technology

More and more of my customers (plumbing) are approaching me during diagnostic procedures and telling me "Clob says this should only take XYZ amount of minutes and you haven't found ABC intermittent currently nonexistent issue because you are wrong".

"Clob says it's not the shower cartridge it's the flux capacitor so would you check that instead?"

So I check the flux capacitor and surprise surprise, it's fluxing as it should be. After exhausting their AI inspired options, I go back to my original plan and it's buttoned up inside thirty minutes. Often, they ask for reduced labor costs because once I found it it only took me thirty minutes to fix, never mind the hour I spent placating a tight ass homeowner.

Or I show up and they tell me "XYZ is broken here's a replacement part on the counter I asked AI so just change that please" it's never the right replacement part and Clob is never right. More often than not I have to leave to pick up the right part and they get upset they're charged for my windshield time.

AI shit sucks and folks who use it suck.

I had a conversation with a long time developer today about this. He basically said his job has moved from "write reviewable code so it is easy to understand and maintain" to "spend all day reading a novel of code that technically works but would be completely unmaintainable if a human had to."

Like technically the code works and so the "writing the code" part goes faster but then it takes the same amount of time to review, cleanup, refactor, fix, etc as it would have to just write the code right in the first place.

It's basically shifting the problem space. The machine can solve the problem for you well enough but it takes a real expert to understand what it did and if it solved the problem well enough within the context of everything else going on too.

So it's not really saving time, and therefore probably isn't saving money in the long run.

Once the real costs of these machines starts coming down the pipe, I think most teams will realize that at least for doing complex tasks like writing code, it's cheaper to just have a person do it.

Don't get me wrong the machines can often write really impressive and correct code, but they are only doing it "faster" if you ignore the context and they're only doing it cheaper because they're being subsidized to do it cheaper. Once that subsidy goes away I think we'll see a lot less of this stuff.

I do think it's never going away though, I just don't see a continued world where "just use AI" continues to be the solution to every problem. Especially not complex ones.

What staggers me is how stupid/unimaginative people whose job it is to "solve business problems" are.

Like, I'm treated like a genius when I make a little Excel template to keep my boomer coworker from manually updating a sheet to track her higher value clients' payments and orders. I guess I just get paid to solve little puzzles, idk I'll enjoy it for what it is.

generate passable output at lightning speed

It seems to me that's the AI grift in a nutshell. People love convenience more than common sense.

OpenAI and Anthropic are now propped up by the US government to develop cyberweapons, bioweapons, etc. LLMs are actually useful in those cases because rapid, guided trial and error is a viable strategy. They only have to be right once, and it's easily verifiable. So it's definitely not going away.

I'm interested to see what happens in the general economy though, because I strongly believe LLMs are a net negative for productivity over the long term in most real work. In a way, the paying users are subsidizing it for the government.

One of the higher ups pointed ChatGPT at our GitHub and asked it to find things for us to do. They then sent us the resulting four pages of incoherent consultant speak it extruded and asked us to address the issues.

I'm pretty sure one of the reasons LLMs are catching on with bosses is because they're used to throwing gobs of money at real people to produce this sort of work-adjacent bullshit and so the ability to automate it is an actual innovation in their minds.

Executive at my company said something along the lines of "AI isn't leaving, it's a massive productivity boost" and then in the same breath said mfs needed to stop causing production outages and that we were on a change freeze for the next month.

We're driving head first into a wall, but we're doing it aT tHe SpEeD oF AI! Isn't that exciting?

From every economic measure ive been seeing, most things are telling that a recesion is coming, and soon, the actual debt of AI is much higher than we are being told as they use shell companies to hide the debt and lease their data centers to them. AI is not making money, no return on investment, at most its goal is to replace workers, its not happening anytime soon at the rate they want, yet the stocks price is exactly dependant on that speculation. CAPE is at 1999 and 2007 points, just before the previous crisis. US debt is unpayable, they paid this level of debt once before only because ww2 made the US the only remaining intact economy and they owned the world. Now? They have no industry, still on trade deficit, dependant on the military industrial complex and venture capital money laundering. The petrodollar is breaking with the war on Iran, absolutelly ridiculous fumble, shooting themselves in the stomach. Bond market is starting to break too, goverments dont trust US to pay its debt so they sell US bonds, so interests are higher, so debt repayments are higher, leaving the government with even greater deficit. They are issuing new debt to pay old debt in a doom spiral.

Material conditions will worsen considerably, I hope US people can wake up and gain some class conciousness.

US hard power allowed soft power to work, now both hard power is failing as we see in Iran, so the already weak soft power is crumbling as they cant keep up their world order.

The only choice is to ask China for help lmao. Century of US humiliation is on its way.

Im an armchair marxist economist at best, if you know more than me pls tell me so I can learn, thanks.