Things I Hate About AI

Anyone who knows me will tell you, I'm not a Luddite. Quite the opposite. I like shiny new technology. I have a closet full of broken tech dreams i.e. all kinds of cool gadgets that were either ahead of its time or outlived its rather cool usefulness. So, when I tell you about the things I hate about AI, it's not a knee jerk reaction. In fact, I wrote a number of papers in the mid-2010s about the potential of AI to help us mere humans.

I don't think that AI is reaching that potential. My list of things I hate about AI is partly why I believe that. 

1. It's often wrong but sounds right. Unless you have expertise in an area, you can't tell if the AI answer is true or not. If you do have expertise, you don't need it. This is an example where no answer is a better answer. I've learned to only use AI in situations where I can truly evaluate the answer's veracity.

2. It makes us lazy. We stop doing learning simple things because the AI does it for us, just, you know, wrong. Lazy isn't necessarily bad. A lot of great software was created by people too lazy to do a simple task. Lazy plus wrong, however, is a toxic combination.

3. All that typing or speaking when a couple of button clicks will do is not progress. We moved away from command lines for a reason - they were too much work for a lot of tasks and error prone. GUIs, designed right, have democratized computing. Which brings me to…

4. AI is being used to make up for bad UI design. Instead of spending bazillion dollars on AI, try fixing your horrid interface or placing that one important selection right up front. I guess we're back to the lazy thing again. Seriously, if I have to ask an AI agent to find and change a setting for me, then the UI is not working out.

5. Generative AI slop is ruining art for everyone simultaneously. Art has soul. Art has creativity. A prompt doesn't count as either and all AI can do is mimic something already created. The problem is that people are getting used to the idea that AI can create art and that what it spits out is art. 

6. AI slop in general but especially code. When revered open source projects like cUrl have to stop bug bounties because of it, you know it's destructive. It's another effect of the intersection of lazy and wrong. You get code, plans, writing, and search results that are not useful. So, it's a waster of everyone's time and resources.

7. The environmental impact is not worth the results. Is the consumption of massive amounts of energy, and the pollution that comes with it, worth what we get from AI? The true ROI is lousy when you take the damage into effect.

8. RAM, once a cheap commodity item, is increasingly expensive because of AI needs. The irony is that there may not be PCs capable of running AI apps because of AI. Once the cost of the endpoint exceeds the benefits of the service, which will be discarded first? I'm betting on the AI.

9. General AI is purposeless. Domain specific AI adds value to whatever tasks you are doing. General AI, especially chat, is a time suck. It's like voice activated everything. It makes sense in the car but not in a crowded office, or church. AI is like that. It has to be used where it makes sense and it's not. That means it needs to be tailored to and restricted to specific domains. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is actually useful. General Copilot on Windows? Less so, by a lot.

It is apparent from my list that I doubt the long-term ROI on AI. That's a money problem and hence, not my concern. My chief concern is that using AI doesn't yield consistent, high-value benefits in most instances. The societal costs - cost of RAM, environmental damage, relying on false information, and the laziness it breeds - are everyone's problem. 

RAM It All To Hell!

 Warning: This post has the potential to be acronym laden. Read at your own risk.

As we all know by now, RAM prices are going through the roof. Some companies are even going so far as to exit the consumer market in favor of OEM sales. All of this is caused by the build out of AI systems by major tech companies. These systems have dubious profitability models. Here are some possible effects this sudden rise in RAM prices may have on the broader market.

1. The Mountain Climber. RAM prices continue to climb. And climb. And Climb. This has the effect of making RAM expensive for consumer products such as SSDs, laptops and desktops, and, especially, smart phones. Other devices that rely on computer technology such as smart TVs are also affected. More expensive storage means more expensive devices, which slows consumer and maybe small business purchases. The electronics segment takes a huge hit. They will have to decide between selling equipment and worsening margins. Ironically, many of these companies are the same companies that are building out AI centers. So, the RAM manufacturers win but everyone else loses.
2. The Crash and Burn. It turns out that no one really wants the AI stuff enough to pay for it. After hundreds of billions of dollars in capital investments and labor, most AI companies either go belly up or severely cut back on their AI products. Half or fully built datacenters are snapped up by the handful of tech companies that found a way to make AI useful enough for their customers to see value in them. With the buildout stalled or stopped, all that RAM that was held back floods the market. Consumers get a windfall, as cheap RAM allows for upgrades and lower prices, electronics and computer companies win back some margin, and AI investors go home with lighter pockets.
3. The Old Ways Return. Back when I started my career, in the before times, RAM and storage devices were expensive and limited. You had to learn to optimize your code to run on computers and devices with extremely low resources. That changed when RAM and hard drives became cheap. We could add Gigabytes of RAM and Terabytes of disk space to even low-end consumer devices. Those times may now be at an end, and the software industry may need to go back and find ways to shrink the footprint of software. This means more cost and time for software development. More cost to the consumer too. Given the amount of competition in the software business, companies may not have the ability to raise prices and, instead, take a hit on margins and profits. 
4. The Soft Landing. The boards of companies investing in AI start to demand profits from AI that match the level of investment. In response, CEOs, slow, rather than stop, the build out of new data centers. RAM doesn't exactly flood the market, but prices start to come down as availability comes back up. Eventually, the market finds its equilibrium. At that point, consumer prices are a bit higher but not crazy high and some value from AI is achieved. Rather than a blood bath, larger companies go on a buying spree and consolidation takes hold. Most of the winners will be large tech companies and a handful of now incredibly wealthy entrepreneurs. 

To me, the most likely scenario is the Crash and Burn scenario. This happens all the time in the tech business. Companies jump on a bandwagon, spend stupid amounts of money, discover that consumers aren't in it for the durations, and then retrench. Some companies win; some lose. The AI Crash and Burn is the best scenario for the consumer. They have some short term pain but eventually get lower prices and some AI value. 

The Soft Landing is also possible, though less so than the Crash and Burn. The history of computing is rarely so pleasant. Just look to the Dot Com crash and the Storage Service Provider bloodbath for inspiration. This scenario is probably the best one for the industry and consumers alike. Prices come down and we get new and useful products. If this happens, it will be a unicorn.

The least likely is the Old Ways Return scenario. Software is a bit like food. Our ancestors lived with constant food scarcity. Over time, food became abundant and we no longer know how to live in a scarcity environment. That's why so many of us are overweight to the point that Ozempic is a major drug. Early in my career, I had to jam software into kilobytes of ram and disk space. Very few software developers today have ever lived with that kind of resource scarcity. RAM and disk space were so cheap that you could expect consumers to just buy more to suit your applications. Memory and storage space are just not something that extreme optimization is given time and money to anymore, and no one knows how to do it well.

If we get the Mountain Climber scenario, we're all screwed. If RAM prices continue to climb, it hurts the tech industry across the board. Consumers too.

These are just observations from my 40+ year old perch. I'm typically an optimist until given a reason not to be. I'm rooting for the Soft Landing, even if I think it unlikely. Let's see if we get the AI equivalent of the PC revolution or Dot Com crash.

Things I Hate About Linux as a Desktop

I've been using Linux since the days you had to compile it from source and there were no distros to speak of. Those were the days of altering two dozen configuration files just to get it kind of working. Ah, the olden days. Since then, Linux has come to dominate the server space, powers every commercial and private cloud, and is the backbone for my home lab. I have at least four Linux computers in my house and all have full desktops loaded on them. A lot of activities are much easier to perform using the desktop tools and, in a pinch, my Linux servers can act as a secondary desktop. That's after my Windows desktop and two Windows laptops but I digress.

Despite all that, there is still a lot of things I hate about Linux as a desktop computer. In fact, these problems are what keep me from jettisoning Windows in favor of Linux. They are also part of why Linux has stalled at its current tiny fraction of the desktop computing market.

So, here are, in no particular order, my complaints about Linux. There are more, but these are top of mind for me.

1. After all these years, some things can still only be done with the command line. Yes, it's getting better, but the command line is still unavoidable. For newbies and non-techies, this is enough to keep them away.

2. The desktop distros are different enough that they may as well be different operating systems. If the Linux community wants to fulfill the dream of being a viable desktop OS, they need to settle on one GUI. Gnome, Cinnamon, and KDE are heading there but for every distro that adopts one of them, a new GUI emerges. The fragmentation is killing the Linux desktop market. Many Linux users see this as good, favoring choice over consistency. The rest of the world is confused by it all

3. Which brings me to diffusion of energy. So many maintainers are complaining about how few of them there are to maintain all the distros, applications, and components that go into a desktop OS. That's in part because they are all working on competing products. There are hundreds of distros with a half dozen GUIs. On top of that the bundled apps are different as well. Lots of people doing the same work just spreads the butter too thin.

4. Competing package managers and app stores don't help either. No one app store interface can update packages from all the different formats. That's a problem for developers and users alike. At moment, I use scripts to update APT, Snap, and Flatpak packaged applications. Your average person has neither the ability nor desire to do write code to manage updates.

5. No matter what anyone says, none of the graphics look as good as Windows or MacOS. Look at Gnome or LibreOffice next to Microsoft or Apple equivalents. I get that that's a heavy lift. Microsoft and Apple can employ a small army of designers to tweak the smallest aspect of the user experience, and even they don't get everything right. Aesthetics do matter to the average person who looks at Linux and has a flashback to 1998.

6. Linux suffers from the "chicken or the egg" principle. Major applications, such as Microsoft Office, won't run on Linux. That slows adoption since many people need these apps. That reduces the market for Linux desktops, making it less attractive a market for major software companies. It's a vicious cycle for sure. Linux needs an iron clad Windows compatibility layer that emulates Windows behind the scenes. Wine and similar apps are still not good enough as far as compatibility and performance goes.

7. Hardware compatibility is still a problem. No matter the reasons for this, a lot of hardware, both old and new, can't run Linux well. I find this especially true with graphics hardware. It even manifests itself with strange desktop GUI behavior. And no, Wayland didn't make it better.

8. While it's great that some Linux distros can run on low-end machines, when you upgrade the software on those machines, it can either bork the machine entirely or make it act all wonky. Either disable updates when the hardware doesn't match up with later requirements or make updates that work on everything. You can't just leave it to fate. And don't tell me that it's impossible to test everything. Microsoft does a much better job with backwards compatibility and when it can't, disallows the upgrade such as the Windows 10 to Windows 11 upgrade issues.

9. The ability to operate alongside Windows machines is still poor. SMB shares either can't be connected reliably or break during a reboot. It's been 30 years of Linux working with Windows machines. This needs to be fixed for Linux to be a reliable desktop machine.

10. All those configuration files are the worst. There are so many configuration files still lurking around in Linux distros. For example, to change from the Ubuntu LTS update cycle to a non-LTS one requires a change in a text file. Corrupted text files can bork your whole machine. Settings of all kinds are sitting in files that can be erased, moved, or corrupted. This needs to be a database with settings apps that change behavior. Files like these are a leftover from the 90s. That was over 35 years ago. 

11. Which leads to a lack of obvious settings available to the user. For example, a number of distros that used to use Cheese as the camera app, switched to Gnome's Snapshot. The latter doesn't have setting to invert the image. Lots of cameras don't do this automatically. Unfortunately, lenses flip the image so that it looks backwards. This is not to dish on Snapshot per se. Lots of apps are missing obvious settings such as flip the screen so that it looks true to life.

12. Gaming support still sucks. Compared to Windows, the best "Gaming" Linux distro is still much less capable than its Windows counterpart. That is partly due to graphics card support. Weirdly, we know this is possible because SteamOS is a Linux flavor. Mainstream distros, i.e. the one's that most people are likely to use, are not great for games. Meanwhile, Microsoft is doubling down on game support merging Xbox features into Windows. 

There's more, of course, but these are the ones that irritate the most. I would love to see Linux distros that are a viable alternative to Windows or MacOS for desktop/laptop computing. It's not even close and the major commercial distro players are obviously more interested in the server market. One can hope, nonetheless.