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.
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?
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™.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
