My company is pivoting hard to Claude for everything, and besides the fact that it’s irritating as fuck to use, it has me worried about shenanigans like in this article. For almost 50 years, they’ve had a “no reliance upon 3rd party platforms for core functions,” but since they hired an AI apologist to the C-suite, all that has gone out the window in a matter of months.
Don’t wait, start now. The job market is a nightmare and finding one that isn’t being consumed by incompetent C-level AI FOMO is getting harder every day. I work on life-saving medical equipment and AI is being pushed on us for things that could literally kill people if not done correctly. Why would anyone spend 30 minutes using AI and risking people’s lives when I can just write it myself in 5 or 10? Madness. Complete, society-scale madness. The people pushing AI have no fucking idea what they are doing or how engineering works. People are going to die.
That’s essentially what I’m doing right now, and thus far, they still want workers who understand the code. However, my manager has already said that his boss had it compose a few scripts, and he thought he could therefore replace an entire workflow.
Thankfully, my manager talked him down and pointed out that it still got several nontrivial things wrong and that taking humans out is dangerous when it comes time to push to production.
But it’s concerning to see that the higher ups don’t understand what it is and what its limitations are.
This makes me so happy about my employer. I’m sysadmin for a newspaper.
We had an all-company test run 2 weeks ago to answer the question “What if we’re hacked?”
Turns out we’re able to produce a printed and online newspaper within a work day if NONE of our normal IT systems (hardware, software, e-mail, network) are accessible.
Everything we need has a redundancy that’s kept completely physically separated from the network until the day it’s needed.
Fuck AI and all, but to be faaaiiiiir, if you take away most people’s computers they would be far less efficient than someone that did the same job without one 50 years ago.
In the profession I recently retired from, if they suddenly went back 50 years in tech the global economy would crash, and even a 20-30 year regression in tech would seriously fuck things up until people adjusted. And even then they wouldn’t be able to reach the same levels of efficiency.
Yeah, I think this is normal. You can probably say the exact same sentence for any year to have occurred in the last several hundred years. Probably all the way back to whenever we transitioned to specialization for production scaling. You know, when someone figured out you can make more clocks per day if you have a nut producer, a spring producer, a frame producer, …
This is the current web with its social media like life. Say something, be outraged.
But let’s be honest. We really have no idea what to the true story is. There are so many ways to spin a story. Probably both sides fucked up.
The one thing we know is fucked up, is that anthropic is acting like a startup. If they want to work with businesses they need a dedicated support team.
I dont know if its because its bern a long day and i am exhauseted but i am tired of being outraged.
Based on a quick web search, staff can only remove people temporarily for rule violations; it takes a court order to get a long-term ban from the NYC subway.
The point is, literally nobody reacts to subway malfunctions with, “and we call this progress???” as if returning to previous modes of transport is somehow the right answer to problems with far less drastic solutions than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
LLMs are a new technology that people are still figuring out how to use effectively. Part of that process is becoming reliant upon “the new way of doing things” to prove that one can rely on it. Clearly, there’s more work to be done. (My dayjob includes working on this same reliability problem.)
One can argue the wisdom of being an early adopter in any new technology. Some thirty years ago, I was told I was insane for going all-in on Linux. The times change. The sanctimoniousness of the peanut gallery hasn’t. The lunatics betting the farm on all that wacky open source stuff three decades ago turned out to have been largely right, despite the numerous failed ventures involved in getting to here.
This is just how the new technology cycle works. With every new tech, a whole lot of people discover all of the ways it doesn’t work before somebody figures out the way to make it work more reliably than any alternative.
Disliking AI is fine and good. But that is a really dumb argument.
“60 employees who can’t be productive without the internet? And this is progress?”
“60 employees who can’t be productive without computers? And this is progress?”
“60 scribes who can’t be productive without clay tablets? And this is progress?”
Etc.
Edit: LLMs/AI are going to change some things. They are going to make (shitty) coding and various automations much more accessible. They are probably not a revolutionary technology like computers/internet, but that they could be a core part of some people’s workflow is absolutely not unthinkable. It has been shown that there have not, so far, been major boons to productivity on the whole, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some use cases.
It is an argument against the false comparison I was responding to, no more. Although the fact AI companies can’t seem to create a profitable or finished product even with subsidies, points to other issues I have not addressed
You people are like flat earthers with this AI hatred.
It’s genuinely fascinating and useful. You’re allowed to hate the companies and evil behind it, but the kid in me is still enthralled by this technology.
I’m pretty sure the reason tech employees hate it so much is because it’s an existential threat to their profession. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t spend so much time talking about it.
Uhhhh computers and Internet aren’t essential either. But they did speed up a lot of things and make new things possible.
There’s nothing I use AI for that I couldn’t do myself, but AI can do most things faster and a few things better than me (LLMs that is. Image generators do all their things better than me because I can’t art, but I don’t use them at all).
If the Internet is down for a period of time at the office, I would expect that my dev team is able to continue working (assuming they’re not exclusively hitting a third party API). At least for a few hours, if not days. It might not be the same cadence, but I’m not about to send them home.
Computers are a tool; AI is an outsourcing. It’s the difference between a carpentry team not having saws, hammers, etc. and having the carpentry team unable to do work if Jose (the outsourced carpenter) doesn’t come in.
AI is a non essential tool. Anything that a chatbot produces, can and should be achievable by a human with access to the same sources of information. Anyone hired to do a specialist job, who cannot perform without access to AI, should be summarily fired because their output would be indistinguishable from that of their LLM of choice.
In contrast, the Internet (as massive interconnected network), computers, even books, enable humans to deal with information in ways impossible to achieve without them, and help augment us. Reading feeds your brain. Computers are a window to creativity. AI does nothing of the sort, in fact I believe it does the opposite, pushing us to outsource our thinking processes while making us feel smart, undeservedly.
In the military we have a maintenance tracking system. It’s electronic. We literally bdo drills for if it goes down and we have to resort to paper backups. And there are paper backups.
Without a computer I could still manage an entire flight line worth of planes, and everything they need. Maintenance, fueling, sorties, etc. What you’re telling me is that this company and lots of companies do not have a contingency for if there is a system failure or other outage.
That seems acceptable? Why? Short of a power outage (and probably not even then unless we can’t Jerryrig a lighting solution) we can do all the jobs required with hand tools. It’s crazy to think that people don’t think this should be a thing.
Yeah, ok. But the military is explicitly supposed to keep functioning when the backend gets nuked literally. Who wants to pay for that kind of redundancy just so that some people can watch Netflix while they’re dying of radiation poisoning?
Hopefully companies relying on other companies like crowdstrike.
What are we paying for if not to have things work and have backups? I have so many questions about the companies you give your money to and what you think you’re getting in return?
Like. I feel like there’s a lot of jobs where email could fail/crash and work could still be done. The whole company shouldn’t just shut down because the AI is down. It shouldn’t shut down because email is down. That’s not just poor planning it’s really poor business practice.
What did they do before the AI? Why (when considering how temperamental LLMs can be) would anyone trust it to such an extent that you’re dead in the water if it fails?
60 employees who can’t be productive without AI?
And this is progress?
My company is pivoting hard to Claude for everything, and besides the fact that it’s irritating as fuck to use, it has me worried about shenanigans like in this article. For almost 50 years, they’ve had a “no reliance upon 3rd party platforms for core functions,” but since they hired an AI apologist to the C-suite, all that has gone out the window in a matter of months.
Got me thinking I should warm up my resume…
Don’t wait, start now. The job market is a nightmare and finding one that isn’t being consumed by incompetent C-level AI FOMO is getting harder every day. I work on life-saving medical equipment and AI is being pushed on us for things that could literally kill people if not done correctly. Why would anyone spend 30 minutes using AI and risking people’s lives when I can just write it myself in 5 or 10? Madness. Complete, society-scale madness. The people pushing AI have no fucking idea what they are doing or how engineering works. People are going to die.
I’ve been unemployed for going on 18 months. It’s awful and the market is the worst it’s been since I’ve been working (15 years or so).
Its ok tho, there’s no recession, becuz stock marmket!!! 11!1!11!!!
Just got let go last week, not ready for the journey it’s taking me on.
That’s sucks. Best of luck to you!
You too friend!
My company is doing the exact same thing.
Why everyone is so eager to add an expensive middleman into their workflow is beyond me.
If you’re being forced to use it, just try to convince them to make whatever workflows you use be AI agnostic, and not required to still function.
As long as you do that, you won’t run into this.
That’s essentially what I’m doing right now, and thus far, they still want workers who understand the code. However, my manager has already said that his boss had it compose a few scripts, and he thought he could therefore replace an entire workflow.
Thankfully, my manager talked him down and pointed out that it still got several nontrivial things wrong and that taking humans out is dangerous when it comes time to push to production.
But it’s concerning to see that the higher ups don’t understand what it is and what its limitations are.
yikes! How long until his boss is like, you’re getting in the way of my plans and are wrong, fires that boss for a yes man, and then boom.
Yup. For sure. Its a matter of when.
Regardless of the fact that work has ground to a halt the CEO will continue to claim productivity has never been higher since implementing AI
This makes me so happy about my employer. I’m sysadmin for a newspaper.
We had an all-company test run 2 weeks ago to answer the question “What if we’re hacked?”
Turns out we’re able to produce a printed and online newspaper within a work day if NONE of our normal IT systems (hardware, software, e-mail, network) are accessible.
Everything we need has a redundancy that’s kept completely physically separated from the network until the day it’s needed.
A business that has a workable disaster plan? Well done.
Fuck AI and all, but to be faaaiiiiir, if you take away most people’s computers they would be far less efficient than someone that did the same job without one 50 years ago.
In the profession I recently retired from, if they suddenly went back 50 years in tech the global economy would crash, and even a 20-30 year regression in tech would seriously fuck things up until people adjusted. And even then they wouldn’t be able to reach the same levels of efficiency.
Yeah, I think this is normal. You can probably say the exact same sentence for any year to have occurred in the last several hundred years. Probably all the way back to whenever we transitioned to specialization for production scaling. You know, when someone figured out you can make more clocks per day if you have a nut producer, a spring producer, a frame producer, …
This is the current web with its social media like life. Say something, be outraged.
But let’s be honest. We really have no idea what to the true story is. There are so many ways to spin a story. Probably both sides fucked up.
The one thing we know is fucked up, is that anthropic is acting like a startup. If they want to work with businesses they need a dedicated support team.
I dont know if its because its bern a long day and i am exhauseted but i am tired of being outraged.
Eh consider it like a power outage. These corporations don’t deserve more than automated slop. If that system is down, it’s an earned break
Funny how nobody seems to use this argument every time there’s a problem with the NYC subway.
Because there’s alternatives. You don’t have to use the subway if it breaks down, and people have enough brains to take a taxi or walk instead.
This is 60 people going, “Fuck, the subway is down. Guess I can’t travel anywhere, now.”
Based on a quick web search, staff can only remove people temporarily for rule violations; it takes a court order to get a long-term ban from the NYC subway.
Which problems are you referring to? None of the physical issues, nor the human behaviour issues are relevant here.
The point is, literally nobody reacts to subway malfunctions with, “and we call this progress???” as if returning to previous modes of transport is somehow the right answer to problems with far less drastic solutions than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
LLMs are a new technology that people are still figuring out how to use effectively. Part of that process is becoming reliant upon “the new way of doing things” to prove that one can rely on it. Clearly, there’s more work to be done. (My dayjob includes working on this same reliability problem.)
One can argue the wisdom of being an early adopter in any new technology. Some thirty years ago, I was told I was insane for going all-in on Linux. The times change. The sanctimoniousness of the peanut gallery hasn’t. The lunatics betting the farm on all that wacky open source stuff three decades ago turned out to have been largely right, despite the numerous failed ventures involved in getting to here.
This is just how the new technology cycle works. With every new tech, a whole lot of people discover all of the ways it doesn’t work before somebody figures out the way to make it work more reliably than any alternative.
Disliking AI is fine and good. But that is a really dumb argument.
“60 employees who can’t be productive without the internet? And this is progress?”
“60 employees who can’t be productive without computers? And this is progress?”
“60 scribes who can’t be productive without clay tablets? And this is progress?”
Etc.
Edit: LLMs/AI are going to change some things. They are going to make (shitty) coding and various automations much more accessible. They are probably not a revolutionary technology like computers/internet, but that they could be a core part of some people’s workflow is absolutely not unthinkable. It has been shown that there have not, so far, been major boons to productivity on the whole, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some use cases.
One is a deterministic machine on your desk, that you own, to do stuff at your desk.
The other is a nondeterministic thing somewhere else, that you don’t own, to do stuff at your desk.
That’s really an argument against all cloud services, and not LLMs. Although most people do LLMs in the cloud.
And I absolutely agree with the argument. It’s insane to me how much companies will put in someone else’s hands.
It is an argument against the false comparison I was responding to, no more. Although the fact AI companies can’t seem to create a profitable or finished product even with subsidies, points to other issues I have not addressed
That’s fair
So?
Seriously?
This isn’t an anti-AI argument it’s a pro-UBI argument
I was talking about a false dichotomy (before the person I replied to edited their comment to save face)
what are you talking about
You people are like flat earthers with this AI hatred.
It’s genuinely fascinating and useful. You’re allowed to hate the companies and evil behind it, but the kid in me is still enthralled by this technology.
It’s just getting weird at this point.
I’m pretty sure the reason tech employees hate it so much is because it’s an existential threat to their profession. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t spend so much time talking about it.
Huh.
Except, unlike computers and the internet, AI is not essential, unless your whole business revolves around it (in which case, good riddance).
Uhhhh computers and Internet aren’t essential either. But they did speed up a lot of things and make new things possible.
There’s nothing I use AI for that I couldn’t do myself, but AI can do most things faster and a few things better than me (LLMs that is. Image generators do all their things better than me because I can’t art, but I don’t use them at all).
If the Internet is down for a period of time at the office, I would expect that my dev team is able to continue working (assuming they’re not exclusively hitting a third party API). At least for a few hours, if not days. It might not be the same cadence, but I’m not about to send them home.
Computers are a tool; AI is an outsourcing. It’s the difference between a carpentry team not having saws, hammers, etc. and having the carpentry team unable to do work if Jose (the outsourced carpenter) doesn’t come in.
AI is a non essential tool. Anything that a chatbot produces, can and should be achievable by a human with access to the same sources of information. Anyone hired to do a specialist job, who cannot perform without access to AI, should be summarily fired because their output would be indistinguishable from that of their LLM of choice.
In contrast, the Internet (as massive interconnected network), computers, even books, enable humans to deal with information in ways impossible to achieve without them, and help augment us. Reading feeds your brain. Computers are a window to creativity. AI does nothing of the sort, in fact I believe it does the opposite, pushing us to outsource our thinking processes while making us feel smart, undeservedly.
In the military we have a maintenance tracking system. It’s electronic. We literally bdo drills for if it goes down and we have to resort to paper backups. And there are paper backups.
Without a computer I could still manage an entire flight line worth of planes, and everything they need. Maintenance, fueling, sorties, etc. What you’re telling me is that this company and lots of companies do not have a contingency for if there is a system failure or other outage.
That seems acceptable? Why? Short of a power outage (and probably not even then unless we can’t Jerryrig a lighting solution) we can do all the jobs required with hand tools. It’s crazy to think that people don’t think this should be a thing.
Yeah, ok. But the military is explicitly supposed to keep functioning when the backend gets nuked literally. Who wants to pay for that kind of redundancy just so that some people can watch Netflix while they’re dying of radiation poisoning?
Hopefully companies relying on other companies like crowdstrike.
What are we paying for if not to have things work and have backups? I have so many questions about the companies you give your money to and what you think you’re getting in return?
Like. I feel like there’s a lot of jobs where email could fail/crash and work could still be done. The whole company shouldn’t just shut down because the AI is down. It shouldn’t shut down because email is down. That’s not just poor planning it’s really poor business practice.
What did they do before the AI? Why (when considering how temperamental LLMs can be) would anyone trust it to such an extent that you’re dead in the water if it fails?