Fucking awesome writing style there - and a lot of salient points. The only weakness is that it's preaching to the choir - the use of jargon and technical references probably makes it inaccessible to anyone who doesn't agree with its conclusion.

That said, it's wonderfully cathartic.

[–] dactylotheca@suppo.fi 67 points 5 months ago (3 children)

That said, it's wonderfully cathartic.

Right‽ This was seriously the best rant I've read in ages; not only was it spot on, it was fucking hilarious.

This has to be the best way I've seen anyone describe what the problem with the current AI woo-woo is:

And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.

[–] maniclucky@lemmy.world 21 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Upvote for use of real interrobang alone.

[–] dactylotheca@suppo.fi 12 points 5 months ago

I can't help but love obscure punctuation

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ive been calling this the reverse turing test:

Can you tell that a known human being is not an 'AI' chatbot, based on text correspondence?

Apparently we are now just going to have AI simulacra of ourselves date each other on dating apps and meet with each other on zoom.

The meeting thing in particular is so fucking insane.

Problem: Meetings waste time and accomplish nothing!

Solution: Don't hire or train competent people, instead, automate meetings, the transcripts of which will presumably still have to be read, and will likely not make any sense, thus necessitating more meetings.

The goal of technological civilization apparently truly is to create maximum misery via maximizing meetings.

[–] dactylotheca@suppo.fi 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Wait, has somebody actually suggested automating meetings? Like, has somebody said that out loud without a hint of irony or sarcasm?

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Hold on , I'll edit this when I find a link.

Edit:

Ok, so here is OpenAI wanting to make... well basically it seems to want to have not only an AI agent in a text support chatbox telling you how to fix a problem...

...but give it the ability to completely take over your computer and just do it for you, presumably via Remote Assistance and whatever the Mac equivalent is.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/openai-plans-chatgpt-supersmart-assistant-135029243.html?guccounter=1

No way this could go wrong and lead to fake support sites just fucking writing a batch file and executing it in the blink of an eye.

Then we've got both Zoom and Otter who yes, straight up, want to build AI powered avatars, based on each employee/user and replace the human entirely in meetings.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/zoom-s-ceo-wants-a-manipulatable-ai-avatar-of-you-to-attend-meetings-instead/ar-BB1nGO5m

https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/could-ai-personas-attend-your-work-meetings-for-you-one-tech-ceo-says-yes-and-by-the-end-of-the-year/articleshow/107797330.cms

Fuck the infinite paper clip making machine, we are intentionally trying to make the infinite meeting machine.

[–] dactylotheca@suppo.fi 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Could AI personas attend your work meetings for you? One tech CEO says yes

One tech CEO has drain bamage, I take it. To paraphrase Charles Babbage, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.

Like, what the fuck is the point of this? If you think meetings are a problem and AI is the solution, there are a countably infinite amount of ideas you could come up with that aren't this idiotic

[–] Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly

Wait your suppose to do that? I mean, don’t get me wrong, that makes sense, but so far 0% of the companies I’ve worked for do that.

[–] dactylotheca@suppo.fi 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Yeeeaaah you're supposed to regularly test that you can actually restore your backups, because boy do a lot of companies find out they can't only after shit goes sideways and to their horror they then realize that they can't restore some system's backups because reasons.

Not sure I've worked in a company that did that, and frankly even when I was CTO in a startup we didn't have automated backup tests – mostly because it was still early days and I just manually tested restoring our in-house service when a change was made that would warrant it. N + 1 other things to do besides automating backup tests so I deemed that Good Enough™.