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Are the people paying your paycheck being fair to you? Are the executives of your company paid orders of magnitude more than you are? Fairness starts from there. Your job is to be as unexploited as possible. I hope my coworkers also have this goal.

What does my relationship with the c-suite/my work have to do with a colleague dumping their unedited chatgpt crap on to me? I legitimately do not understand what point you’re trying to make. There seems to be a lot of assumptions here and I’m not sure what they are.

Sending your unedited LLM outputs to me is not sticking it to the execs. If you really want to play that game, you go ahead and ship that or hand it to someone who deals with the final output. That’s your prerogative and you can face the consequences. I am not here to clean up your AI slop. That’s not my job. At that point you are the problem, not the c-suite.

All I hear from AI evangelists is “it’s a tool! It’s not the problem! It’s people using it wrong!” Ok, then the people using it are the problem if something is wrong. So if you act this way, which is clearly not a productive use of the tool, you are the problem.

Edit: let me just ask you a somewhat multi-faceted question. If you ask me for a summary of something and I simply hand you what ChatGPT gave me, would you say “thanks” and be satisfied? Is that what you wanted me to do? Is there a reason you asked me to do it instead of prompting ChatGPT yourself?

What if I did this every time I had to write anything? Every email. Every summary. Every report. Just prompt, copy, paste, send to you.


> If you ask me for a summary of something and I simply hand you what ChatGPT gave me, would you say “thanks” and be satisfied?

Yes. Again my job is to stay unexploited. Saying yes is the easiest option. I'll leave the worrying to the people making an order of magnitude more money than me.


It seems you are either very unhappy at your job or just anti-work, that’s fine you do you/sorry if your work sucks, but there is a huge gradient between “completely not caring and doing the bare minimum to collect a paycheck” and “sacrificing everything for a company that does not care about me.” Many of us fall in that gradient. We do decent work and clock out when we’re done.

If you want to phone it in or act your wage or whatever go ahead but don’t make it my problem. You’re not sticking it to your employer. You’re actively making your workplace worse for everyone else. Your decisions impact others.

This is like working in the service industry and simply not doing your job. Management doesn’t suffer and they’ll just fire you. The people you work with have to do your job for you. What have you actually accomplished?


First of all, I don't agree with your implication that AI produced code is bad. It's as good as the developer prompting it in my experience. Secondly, yes I'm anti-work. Capitalism does not allow for what you are desiring. Capitalism is configured such that capital is seeking maximum return for minimal costs (my pay). I am incentivized to do the opposite. Wealth inequality is a multiplier on how hard I'm going to try to achieve my goal.

> First of all, I don't agree with your implication that AI produced code is bad.

Never said that. I said generating code with an LLM then not looking at it at all and pushing it (which is what started this whole comment thread) is a selfish and lazy decision.

Not everyone prescribes to a strict anti-work stance. Most people don’t in fact. So we’re at quite an impasse and it doesn’t change the fact that your decisions become your colleagues’ problems and does nothing to deconstruct/fight capitalism. I feel sorry for anyone who works with you if this is not an internet routine and reflects how you actually operate.


And I don't agree with that. Who cares how the code got generated? Like I said most code that's written by AI is better than code written by humans.

> Like I said most code that's written by AI is better than code written by human

1) this is an arbitrary bar that needs more qualifiers (all code? All people?) and 2) citation needed.

I don’t care how it was generated. I want you to vet the results at some point with your knowledge and not send me whatever it spits out with no consideration for the results. You’re not sticking it to capitalism when you pass the buck to me. You’re being selfish.

I think we are just too far apart on this to be productive unfortunately. I just urge you to consider the impact of your choices. See my accessibility comment from a different part of the thread:

> I also may be staring at consequences you are not. It’s passing the buck with no regard for who is left to deal with the results at the end.

>What if we are working on, say, accessibility tasks? If I see your work won’t actually help those in society who seriously need these features, what am I supposed to do? My kneejerk is 1) fix it (more work for me, selfish on your part), 2) kick it back to your lazy hands that clearly doesn’t see this as an issue, or 3) send it up the chain (or laterally) where someone else has to ask these questions or - worse - it gets shipped and people who need this stuff are screwed. This is basic ethics.


> You bought a laptop or desktop with an operating system, and it did what it said on the tin: it ran programs and stored files.

I feel like people may be viewing the past with rose colored glasses. Computing in the 90s meant hitting ctrl-s every 5 seconds because you never knew when the application you were using was going to crash. Most things didn't "just work", but required extensive tweaking to configure your ram, sound card... to work at all.


I remember when the computer crashed and the user hadn't saved recently, we blamed the user.

It's sad, but they should've compulsively hit save after every few letters - it's documented very clearly on page 404 of the manual. It's a real shame that such things couldn't be done automatically until recently, early-2000-era CPUs just weren't sophisticated enough to run advanced, reactive logic like that.

My parents indoctrinated me as a child to constantly hit save because they grew up with that. It was a part of our cultural expectations for "basic life skills to teach children".

Serializing a document was non-trivial for the first two decades of personal computing. Auto-save would have destroyed performance.

Indeed, not like today, where we're closer to the metal and have as few abstractions as possible. Maybe we'll be able to use high level languages again after this RAM shortage passes.

This is not just the past. I still have headaches configuring my video card to work with the right CUDA drivers, etc.

The tower of abstractions we're building has reached a height that actually makes everything more fragile, even if the individual pieces are more robust.


We just need one more layer of abstraction to fix that, and everything will be fine

I'm vibe coding this presently. Update soon.

Wait, I literally still hit Ctrl-S constantly, usually a few times in a row.

Have people outgrown this unnecessary habit? Haha


Manually editing config files thanks to an obscure thread so that your printer can actually be recognized by the OS

> Computing in the 90s meant hitting ctrl-s every 5 seconds because you never knew when the application you were using was going to crash.

That was in the Windows world. Maybe in the Mac world too?

No so much in the *nix world.

Windows seems to have improved its (crash) reliability since then though, which I suppose is nice. :)


And yet the word "crash" appears quite often in The UNIX-HATERS Handbook: https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

Yep, it's not surprising that a book called something HATERS Handbook would be pretty focused on the negatives, even if they're rare. ;)

And then having to learn ctrl-q the minute you started working in the shell..

Muscle memory is a bitch!


lol be honest that lunacy was unique to Microsoft, never had to do that with FrameMaker on SunOS

Still though -- once you got a workflow, no matter how terrible, it strongly tended to continue to work that way, and it was still much easier to diagnose, fix, and just generally not have unexpected behavior.

This is the issue; agents introduce more unexpected behavior, at least for now.

My gut is that always on "agents who can do things unexpectedly" are a dead-end, but what AI can do is get you to a nice AND predictable "workflow" easier.

e.g. for now I don't like AI for dealing with my info, but I love AI helping me make more and better bash scripts, that deal with my info.


alot of software engineering, especially in complex systems, is still just tweaking retries, alarms, edge cases etc. it might take 3 days to even figure out what went wrong

I don't know what computers you were using.

I had occasional crashes, sure, but unless you had some very dodgy computers, it seems like you're overcorrecting for those supposed rose-colored glasses.

I never knew anyone in the '90s who was constantly living in fear of their programs crashing and losing their work.


Were they using Word? That was absolutely a fear of mine at the time.

I used Word—mainly on Mac, version 4.01—all through middle and high school for my homework, and never had any particular problems with it. Frankly, I think it was much more stable then than it is now.

> Computing in the 90s meant hitting ctrl-s every 5 seconds because you never knew when the application you were using was going to crash.

THIS.

I lost so much work in the 90s and 00s. I was a kid, so I had patience and it didn't cost me any money. I can't imagine people losing actual work presentations or projects.

Every piece of software was like this. It was either the app crashing or Windows crashing. I lost Flash projects, websites, PHP code.

Sometimes software would write a blank buffer to file too, so you needed copies.

Version control was one of my favorite discoveries. I clung to SVN for the few years after I found it.

My final major loss was when Open Office on Ubuntu deleted my 30 page undergrad biochem thesis I'd spent a month on. I've never used it since.


Open Office on Ubuntu 11.10 user here. I can confirm it froze frequently and you would lose everything. it was incredibly frustrating

Windows 95 Word was also bad. Some poor non-CS student brought his thesis to our computer pool and worked from Floppy with the only copy he had. Panic mode on when the backup file and original did not fit on that floppy any more and Word asked to swap disks for an empty one. We advised him to just continue swapping, eventually Word will have that backup file on the other disk. It worked after an ennerving amount of floppy swaps...

Quality issues are a different vertical within the space of software/user misalignment. The sort of issue the author talks about is more like the malware of the 90-00s era: the software deliberately does something to screw the user.

Hmm ... no?

I used computers back then and many things just worked fine. I found Windows XP way more predictable and stable than any of its successors.


The comment said "in the 90s". Windows XP was only released 10/2001.

So how stable were Windows 95, or Windows 3.x, IYE?


Ah, fair point!

Windows 3.x was pretty good, imo. Windows 95 bad. Windows 98 overall good but like 7/10.


Israel are the terrorists who invaded Palestine and have committed crimes against humanity all across the Middle East. Your hypothetical situation is nothing at all like what's going on in reality. Iran is our ally against Zionist occupation of our own government.

> Obviously the Iranian government are not good guys

I'll believe this when it comes from someone other than the Epstein people. As it stands, the worst people in the world do not like Iran, so they're definitely doing something right.


Tesla has a P/E ratio of 364.981. It's blatant fraud.

Nobody is forced to buy shares of any company. Even automatic 401k investment plans let you specify what to buy if you so choose. Perhaps you could make the argument Elon makes false promises to boost the stock price, but at the end of the day, individual investors must decide what they believe in no matter the CEO's antics.

Enron was absolute peanuts compared to the financial fraud Musk has been executing (with the apparent blessing of the SEC). At its peak Enron had a roughly $70B market cap, TSLA is currently sitting at $1.74T. We can expect similar numbers from the SpaceX IPO.

It's hard to compare these numbers directly since valuations have increased quite a bit since a quarter century ago. As a proportion of the S&P 500, Tesla (2.3%) is about 4x of Enron at that $70b (0.6%).

> this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.

I think Musk being a ketamine addict explains a lot and this is very aligned. Given that he can't build a self-driving car, he would have to be under the influence of very strong drugs to think he could build a Dyson sphere of all things.

That being said, some sort of financial fraud is even more on brand.


Dumb question, do the cybercab thingies not drive themselves? Having a safety driver doesn’t disqualify them if for the vast majority of the time they’re autonomous. It just means they’re earlier into chasing 9’s than Waymo.

The characterisation of “level 5” autonomy as the car handling any conceivable circumstance (not that you explicitly made this claim here) is just silly. Humans can’t handle any conceivable circumstance either.


No they do not drive themselves. They're not Waymos (which do drive themselves, without a driver).

Apparently this is a real thing: https://www.generativeaiforgood.com/

Source for it being an Israeli operation versus rando doing a thing?


...what am I looking for?

I just provided a source that this is an Israeli initiative.

> this is an Israeli initiative

The source shows an Israeli person. That doesn't make it an "Israel operation." It looks like the site of every small nonprofit I've ever seen.


Anything coming out of Israel is by definition Israeli. Add to that mandatory service and the stated partnerships with other Israel organizations. I don't see how arguing semantics is adding anything here.

I heavily doubt that if the author would be from Spain, that you would call it an Spanish operation with the same undertones.

If it was generative ai being used to slander the people Spain was committing a genocide against, absolutely. Imagine if they had generative AI during the genocide of the Americas and the Spanish were using it to fabricate false sexual assault claims against conquistadors. Exact same situation.

I somehow doubt it. They didn't need to invent the sexual assault crimes against the former IOC chief that first came up with the genocide accusations.

I mean they absolutely did need to invent those, not that it has any bearing on the genocide.

I noticed people like to change the definition of genocide. Because the common understanding just blatantly doesn't fit the situation in any real sense.

It's a genocide, the most well documented in all of history.

The Democrats have a very similar platform to the Republicans (especially around ICE and Israel, both of which Harris vowed to continue supporting). Trump is uniquely incompetent though, which if you believe in accelerationism may or may not be a good thing. For instance Democrats have long yearned to go to war with Iran, now Trump did it, but he did it in such an incompetent and rushed manner that it's led to US bases throughout the Middle East being destroyed and abandoned. That's a good thing that came out of a bad situation.

Lots of yapping, no showing. Show me the equivalents I asked for.

> Democrats have long yearned to go to war with Iran

Really?


I'm not trying to be combative, just honest. Here is Harris saying Iran is our greatest adversary (sorry for the Zionist source). Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton have also been very vocal about wanting to attack Iran. Clinton actually recently praised Trump!

https://x.com/EYakoby/status/2045697406612762951


Oh, Harris called Iran an adversary! Wow! I'm glad we didn't elect her or the party that negotiated the last deal with Iran! The party that tore up the Iran deal and kept joking about bombing them into the stone age and started 2 out of 2 of the last middle eastern forever wars is the much better bet.

What? They bombed Iran and started forever war 3 of 3? Who could have seen this coming?!


The Democrats started the genocide against Palestinians and Harris vowed to continue it (just as Trump has).

That's right, keep pivoting.

No, Harris failing to push back hard enough on Gaza is not in the same galaxy of culpability or catastrophe as Trump starting a war with Iran on Israel's behalf. And endorsing their actions in Gaza, lest we forget.


And let's not forget who is actually in office and started the war, and how it's currently going. We can wring our hands about what democrats might have done but we have active proof of what republicans are currently doing and it isn't pretty. There's a vast gulf between "hawkish" and "actively bombing." I'd be willing to give pretty much anyone else a shot at it right now.

I simply do not vote for Zionists of either party. They can keep swapping seats and lose every time. If you support Israel, you cannot have my vote. I'll just sit out the election if I have to (and did last time).

Oh, that's why you can't acknowledge the simple fact that Kamala was better on Gaza, because if you do you acknowledge your own culpability in making the genocide worse.

More people in Gaza were murdered under Biden/Harris than Trump. I’ll never understand neo-liberal extreme parasocial behavior. These people are not your friends, they are the scum of the earth. Treat them as such.

What Biden did in Gaza (and Trump continued) is way worse than what has happened in Iran. It's a vile crime against humanity to attack Iran and kill civilians but Gaza is a straight up US fueled genocide.

It's not apparent on first read but I do think he's referring to the US and Israeli governments.

I'm pretty sure that's why the above comment said he needs to look in a mirror.

If he's correctly calling out our government, than he is looking in the mirror no?

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