i'm pivoting to AI (Artificial Incompetence)

in case you need a taste of how fucked the tech industry is right now, I'm being required to use AI at work. if I talk about how it fucks up or overcomplicates basic asks, it's because I "don't know how to use it" which indicates a "lack of growth mindset", and thus poor performance. I've been told this directly to my face, starting immediately.

so not only must I use Claude, I have to cover for Claude's mistakes, and then go the extra mile to pass off my own work as Claude's.

@AmyZenunim

If gen AI is so awesome, why are companies mandating it? Shouldn't its value just become obvious?

I am reminded of something Tim Bray wrote about blockchain years ago:

" I’m an old guy: I’ve seen wave after wave of landscape-shifting technology sweep through the IT space: Personal computers, Unix, C, the Internet and Web, Java, REST, mobile, public cloud. And without exception, I observed that they were initially loaded in the back door by geeks, without asking permission, because they got shit done and helped people with their jobs.

That’s not happening with blockchain. Not in the slightest. Which is why I don’t believe in it."

Quote from https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/05/13/Not-Believing-in-Blockchain

I Don’t Believe in Blockchain

ongoing by Tim Bray

@EFreethought @AmyZenunim not all companies mandate it, the company i work for makes it as easy as possible to pick up, and encourages usage, but there is no mandate of any kind, devs are trusted to use the tools to suit the job, and many use it, with the understanding that it’s a tool, if it messed up and we let it though, we messed up.

Many devs, experienced or not, happily use it. And indeed, here it was asked for and pushed in by devs.

Mandating it is stupid and counter productive.

@EFreethought @AmyZenunim

There is no value add for commercial users. Zero. They just make stuff that seems appealing to us as a commercial side for a tech that is actually not at all about everyday users.

Only value add is for business owners seeking the pipe dream of greater value extraction from a more outsourced workforce,

and for more rapid military targeting than humans and their organizations can reasonably achieve, at the expense of accuracy.

@EFreethought @AmyZenunim I read this post and only this post, and till the end I was convinced it was about AI.
Funny

@EFreethought @AmyZenunim I know this is a rhetorical question, but I think there are two aspects to it.

First, is that tech under capitalism but more specificially under * bros (tech, finance, etc) has become so utterly bureaucratized and middle-manned and anti-worker and wealth-transfer-y and generally just SHIT that a huge portion of everyday work is just shoveling shit around.

Second, is that the * bros square-peg-round-holed LLMs into a thing that "just works" and "saves time" when it really just changes the mode and appearance of the shit shoveling, and actually creates enough of its own shit to more than compensate for the amount of shit it's automatically shovelling (assuming that shit is even shoveled kind of OK in the first place).

Since that extra shit is not immediately visible to many people and will only be found months or years down the line, it's seen as an incredible timesaver.

And this of course discounts all of the ethical/environmental and cognitive decline issues with it.

So they literally created the problem, created a new problem to solve the old problem that results in an even bigger problem, and then with their vast wealth have been continually and perpetually trying to sell the new problem as a solution.

It's ponzi schemes, all the way down.