I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

[sabotabby]

 I keep going back to this essay, over and over again, as it's the best thing I've read all week and if you haven't read it, that means I get to be the one to tell you about it.

You're welcome.

Comments

[radiantfracture]

"the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable"

[sabotabby]

There are so many in education.

[china_shop]

LOL, that was wonderful. :-)

My standout line was "Having your team type in import openai does not mean that you are at the cutting-edge of artificial intelligence no matter how desperately you embarrass yourself on LinkedIn" :D

[greylock]

How can one "embarrass yourself on LinkedIn" if one is active on LinkedIn?

[sabotabby]

I am hard pressed to pick a favourite, which is why I didn't quote it.

[dagibbs]

Pretty good rant.

[sabotabby]

I enjoyed it a great deal.

[eagle]

So good. This made me so happy when I ran across it, and I shared it with a bunch of other people who all similarly approved.

Never ask Synergy Greg's opinion about anything.

[sabotabby]

No! And why does Synergy Greg make three times as much as I do?

[eagle]

There are many things (environmental, human rights, political corruption, the soul-deadening effects of putting a price on everything) to say about capitalism, but I think one of the underappreciated critiques is that capitalism is frequently governance by fast-talking con artist. There is probably some -ocracy word for that which I don't know.

[sabotabby]

Kakocracy!

[eagle]

Ah, yes, thank you!

[armiphlage]

My company is profiting greatly from AI.

We don't create AI. We don't use AI. We can't even spell AI right half the time. However, our factory is making lots of really expensive computer boxes with blinky lights on them, selling them to companies with scandalous amounts of money who think they can make money off AI.

When there's a gold rush, the people who get rich are the store owners selling shovels.

[ioplokon]

Yeah; the business cases I've seen are this and also some companies who replaced their customer support with a chatbot and make it an upsell to talk to an actual person.

[greylock]

Am journalist.
AI will apparently replace "donkey work".
That's not how it works.

[ioplokon]

Huh, I always thought the hardest & most annoying part of being a real journalism was getting people to talk to you and tell you things everyone doesn't know already & that the like... writing part was more the fun side because you get to be creative and synthesize things.

(then again, the closest I get to being a real journalism is submitting freedom of information requests for communications containing swear words for my own amusement, which I suppose an AI could maybe do...)

[greylock]

You'd be wrong.

"getting people to talk to you and tell you things everyone doesn't know already"

are skills I don't have. I HATE people, You need to get in the slop for that. I never had that skill.

which I suppose an AI could maybe do...)

Could! Would? And could it make connections? I doubt it.
I can remember stuff that happened decades ago, pre-internet, and connect A-B-X.

[ioplokon]

So what's the Donkey work? I thought it was an expression for the Worst Jobs (so therefore, talking to people...)

[greylock]

Donkey work for me (apparently) is, for listed companies: who is raising money, employment changes, and who is doing what, when.
The former is not-so-obvious, the latter two is all about the vibe.
It is grunt work, but it's all about the vibe

[ioplokon]

Yeah, I can't see how an llm would help at all there. People really seem to treat it like an oracle, but how will it "know" non-public information (unless it was trained on it and you can trick it in to leaking training data; I'm not sure that is legal, though? And it's not super reliable what you'd get)

I can see how scraping might be useful sometimes, to pull in a bunch of searchable data, but that's not really AI... For example, 404 Media has been able to sus out some gambling sites' acquisitions by noticing they share a WordPress user account (you could also see, eg, who shares Google Analytics tags)

[sabotabby]

Hah. I wish I were ruthless enough to do this grift.

[greylock]

Look.. AI, little things... simple two... little simple letters... but it’s big.

And I realized the other day, more than anything, when we were at David’s house and talking to a lot of geniuses from Silicon Valley and other places, they need electricity at levels that nobody’s ever experienced before to have to be successful, to be a leader in AI.

And a windmill turning with its blade knocking out the birds and everything else is not .
,” Trump continued.

[sabotabby]

Yeah, it's cool that to get the plagiarism machine to make a bad essay you have to drain a fucking lake.

[ioplokon]

Yes, my understanding is that for LLMs, there haven't been many technical advances, just a willingness to devote more processing power to training them and a decision to no longer bother cleaning inputs.

[viggorlijah]

I read it thinking who interviewed my boss?? So funny

[sabotabby]

LOL. Can't wait to sit through 10000 workshops on how to integrate into my job while cellphones get banned.

[blogcutter]

You'll get no argument from me - spare me from technology that thinks it knows better than me what I want to do! And when it comes to cell phones, I think there are good reasons why dumb-phones are making a comeback. Though why we have to be continuously available to all and sundry, by whatever technology, is beyond me. When I began my career, we were assured that by the 21st century we'd all be in an age of leisure and a full-time workweek would be maybe 20 hours!

[sabotabby]

I am tempted by dumb phones. But I like being able to check my email and Discord.

[dewline]

Same.

[dissectionist]

He has a similar rant about Excel sheets. As dealing with everyone else’s Excel sheets and converting them for SQL use is one of the things I have to do for my work when I’m wearing my Oracle Dev hat, I felt that one so hard.

[sabotabby]

I have a soft spot for Excel but I have that tab up to read next.

I'm sad I can't see his LinkedIn profile since I refuse to sign in to LinkedIn.

[dewline]

I was never comfortable with LinkedIn as it was being sold to me by some of the people running the job-search-networking workshops I was attending between contracts.

[dissectionist]

I’m not anti-Excel, and we use it regularly. His frustration is based around when people try to integrate it into workflows rather than using databases, which is also my frustration. I don’t mind when people don’t have an app yet and they’ve been collecting their data in Excel for years, and now they want to convert it into Oracle. That’s all good. Where it makes me murderous is when they have me make an app and then continue to input data into Excel and expect me to keep doing new uploads of Excel sheets periodically. I! Made! You! A! Database! And! App! Use the fucking app to input data, that’s why it exists! You have no need to use Excel for this project ever again! Don’t make me waste my time doing conversions and uploads when you have beautiful app forms!

[minoanmiss]

If you killed them and I were on the jury we would not convict you.

[lastofhisname]

Truly one for the ages.
And he's fucking right. I despise what those pushing "AI" have done to tech.

Enshitification continues..

[sabotabby]

Here is this thing no one asked for that will fuck up your life. Now we're going to jam it into everything.