Imagine being so bad at stuff that using an LLM makes you better.
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@david_chisnall Imagine... being lucky enough to live in the era of Coding AI... to have the resources to use it to do many things you wanted to do, but couldn't before... but... you can't figure out how to leverage it in a way compatible with your ego.
@hopeless Indeed, it looks we are surrounded by absolute geniuses with exceptional skills in every possible task
@david_chisnall -
My job is important, but I fear that LLM results will soon be mandatory. My employer's senior management can't utter two sentences without saying how great AI is and how it's changing everything.
Ah well, it won't be long until I retire.
@CppGuy
yeah, unfortunately, it doesn't even have to work well to be a threat. LLMs are imposed on people not on merit but by AI-pilled management. -
@CppGuy
yeah, unfortunately, it doesn't even have to work well to be a threat. LLMs are imposed on people not on merit but by AI-pilled management.Right. My few experiments show that nothing an #LLM says can be trusted. You can write instructions telling it to express uncertainty rather than guessing, and then it'll hallucinate less, but not to the point where I'd want to use it for anything that mattered.
Unfortunately, a year from now, my employer's staff will be divided into two classes: people who use #AI every day and people who've lost their jobs. There's too much ageism in my trade for me ever to find another job, so my choice is LLMs or enforced early retirement.
I once knew an extremely capable and senior developer who took early retirement rather than be forced to do #agile, but I'm not rich enough to take a similar stand against AI.
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Imagine being so bad at stuff that using an LLM makes you better.
@david_chisnall "Aspire to be Average"
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@david_chisnall imagine not being able to be an expert in everything but being asked to do a 100 jobs a day.
I'm hating on what llm mean but maybe pont the critique at the systems and the owners of the systems.
Don't blame the workers for having 100 jobs and only knowing how to do one of them right.
IMO the OT offers systemic criticism.
There's a fundamental difference between Being Bad At and Not Being Qualified For, isn't there?
I feel the OT is more about a watchmaker Bad At watchmaking than about a watchmaker Not Qualified For gardening, thus blaming employers for bad policies instead of workers for grasping at straws.
(Besides systematically attacking middle management willingly padding their own qualifications with shiny LLM overachievement, of course.
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@hfalcke @david_chisnall I read somewhere that the average speed of a moving vehicle in Manhattan is approximately walking pace
@chris_e_simpson @hfalcke @david_chisnall must be awful for people who live in Manhattan
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Imagine being so bad at stuff that using an LLM makes you better.
@david_chisnall Just dropped that quote into my company's #ai-fanboy slack channel. Boy, am I gonna get it!
It'll surely be some variants on "I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing" -
Imagine being so bad at stuff that using an LLM makes you better.
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@david_chisnall Imagine being so slow at walking that a car makes you faster
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@david_chisnall imagine not being able to be an expert in everything but being asked to do a 100 jobs a day.
I'm hating on what llm mean but maybe pont the critique at the systems and the owners of the systems.
Don't blame the workers for having 100 jobs and only knowing how to do one of them right.
At some point we need to stop giving workers a pass on doing Bad Thing. It has become normalized to the point that it is part of the modus operandi of their employers to externalize everything and be held accountable for nothing because no one pushes back on them.
Workers are the ones who hold all the power here but by continually telling them it's not their fault, that they're just part of the system, we're also disempowering them.
If not workers, who?
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Imagine being so bad at stuff that using an LLM makes you better.
And also, imagine being bad at a task and choosing an LLM to do it for you, acquiring a dependency for life, instead of putting in the time and effort to learn how to do it, *when you have the time to do so*, like students do.
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At some point we need to stop giving workers a pass on doing Bad Thing. It has become normalized to the point that it is part of the modus operandi of their employers to externalize everything and be held accountable for nothing because no one pushes back on them.
Workers are the ones who hold all the power here but by continually telling them it's not their fault, that they're just part of the system, we're also disempowering them.
If not workers, who?
@zimzat @david_chisnall Management.
The person who is deciding how much money gets invested in salaries and how much in dividends.the persons who are lobbying politics for lesser work safety laws and the politicians who pass those laws.
People with enough money to be relaxed in their daily life and not promoting solidarity but hate.
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At some point we need to stop giving workers a pass on doing Bad Thing. It has become normalized to the point that it is part of the modus operandi of their employers to externalize everything and be held accountable for nothing because no one pushes back on them.
Workers are the ones who hold all the power here but by continually telling them it's not their fault, that they're just part of the system, we're also disempowering them.
If not workers, who?
@zimzat @coba @david_chisnall yes certainly not everyone can stand up all the time, and it'd be largely counter productive to encourage doing things individually, but also this'll only change when workers say no.
I'm not interested in shaming people one bad day away from homelessness for holding their nose and muddling through, but that's not all of us. Yet.
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@david_chisnall imagine not being able to be an expert in everything but being asked to do a 100 jobs a day.
I'm hating on what llm mean but maybe pont the critique at the systems and the owners of the systems.
Don't blame the workers for having 100 jobs and only knowing how to do one of them right.
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Right. My few experiments show that nothing an #LLM says can be trusted. You can write instructions telling it to express uncertainty rather than guessing, and then it'll hallucinate less, but not to the point where I'd want to use it for anything that mattered.
Unfortunately, a year from now, my employer's staff will be divided into two classes: people who use #AI every day and people who've lost their jobs. There's too much ageism in my trade for me ever to find another job, so my choice is LLMs or enforced early retirement.
I once knew an extremely capable and senior developer who took early retirement rather than be forced to do #agile, but I'm not rich enough to take a similar stand against AI.
@CppGuy @koantig @ambiguous0 @david_chisnall As a technical writer, I'm facing the same shitty dilemma except that I never really meaningfully re-entered the job market since have my 3rd kid in 2004. I've had jobs, but they didn't really use my skills except for one in fin tech that only lasted 6 months in 2022.
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@zimzat @david_chisnall Management.
The person who is deciding how much money gets invested in salaries and how much in dividends.the persons who are lobbying politics for lesser work safety laws and the politicians who pass those laws.
People with enough money to be relaxed in their daily life and not promoting solidarity but hate.
@coba @david_chisnall What mechanism do we use to hold management accountable for doing what they've been instructed to do by their management [ad infinitum] and not what is in the best interest of their workers (who are not the ones signing their paycheck)?
Their incentive is the same as the workers: Don't get fired, don't become homeless; individually they're also easy to replace and have no protection against retaliation.
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Imagine being so bad at stuff that using an LLM makes you better.
@david_chisnall Imagine being a beginner?
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@david_chisnall Imagine being a beginner?
@maxh
More like imagine deciding to be a beginner forever and to never progress. -
@CppGuy @koantig @ambiguous0 @david_chisnall As a technical writer, I'm facing the same shitty dilemma except that I never really meaningfully re-entered the job market since have my 3rd kid in 2004. I've had jobs, but they didn't really use my skills except for one in fin tech that only lasted 6 months in 2022.
That sounds rough. I'm sorry.
So what are they asking you to do: just touch up documentation spat out by an #LLM?
I've spent the last fortnight wrestling with documentation that was clearly written by people without any understanding of the subject matter. It's almost impenetrable, and it's a miserable experience piecing together the incomplete and fragmentary information the devs must have supplied before the tech authors were told to make the best of whatever they had. People underestimate the importance of really good documentation.
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@hopeless Indeed, it looks we are surrounded by absolute geniuses with exceptional skills in every possible task
@david_chisnall@emmecola @hopeless @david_chisnall You don't need to be a genius to recognize mediocrity. And oh boy, is there mediocrity in Claude outputs.
