Me: no way, AI is very helpful, and if it isn't then don't use it
created challenges in achieving the expected productivity gains
achieving the expected productivity gains
Me: oh, that explains the issue.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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It's hilarious to watch it used well and then human nature just kick in
We started using some "smart tools" for scheduling manufacturing and it's honestly been really really great and highlighted some shortcomings that we could easily attack and get easy high reward/low risk CAPAs out of.
Company decided to continue using the scheduling setup but not invest in a single opportunity we discovered which includes simple people processes. Took exactly 0 wins. Fuckin amazing.
Wow shockingly employing a virtual dumbass who is confidently wrong all the time doesn't help people finish their tasks.
It's like employing a perpetually high idiot, but more productive while also being less useful. Instead of slow medicine you get fast garbage!
Large "language" models decreased my workload for translation. There's a catch though: I choose when to use it, instead of being required to use it even when it doesn't make sense and/or where I know that the output will be shitty.
And, if my guess is correct, those 77% are caused by overexcited decision takers in corporations trying to shove AI down every single step of the production.
The workload that's starting now, is spotting bad code written by colleagues using AI, and persuading them to re-write it.
"But it works!"
'It pulls in 15 libraries, 2 of which you need to manually install beforehand, to achieve something you can do in 5 lines using this default library'
I was trying to find out how to get human readable timestamps from my shell history. They gave me this crazy script. It worked but it was super slow. Later I learned you could do history -i.
Turns out, a lot of the problems in nixland were solved 3 decades ago with a single flag of built-in utilities.
They tried implementing AI in a few our our systems and the results were always fucking useless. What we call "AI" can be helpful in some ways but I'd bet the vast majority of it is bullshit half-assed implementations so companies can claim they're using "AI"
The one thing "AI" has improved in my life has been a banking app search function being slightly better.
Oh, and a porn game did okay with it as an art generator, but the creator was still strangely lazy about it. You're telling me you can make infinite free pictures of big tittied goth girls and you only included a few?
You mean the multi-billion dollar, souped-up autocorrect might not actually be able to replace the human workforce? I am shocked, shocked I say!
Do you think Sam Altman might have… gasp lied to his investors about its capabilities?
Nooooo. I mean, we have about 80 years of history into AI research and the field is just full of overhyped promised that this particularly tech is the holy grail of AI to end in disappointment each time, but this time will be different! /s
AI is stupidly used a lot but this seems odd. For me GitHub copilot has sped up writing code. Hard to say how much but it definitely saves me seconds several times per day. It certainly hasn't made my workload more...
They've got a guy at work whose job title is basically AI Evangelist. This is terrifying in that it's a financial tech firm handling twelve figures a year of business-- the last place where people will put up with "plausible bullshit" in their products.
I grudgingly installed the Copilot plugin, but I'm not sure what it can do for me better than a snippet library.
I asked it to generate a test suite for a function, as a rudimentary exercise, so it was able to identify "yes, there are n return values, so write n test cases" and "You're going to actually have to CALL the function under test", but was unable to figure out how to build the object being fed in to trigger any of those cases; to do so would require grokking much of the code base. I didn't need to burn half a barrel of oil for that.
I'd be hesitant to trust it with "summarize this obtuse spec document" when half the time said documents are self-contradictory or downright wrong. Again, plausible bullshit isn't suitable.
Maybe the problem is that I'm too close to the specific problem. AI tooling might be better for open-ended or free-association "why not try glue on pizza" type discussions, but when you already know "send exactly 4-7-Q-unicorn emoji in this field or the transaction is converted from USD to KPW" having to coax the machine to come to that conclusion 100% of the time is harder than just doing it yourself.
I can see the marketing and sales people love it, maybe customer service too, click one button and take one coherent "here's why it's broken" sentence and turn it into 500 words of flowery says-nothing prose, but I demand better from my machine overlords.
Tell me when Stable Diffusion figures out that "Carrying battleaxe" doesn't mean "katana randomly jutting out from forearms", maybe at that point AI will be good enough for code.
You all are nuts for not seeing this article for what it is
Which is?
A hit-piece commissioned by the Joker to distract you from his upcoming bank heist!!!!!
Replace joker for media and replace distract you from bank heist with convince you to hate AI then yes.
Do convince us why we should like something which is a massive ecological disaster in terms of fresh water and energy usage.
Feel free to do it while denying climate change is a problem if you wish.
I wrote this and feed it through chatGPT to help make it more readable. To me that's pretty awesome. If I wanted I can have it written like an Elton John song. If that doesn't convince you it's fun and worth it then maybe the argument below could, or not. Either way I like it.
I don't think I'll convince you, but there are a lot of arguments to make here.
I heard a large AI model is equivalent to the emissions from five cars over its lifetime. And yes, the water usage is significant—something like 15 billion gallons a year just for a Microsoft data center. But that's not just for AI; data centers are something we use even if we never touch AI. So, absent of AI, it's not like we're up in arms about the waste and usage from other technologies. AI is being singled out—it's the star of the show right now.
But here's why I think we should embrace it: the potential. I'm an optimist and I love technology. AI bridges gaps in so many areas, making things that were previously difficult much easier for many people. It can be an equalizer in various fields.
The potential with AI is fascinating to me. It could bring significant improvements in many sectors. Think about analyzing and optimizing power grids, making medical advances, improving economic forecasting, and creating jobs. It can reduce mundane tasks through personalized AI, like helping doctors take notes and process paperwork, freeing them up to see more patients.
Sure, it consumes energy and has costs, but its potential is huge. It's here and advancing. If we keep letting the media convince us to hate it, this technology will end up hoarded by elites and possibly even made illegal for the rest of us. Imagine having a pocket advisor for anything—mechanical issues, legal questions, gardening problems, medical concerns. We're not there yet, but remember, the first cell phones were the size of a brick. The potential is enormous, and considering all the things we waste energy and resources on, this one is weighed against it benefits.
Not being able to use your own words to explain something to me and having the thing that is an ecological disaster that also lies all the time explain it to me instead really only reinforces my point that there's no reason to like this technology.
It is my own words. Wrote out the whole thing but I was never good with grammar and fully admit that often what I write is confusing or ambiguous. I can leverage chatgpt same way I would leverage spell check in word. I don't see any problems there.
But if you don't mind, I'm interested in the points discussed.
Ok, let's look at your own words then:
I heard a large AI model is equivalent to the emissions from five cars over its lifetime.
Cool, I hear lots of things. Where's the evidence?
So, absent of AI, it’s not like we’re up in arms about the waste and usage from other technologies. AI is being singled out—it’s the star of the show right now.
Who is we? I am not happy about any of it, but especially when it is something not especially useful (you could have used spelling and grammar checkers that have predated AI by many years but you decided to waste water).
And I don't really care about the potential of an orphan-crushing machine as long as we let it keep crushing orphans.
I love this last part the best though:
Sure, it consumes energy and has costs
We can just forget about these because you didn't want to use standard grammar and spellcheckers and they have the potential to do a bunch of things they can't do. Awesome. Totally worth the end of civilization.
Cool, I hear lots of things. Where's the evidence?
It's not crushing orphans. It's solving advanced problems that human brains are not able to and reducing the time between discoveries but also just being fun to play with and helps everyone access tools that just speeds everything up and only going to get better.
Does more than spell checking, not a sound argument.
Everything in life will have a cost. We have to weight the benefits against the cost. AI is potentially the greatest benefit we could see in our lifetime.
That is training, not use. You are being dishonest.