if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)
This is the most beautiful thing I've read all year
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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As someone who conferenced some basic ML research in early 2000s and then left academia for a boring/stable software engineering gig in a non IT org to escape the hype bubble only to end up having to talk to people about ML/AI frequently this article speaks to me.
Old man yells at clouds
Old man yells at exploitative capitalist practices*
Ftfy
Awesome, now do one on “the cloud”
XXXX on the cloud. We have YYYY in the cloud. Gahhhh
this is a fucking masterpiece
Read the article. This hit home too close.
Amen.
Dear sweet christ, I've been the manager of a medium sized non profits databases (everything other than finance because they're special, as in using an overpriced wacky proprietary tool because they are used to it, oh and probably commiting fraud) and, as the author references, I have actually had one of the members of the board get a bunch of other people with 0 technical competence to try to get me to 'implement blockchain technology' on postgres.
Non of those fucking morons could ever provide an actual project outline. None of these fucking morons even knew their own teams processes, and they would all change depending on team member asked and date.
Not relevant to this story, but basically I am now disabled and living off of SSDI after being assaulted and seriously injured.
I am 99% sure, after years of working with completely technically incompetent managers, I am never going to work in tech again.
I would literally rather be poor, do uber eats delivery when I feel like it, and slowly build a video game, by myself, not even to make money, just to give my tech brain something to sate it.
I am too autistic to be able to handle the constant stream of bullshit and social manipulation/pressure from everywhere I have ever worked.
Addressing exactly one of those things: GBA Jam 2024 runs for another two months.
Problem is the morons from other industries have all decided that working in tech is now cool and le future, so they get hired at tech companies and bring all their stupid non-merit-based shenanigans with them. Good tech people don’t want to become bullshitters, so they avoid management positions, and therefore get these idiots as their bosses. The solution is to only work at small companies with flat hierarchy.
Man I feel this so much. Stay well good sir.
Aside from the technology stack being the embodiment of vendor lock-in and misery, the scamming is really what makes me not want to work on Generative AI tasks, or whatever the next hype thing is going to be.
The worst part is that many people want to be scammed. We have customers come to us, asking for a solution to a problem they've had for long time, and asking it to be solved with GenAI.
Then we tell them that there's really no use-case for GenAI there, that it could be better solved for half the money using traditional methods.
At which point, they ask us to integrate GenAI in some place anyways, because otherwise their boss will not give them the money. And of course, that boss also has a boss who also only frees up budget for GenAI.
And that just repeats upwards, until you have shareholders at the top, who eat up the hype, because other shareholders eat up the hype.
And if you tell them “no” too often they’ll choose your scummy competitor who’ll just tell them “yeah we put all the AI in it, whatever” over you who want to actually help them.
import tensorflow # we don't actually use this anywhere, but my boss told the client we use AI
A lot of spicy quotes I could steal.
I'm going to ask ChatGPT how to prepare a garotte and then I am going to strangle you with it, and you will simply have to pray that I roll the 10% chance that it freaks out and tells me that a garotte should consist entirely of paper mache and malice.
Facepalm again and again every time my non technical boss asks me if Ive been using genai to speed up my work. No boss, I haven't, that actually slows me down
I used GitLab’s version of Copilot when it was free and that was net helpful. It predicted for loops and stuff and was close enough, enough of the time that it was net positive. Not enough that I’d actually pay for it…
"Sure thing boss, I make all my wallpapers with it "
"Yeah, but my PC doesn't handle it well. If my PC were upgraded, it could really gen some AI."
Also doesn’t really make sense without dual 5k screens
Me, buying a 4070 super on the company's dime
Absolute poetry:
I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.
The CEO of the company that fired me consistently goes up on stage and talks about the transformative power of AI. The company does not use AI for shit.
Hey now, AI transformed him into a tool who goes onstage to talk about AI. That's transformative.
YES! I study AI, and this is exactly how I feel!
Side note-One of my favorite things to do is ask people what their use case for using AI is, and watch them sputter out "uh...emails and productivity and things."
Easy: recognizing bird calls on my phone.
It's got electrolytes, it's what the plants want.
I got pulled into a meeting with a team from AWS. I was told they were looking to implement a new solution, so I had to explain in detail how our data lake and data warehouse solution worked. I showed them how we pull data from all these different sources, how we have different integration patterns, etc.
At the end of my presentation, I asked "does that give you what you guys need? Or do I need to go into any more detail about anything specific? I don't know what you all are actually building, so I'd be happy to provide more detail where you need it."
Their response was "yeah that was all great info. We're looking to build an app using AI and ML that allows you to run the business with a click of a button."
I'm glad it was a remote meeting without cameras, because I literally face palmed. They didn't have an actual use case or problem they were trying to solve. They were literally just selling a solution built on AI and ML. They didn't know what it was gonna do, but by God they were committed to selling it.
Great read. Even in STEM research as a grad student I'm very tired of every saying "let's try machine learning on this problem" to get something that works marginally better than some conventional models but requiring huge amounts of computation and data.
I work professionally with actually useful ML stuff (we parse a lot of weird ass files and it's extremely powerful in that context) - we've looked at integrating gpt3 and it scored much worse on accuracy than the model we trained in-house. We're also investigating adding front-end AI bullshit to placate the CEO. Even at the good shops, you'll probably get buried in this bullshit - but there are good opportunities out there!
Hahaha:
if you continue to
try { thisBullshit(); }you are going tocatch (theseHands)
III. We've Already Seen Extensive Gains From-
When I was younger, I read R.A Salvatore's classic fantasy novel, The Crystal Shard. There is a scene in it where the young protagonist, Wulfgar, challenges a barbarian chieftain to a duel for control of the clan so that he can lead his people into a war that will save the world. The fight culminates with Wulfgar throwing away his weapon, grabbing the chief's head with bare hands, and begging the chief to surrender so that he does not need to crush a skull like an egg and become a murderer.
Well this is me. Begging you. To stop lying. I don't want to crush your skull, I really don't.
Fucking awesome writing style there - and a lot of salient points. The only weakness is that it's preaching to the choir - the use of jargon and technical references probably makes it inaccessible to anyone who doesn't agree with its conclusion.
That said, it's wonderfully cathartic.
That said, it's wonderfully cathartic.
Right‽ This was seriously the best rant I've read in ages; not only was it spot on, it was fucking hilarious.
This has to be the best way I've seen anyone describe what the problem with the current AI woo-woo is:
And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.
half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly
Wait your suppose to do that? I mean, don’t get me wrong, that makes sense, but so far 0% of the companies I’ve worked for do that.
Yeeeaaah you're supposed to regularly test that you can actually restore your backups, because boy do a lot of companies find out they can't only after shit goes sideways and to their horror they then realize that they can't restore some system's backups because reasons.
Not sure I've worked in a company that did that, and frankly even when I was CTO in a startup we didn't have automated backup tests – mostly because it was still early days and I just manually tested restoring our in-house service when a change was made that would warrant it. N + 1 other things to do besides automating backup tests so I deemed that Good Enough™.
Ive been calling this the reverse turing test:
Can you tell that a known human being is not an 'AI' chatbot, based on text correspondence?
Apparently we are now just going to have AI simulacra of ourselves date each other on dating apps and meet with each other on zoom.
The meeting thing in particular is so fucking insane.
Problem: Meetings waste time and accomplish nothing!
Solution: Don't hire or train competent people, instead, automate meetings, the transcripts of which will presumably still have to be read, and will likely not make any sense, thus necessitating more meetings.
The goal of technological civilization apparently truly is to create maximum misery via maximizing meetings.
Wait, has somebody actually suggested automating meetings? Like, has somebody said that out loud without a hint of irony or sarcasm?
Hold on , I'll edit this when I find a link.
Edit:
Ok, so here is OpenAI wanting to make... well basically it seems to want to have not only an AI agent in a text support chatbox telling you how to fix a problem...
...but give it the ability to completely take over your computer and just do it for you, presumably via Remote Assistance and whatever the Mac equivalent is.
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/openai-plans-chatgpt-supersmart-assistant-135029243.html?guccounter=1
No way this could go wrong and lead to fake support sites just fucking writing a batch file and executing it in the blink of an eye.
Then we've got both Zoom and Otter who yes, straight up, want to build AI powered avatars, based on each employee/user and replace the human entirely in meetings.
Fuck the infinite paper clip making machine, we are intentionally trying to make the infinite meeting machine.
Could AI personas attend your work meetings for you? One tech CEO says yes
One tech CEO has drain bamage, I take it. To paraphrase Charles Babbage, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.
Like, what the fuck is the point of this? If you think meetings are a problem and AI is the solution, there are a countably infinite amount of ideas you could come up with that aren't this idiotic
Upvote for use of real interrobang alone.
I can't help but love obscure punctuation