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.

  • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    421·
    25 days ago

    What staggers me is how stupid/unimaginative people whose job it is to “solve business problems” are.

    Like, I’m treated like a genius when I make a little Excel template to keep my boomer coworker from manually updating a sheet to track her higher value clients’ payments and orders. I guess I just get paid to solve little puzzles, idk I’ll enjoy it for what it is.

    • Commie_Chameleon [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      22·
      25 days ago

      Sumifs statements are incomprehensible magic to the average office worker. Keeps people like us looking great though so I’m ok with it lol.

      My job’s been trying to integrate Claude into our workflows and I was asked to try out the Excel addon. I have a decently complex sheet that I use to do an inventory audit. As a test, I pasted the pure data from that into a fresh spreadsheet, then gave it instructions to do the audit. Not only did it not give me what I asked for, it made like two or three extra tabs to find values that I only needed one formula to get. No clue how many tokens I would have had to burn through to get it into a usable shape. Oh and now Excel is even more sluggish regardless of if I’m using Claude. Definitely worth the trillions we dump into this bullshit, great job everyone

      • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        12·
        25 days ago

        I got the shitty Copilot “upgrade” for Excel and it always tries to autofill the worlds most pointless xlookups when I’m writing a formula. I tell it to make the formatting “professional” when it’s some kind of doohickey I’ll be handing off to another person (I rarely care about blinging out shit in Excel lol).

        I felt like a dummy when I barely got my undergrad in math ages ago, but damn do I feel like the smartest computer toucher in the room too often.