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I feel extremely lucky to have been able to retire when I was laid off after 30 years at the telecom company I used to work for.
The guys who are still there have been on a roller coaster of crazy in the last couple of years.
I started my job just a few years prior to this AI boom. With a shitty company and now AI on top, I’m really trying to think of other jobs I would be okay at/with doing.
I think we might need a support group for disillusioned tech workers.
There’s a tales from tech support on lemmy. Would that suffice?
It’s hard having two decades of experiences in a domain I suddenly find myself at odds with. Reading about others having the same qualm reassures me that I’m not going crazy. On the other I feel drawn further into an untenable contradictory position.
Once in a while I give in. It’s typically when I’m faced with a non trivial problem I realize will take me days of learning before I have any chance of tackling it. My colleagues start suggesting it or share some slop to “help out”. So I think fuck it I’ll study later for now AI will solve it I need this ticket closed asap. I fire up a “decent” paid model and I start feeding it context. Every time it’s a nightmare. Hours of trying stuff that doesn’t stick, of questioning, of arguing with a chat bot, of wading through “here are the facts” and “good catch” and “I owe you an apology”. It’s not a shortcut it’s a fucking dead end. Then the bitter aftertaste can only be cleansed with cold hard time consuming actual learning.
At least after hours of arguing with a bot and burning tons of money and energy you have a pile of code you can’t understand without paying a chatbot.
But will the chat bot understand itself? It’s fun when you start questioning the LLM line by line about its own slop in the same session and it starts flagging all sorts of things it did wrong. Why didn’t it write it correctly in the first place? Or is the fix wrong? Who knows? People I guess. The model is fed on knowledge but whether it will activate in response to your prompt and be restored unadulterated is a coin toss.
No, but it will gladly pretend to understand it. For a price.
That’s a problem, but the bigger issue is how the commercial models are tuned to tell you that you are never wrong.
Or, more to the point, telling people who don’t know what they’re talking about that they’re never wrong.
We see the appeal to middle and upper management.
7 months ago I quit my job for this reason. I thought long and hard about it even bought a ranch. I have joined another team, but one that is pretty critical of ai. They aren’t anti ai, but using it needs to have good reason. I figure this is my last bastion and I’ll ride this.
Got room for one more at the ranch?
Absolutely, but you’ll have to help me tend to the yaks, and hike through the mountains every so often to forage for food and set up new sensors. :)
I saw the yakherds riding Honda motorcycles all over Gansu. Seems like a blast.
I need to watch this
Won’t let me upload directly. Here’s a link: https://imgur.com/a/FwoVHO2
If my current employer goes bust and I lose my job (which doesn’t seem unlikely right now), I think I’m out. I’ll have about 1.5 years to reinvent myself somehow. But at this point I can’t really see myself working in tech for the rest of my life.
Same. If I lose my job I think I’m going to become an electrician instead. That or work on a farm or garden center.
You’re going to be competing with everyone else that’s deciding to suddenly become an electrician plus all the existing master electricians. Good luck.
Electrician sounds kind of cool, but the union route (in the US) seems like a pretty serious commitment.
Real
This is the sign I needed to call in sick for the next few days. This shit is so tiring.
Sounds like an opportunity for malicious compliance.
Auth is down? AI did it.
When I see people begin their Anti-AI arguements with “it’s bad for the environment” I tune out completely. These motherfuckers have been driving gasoline powered vehicles around for decades, and are totally fine with natural gas fired power plants.
Fuck off.
Theft of ideas and IP?
Buddy, do you not fucking understand how society has improved over the last 10 thousand years? We even have a saying for it, “standing on the shoulders of giants” which as a saying/concept has been around for about the last 800 fucking years, and was made or remembered famously from Issac Newton in 1675.
If we didn’t use the ideas and learning from those that came before us, we’d still be living in caves.
Do you know what’s more recent than that saying? The entire concept of Intellectual property. Which has only been around a bit more than 500 years.
Buddy is complaining about giving money to large companies, then you look at their linked in profile and see a job history that includes Dropbox, Scribe, and a for-profit healthcare company.
It’s amazing how passionate bootlickers are about text prediction and the capturing of the commons.
The billionaires aren’t going to love you backv bro.
You’re doing the same shit on 100 different technologies that existed before LLMs but only this is a step too far?
Use your critical thinking skills.
Why are they worth so much?/Non are making any money. Its all just a scam and nobody wants to be left holding the bag.
When I see people begin their Anti-AI arguements with “it’s bad for the environment” I tune out completely. These motherfuckers have been driving gasoline powered vehicles around for decades,
So, we’re starting with this:
and are totally fine with natural gas fired power plants.
…and a complete assumption about the author’s opinions. One that is in direct contradiction to what they’ve said in the article. I shouldn’t need to elaborate on why this is a bad start.
Then you discount IP theft as a concept, when caring for creator’s works (and encouraging more) is what IP was invented for. And yeah, it’s grown massively out of control. There’s a reason Cory Doctorow and many others have suggested that concern for copyright is the wrong reason to hate AI. But if you ask me, you still can hate AI for that when it comes to small creators, who cannot meaningfully weaponize the broken aspects of it. And those creators are precisely who AI companies disproportionately steal from.
Lastly, you end your comment the same way you started it, only now it’s even more like the meme. The entire post is about how they quit their job because they now felt staying was unsound from both ethical and practical perspectives. That is a direct example of them following their morals.
I believe the arguments you make here are bad, but the condescension dripping off your post – especially when you’re attacking the author for hypocrisies that aren’t even real – is much worse. That’s Reddit behavior, and it’s not helping anyone.
Nah, these data centers are not even worth talking about being bad for the environment compared to almost everything else we do. Trying to use that as a primary focus here is just people looking for an excuse to hate the technology.
https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/comparing-water-footprint-ai/
Here’s a beautiful article comparing the AI industry to Cattle farming. AI data center water use is measured in tens Billions of liters, while the beef industry is measured in Quadrillions.
You already shot down your own IP argument, I don’t need to help you there. AI companies don’t disproportionately steal from small creators, They may have done more of that in the first few iterations, but the datasets simply don’t do that anymore. There’s no need, they can train it on clean data, then just pull live from the web for specifics now.
I am dripping condescension because it’s fucking stupid. There are plenty of horrible things happening in the world today, AI datacenters are so far down the list that they do not deserve the amount of effort people are putting in to hate them while far more significant things go un-recognized. The reason for this? Because people are being misled, and instead of figuring out things themselves they take the shit they read at face value.
Using data about data centers from 4 years ago. Haha I guarantee you googles data center snare using more water now. Also one is food one is not, and the this is also bad argument is stupid.
