In context, it sounds like he’s “disappointed a lot” by people choosing to use AI, which is a crucial distinction. His objection is about the kind of society we’re sleepwalking into, not the technical maturity of the current crop of software.
AI's generated text is "too dry and too perfect, and I want something from a human being, and I'm disappointed a lot."
Woz has a better take than the vast majority of people the MSM tends to interview. I'm not surprised (he seems pretty technically competent in general), but it's definitely a breath of fresh air.
Steve Wozniak is our guy.
If you like Android, if you hate Apple, if you don't like the way things are going in tech... you probably have more in common with Apple co-founder Steve "Woz" Wozniak than you think.
Co-founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 (-04-01, 50th anniversary coming soon) (plus an investor), Woz wanted Apple to make PCs for tinkerers with open ports, open source, all that good stuff. Jobs on the other hand, wanted a closed system end to end.
Woz is also quoted as saying something like, "they send me the latest and greatest iPhone every year. They're pretty, but I wish they did half the shit my Android phone does." He doesn't open them. He stacks the boxes in his closet, or he used to. He uses an Android phone. I think he's rocking GrapheneOS on a Pixel. He probably posts on Lemmy under an alias. (No, I'm not him. He probably wouldn't be on db0. Though, he might be.) (Please don't say I'm him. I'm nowhere near that cool. And I use an iPhone 16 Pro Max 512GB. My Android phone is 7 years old, though I do like a few things about it more. If I were Woz and I used an iPhone, I wouldn't still use the 16 Pro Max, I'd be using the 17 Pro Max, and I'd have the 2TB one.)
As a software engineer, I'm convinced "vibe coding" is just a meme. It's like watching a chaotic system. You need to constantly be wrangling it back on topic, and keep it from bloating the codebase, in order to get anything done. You may be able to vibe a small mockup, but it will inevitably go off and produce garbage that doesn't make sense.
It is useful as a glorified grep, and a sort of natural language to programming language compiler for simple descriptions. But if you don't already understand what you expect the LLM to output, you're gonna have a bad time.
I run a microscopy facility at a university.
In the last 2 years, software companies have tried selling AI-based image correction and quantification software.
Fuck no, you cannot do biomedical research by generating slop and calling it data. No one is buying this software.
There are also those who slam people for having negative opinions of AI. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft's AI group, called public criticism of the tech "mind-blowing," Nvidia's Jensen Huang says the negativity is hurting society, and Nadella has pleaded to move the conversation beyond "AI slop."
Then stop serving us AI slop. Y'all get paid way too much to claim that your products aren't what they are.
It sucks so much and they are forcing it everywhere trying to find ways to not pay people for labor.
Its all just generic shit
Ban it outright, in all of your projects. Protect open source:
I get his and stallmans objections or disapointment in this case but really it is just another abstraction of search. which by the way was not expected to give perfect answers to questions. one of the top bad things with llm's is the expectation by some that what they send back can be just used without review.
What a brave, tepid stand.
Steve Wozniak is a textbook example of a tech guy who got driven out by business guys so they could ruin everything for fun and profit.
This Steve would have probably put all of us in a better timeline. But no. The car salesman took over.
Hard agree.
Every time Woz says something I'm reminded of what a cool guy he is. Probably be good friends in the right circumstances
One of the few valid uses for AI in tech is quickly parsing documentation or looking for implementation examples. You can still do this without AI, it's just faster with.
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