anyway - stories my brain tells itself.

Because they take investment.

Privately held companies can sit around earning the exact same amount of profit forever.

But if you are publicly traded on the stock market, people are walking up and injecting money into your business. They expect a return for that investment. And that means that the part of your business they’ve bought has to be worth more in the future in order for them to sell it for more than they bought it.

Therefore: growth. Owning 1% of a $100k business isn’t with as much as owning 1% of a $200k business. So if you own 1%, you want it to go from $100k to $200k.

If you aren’t taking outside money, none of this is a problem. Unless the owners just want a raise, which most people generally do over time. If nothing else, inflation is constantly eroding the value of money so you need to grow a little just to stand still. Most people don’t want to make do with less and less over time.

Once I actually stated meeting people in life who go out to the track, I saw street racers in a new light. I never admired them in the first place, but I started seeing them as absolutely pathetic, once I became aware of how easy and popular it is to take your car out to a track and actually push its limits and/or compete with others.

A lot of people like to go to the firing range, too. But you don’t see them doing target practice walking down the sidewalk. That’s essentially what street racing is.

More like “those who want to see 10% more socialism in their capitalism are feeling cautiously optimistic that the Democratic Party might change slightly.”

Oh I completely agree. My point is that just because it was driven by bots doesn’t mean it was fake and therefore we can ignore it (I believe some people have that perception when they hear that some online uproar was driven by bots).

Enough with the agentic experiences.

Bring on the entish experiences.

Real talk: a crappy imitation of someone else can still be a better person than 100% authentic “you.”

Be the best person you can be whether that feels like it’s coming from your innermost soul or not. A lot of us have a bunch of trash inside that’s not worth being 100% true to.

Nice. None of those “go woke go broke” boycotts ever actually materialize into meaningful business pressure.

Unless you’re fucking Cracker Barrel.

The thing is people were persuaded to GAF. We hear “driven by bots” and we think “oh so it was fake.” But bots are merely the PR mechanism of choice in 2025. In prior decades it might have been AM radio and a bunch of press releases faxed around or influence networks pumping the talk shows for airtime or church networks getting people riled up from the pulpit. But the game has always been the same. It’s only the tools that have changed.

Starting next year, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed by users on certified Android devices.

Are they actually proposing to make any previously sold devices “certified” through a software update, though? Your points are right on if this edict applied to all devices.

I’m frustrated that the article didn’t link to the “decree.” Do you know where it is?

EDIT: nvm think I found it

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elevating-android-security.html

Okay ;)

If you know, you know. When you don’t know, it shows.