CrankySec

Smart Guys

Where I come from, there's this saying that goes something like "the smart guy's weakness is believing everyone else is dumb." When you believe that you're smarter than everyone else, you make assumptions. When you make assumptions, you're fucked.

"No one would do that!" - They would

"No one will think of that!" - They will

"Why would anyone do this? It makes no sense!" - LOL

Those assumptions are, coincidentally, at the core of pretty much every single software, hardware, wetware vulnerability there is.

"Why would anyone type ‘  OR  ’1’ = ‘1’? It makes no sense!"

Being a dilettante is a very dangerous thing, and the tech industry is full of those. That, I think, comes from not having experienced reality like many of us have. Assumptions made by a tech bro born and raised with all the privileges in the world are not the same assumptions you and I would make. That's why they come up with those incredible disruptive ideas and get confused when people tell them "You just reinvented the bus." They have never interacted with public transit in their lives. "A bunch of those companies started in a garage!" And who has garages available like that? Exactly.

This absurd disconnection between people with unfettered access to capital, and the rest of us is obviously going to end poorly for everyone. And that's another bug that Silicon Valley insists it's a feature: thinking that negative consequences are for the plebs. They are not. It feels that way because those consequences usually hit when the perpetrators are long gone. The world is the way it is right now because of things that were done 40, 50, 60 years ago. Moving fast and breaking things is just another term for kicking the can down the road. It's unfair, and it is infuriating.

That's privilege: not having to think about the consequences of your actions. You can do whatever the hell you want if you have money and don't have to deal with the consequences of your actions. You can litter the sky with satellites, fuck those who make a living studying it. You can unleash cars that "drive themselves" on the streets, and if some pedestrian or motorist dies in the process, it's a small price to pay for progress.

Even when this "progress" doesn't do much for the overwhelming majority of people on this planet. You can spend billions of dollars, use the energy whole countries can only dream about, consume water that people would go to war to have access to, just to develop a technology that will...hmmm... "wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs."

For what? Why would kicking a huge chunk of the workforce to the curb be a worthy goal? It's not, of course. It's just another "I will become extremely wealthy if I am allowed to do this, and there's literally no one who can stop me. When the bill comes due, I'll be gone. And I don't even care about the future of my descendants." The people who claim to be inventing the future, don't give a shit about the actual future.

This, of course, is a very mediocre and shortsighted way of doing things. Who in their right mind will take out a six-figure loan that cannot be discharged to go to college and study computer science? Or engineering? Or physics? Or music? Or literally anything else that makes this life some of us enjoy, you know, enjoyable? If there's no middle-class, there's no hope of achieving social mobility. Not that we've had that for the past 40 years, but you know what I mean. It is at least nominally possible.

What is Anthropic, whose CEO said that quote above about wiping out half the entry-level white-collar jobs, going to do when there are no workers at all to use their shit? Are they going to sell LLMs to other LLMs? Who's going to pay for that when no one's got any money? Who's going to pay for anything? The future this cunt named Dario Amodei is pitching is obviously a threat to his own company. But who gives a shit? They will IPO, he'll become a trillionaire, acquire everything there is to acquire and still have trillions left, and die. The price of his lifestyle is everyone's jobs, the environment, the middle-class, and social mobility. We are giving up that, so Amodick over there can have an impossibly lavish lifestyle. It's a stupid trade.

And that's what's been plaguing us for decades: mediocre people being celebrated, handsomely rewarded, and fêted for doing mediocre shit. That's why you, youngster who just emailed me asking for advice, can't find a job that's not going to drive you insane. And forget about sitting on the couch to watch some new TV show or listen to some tunes from some new band: no one will be able to afford dedicating time to learning and practicing the arts when they are struggling to make ends meet. No parent who got laid off today because of Claude will be able to bankroll their kid through culinary school tomorrow, so no more nice restaurants.

No more of anything, really. Because we do a lot of things now that will only yield results later. We need to eat the cost of letting medical students study and train for a decade or more before we can have doctors. Can't do that if you don't have a support system. We need a system that lets people train today so they can be professionals tomorrow, and train the next generation. Without those things we don't have any kind of innovation anywhere.

Your software will be the same bland shit everywhere. Your music will be a weird mishmash of everything you've ever listened to, but bad. Your movies and TV shows are going to be predictable and look the same, but uglier than they are today. Your architecture will all beige, boring, and dumb. Your food will be shit. Your art will be no more. Nothing new is going to happen.

I fear we're headed to a very dumb dark age. And what do we get in return? It is unreal to me that someone will go on the record saying "We plan on destroying society as we know it, and have a new ruling class that would have made the French guillotine people twice just to make sure they are not coming back.", and everyone is like "Eh. Sounds pretty good to me. Cool tech. I can cheat on my homework and create images I wouldn't be able to otherwise, because I'm a talentless bitch."

Cybersec? Well, we're either going to watch Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and literally every "tech" company in the world kill our profession, or we're going to go to the other side and make a living attacking instead of defending. Until we run out of people to do even that because no one in their right mind would even think about considering this field. Why would they? You need training, and you need to start somewhere, right? Wrong. Anthropic just killed entry-level white-collar jobs, so you're $200k in debt and can't enter the market. Get comfortable with outages, leaks, hacks, and fraud, because no one's going to be there to protect the infrastructure we all rely on.

We can, of course, argue that Dario, and Sam, and Mark, and Satya, and Sundai are all morons who are also full of shit, because they absolutely are. But the mere fact that we're entertaining this idea, and just watching those idiots kill jobs, the economy, and the planet with reckless abandon to make line go up shows how fucked up society has become. They are saying "We are going to make your life a fucking nightmare!" and we're all going "Yes, please!"

Here's the thing, though: human beings are crafty, ingenious, clever, and the thing those LLMs will never be: creative. And we are stubborn, petty, and vindictive. If shit goes down the way I just poorly described, human beings are going to find a way to overcome this bullshit. We've been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and, when push comes to shove, we know that the only answer to existential threats is to band together, and there's no Nvidia GPU out there that can beat a bunch of people who are fed up. We are smarter, and we are not sociopaths with billions of dollars who think everyone else is dumb. Let's fucking go.