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@cstross @briankrebs Living here is not a walk in the park at this point...
I'd never ask anybody to travel here now. I'm glad I'm no longer in the events-organizing part of tech -- I couldn't host anything anywhere in the U.S. if it required people to come from outside.
Not our largest problem right now, but it's a fairly nasty symptom.
@riverpunk oooh. Apparently I'm a centaur. Cool. @pluralistic
@MartinEscardo well played. I should’ve expected that, but in my defense… I was really tired. 
@matt That's true, though I'm not sure I'd call using LLMs to do homework pro-worker, either. It's kind of a different tangent.
@larsmb @em_and_future_cats Well, as designed, they are -- I'm not sure that's a built-in limitation of LLMs or not. To be fair, I am not an expert on the tech.
As something of an aside...
It would be really interesting if you could pair the natural language instruction input with predictable output.
That is, for example -- if I could query, say, all the data in Wikipedia but get only accurate output. Or if you had something like Ansible with natural-language playbook creation.
"Hey, Ansible -- I want a playbook that will install all of the packages I have currently installed and retain my dotfiles" (or something) and be guaranteed accurate output... that would be amazing.
Except that I also worry about losing skills to do those things. I worry about the loss of incidental knowledge when researching if a computer can return *only* what you ask for and sacrifice accidental discovery.
(I also still think search engines were something of a mistake and miss Internet directories. Yeah, I'm fun at parties....)
@bexelbie From my POV the answer to "why not both?" is that you can't really separate them right now.
Adoption of the commercial tools for whatever purpose does more to pave the way to the negative outcomes than any positive ones.
I think the "overemployed" thing is more of a statistical anomaly than a real thing.
Perhaps I'm just old and inflexible, though. Ideologically, I mean. I know I'm not very flexible physically these days...
@matthewcroughan No. That's "wow, look at how you can overload your workers when they say 'I can't be in 3 places at once'."
They're not trying to sell Copilot to the person in the picture, they're trying to sell it to their bosses and trying to sell the productivity glory story to go along with it.
A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…
Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers.
“Use ChatGPT to write your TPS reports, go home at lunchtime. Spend more time with your kids!” “Use Claude to write your code, turn 60-hour weeks into four-day weekends!” “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”
Imagine if AI/LLM tools were not shareholder catnip, but a grassroots movement of tooling that workers were sharing with each other to work less. Same quality of output, but instead of being pushed top-down, being adopted to empower people to work less and “cheat” employers.
Imagine if unions were arguing for the right of workers to use LLMs as labor saving devices, instead of trying to protect members from their damage.
CEOs would be screaming bloody murder. There’d be an overnight industry in AI-detection tools and immediate bans on AI in the workplace. Instead of Microsoft CoPilot 365, Satya would be out promoting Microsoft SlopGuard - add ons that detect LLM tools running on Windows and prevent AI scrapers from harvesting your company’s valuable content for training.
The media would be running horror stories about the terrible trend of workers getting the same pay for working less, and the awful quality of LLM output. Maybe they’d still call them “hallucinations,” but it’d be in the terrified tone of 80s anti-drug PSAs.
What I’m trying to say in my sleep-deprived state is that you shouldn’t ignore the intent and ill effects of these tools. If they were good for you, shareholders would hate them.
You should understand that they’re anti-worker and anti-human. TPTB would be fighting them tooth and nail if their benefits were reversed. It doesn’t matter how good they get, or how interesting they are: the ultimate purpose of the industry behind them is to create less demand for labor and aggregate more wealth in fewer hands.
Unless you happen to be in a very very small club of ultra-wealthy tech bros, they’re not for you, they’re against you. #AI #LLMs #claude #chatgpt
@inthehands I mean, that's exactly the people that ICE attracts: bullies who get off on abusing people. People who are afraid to get hit back in a fight.
Living in the 2020s is like seeing all the worst people I went to high school with running the country. Noem reminds me of the mean girls who were inexplicably popular and just incredibly horrible whenever they had the chance.
I wonder what we can do from afar to help?