A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers.

“Use ChatGPT to write your TPS reports, go home at lunchtime. Spend more time with your kids!” “Use Claude to write your code, turn 60-hour weeks into four-day weekends!” “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”

Imagine if AI/LLM tools were not shareholder catnip, but a grassroots movement of tooling that workers were sharing with each other to work less. Same quality of output, but instead of being pushed top-down, being adopted to empower people to work less and “cheat” employers.

Imagine if unions were arguing for the right of workers to use LLMs as labor saving devices, instead of trying to protect members from their damage.

CEOs would be screaming bloody murder. There’d be an overnight industry in AI-detection tools and immediate bans on AI in the workplace. Instead of Microsoft CoPilot 365, Satya would be out promoting Microsoft SlopGuard - add ons that detect LLM tools running on Windows and prevent AI scrapers from harvesting your company’s valuable content for training.

The media would be running horror stories about the terrible trend of workers getting the same pay for working less, and the awful quality of LLM output. Maybe they’d still call them “hallucinations,” but it’d be in the terrified tone of 80s anti-drug PSAs.

What I’m trying to say in my sleep-deprived state is that you shouldn’t ignore the intent and ill effects of these tools. If they were good for you, shareholders would hate them.

You should understand that they’re anti-worker and anti-human. TPTB would be fighting them tooth and nail if their benefits were reversed. It doesn’t matter how good they get, or how interesting they are: the ultimate purpose of the industry behind them is to create less demand for labor and aggregate more wealth in fewer hands.

Unless you happen to be in a very very small club of ultra-wealthy tech bros, they’re not for you, they’re against you. #AI #LLMs #claude #chatgpt

A nice little badge to display if your website still works right now.

(Full download: https://kestr.al/i/notonflare.gif)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

My non-algo feed on @Mastodon that is time-based and enhanced by boosts from people I follow is the most enjoyable method for consuming social posts and it improves my mental health versus how every other platform approaches it. I pretty much use Mastodon >90% of the time now.

It’s worth taking the time to slowly build your network and liberally mute, unfollow, and block who you don’t like. I’m on a single-person instance and I was able to do it.

I can't help wondering why the "AI" coding assistant vendors don't have faster release cycles.

Also, given the obvious business risks of building your club house in somebody else's yard, why haven't they generated their own IDEs already?

PhD Timeline
By XKCD (Randall Munroe).

Title text: Rümeysa Öztürk was grabbed off the street in my town one month ago.

That's where we are now. Let's work to drive away these invaders and to restore our values.

https://xkcd.com/3081/
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3081:_PhD_Timeline
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