^ This. This is the actual truth of it. You can always find a 500 person company that does a shit job at forced integration and you can find a 2000 user company that tied all their systems together and moved at paces that made everyone sick with risk. You can find individuals who tried to make copilot write micron code (horrible) and who used claude to write ansible code (~magic)

I love Doctorow, I read most of his stuff, I recently read Reverse Centaur, it had its informed moments. It made some strong points that stand out as to where using AI makes sense. It also has some perspective issues, being written by someone who focused on case studies with the worst possible outcomes. A lot of the same problems in this article.

AI can, in the right circumstances with the right needs, remove many manhours of tedious shitty labor, or it can be used by shitty people to vacantly crap out slop 24x7. It's only as useful as its implementation/workload.

But what never gets better is the societal and ecological impact. The slop pouring into journalism, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the scams running with perfect English vocabulary. The shitty AF water and electricity usage. The corporate bribery. Those are along for the ride by default.

If AI went away, right this very moment, my job would grind to a snail's pace for months while we once again pivot back to another way improved but not unlike we did prior. We would have a man-century of meetings on how to recreate all the processes affordably. We are doing more now with fewer people, but they're paying more in tokens + labor. This is not to say that any of us would be horribly sad.

This article is based on a case study by one guy on a 500-person company that didn't want to implement AI and did a poor job of implementing it. Yeah, many of us work for some place like that and some of us work for places that got it working. That's the reason for the big divide. It's not always a delusional asshole lying about it working, it's about it working when engineers who have the right workload use it to solve their needs. Still too fucking expensive on all accounts.

AI is not worth the investment. It's not worth the money. It's not worth the damage. But the argument that it doesn't do anything because you see it do jack shit somewhere doesn't hold up to even light scrutiny.

And ecological

I work in construction and so far I must admit that I have no idea what the hype is about.

But I have decades of experience, meaning I don't know shit about anything BUT I know how to quickly find usefull information in the codes or in pertinents books.

If I were younger I might have fallen into the trap. If so I would probably be in jail by now, because in my tests I've seen LLM be dangerously wrong.

LLMs seem to be pretty bad at home improvement sort of questions in my experience. I suspect they don’t have a team of carpenters they use to RL the models, like they do for software engineers, etc

Vibe construction

I'm glad you specifically pointed out proof-of-work blockchains.
They're very inefficient (economically and ecologically) by design. In almost all cases this design isn't warranted.
Alas there are other designs and while most of them are rubbish as well, a few ones are doing things quite right.

I hope that just like other schemes than proof-of-work were thought of regarding blockchains, there will be AI models that are way, way more efficient and ideally can be run locally - for those cases that can use AI...

I feel like block chain as a public ledger has found quite a few purposeful uses, and was a solution to a handful of problems most people rarely if ever encounter. Then fake money got involved

That's top down thinking for you.

Yeah, right. My boss gave me a bunch of risk assessments to read through and let slip that AI had 'helped' produce them. So I said I'd get AI to summarise them. All this vast computing power and climate damage is being used for bullshit.

Well I wouldn't recommend data & analytics right now, if you treasure your sanity.
Imagine tech debt accumulated over decades absolutely skyrocketing because LLM can generate thousands of lines of SQL or Python that noone understands.

I mean, I'm sure the same applies to all tech sectors and likely worse. I do admit it also helps us fix and uncover some old and buried bugs. It's just not used with any sort of care or long term plan.

Hate to day it, but every industry has turned into that. At least in my anecdotal experience and my network’s anecdotal experience, useless people using AI to create shit that means extra work for others is happening everywhere. Not saying you should stay in manufacturing if you hate it, but just be aware that you probably won’t be leaving that issue behind.

I use google "ai" in when thrifting for audio gear. Minimum 80% of the time it gets something GLARINGLY wrong. "Oh ho ho! You correctly pointed out that I was completely wrong on all counts! An astute observation! Let me try again but this time give you the CORRECT information."

It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.

I mean... it gave you the amalgamated wisdom of the internet after a very complex game of telephone.

I really like a song that has intro and outro samples and I wanted to know where they were from, so I googled. Google AI promptly informed me that the song has no samples. Guess that settles that.

I do potatoes in my instant pot but leave the water in, it just gets absorbed. So the salt is effective in that case. I salt the potatoes themselves and toss them before adding the water, too, so they should get reasonably seasoned.

Also i use soup stock.

Mashed, though.

Salting the water would increase the boiling temperature I guess, but it seems like a waste of salt because that info isn't meaningfully changing the cooking time

Salting the water is relevant when not using a pressure cooker. It makes no sense when you're steaming them in a pressure cooker. AI is a good tool, sometimes. But for everyday tasks, it is irrelevant and often wrong.

That “AI” is a completely dumbed down one with reasoning disabled. Of course it’ll make stuff up.