Technology

I fucking hate Big Lawn. I have friends who let their yard grow wild and it's awesome. The pollinators love it. My HOA and spouse won't let me do it.

Yup.

My work uses MS Teams and Sharepoint, and MS is dumbing down both products as much as is feasible in order to force people to use CoPilot more. It's moronic, and I hate discovering changes to the UI that appear to be bugs and then finding out it was deliberate. (Like buttons and scroll bars that are invisible until you hover a cursor over them. Stupid.)

But LLM's were only ever useful if the validation of their output didn't outweigh the supposed time saved, and that is rarely the case.

Stupid business practices. Can't wait for a popping of the bubble.

I'm probably ignorant, as i left the conventional workforce before AI took off.. But how does that exactly make you work longer? If the AI isn't finished by the time the shift is over, then it's tomorrows problem, no?

My company recently shifted to a new time clock system, which uses AI for basic search functions. Search is also intended to be the primary way users navigate the site. The salesperson’s marketing was “oh it’s so easy, you just describe what you want to do, and the AI takes you there!”

I need to approve my time card each week. The page is literally titled “Time Approval”. But searching for “Time Approval” usually doesn’t yield any results. Sometimes I’ll get lucky if I search for something like “I need to approve my time card for last week” but even that isn’t foolproof. Like it literally can’t find the page I need every week, even when I search for the exact title of the page. And who the fuck wants to type out an entire sentence just for a basic site directory search?

The way to get to the approval page through the UI (by clicking through, without using the AI-powered search function) is like four obscure menus deep. This is something that every employee is expected to do every week, and they buried it like they were planning on making a treasure map. They intentionally made the UI unintuitive, so users would feel compelled to use the AI search. But then the AI search doesn’t fucking work, so I end up having to navigate the unintuitive menus anyways. I ended up just bookmarking the approval page directly in my browser, so I can log in and then use the bookmark to jump straight to that page.

this is what my company owners don't seem to understand.

productive employees don't enjoy that. if that becomes our job, will either do it poorly or leave, and then you'll just have shitty people doing it, with shitty results.

they've backed off a little bit, but they're still trying to push AI tools to do parts of our job that we are still 100% responsible for the outcome of. fuck that.

actually now that I'm thinking about it, fuck, it fucking pisses me off. like I told them that an application with major value (which also would be one of the easiest things to implement) is just a chatbot that reads the customer spec and you can ask questions, so instead of sorting through hundreds of pages across multiple different files and file types, the chatbot can find anything relevant and then you can look closer at it. do we have that tool? no. are they trying to push other tools on us that are half complete, can't possibly do a good job, and only have marginal time savings? yes. like yeah sure let's fucking let AI do an engineering drawing of a part, I'm sure it'll make it a very nice easy to read drawing that the machine shop will love, and all the senior people who are already reviewing everybody else's work will love to review constant junior level quality work. that's probably their favorite part of the job, reviewing shit quality work. and they love it even more when they know that the feedback they give won't result in somebody getting better at it, they'll just see it again tomorrow.

My colleague: I created an AI skill for the review.

Well yes, that's why there are layoffs too.

Are people still invested to that degree? I'm surprised they don't reject significantly or long term more work and let management feel consequences.

Could you tell which field that job is in?

What I've seen so far is a lot of people basically getting good starts with something AI but mostly still having to correct too much so that either the prompt takes more work than the actual task or the work thereafter is more.

And I have seen some situations where llm also really made sense and was helping in general, but that was far and in between.

LLM help at my job too but only if the employee has the knowledge to correct the issues.

Today I needed to send an email with a few details, the most important being the customers email needed to be included in the body of the email.

I tell copilot that. What does it provide.... Everything except the customers email. I was able to prompt it again to include that information but 90% of my team would've just sent the original copilot response instead of rereading it.