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days of future past (lemmy.ca)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/65410582

sauce

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[–] 114 points 5 months ago (17 children)

Canals were at least solving a problem that actually existed and needed solving at the time when they were started. AI data centres are being built in anticipation of future demand, for use cases that haven't been developed yet.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    A few years ago with ARM arriving at the data centers I envisioned there would be a day that density would go up and new data centers would be less in demand. I'm either too early or wrong.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I'm thinking you might have been wrong. Even without AI, I don't foresee demand for compute going down. Even if everything went over to ARM, I think that would have just slowed the rate of new builds.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    Working for a fairly large open source project and we began testing arm hardware for in house use and it was ridiculous how much compute we could fit in the same U space.

    We were doing nothing with GPU though, so CPU and memory speed was our bottleneck.

    We were definitely more compute dense with our arm cluster but we couldn’t get as large. Yet. Maybe it’s changed now

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    In economics, the Jevons paradox, or Jevons effect, is said to occur when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource.

    Unfortunately using less of a good thing isn't how we do things.

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  • [–] 29 points 5 months ago (9 children)

    That’s not accurate from my understanding. I quit my SDE job in December, but my former coworkers say they use AI pretty much all day and find it useful. Ofc, the company’s systems were an indecipherable mess, mostly because of rushed choices those same people made everyday, but neither here nor there. This is why tech companies are cutting jobs.

    Whether any of this is sustainable remains to be seen, but there are current use cases and real demand for “AI” data centers.

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  • [–] 43 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    Current tech layoffs are mostly a result of over hiring during the pandemic. Blaming AI is just the sales pitch to investors try to prove that the AI spending was worth it.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    I find this hard to believe, since I remember those pandemic layoffs already happening around 2023.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    Wasn't this more related to the Trump era H1B limitations expiring under Biden around 2022? I may be misremembering the timeline since time after 2020 is fucked, but I swear I remember a greater uptick of H1B hires in tech around this time, as well as outsourcing teams to India.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    An H1B is valid for up to 6 years, and as far as I know the thing that changed is how hard it is to get a visa in the first place, anyone already hired would be unaffected. Tech companies spend so much on legal fees for hiring foreign workers, they're a bit reluctant to get rid of them immediately. It's also really shitty for the workers if they get laid off, since their visa is tied to employment, and it only gives them like a month to find a new job sponsor or leave the country.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago*

    Sorry, I was unclear. I meant the layoffs were related to replacing pandemic hires working from home with cheaper H1Bs willing to RTO/take cheaper salaries, since by then everyone was boostered up and ready for travel, and visa applicationswere actually being processed instead of "backlogged" (ignored) by Trump Admin 1.0.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    Maybe. There were rounds of layoffs a couple years ago where companies used COVID over employment as the rationale. I think four years removed that rationale is a bit of a stretch.

    I think it’s also possible that the looming recession is a cause, but they can’t say that out loud for fear of offending the Crybaby in Chief.

    And if AI is working properly these “innovative” tech companies shouldn’t really need to fire anyone, right? All their bright employees should just be able to use AI to generate value for their respective companies.

    Idk the answer, but I can say that I personally know high-performing engineers who swear by it. I mostly found it useful as a rubber duck, or to quickly tear down some code in a language with which I’m not acquainted.

    I actively try to avoid AI for moral reasons, but I have found it useful for certain tasks. It’s not a panacea, but it’s also not useless.

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  • [–] 24 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I believe that they use it all day. I believe that they say they find it useful.

    I also believe that their bosses gave them a productivity slot machine and told them if they don’t play it they’re fired.

    So some of them like it for bad reasons, and some of them have to pretend to like it.

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