Dude donated a shit ton of money to slop Linux (omarchy). What did he expect?
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Well, yeah, the problem with LLMs in a professional context is exactly that the second order effects of using them are so bad that they wipe out the direct effect gains (the time saving in creating the text).
It's fine for entertainment if all you want is to be distracted for a while with some somewhat bland chewing-gum for the brain.
CEO Tobias Lütke... told employees last year that using AI is "a baseline expectation," and they should first prove they "cannot get what they want done using AI" before asking for more resources.
Isn't this an example of Play stupid games, win stupid prizes?
It looks like an example of Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Just playing uhm angels advocate? Not sure how to call it, the naive optimist perhaps!
Not necessarily: the statement (in isolation) is a call to learn and become capable to explain limitations. The criticized effect is basically "people not being able to explain the limits".
I suspect that "finding limits" wasn't incentived though (and I mean things like positive feedback, not money). And then you get shit-in-shit-out factories.
Or to rephrase your statement: If you want to play a game then stick to the rules you've set up - otherwise everyone's allowed to cheat.
A hammer makes a poor substitute for a knife & fork.
Ok, sure
However
In this case everyone that had a connection to reality told him that's not a reasonable baseline.
You can force everyone to use it, but then you are working against that
Not exactly setting up your workforce for a win
I would love to find anything that had a more positive outlook .. but alas perhaps I should ask OpenGrok because my creativity is not enough.
Fuck em.
He said AI is helping workers produce more output, but the quality of it is so bad that their colleagues have to spend more time fixing it
Everyone predicted this. Why the fuck didn't the billionaires? What is their major malfunction?
Not even predicted. This is what everyone realized the second they started having to use Ai tools at work. This has been wide knowledge for a year or two, and likely known by those doing early tests with it prior.
If a billionaire bought a ticket to the Powerball lottery and won they would attribute that win to their superior "genius", "work ethic" and deep strategy.
I got let go from a job about a year ago because I said this and showed the data to support my claim in reaponse to why it was taking me a while to complete some work. I was "not a good culture fit"
They're all conservatives. Conservatives are profoundly unintelligent by nature. Just the dumbest cockroaches to ever infest a planet.
Oh it is simple, they are fucking dumb. Always have been. If they do have some brain cells to rub together they will get stuck on short term gains for themselves which in the long run is fucking dumb.
Either way you slice it dumb, just fucking dumb.
We don't live in a meritocratic society, especially at the higher levels.
Right mommy, right daddy, right school, knowing the right people, right way of talking - that's far more important to end up a CEO than competence.
I'm surprised it's not more obvious. Tons of CEOs tank their companies and fail upwards into boards and other CEO positions of multi-billion dollar companies because they completely mismanaged the company but somehow rich people are geniuses?
We're all supposed to believe that the rich are rich because of their own merit and the poor are poor because of their own lack of merit, so that we don't force the rich contribute more to the public pot so that the poor aren't poor.
So the relentless propaganda we're bombarded with in the media is that the rich are great and amazing people who got to were they are due to their hard work and intelligence (notice how Bill Gate's mother who was a member of the board of IBM was never mentioned in the press when talking about "his" success with Microsoft) whom we should all look up to whilst in the last couple of decades we've been seeing more and more in the rightwing press stories about how the poor are lazy and dependent on benefits (aka social security if in America).
The poor aren't the ones who own TV Channels, Newspapers and (in countries that have that) end up in the boards of publicly owned TV Channels and Newspapers.
Because they always think they're the exception and everyone else is doing it wrong.
It's not uncommon with narcissists.
Because they always think they’re the exception and everyone else is doing it wrong.
They are wrong in this belief because being idiots they don't have the capacity to be aware that they are idiots. But generally this belief is true. It is more positively expressed in these words: “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” When I look at the dismal state of software, I see crap everywhere. With the rise of slop generators this is bound to become worse.
It's about their personality disorder, not their intelligence.
No one tells them no
Billionaires, that's the malfunction, time to dine yet?
Honestly, its beyond billionaires. Even upper management and smaller business owners are slopping up the koolaid like its nobody's business. They feel like they just got that secret weapon to lord over all their employees or fix every problem they couldn't manage.
They think it’s worth it to scare employees and suppress wages.
Even if it costs more to fix the mistakes it might actually be cheaper if people don’t win wage increases and layoffs continue.
I’m not saying this will work but it seems to be at least part of the logic.
They did, but they knew they could make money out of it anyway.
Lmao I am living this right now at work 🥲
Yep. We have a guy on the team who generates document after document for us to review and it's all slop that he has no understanding of (not that anyone could understand the mostly nonsense)
Did you not get to reject all of that yet?
I wish. Our company is still at the "you must adopt and use AI" phase. I'm looking forward to the "Holy fuck that's expensive! Be careful of your usage" phase
My org saw AI as a threat and immediately banned it (blocking websites and restricting features in apps) until our IT folks could evaluate it and implement safeguards. Incidentally, they missed the window when vendors were more or less offering it for free. Now any AI solution doesn’t just have to be vetted against our security and privacy needs, but most likely requires a darn good business case, RFP’s, quotes, and contracts.
It never became a part of the culture here, much to our benefit.
This is also what I don't get. At worst people start ignoring the documents or requests for review (or code changes) because they have better things to do than review generated text.
At best you push back.
how else is ai slop going to be monetized? more slop more hallucinations more bubble.
With CEOs - we need to switch to REAL grenades.
Tobias Lütke's net worth is over 12 billion, like all billionaires he won't have an income. He'll be buying assets at an inflated price then taking out bank loans against them - a process that inflates prices on things like realestate and land (because the more they pay the more they can borrow from the bank).
Billionaires do this to avoid income taxes. They want to be paid in stocks, assets, and live tax free off never ending bank loans. He'll they'll buy media companies just to borrow against them, they'll buy lobbying companies... And they'll use them to make society worse (on top of the inflation they create).
....and the increased roads, infrastructure, costs to the community? Who covers their tax burden? That hole in the tax system? They use tax loopholes, so YOU cover their tax burdens. YOU do.
Billionaires do this to avoid income taxes.
The most infuriating part of this? Mr. Lütke endorses the idea of granting more votes to those who pay more income tax, including stripping the right to vote from people who do not pay income tax.
He has also called pensioners 'dependents' who shouldn't get to vote:
New deal: when you get your pension deal it’s locked in and guaranteed. But now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age. Enjoy the deal, let people with a stake in the future decide.
https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/shopify-ceo-tobi-lutke-pensioners-voting-rights
Well, considering I paid more in income tax than Bezos did, I think that's a pretty damn good idea
I spent half my day dealing with a slop grenade.
Someone came in and dropped a (bunch of) AI generated PRs. Said person knows nothing about my world, but they want cost optimization and Fable runs through logs and gives them code. Second Fable review agent tries the code, it doesn’t work. Gives suggestions to first. New commit comes in with workaround, I decline this because it’s a shit and had another unnoticed critical integration bug. This goes on a few more times.
It comes back a fifth or so time with something that is now technically correct, but fucking horrifying. Great, now I don’t know what to do, because I’m getting told it’ll fix the billing issue and this is a huge problem, but the code is insane.
This is a cost optimization PR, advertising massive savings, but the numbers seemed way off. It turns out it looked at one day with a runaway process that racked up insane billing (90% of year-to-date total project cost) and “annualized” it, and that was the savings. But further, it calculated all the costs using the wrong billing system, so all the numbers were wrong.
When I recalculated and corrected it, the whole thing saves us $6/month, because we don’t have runaway outages very often.
This is on top of every ticket I get is Claude generated, they never just state the fucking issue, and 100% of tickets in 2 weeks plus today I’ve received were inaccurate and wrong.
I hate the slop. I hate the non technical users throwing the slop on me without knowing how it works.
Take whatever prompt you put in the AI and write exactly that for the ticket content, then spend 30 seconds summarizing it into a title. I don’t care if it’s “customer wants a button that shows a cat”, just write that.
I cannot take another “client has a load bearing contract dispute with sales. Genuinely the verdict here will secure the shape of the contract. Critically in foo.py function get_foo_blorp there is no reference to felis catus to satisfy hard customer requirement. Acceptance requirement: return felis catus when module controller clicked and client is logged in and client’s birthday is in same month, otherwise return error codes 412 404 526” word salad ticket that doesn’t just state the problem.
"SHIP MORE CODE!!! NO NOT LIKE THAT!!!" - CEOs
More lines = better
max-line-width: 20
I'm finding it hard to reconcile the people who find it useless with those who find it useful. My own experience with languages is that it speeds me up for tasks I have the skills to verify, but with ones I don't it can slow me down doing the verification and fixes.
I know software developers in a Fortune 500 company who swear that overall they are far more productive with "agents". I don't know if it's a highly tailored system rather than the more all-purpose ones the general public have. So I do wonder if there are use cases for it.
It's ruining the planet and our societies, though. And it's distracting us from what really matters. Net negative for sure.
Edit: they're also not very good at their most basic tasks. Researchers have found that when the major LLMs summarise articles, it misrepresents the facts 51% of the time.
it speeds me up for tasks I have the skills to verify
The issue is that the executives only see the potential to speed up, and not the necessity of having skilled people who can do that verifying.
Agents is just the LLM prompting itself with subtasks. This can be helpful to compartmentalize larger and more complex tasks. I find the tool calls most important. An agent that can compile and test its own code will make fewer mistakes (assuming the tests weren't also written by LLMs but even then).
So there's a self-correcting feedback loop that will improve quality, but is also a lot more expensive. The problem is that the temptation is huge to give more and more complex tasks to the agents and then they go off for 30min or longer and may or may not create complete and utter bullshit because something led them astray or they forgot something one agent did wrong and never fixed it. The end result may work, but it may be less efficient or come with a share of dead code that's never called etc.
You end up with hundreds of lines to verify. You could just ask an agent to do it, but at some point adding more agents to the pile is not going to help... and probably takes longer than just reading it yourself.
The "purpose" for AI (the reason it is being FORCED on us) is that it allows "wealth" to access "skill" while at the same time keeping skilled people away from wealth.
NOW what billionaire would not want that?
What poor person would want that?
See the problem yet?
This currently only works for poor people because access to skill is free right now... and we see it not working for billionaires once the financial bubble around LLMs bursts.
Not that billionaires will suddenly be poor, but someone will be holding the bag eventually. We see efforts right now that the government/taxpayers will be the ones via bailouts. This is of course unacceptable but the patriotism argument that the West needs to outcompete China may work for some.
Defenestrate Mark
That doesn't work, Mark flies.
Ok then why did you give money to your friend DHH for Omarchy? it's literally a slop vibe coded "distro".
Because of the complete vibe coding of Omarchy it takes longer the configure it than any other distro with a WM. I mean hell the AI cut the Hyperland config up into 6 damn LUA files AND THEN you have to unbind everything and rebind it as opposed to ONE file that you can literally just swap out binds. And yet you gave the guy a couple million for it.
So I'm so sorry Tobias but you did this to yourself. you were one of the first to embrace AI completely and use it completely wrong and now you're whining about it and you continue to fund it. you can't have it both ways bud.
Wasn't Shopify one of the first companies to go all in on an AI infrastructure? I seemed to recall reading that about a year or two ago.
Yep. Same guy said managers will ask why they can't use AI for that job. It seems that he has answered that hypothetical question here.