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Cake day: May 10th, 2024

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  • As someone dabbling with writing, I bit the bullet and tried to start looking into the tools to see if they’re actually useful, and I was impressed with the promised tools like grammar help, sentence structure and making sure I don’t leave loose ends in the story writing, these are genuinely useful tools if you’re not using generative capability to let it write mediocre bullshit for you.

    But I noticed right away that I couldn’t justify a subscription between $20 - $30 a month, on top of the thousand other services we have to pay monthly for, including even the writing software itself.

    I have lived fine and written great things in the past without AI, I can survive just fine without it now. If these companies want to actually sell a product that people want, they need to scale back the expectations, the costs and the bloated, useless bullshit attached to it all.

    At some point soon, the costs of running these massive LLM’s versus the number of people actually willing to pay a premium for them are going to exceed reasonable expectations and we will see the companies that host the LLM’s start to scale everything back as they try to find some new product to hype and generate investment on.



  • The only reason we’re trying to somehow compromise and allow or even incorporate cheating software into student education is because the tech-bros and singularity cultists have been hyping this technology like it’s the new, unstoppable force of nature that is going to wash over all things and bring about the new Golden Age of humanity as none of us have to work ever again.

    Meanwhile, 80% of AI startups sink and something like 75% of the “new techs” like AI drive-thru orders and AI phone support go to call centers in India and Philippines. The only thing we seem to have gotten is the absolute rotting destruction of all content on the internet and children growing up thinking it’s normal to consume this watered-down, plagiarized, worthless content.






  • You do NOT get a choice about getting an education in a vast, vast majority of life paths in the developed world.

    I know a lot of people and exactly two of them are working in the field they got degrees in. You cannot always control the direction of your life, anything from medical issues to family emergencies to economics in your region can profoundly impact your chances of landing a career in your chosen study field, or even just getting a simple job that can pay back tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars as the interest snowballs.




  • In my time managing a team of about a dozen WFH employees, I had 10 of the 12 overworking every damn week. They were putting in time off-the-clock just because they were sitting at their desk without anyone coming in to shut off the lights and because they were comfortable at home. In the four years or so that I did that job, I had more problems with people overworking themselves than slacking off.

    There were a couple times employees were obviously doing the bare minimum and playing video games. Since I managed in-person teams as well in the past, I know that this is normal, there will always be some percentage of employees that cannot stand working and try to do anything to avoid it. This happens WFH as well as in offices, but when it’s WFH the company managers and owners don’t have visibility on it, and thus feel not in control, and that’s the very worst feeling for most of these folks who run companies.










  • Absolutely correct, I watched this happen to our tech team before I was also thrown in the chipper.

    And it doesn’t help that a lot of the young people trying to get into coding and tech fields are not what you would call titans of confidence and charisma, these are mostly introverted and thoughtful people who have studied most of their lives under the belief that meritocracy exists, and they can prove themselves in the business world by doing great work and being a good employee.

    Meanwhile glance over at the sales side of the building and there are people there making six figures a year who do next to nothing but party and tell lewd jokes, but are absolutely invulnerable to layoffs and downsizing as long as they can talk to clients and joke about sports with the CEO.

    The disillusionment around the business world is real and unsustainable.