@carnage4life Seen this firsthand and it makes for a nightmare.

It’s basically an internal DDoS on your ability to execute as a team, as you have to counter a lot of plausible sounding (but not applicable/not optimal/flawed) proposals/changes against other team members/higher ups that aren’t as discerning or knowledgeable.

@willhopkins @codinghorror @carnage4life Yup. The 'AI made x% of our headcount redundant' claims should be taken with a grain of salt and only after due diligence. Some of these companies are underperforming, overhired, and have massive AI data capex to cover.

This could be a Rust Belt moment or it could be a 3D printer moment ("no one will need hardware stores!") or any number of infinite possibilities along that spectrum.

That doesn't mean CEOs won't make dumb decisions anyway.

@paul Always felt more like a midlife crisis and a grasp for relevance than anything anyone wanted IMO. Rose’s record post-Digg has been one of short lived flare outs, so I didn’t really expect much.

The Internet is a very different place than the Web 2.0 era, and a much less easy going, fun one.

@felix @carnage4life That may have had an impact, but unlike Tesla at the outset or SpaceX, you’re basically working at a third rate AI company that is most well known for calling itself MechaHitler, being offensive, and generating naked images of children, while also constantly being interfered with by a drugged up, far-right CEO under horrible working conditions.

If you have AI chops, there are a million other places that would love to have you and pay you accordingly.

@codinghorror @carnage4life Musk has destroyed Twitter, but Dorsey selling it to him was kinda a business genius move (for Dorsey specifically)?

It was like when Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace from Tom Anderson (which was already largely dead by then) or when Instagram sold itself for a billion dollars to Zuckerberg.

I get what you’re hinting at, and I think Dorsey is far from a genius whatsoever, but….bruh, I’d sell my unprofitable, headache of a business to a sucker for a few billion, sure.

@fds @carnage4life I tend to agree though, to be fair, this applies to most wealthy people.

MySpace Tom may be the general exception (AFAIK)

@carnage4life Personal experience: It’s enormously useful for my field, but also making the usual overly confident suspects even more overly confident and (often) wrong, and increasing the number of them rather rapidly.

Also, seeing a lot of auto-generated content replying to other auto-generated content with almost no actual human evaluation, leading to a lot of really inane and stupid discussions. Lots of noise, low signal. YMMV.

@carnage4life Ideas are cheap.

So is AI right now, which is *heavily* subsidized and wildly unprofitable. Even as that curve goes down, and it will for some tasks, that doesn’t mean every idea will be financially viable (it still has to be good).

All of which is to say, generative AI is useful in some cases and will enable some financially unviable ideas to come more willingly to fruition. But it’s not going to kill personal expertise; it will just narrow it down a bit to when people want it.

@carnage4life Off the mark on this take.

First, consider the source of the claim, who has a very vested financial interest in perpetuating it.

Second, you still need expertise. A sewing machine doesn’t mean I can readily make clothes that fit well or make a leather jacket. Power tools don’t mean I can suddenly make myself a house.

Now, I *can* over time, as I learn the necessary skills to do so and….build expertise using the tools. Uh-oh!