Technology

It's like employing a perpetually high idiot, but more productive while also being less useful. Instead of slow medicine you get fast garbage!

The one thing "AI" has improved in my life has been a banking app search function being slightly better.

Oh, and a porn game did okay with it as an art generator, but the creator was still strangely lazy about it. You're telling me you can make infinite free pictures of big tittied goth girls and you only included a few?

I was trying to find out how to get human readable timestamps from my shell history. They gave me this crazy script. It worked but it was super slow. Later I learned you could do history -i.

TBH those same colleagues were probably just copy/pasting code from the first google result or stackoverflow answer, so arguably AI did make them more productive at what they do

It's hilarious to watch it used well and then human nature just kick in

We started using some "smart tools" for scheduling manufacturing and it's honestly been really really great and highlighted some shortcomings that we could easily attack and get easy high reward/low risk CAPAs out of.

Company decided to continue using the scheduling setup but not invest in a single opportunity we discovered which includes simple people processes. Took exactly 0 wins. Fuckin amazing.

Probably because the vast majority of the workforce does not work in tech but has had these clunky, failure-prone tools foisted on them by tech. Companies are inserting AI into everything, so what used to be a problem that could be solved in 5 steps now takes 6 steps, with the new step being "figure out how to bypass the AI to get to the actual human who can fix my problem".

They've got a guy at work whose job title is basically AI Evangelist. This is terrifying in that it's a financial tech firm handling twelve figures a year of business-- the last place where people will put up with "plausible bullshit" in their products.

I grudgingly installed the Copilot plugin, but I'm not sure what it can do for me better than a snippet library.

I asked it to generate a test suite for a function, as a rudimentary exercise, so it was able to identify "yes, there are n return values, so write n test cases" and "You're going to actually have to CALL the function under test", but was unable to figure out how to build the object being fed in to trigger any of those cases; to do so would require grokking much of the code base. I didn't need to burn half a barrel of oil for that.

I'd be hesitant to trust it with "summarize this obtuse spec document" when half the time said documents are self-contradictory or downright wrong. Again, plausible bullshit isn't suitable.

Maybe the problem is that I'm too close to the specific problem. AI tooling might be better for open-ended or free-association "why not try glue on pizza" type discussions, but when you already know "send exactly 4-7-Q-unicorn emoji in this field or the transaction is converted from USD to KPW" having to coax the machine to come to that conclusion 100% of the time is harder than just doing it yourself.

I can see the marketing and sales people love it, maybe customer service too, click one button and take one coherent "here's why it's broken" sentence and turn it into 500 words of flowery says-nothing prose, but I demand better from my machine overlords.

Tell me when Stable Diffusion figures out that "Carrying battleaxe" doesn't mean "katana randomly jutting out from forearms", maybe at that point AI will be good enough for code.

For anything more that basic autocomplete, copilot has only given me broken code. Not even subtly broken, just stupidly wrong stuff.

Except it didn't make more jobs, it just made more work for the remaining employees who weren't laid off (because the boss thought the AI could let them have a smaller payroll)

Have you tripled your billing/salary? Stop being a scab lol

I mean if it's easy you can probably script it with some other tool.

"I have a list of IDs and need to make them links to our internal tool's pages" is easy and doesn't need AI. That's something a product guy was struggling with and I solved in like 30 seconds with a Google sheet and concatenation

It also helps you getting a starting point when you don't know how ask a search engine the right question.

But people misinterpret its usefulness and think It can handle complex and context heavy problems, which must of the time will result in hallucinated crap.