Disclaimer: I don’t have any understanding when it comes to finance/economics other than what I’ve experienced/read. However, it does seem hard to argue the fact that economics/finance are so divorced from reality that they ought to be viewed the same as the national debt.
I’m sure there are others in the same boat, but I’m still having trouble getting past the absurdity and ominous nature of everything happening in the corporate world right now. Almost every single conversation is boiled down to “just ask Claude” and it’s being used to slow down existing workflows to a comical degree. Who knows maybe this will self-correct over time, but it’s certainly a choice at the moment.
I’m not trying to be a doomer I’m really not, but these people live in a different reality than you and I. I used to listen to Ed Zitron’s podcast and tuned in to any number of his appearances on other shows to sort of shield myself from all the noise that encompasses this age of tech, but I’m slowly coming to the realization that the economics/financial picture of the situation seems entirely inconsequential. I’m hoping this is just my lack of knowledge when it comes to finance/econ, but fuck if I know. Maybe this post will make me look like a dumbass in a year or so (I hope it does).
I feel like all of us in corporate are all assets in a bet from the most evil people on the planet to see if they will be able to replace huge swaths of the population with a “good enough” solution that will slowly be de-valued and phased out of the workforce akin to IT jobs in the early/mid 2010s.
This shit really blows and I feel like LLM companies are going to come out on top, primarily because Claude has proven that it can generate passable output at lightning speed and that is more than enough to please C suites.
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.
What’s up with homeowners and trying to be as cheap as humanly possible? Like my dad got a quote for our roof for 6 grand, so he told them to beat sand and asked his friend to do it for the price of parts. I sure hope he knows what he’s doing because his friend isn’t a roofer, he’s just a general handyman.
Similar to car mechanics, a lot of these private businesses will just try to scam you. If it comes down to trust, well, I know I can trust my friend, but who knows if that random roofing company aren’t just going to fuck me out of several thousand dollars?
Suburbanites and their libertarian brainworms.
Also the industry being filled with people taking advantage of presumed wealthy people (cuz, you know, house) who don’t know better and not being able to tell a fair price. Got quoted 800usd to replace a water main shutoff valve stem last year, as an example.
That’s correct. The industry is also fucking FULL of private equity plumbing companies that nickel and dime for everything. An example; as a routine part of chasing a sewer clog sometimes I need to pull a commode. I will typically just re-use the commode supply line unless it is leaking, visibly damaged etc. Lot of places will not pull a commode without requiring you to purchase a new commode supply line due to “liability”, they claim it might rupture because it’s reused and it must be replaced instead. That supply line costs me about three bucks wholesale and then places like Roto-Rooter will charge you forty bucks for the supply line and fifty bucks for labor.
The shop I work for gets a bit exorbitant even then. Example sewer call:
$145 trip charge just for me to darken your door
$175 per hour for me (TWO HOUR MINIMUM!)
$85 per hour for my greenhorn
$100 equipment charge
$50 gas
$25 consumables charge (gloves rags shoe booties etc)
That’s how you end up with an $25 dollar brass valve costing 800 to install
I will however, find any and every way possible to stick you with as large a bill as I can legally manage if you are a land lord/property manager etc. I will lie to landlords about the tenants responsibility for clogs/breaks/negligence. I absolutely enjoy that part, comrade. It’s never the tenants fault, even if it is.
Based.
My landlady has “cheap as humanly possible” mindset. For any kind of repair work - she hires the cheapest guys possible and then she gets pissed off when they do a shitty job. Luckily for me when I had a rain leak in my living room - she spent a bit more so the guys did a good job. But I’d spy a look at them and they’d be on the very dangerous “do not step” part of the ladder. I half-expected one of the guys to fall off and break his neck.
Tbf I’m a pretty good plumber and I’ve used the “not a step” part of the ladder. I’ve also used the “do not climb” side of the ladder b/c sometimes it’s Friday 4:45pm so I’m not making another trip for different ladder.
The guy at the top was leaning too. It wouldn’t take much for the ladder to topple over. I don’t know how much time they spent in that perilous position but they did it early in the day and the job took three days.
Oh no. Thats actually a really good way to end up paraplegic first thing in the morning. I’ve used the top step on occasion to snag a hand tool or something left on a suspended ceiling or on top of a wall, or climbed the wrong side to retrieve a tape measure left on top of the ladder, but I won’t actually work up there. I’m the OSHA competent person where I work so I can’t bring doing dumb stuff like that too often.
Earlier today when I was commenting on AI I said that people love convenience more than common sense. I never thought of convenience as a siren song but it certainly is.
The trick to being a cheapskate is knowing when not to cheap out on stuff.
If it’s safety related or could destroy something, don’t cheap out on it.
I actually know someone like this who had a medical issue, asked ChatGPT about it, concluded it was the solution to their ailment, and now swears by it
Same. A guy I know was all like “chatgpt fixed my lifelong back problems”. Then proceeded to tell me what exercises it told him to do and turns out most were the same ones I told him to do like ten years ago when I was his trainer. But he never really listened to me, because I am woman and obviously have no idea what I’m talking about.
Anyway, the “ai” told him to overdo it and do way too monotonous stuff so he did, and now his back is worse than it’s ever been.
I hadn’t even considered the effect prolific use of LLMs for literally everything would have on mansplaining. I mean why trust a woman on any subject you don’t know anything about when you can just ask ChatGPT instead.
I’ve thought about the way these are mansplaining machines a lot and how there would be space for some great feminist analysis of expertise, the way these things are so bro-coded. The impact that would have on society. It probably exists, but haven’t seen it.
It was wild realizing that a man took basically the same advice I had tried to give, but without the nuance, which would be needed to not fuck themselves up with it, when it came from a machine. This person is a tech bro who tends to think humans make mistakes, machines don’t. Big believer in robotic driving.
I heard a person saying their AI agent did this. I still don’t get what the fuck AI agents are. Is it making up a guy for the yes-man machine to pretend to be?
An “ai agent” is when you give the hallucination machine direct access to tools so they can do stuff autonomously. Like if you were to set it up so you can say “buy some socks” and it just goes on amazon and finds whatever sounds like socks and buys it for you. and if it decides that you need $8000 worth of socks, so be it
We had things that could do that well before these stupid chatbots. And they’d ask for confirmation before doing the thing. I guess people are just obsessed with the sci fi idea of “computer, resolve this mundane errand”.
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Is there a way to make the doo doo and pee pee flow into their house instead of water? Because you should have done that.
I like the way you write
lol thanks