CUDA engineers, your job security has never felt more certain.
I was migrating from pfsense to Opnsense so I wasn't too familiar with some of the nitty gritty. Was migrating to xcp-ng 8.3 from 8.2 which has some major CLI differences. It was a pretty big migration that took me a full weekend.
OpenAI got things wrong (mostly because it was using old documentation - opnsense had just upgraded) maybe 8 times in the whole project and was able to quickly correct itself when I elaborated on the problem.
If I just had google this would've been a 2 week project easily. I'd have to drudge through extremely dry documentation that mostly doesn't apply to anything I'm doing. Would have to read a bunch of toxic threads demeaning users who don't know everything. Instead I had chatgpt 5 do all that for me and got to the exact same result with a tenth of the effort.
The AI is useless crowd truly makes me scratch my head.
But you'd know something new by the end of it.
So many are so fast to skip the human experience element of life that they're turning themselves into mere prompt generators, happy to regurgitate others' knowledge without feeling or understanding.
For this, you might not care to gain meaningful experience, and as a conscious choice, that's fine. But there are an increasing number of developer and developer adjacent people who reach for the LLM first. Who don't understand "their" contributions to projects.
The haters are those of us who have to deal with this slop, and the sloppy people submitting it without thought, care or understanding.
It's not just a tech thing. Kid's learning suffering at their ability to just crank out essays they've never even read.
LLMs and AI are getting better. We doomers aren't decrying the technical advances they're making, we're appalled at the human cost of giving people a knowledge-free route through life.
I'm not against the calculator and I'm not against LLMs. I'm against people choosing ignorance.
Conservation of Energy rears its head in fascinating ways.
Practically every educational institution is with me here, so uphill it may be, but it's an important battle for the future of mankind, and recognised as such. We've long joked about a quick slide into Idiocracy (2006), but substituting learning for what a LLM can answer for you is how you rapidly deskill and get there.
In this case, "ragequittah" up top doesn't know how their router/firewall is actually configured. That might work out okay for them but they (and people like them) don't even know what they don't know.
I didn't have to very much because pfsense that I've been using forever and opnsense are basically the same, but if I wasn't sure on why I was setting something the way I was setting it i would ask for clarification with sources. This just amounts to an extremely powerful google search tailored exactly to my situation.
I think everyone pictures ai users as drooling idiots who copy / paste without thinking. While I'm sure that exists you can use AI to learn and it works quite well. To me it feels like how a librarian might feel when people started using the internet to learn because if you don't use the dewey decimal system you aren't really learning anything.
And you can easily learn deeply with AI just ask it deeper questions. I do this all the time. I did this several times in this network setup when I did encounter something I didn't understand. If you aren't curious you won't learn, if you are you'll learn faster than any other method out there.
I think it's because, past autocomplete, for AI to be useful professionally you need to already have a lot of background and experience in what you are using it for, in addition to engineering and project management to keep the scope on track. While demos with agents are impressive in practice autonomy is not there they need strong guidance, so it only works as very smart assistant. What you are describing is very representative of this.
If you don't have that level of seniority then you'll struggle to get value from AI because it'll be hard to guide and keep on track, also spotting and navigating errors and wrong thinking paths. You cannot use it as an assistant, only takes what it says at face value, and given it'll randomly be wrong it makes it useless.
I use it like a book of openings in Chess. Advanced players also learn openings.
"AI" is also larger than plagiarizing Stackoverflow. Google AI answers on any topic, which most people use, are pretty poor.
Coming back to sysadmin/programming. There are many migration guides from pfsense to Opnsense, for example (note there are no mean people in that thread):
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=32793.0
The estimates are days, which is not that different from a weekend.
OpenAI now basically has your firewall configuration and who knows what else, so I would not recommend using "AI" for such sensitive matters.
Moreover the fact that the AI knows my setup now makes it effortless to troubleshoot.
But I wonder if there could be room for an ARM-like spec that Google could try and own and license but for AI chips. Arm is to risc-cpu as google-thing is to asic-aichip
Prolly a dumb idea, better to sell the chips or access to them?
Something like DirectX (or OpenGL) might be the better level to target? In practice, CUDA is that level of abstraction, but it only really works for Nvidia cards.
There are people actively working on that.
To circumvent: you have someone (who might be bound by the EULA, and is otherwise not affiliated with you) dump the data on the internet, and someone else (from your company) can find it there, without being bound by the EULA. Nvidia could only sue the first guy for violating the EULA.
However you are right, that copyright and patents still bite.
Did they? Sounds like AMD did that[^1] and that the project is continuing based on the pre-AMD codebase[^2].
[^1]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ZLUDA-CUDA-Taken-Down
CUDA is hardware designed according to the C++ memory model, with first tier support for C, C++, Fortran and Python GPGPU DSLs, with several languages also having a compiler backend for PTX.
Followed by IDE integration, a graphical debugger and profiler for GPU workloads, and an ecosystem of libraries and frameworks.
Saying just use DirectX, Vulkan, OpenGL instead, misses the tree from the forest that is CUDA, and why researchers rather use CUDA, than deal with yet another shading language or C99 dialect, without anything else.
now they dont want to sell them - why power local inference when they can saubscribe forever and you get their juicy datas too
100ms of latency is nothing when added to 10 seconds of generation time.
shrubble•2mo ago