So much for DARE program. (TikTok screencap)
1980s: Please do not use drugs. They seem great at first but you don’t want to get hooked.
2020s: Please DO use the AIs. They seem like shit at first, but you DO want to get hooked because we have about a trillion dollars in new mortgages to keep up with.
I get paid to encourage people to use it at work. I’m a problem, creating more problems to solve my own problems.
So you’re a consultant?
To a degree, kinda. Primarily responsible for technology onboarding and training as well as consulting. Subject to whatever the suits want pushed on employees. Been doing it for so long, I can’t think of any other work fitting to my current lifestyle (work to live) to know any better. Pays the midlife hell bills, leaving enough for leisure.
So how are these paid for AI models vs the free / cheapo models? Who would actually notice the difference?
I’ve been messing around with AI a bit. Kimi k2.6 is very close to Claude Sonnet; “thinks” a lot, but that seems to help it. I think it’s something like 1/3 the cost of Sonnet. The newest GLM is supposed to be similar. Minimax, MiMo, Qwen, and Deepseek is a bit of step down. The big step down are the small models like Qwen 35B and 27B, but they’re still “useful,” and I can run them on my 24GB GPU. I’m also now forced to use Sonnet and crank out slop code :( It’s going to end in disaster.
“Help! I’m being crushed under a dock!”
The real dangers of pier pressure
Detla pee is no joke
This is so accurate. And, I had “friends” back in high school, who were very much into meth and very much into sharing.
But every single big meeting at work, is just about AI. it’s just a sales pitch, nothing specific. One of the senior managers emails multiple times a week about fake “wins” due to AI. How, because of AI, some random API is now 4x better! (He doesn’t know what API is…) When I teams opens up, it’s just “AI Bootcamps” plastered everywhere. The intranet homepage, 3 of the 5 things on the carousel is just AI. Multiple “demo days” have just been people showing how they’ve been fucking around in AI and not doing work.
Someone in mgmt, has made it a goal for more AI usage. Put teams on blast who weren’t “using it enough”. Fake metrics of how much good code it’s generated (with no actual examples of course). And yeah, now they’re tracking usage to ensure we get enough AI “touches” a month. They’re monitoring our badge-in (due to RTO) and now they’re monitoring AI adoption and usage.
But just ignore the massive outsourcing to India/SEA… no need to worry about that.
It’s funny how this could be my post and we very likely don’t work at the same company.
Its funny that there is even a physiology diagnosis for being addicted to AI. Just because you can profit from AI in shady ways doesn’t make you not a fraudster. Didn’t 60 minutes have a segment about China kids profiting from it? How is that not child labor.
This stuff is expressly forbidden in my workplace.
Are you hiring?
Really intrusive to take the AI pee-test every six months. But that’s what it takes to maintain my security clearance, do whatchagonnado
You should be immune based on all the peer pressure videos you watched then.
Yeah my manager is tracking my token usage. But not my hemp usage
I wish my manager would assign me toke quotas instead of token quotas.
Tracking tokens not tokes
Tracking Pokémons not pokes
Sellin’ black market tokens 🎶
I have figured out where my intense dislike of using AI comes from.
My need for control/understanding stuff I create.
I find the idea of giving up knowledge and skills in favor of statistics based chatbot to be repulsive and extremely dangerous.
I am no systems developer, I am an IT guy, I write some Powershell from time to time to automate stuff, I understand the code, if I didn’t, I would not run it on prod.
A huge amount of why normal office workers like using AI, in my opinion, is that they never learned how make even simple scripts which would have helped them in a lot of their tasks.
And now they use AI to make a computer kinda guess what they wanted, but with no way to verify the code before running it.
I honestly can’t understand why companies/governments/institutions believe that a chatbot is better than a skilled and knowledgable developer.
They don’t really understand how they work and get misled by how AI can get to a correct solution (or correct looking one).
Like I was in a meeting where people were presenting their Claude skills (which are just text files describing processes that it can add to the context) and one manager mentioned doing regression testing on added skills to make sure they don’t break the functionality of existing ones. From my pov, he was both on the right track but also missing the point entirely because they won’t be able to consistently pass regression tests even without new skills. Because something being in the context window only has a chance of affecting the output. If the code being modified has comments that look like instructions, they might override the actual instructions.
Or it might try solving non-existent problems for you. Like a skill I was “developing” for making a particular modification to tests basically just outright said “make a test that inherits from the target test and add these parameters”. Dead simple step. First test I use to test it on, I see it’s missing one of the arguments. I mention it and the AI says that because of the start of the name being “<name of section>” and the test didn’t target that section, it decided that the argument wasn’t necessary, so I had to add instructions to not just add that argument but to not decdide to just leave it out for arbitrary reasons.
I can’t say for sure any of the AI tasks I’ve done saved any time by being AI. But the mental load is lower and they really want us using AI, so I’ll keep doing it, but the unreliability is going to cause more problems than it solves in the long run IMO.
100%
Programming languages are already languages, languages that do exactly what I request, languages which are free/cheap to use, languages which just make sense
Why would I defer that to another language which is imprecise, and which I don’t have control over?
I find it’s much better to have an LLM give me a code review than to have it write code.
I’ve learned quite a few tips and tricks that way which I can employ at my discretion.
It not being consistent also adds to this.
“Same exact input in same exact situation next time can have completely different output” is just unacceptable in automation.
I feel like a gambler trying to get a big win and 50% of the time digging myself out of a bigger hole.
A huge amount of why normal office workers like using AI, in my opinion, is that they never learned how make even simple scripts which would have helped them in a lot of their tasks.
Most office workers do not have the access rights and programs to run scripts. I know how to write them, but there is no way that local IT would allow me to run python on my work machine.
My need for control/understanding stuff I create
And that is really important from a mental health perspective: People are being held responsible for their work. If something does break that they’ve built, their boss & coworkers expect that they are able to fix it and that the error will not happen again. If you understand your system, you are able to do that. If you are responsible for some kind of AI-driven house of cards that you do not understand and can’t fix, that is really bad. It’s triggering some kind of imposter syndrome
Um … NORPs don’t use AI to code. They use it to think for them. And mostly they don’t think about code.
If you exported your support ticket database and your customer feedback to CSV files, upload that to a chatbot, cross-reference it, ask it the right questions, structure the output, it could tell you everything going right and wrong with your customer base. Backed up with data. And it could do that in like 10 minutes. Instead of weeks of research.
Problem is, you (or whoever reads tickets), are going to miss the details. You won’t read that one heartbreaking story. You won’t see the success. You’ll have an insightful (if you are good with prompts) summary. That’s it.
Secondary (or perhaps this is the big one) problem is that the more you let the machine think for you, the less thinking you do. It makes you dumb.
What does NORP stand for?
I don’t understand half of the acronyms people use these days.
ICA.
(I Completelt Agree)
ICA!
Normal Ordinary Responsible Person.
Its not a compliment, but only slightly derogatory, and only if ur a freak like me.
Fair point, I agree completely.
Honestly, don’t understand your problem. You still can read the code and control the quality. You can still write scripts and you can even teach the AI to use them.
Yes, the ability to do that exists.
But you gain far, far more understanding if you write the code yourself.
Depends on what you write and how much you spend reviewing, you can get the same understanding. The speed differs by a lot.
Better information control no human to leak it no Hunan in the loop more human labor fungibility its the best
ikantreadthis
I’m a software developer and those who use AI are slower than me lmao
My colleagues use it extensively for coding, I use it barely and we are about the same speed but their code is absolute shit AI slop.
If you know what you’re doing, nothing is faster (with a good autocomplete it’s even faster).
But are you cheap to hire? Checkmate anti AI people! /s
Yeah, i find it’s a lot quicker to fix AI script than write one from scratch. AI logic isn’t the worst, execution where it can REALLY trip up if you give it wrong prompt.
Hell, i had used straight up AI scripts in prod because it’s just 100 lines of code and I would’ve written it the same way. Our ERP instance has roughly 300 scripts, most written by me. I know how to code but some times? I really can’t be bothered to write something simple as “take these two fields, calculate the difference, do it for all line items and write total into this field”. AI won’t do something as stupid as do it on change, it know something like this is for after submit.
The future is bright and I do think AI will be a net benefit for my role in the long run if this is what it can do now.
Also parsing 10k lines of debug? It’s a champ. I wouldn’t be able to open excel and filter by the script, user and date by the time Ai already has it figured out.
I get skepticism and then there’s the unemployed know it all… it’s a tool, if you can’t use the tool, it doesn’t make the tool bad.
People are trying to use it on larger code-bases and that’s where it goes rogue and just creates an unmaintainable mess. It’s decent at writing small scripts that are likely similar to scripts it has been trained on (starts failing when you start trying to get it to do more novel types of things).
At least the drugs were fun.
DARE promised me free drugs. What a letdown.
Fuk, I’d have just taken the fried eggs. That looked pretty good.
But I got nuthin.It was like a commercial for children living in poverty having an at school food program.
This is breakfast. This is your brain on breakfast. Any questions.
This is why I always laughed around Halloween when the news tries to scare people that drugs are being put into candy.
Drug dealers aren’t exactly known for just handing out product for free.
Well, I do associate the phrase “first one’s free” with drug dealers trying to get a new customer hooked, but as someone who doesn’t do drugs, I’m not sure how common such a strategy is in real life.
Drug dealers, no. Friends, absolutely. I’ve had a couple great dealers who would smoke me down if I came around to buy, quite generously, but not what I would categorize as “first one free”.
Yeah, I meant a more malicious “first hit of this highly addictive drug is free, because I know you’ll be back for more after that.” Glad to hear things aren’t so predatory.
I must be lucky—I’ve run into free drugs heaps of times in my life! It helps having a long phase as an outgoing rave kid.
Yeah, I look back and think about how I kinda got lucky that they were just the things I was looking for versus some scary shit, but there was a good decade where I got plenty for free. And I’m a dude.
Shit, I’ll throw an edit in here. I saw Rusko in Philly (RIP EFactory) and got kicked in the face by a crowd surfer, and I can’t stand crowd surfers to begin with. And this girl who was a friend of a friend comes, wipes the blood off my face onto the shirt I have on, and goes in her purse, grabs something, pops it into my mouth, and gives me water. Like some sort of medicine woman. Lemme tell you though, all my ails went away, believe it or not.
Drugs became way less cool when they switched to the token system.
Yeah crypto on the dark web is for dorks. You gotta go to the bad part of town with a roll of crumpled dollar bills to meet a guy with a gun. Otherwise the high just isn’t the same.
If you can’t taste the dirt from the ditch just that side of the Great Trump Wall, it’s just sparkling grass.
And sexy felines.
You lied to me!
Pawb users are in shambles
What DARE program gave you these? I just got a ruler and a t-shirt.
And I think some cop talked to us and passed around a bag of weed.
I use it at my corporate job to do most of my job now. I still get paid the same regardless if i try harder (without any rewards) or submit to burnout and let the standards slip. Fuck em.
Reminds me of some funny old posts on r/sysadmin of greybeards who had essentially automated their entire jobs and life in perl lol.
Best one was a script that would auto text message his wife he would be coming home late if he still had an active terminal session.
There was a recent post around here or reddit that was about management trying to gauge performance via AI use, and how they had caught on to the token spending tricks people were using, but honestly it doesn’t seem that hard to fake around it if it ever came up.
Just throw some agent work at it like codex and watch it burn tokens running grep lol.
Yeah, doesn’t bother me. I’ll just leave it crunching a boring problem while I go away and make a cup of tea or chat some shit.
Yea because they are literally threatening to make you homeless and die or use this pedophile AI mass surveillance bull shit that will literally kill all life on earth
but why, it’s so great!?
https://gizmodo.com/spending-just-10-minutes-with-ai-can-fry-your-brain-researchers-find-2000755701
Find us the value for our stockholders, slaves!
