[{"content":"i had so many discussions about ai those past 3 or 4 years, some were good, some were bad, some were interesting, most of them were either very frustrating or very anger-inducing. and sometime, during those conversations, happen something very common : someone says something, and i don\u0026rsquo;t have a rebuttal, or someone interrupt the conversations and we move on to another subject. or sometime it\u0026rsquo;s just during a job interview and i prefer not to offer a rebuttal and just nurse my anger in a deep part of my brain. and after a while, often in the shower, i replay the argument in my head, and find new ways to respond, new answers to give to my now imaginary opponent. and it\u0026rsquo;s frustrating that only my bottle of shampoo will ear those arguments, so i decided, hey what the hell, that\u0026rsquo;s why this blog exist : to give an out to my most annoying thoughts and shower the world with them.\nso i\u0026rsquo;m compiling them into an article.\nif new discussions emerges, i\u0026rsquo;ll be posting more.\n(but not updating this one that would be silly i want more articles)\n🇫🇷 il n\u0026rsquo;y a pas de version en français pour l\u0026rsquo;instant, mais je verrais si je me sens d\u0026rsquo;en faire une traduction. en attendant, vous pouvez utiliser la fonction \u0026ldquo;traduire cette page\u0026rdquo; de votre navigateur internet.\nai will allow me to live my life and stop working no it\u0026rsquo;s not.\nwell, ai itself would maybe help with that if you lived in a socialist utopia. after all, an utopia is simply a slave state where you manages to hide the slaves and as unconscious automatons, ai make for the perfect entities to take care of essential work. but first of all we\u0026rsquo;re not there yet and second of all we would have to calculate if the energy and resource intensive time to train ais on all those different job is really worth it and compatible with what we have left as finished resources on our planet. maybe over a very long period of time to not overstress our energy production with unnecessary model training?\nbut that\u0026rsquo;s in a perfect world; in our reality, nobody and i mean NOBODY plans to give you a salary to do nothing while an ai is doing your job. what is planned is to get you fired and replaced with an ai that will do your work but cost less to your boss that will be replaced by an ai the second their company is bought by a bigger one and so on until the only companies left are ai companies selling to themselves models and so on, you get it, capitalism at it again. and you, during that process, will be left to die, or do the few manual job ai will not crack because after all LLM are not a 1:1 equivalence with the human brain and some things will always be above their capacities, even if we manage to put them in bodies better than our owns.\nai makes my homework easier, i don\u0026rsquo;t have to read the book, chatgtp write my paper for it this is a discussion i had with my nephew : and yes, this is very true, all of this.\nbut it\u0026rsquo;s not good. those things are not supposed to be easy, and they are not made to be interesting. they are the annoying cardio exercises your coach makes you do before training : when you are not making the effort of reading and then writing something, whether it is a book review, a commentary, a text analysis, what is expected of you is not to fill up a piece of paper because it\u0026rsquo;s good for the economy that you use ink somehow. you\u0026rsquo;re ask of doing this because learning and practicing those skills is something incredibly important and valuable in a democratic society. what you are learning during those steps is to not only read a text but understand it, internalize it, criticize it, and help you shape what you think and who you are as a person.\nusing a machine to do that for you, means that you are delegating your own understanding of reality to someone else. and i didn\u0026rsquo;t say \u0026ldquo;something else\u0026rdquo;, i said someone else, because elon musk and grok proved it : ai is first and foremost owned by someone, and therefore, the projection of the belief system of that person. so, if you rely on that person, you are denying yourself your own independence. television and cable channel did that for years but ai, by the place it\u0026rsquo;s taking in your life, is doing so much worst, and quicker.\nand once those skills are gone, they are hard to get back, because they require an conscious effort. a conscious effort that you wont want to make because the machine will convince you that you don\u0026rsquo;t need to. and then, the machine, or rather the people exploiting the machine, will be able to sell you anything and everything. nobody is immune to propaganda, but YOU, you will become a sponge to it.\nand that count for kids in school, but also for you who use ai to summarize meetings and emails. you don\u0026rsquo;t realize it, but your brain and your critical sense is being melted away.\nai doen\u0026rsquo;t consume too much when you put what it brings in perspective of what it can do often this argument is brought up as \u0026ldquo;when ai will fix global warming\u0026rdquo;. and i want to say to that : where? where is ai fixing global warming? where is ai fixing its own energy and resources consumption? for now, all i can see are some very very specific ai specifically trained for fundamental research project, medical purposes (not chatgtp telling you you have cancer, but rather ai trained on xray to detect cancer more accurately), some old models are still improved in some weather research centers\u0026hellip;\nbut if we are building bigger and bigger datacenters today, it\u0026rsquo;s not to bring power to those models, it\u0026rsquo;s to bring power to the ones made to replace your cousin working in a call-center, make your saas startup generate even more technical debt via claude or generate naked pictures of children. if elon musk is installing gaz powered electrical power station, it\u0026rsquo;s not to improve how to calculate the oxygen needed in an hydroponic farm of the future, it\u0026rsquo;s to make sure grok doesn\u0026rsquo;t make the mistake of considering trans people as real people.\nthe goal of the ai industry is not to save the world, it\u0026rsquo;s to save their own skin by making the economy dependent from them, and nothing else.\nall datacenters consume water and energy, we didn\u0026rsquo;t see you complain before so a weird part of my career is that i started as an adminsys so i have a beginning of a response for you that is a bit technical but i\u0026rsquo;m going to try and dumb it down. basically it comes from the difference between an AI datacenter and a standard, non-specific datacenter : very basically, AI datacenters run at maximum, all the time. they also consume energy in a very different way. we spent years working on virtualizing systems, i.e. trying to fit as many systems as possible on one single CPU, on one single core of a CPU (so a fraction of it) specifically to save running cost. so we created infrastructure where we shared everything; we shared ram, we shared storage, we shared computation capacity. this way, datacenters stayed relatively ok-sized (small compared to ai datacenters) to the point that, you might not know, but if you live in a city, you might live closer to an old school datacenter without knowing it. the one i used to intervene on was just a weird hidden warehouse smack down in marseille third district, in the middle of hotels, hospitals and residential buildings. and we still need those, they are as capital to our modern life infrastructure as the power-grid, train rails or any supply chain, because they provide our current internet, it provides services that we use daily to pay for stuff, know where we are, shop, order food, watch dumb cat video and work.\nalso, GPUs and CPUs didn\u0026rsquo;t followed the same development path AT ALL : if you look at CPUs those last few decade, the goal was to increase calculation, increase transistors concentration, while keeping power consumption at bay, because power consumption meant heat, heat meant low performances and potential wear. GPU does : none of that. the nvidia way those last few years was \u0026ldquo;just buy bigger power supplies\u0026rdquo;, and once ai computation came around and they became the main focus of the economy, they didn\u0026rsquo;t batted an eye and kept pushing.\nso yeah, regular datacenters gobble energy and water too, but it\u0026rsquo;s nothing compared to ai datacenters AND they are doing an important job in our modern infrastructure and life. ai datacenters do not, i don\u0026rsquo;t care how important you feel is your ai girlfriend, your vibecoding buddy or your ghibli picture filter, but they are NOT as important.\nthe ai genie is out of the bottle now, we HAVE to use it, we can\u0026rsquo;t go back the fuck we can\u0026rsquo;t. of course we can. there is in fact a precedent : asbestos.\nasbestos, when introduced industrially and mostly in construction, was a miracle technology. it was used everywhere, praised everywhere. but as we discovered that it was highly carcinogenic, we decided, as a society,that its benefits were too few to keep it around, and labelled it culturally as well as literally as something very toxic, almost synonymous as nuclear waste. the only things convincing you that you HAVE to keep ai around is because it made you very lazy, gave you undeserved and untrained skills, and because like people in the 60s putting lead fuel in their car, or construction workers putting asbestos in the celling of a house, you are meant to not understand the consequences of what you are doing and just reap the fake \u0026ldquo;benefits\u0026rdquo;, while the ones pushing that the ai revolution is inevitable, are the ones reaping the real benefits.\nyeah, that\u0026rsquo;s the last point; ask yourself who\u0026rsquo;s making you say that? is it you? your own laziness? or is it someone really rich that see in your addiction a way to get them even richer?\nai must be consuming as much as a video game studio, it must be as costly to make a game like gta6 yes this is a real phrase that has been spoken to me by a CEO during an interview\ni don\u0026rsquo;t really know how to respond to this one, except by saying a big fat \u0026ldquo;no\u0026rdquo;, like, yes making a game and playing a game consume a lot of energy but so is playing a game on your phone or even playing cards with a friends. but i never heard of a video game studio that had to open a gas-fired power plant inside their workspace to allow them to make a game.\nof all the arguments used in front of me to defend ai, i think that one was the dumbest. by a large margin.\nai doesn\u0026rsquo;t consume that much energy, we need more studies same dude as above btw\nthis is just a lie. it\u0026rsquo;s not even a clever lie or a smart lie it\u0026rsquo;s just a dumb lie : the ai industry consume today more than 3% of the energy consumed by all humans on earth and that slice of the energetic pie will be, by their own account, growing a lot in the next 4 years.\nai will be 100% right at some point not it will not, for multiple reasons :\nai improvement are made by feeding it increasingly bigger and bigger dataset, but those datasets will contains errors, which will always ALWAYS create hallucinations. ai has no way to know it\u0026rsquo;s hallucinating. it\u0026rsquo;s basically a big fat autocorrect system that is just statistically guessing what\u0026rsquo;s supposed to be its next answer; you can increase the usage by making it check its results but that\u0026rsquo;s just using ai over ai, that doesn\u0026rsquo;t solve the main issues. ai is starting to running out of \u0026ldquo;human content\u0026rdquo; and is starting to use ai content for its training, which is only making hallucinations worst. in term of raw performances, it\u0026rsquo;s already plateauing, what\u0026rsquo;s improving are the tools around ai and those will reach their peak at some point and like very product, will start going downward in quality. ai will increase productivity except i personally don\u0026rsquo;t believe it\u0026rsquo;s always true. when we talk about gains i look at 2 things :\nwhat are we talking about? is it gain in production of code? is it gain in features? in stability? in refactoring? in quality? who is talking about those gains? is it a research institute? is it a company heavily using and emphasizing their internal ai deployment in their own teams? is it someone at anthropic or open ai? for the first one, and i talk of experience, most often what is sold as a gain in productivity is the fact that you can ship a feature faster. which is very much true, ai made it so easy to ship something. but ask any dev : shipping was never the hard part. actually, making a feature, any feature, in a void, is very easy. you know the classic \u0026ldquo;they are asking me 2 weeks to add a button\u0026rdquo; which is supposed to show how hard it is to do simple tasks without breaking things, well ai now empower people to do that change and to not worry about the consequences of that change. will it break something? you don\u0026rsquo;t know, you\u0026rsquo;re not the one changing the button anymore. have you took the time to review what the ai produced? of course not, it would be slowing down the push to shipping. with ai, you don\u0026rsquo;t have ownership of what you\u0026rsquo;re doing, you just herding automated processes toward something you want and you cross every fingers on your body that token price will not hike more and that your basecode is still somewhat readable.\nbecause chances are : they are trying to convince you to buy something, or just are trying to reasure their shareholder that yes, that 80k a month in tokens was worth it.\nai made code easy no ai made production easier, it always was the easy part, but it made maintenance worst than before. and it killed the capacity for junior to learn how to properly code, which was, again a very good way for them to ensure selling their product even after prices explode, because you have now created an economy where people completely forgot how to work without your product. and government are encouraging this, how f u n.\nalso, like, what the actual fuck? we spent the last 3 decades at least yelling that making black boxes is a really bad thing, that obfuscating code was a big no-no. and now we created a machine that only make that? code that nobody knows how it works? that nobody review? that nobody knows how to fix?\nI N S A N E\nyou are just jealous because ai is smarter than you no, i know a machine that is supposed to know everything look smarter than me, but my understanding of my absence of universal knowledge is what makes me, in the end, infinitely smarter than it is.\nthe fact that you consider yourself dumber than an ai, that, is the concerning part.\nthere, im gonna stop here. concerning sources of everything i talk about in this article, you\u0026rsquo;re grownups, i can\u0026rsquo;t hold your hand about everything (and i never see those fucking bring up sources first so i don\u0026rsquo;t know why i should do be held to a higher standard).\ni still have more points to talk about, more development to do, but that will have to wait for a future part article, as i think this will be a recurring series on the blog, and also i have to stop at some point and click the publish button or that article, like my eternal frustration about this subject, will never end.\n","permalink":"https://blog.nakou.dev/posts/ai-will-not-save-you/","summary":"\u003cp\u003ei had so many discussions about ai those past 3 or 4 years, some were good, some were bad, some were interesting, most of them were either very frustrating or very anger-inducing. and sometime, during those conversations, happen something very common : someone says something, and i don\u0026rsquo;t have a rebuttal, or someone interrupt the conversations and we move on to another subject. or sometime it\u0026rsquo;s just during a job interview and i prefer not to offer a rebuttal and just nurse my anger in a deep part of my brain. and after a while, often in the shower, i replay the argument in my head, and find new ways to respond, new answers to give to my now imaginary opponent. and it\u0026rsquo;s frustrating that only my bottle of shampoo will ear those arguments, so i decided, hey what the hell, that\u0026rsquo;s why this blog exist : to give an out to my most annoying thoughts and shower the world with them.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"ai will not save you, part 1"},{"content":"version française de cet article\nwell not really that homemade.\nit\u0026rsquo;s made with hugo, a static website generator which can manage a post system (that i write somewhere and then build to be hosted somewhere else, yes, even when i want to do simple things, i manage do make them complicated anyway). but it\u0026rsquo;s not like a wordpress or a substack or anything.\nbut\u0026hellip; why tho? everything is shit. substack is shit and owned by nazis (or is hosting nazis? can\u0026rsquo;t keep track of who\u0026rsquo;s a self-claim nazi or just eating with them), wordpress is bloated, they really did a number on my boy. and i wasn\u0026rsquo;t really interested to go the full way html+css pages by hand, or make my own blog system old school it would have been annoying (and i HATE frontend development, i never feel more the attraction to vibecoding than when talking about frontend development).\ni also spent like 3 or 4 days looking for alternatives to substack, because i was under the delusion that people would be so interested by what i was writing that they would like a newsletter, or even more delusional, want to pay me for it. which is dumb. i\u0026rsquo;m currently writing a book, and the 3 people i ever sent what i wrote so far (120 pages mind you) never talked about it ever again. so you know, i\u0026rsquo;m not in any delusion that i\u0026rsquo;m a good writer. i\u0026rsquo;m barely considering being a writer at all. i\u0026rsquo;m like nick miller, i don\u0026rsquo;t know how to read or write, i just memorized a lot of words.\nso since that blog will mostly be something that i\u0026rsquo;ll use to write longer bluesky posts without having to make threads, hugo and its basics are enough.\nand hey, if you still think my words deserve something in return, here\u0026rsquo;s my ko-fi link. and if one day it really feels like i have to upgrade, i\u0026rsquo;ll open a ghost blog or something.\nno but why a blog in 2026? i\u0026rsquo;m gonna start saying words and please stay with me, do not be alarmed : i am NOT a conservative. i am a progressive person, a socialist, an anarcho-syndicalist, i believe strongly that yesterday was worse than what we have today (well, until the fascist drag us down again) and that we have to strive for a better future and a better tomorrow, as detached from the past as possible (not in memory but in acts).\nall of this, i believe to my very core, this is my personality, this is who i am as a person, as a woman, as a queerfolk and a trans person.\ni believe in progress and modernity, and in changing the world for the better by the way of reform or revolution, i strongly believe in all of that.\nexcept concerning the internet.\ni strongly believe, with all my heart, that internet, in our year 2026, is worst that it was before, and that it\u0026rsquo;s becoming shittier every day. concerning the internet, i am a conservative. i DO believe that internet was \u0026ldquo;better before\u0026rdquo; and that \u0026ldquo;we should go back to the way it was\u0026rdquo;. i\u0026rsquo;m not talking about the way we interact on the internet. i\u0026rsquo;m not talking about discourse on the internet. im not talking about how the internet is leaning politically, i\u0026rsquo;m talking exclusively about how internet work as a place, as a product, and deep down, as a software.\nlike, have you noticed? every website, every application, every software, every new game has become worst in quality. bugs are appearing where there were none, features that were always working suddenly stop doing that. your favorite app that was working fine now needs to be rebooted every now and then. every software installed on your computer now eats ram like it\u0026rsquo;s an open buffet. what they are now lacking in quality they are replacing with fucking \u0026#x2728; emojis which mean now what a simple piece of code did pretty well, an AI will do worse.\nand i am unfortunately old enough to remember periods, very briefs moment in time, when the internet went through phases that were so so much better, and more importantly, way better than the real world. for me the first time was roughly the mid-2000s and it ended with social network and facebook.\na reflection on internet past golden ages (by my standards) if you weren\u0026rsquo;t around, you can\u0026rsquo;t imagine how fun the web was at the time. yeah it was a dangerous place to be as kids but mostly because adults didn\u0026rsquo;t really understood it and let their children go roam free and do stuff without any precaution, education or supervision (this was basically our 90s/2000s equivalent of letting kids outside until 11pm in the 80s and having to run a PSA to remind the parents to check on them ; \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s 10pm, do you know where your kids are?\u0026rdquo;) which is great when you\u0026rsquo;re a kid in term of freedom, to be able to go and surf the web without your parent watching what you\u0026rsquo;re doing, but also you could end up being trafficked so that was a tradeoff.\nfor me that era was forums, MSN messengers, skyblogs (basically the french cultural equivalent of blogger that was centered around skyrock, a french radio dedicated to young people), RPGMaker2k and warcraft III online. what a time to be alive. i would argue that what we have today that is as close as this are maybe discord servers and mastodon instances : that separation of communities by interest is something that i think we had and was working very well at the time, although discord is destroying the open internet by obfuscating information in non-indexable communities but i\u0026rsquo;m getting sidetracked, this is a subject for a future post (yes i have a bone to pick about discord and discord-like applications).\nnow, if i want to be totally honest, that web was kinda\u0026hellip; bland? do not get me wrong, nothing beats the 2000 post-dotcom bubble websites aesthetic, but who wants a web that\u0026rsquo;s interesting enough but not interactive enough that it still makes you yearning for the mines nature and grass from time to time. if i had to really point to a sweet spot of community, accessibility, cutting edge stuff and fun (with a dash of problematic things like very edgy humor or straight up every -isms you can think of), that \u0026ldquo;second golden age\u0026rdquo; of internet has to be somewhere between 2010 and 2012. facebook was still friend and family (and not bot and shitty interactions with strangers), twitter started to be relevant as the \u0026ldquo;public town square\u0026rdquo; but was still very non-algorithmic and so people fought for attention the old fashion way : by shitposting.\nwhen thinking about when that era ended the other day on bluesky, msmeaaaa found an incredible and very fitting explanation : the mayas were right, the world did end on the 21th of december 2012; psy obtained his 1 billions views on gangnam style, the first video to ever reach that level of popularity and bam, gone, there were no more world to conquer, and internet started collapsing on itself by becoming more mediocre every seconds.\nand even if i yearn still for the long lost golden ages of the internet, i trully miss this one. i miss the blogs. i miss old twitter when they didn\u0026rsquo;t tried and it was okay. i miss when internet was still that obscure thing that was creeping more and more on real life, i miss the joke that politicians and journalists really didn\u0026rsquo;t get twitter and its pretend-influence at the beginning, i miss the less-user friendly interfaces that were somehow easier to use once you got used to it.\nand yes, i know, of course i know it\u0026rsquo;s almost purely nostalgia; i don\u0026rsquo;t miss old trends, i\u0026rsquo;m just too old to keep up with the new ones. i miss gangnam style, dumb flashmobs, pranking and harlem shake, but all of this is basically what people are doing with tiktok trends, i\u0026rsquo;m just too old to use tiktok.\nand not all aspects were so perfect either. i know people were shitty, edgy, racists, misogynist, queer and transphobics. we do not miss the redditors of old that ended up being purged, and rightfully so.\nbut i still miss it. i miss the style, the energy, basically internet as a \u0026ldquo;place\u0026rdquo;. it\u0026rsquo;s like internet ended up being gentrified, and i\u0026rsquo;m that old tenant that doesn\u0026rsquo;t recognize her old neighborhood anymore.\nso yeah my point is : internet IS becoming worse.\nwebsite that were previously fighting for attention by offering services that people would want, are now purely made to trick you. gmail is not longer the best mail, but you\u0026rsquo;ve been here for so long, why change. google doesn\u0026rsquo;t work as a search engine anymore, but we\u0026rsquo;re still using it, because it smother every competition. youtube killed its competitors and now your subscriptions don\u0026rsquo;t reach you.\nall of this has a name, and it\u0026rsquo;s called enshitification : everything is becoming shittier. and that\u0026rsquo;s because of monopolies of course, abuse of companies in a dominant position that now does not need to make any effort to retain their consumer base, now they just want to squeeze every bit of personal information from you (which they already have, tenfold, but still need more for some reasons) and everything, every bit of the web is now made to get everything from you, and no more to give you things in exchange from a bit of attention.\nyeah, it\u0026rsquo;s 2026, and i kinda misses the time when the only annoying thing on the internet was targeted ads. i would have loved for it to stay like that.\nfight the future, one blog at a time so what\u0026rsquo;s my point? well, since we can\u0026rsquo;t go back in the past, i can, however, make the conscious effort of fighting for the old ways. and one point i think we can start, is by taking back space in the internet. not being hosted somewhere, not being own by an entity, but just a server, a website, a blog, a space you can call your own on the internet. this will not start a revolution, this will not change how things works on the internet today. this will barely be something.\nbut it will give me a place to write, a place to be, a place to call home.\nso yeah, it\u0026rsquo;s 2026, and i\u0026rsquo;m opening a blog.\nnakou, you\u0026rsquo;re a french girl. why english? because i took the habit years ago to communicate mostly in english on the internet. and turns out i have to also work professionally with people all around the world and, believe it or not, english is the most common language we have. the american empire might be crumbling, but the british empire survive in our usage of the shakespearean tongue.\nalso, disclaimer, i\u0026rsquo;m using a mix of codium, visual studio code and basic gitlab web editor to write, so the spell and grammar checks might be less than enough, and my dyslexia might not help. but as long as i\u0026rsquo;m understandable and that i get my point across, we should be good.\nfinally, some article may be written in french, and they will be done like that because i will have probably something very french to share, probably about french politics, and i\u0026rsquo;ll have the goal to share my thoughts with as many french people as i can, and my country is very bad at reading english like\u0026hellip; i\u0026rsquo;m watching all my movies in their original languages and i\u0026rsquo;m getting shitted on i swear to god. dubbing is a religion here.\naight, im somewhat satisfied by those really elongated explainations of questions nobody really asked good! then, welcome to my blog. it\u0026rsquo;s 2026, but we\u0026rsquo;re partying like it\u0026rsquo;s 2004 babyyyyyy.\n","permalink":"https://blog.nakou.dev/posts/my-blog/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/fr/posts/mon-blog\"\u003eversion française de cet article\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ewell not really that homemade.\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eit\u0026rsquo;s made with \u003ca href=\"https://gohugo.io/\"\u003ehugo\u003c/a\u003e, a static website generator which can manage a post system (that i write somewhere and then build to be hosted somewhere else, yes, even when i want to do simple things, i manage do make them complicated anyway).\nbut it\u0026rsquo;s not like a wordpress or a substack or anything.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch1 id=\"but-why-tho\"\u003ebut\u0026hellip; why tho?\u003c/h1\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eeverything is shit. substack is shit and owned by nazis (or is hosting nazis? can\u0026rsquo;t keep track of who\u0026rsquo;s a self-claim nazi or just eating with them),\nwordpress is bloated, they really did a number on my boy. and i wasn\u0026rsquo;t really interested to go the full way html+css pages by hand, or make my own blog system old school it would have been annoying (and i HATE frontend development, i never feel more the attraction to vibecoding than when talking about frontend development).\u003c/p\u003e","title":"this is my new blog"}]