Spend the day talking to workers council members about "AI".

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@SnoopJ@hachyderm.io @tante@tldr.nettime.org @glyph@mastodon.social and now we have "so many models to choose from", so we get to play double extra bonus round roulette! Don't just vary your prompts, change models! Infinite combinatorics! You'll never run out of parameters to fiddle with! Burn those tokens, burn em good!

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@otherdog @tante In my own analysis I discounted that cost to zero and still found myself estimating very heavy costs, just from the downsides of using the model itself, which AFAICT are going _totally_ unmeasured almost everywhere

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@otherdog @tante I guess I'll drop the link again just for reference if you haven't seen it, I didn't do so above because I feel like I post this every single day now to the point where the self-promotion feels shameful. but it remains painfully, almost nauseatingly relevant, so, here you go https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html

[dzwiedziu@mastodon.social]

@tante
> CEO's are really not okay.

Never have been.

[maxfenton@mas.to]

@tante Sounds about right

[sablebadger@dice.camp]

@tante CEOs have to do that, they can't admit defeat, so they push ahead regardless and when the chips starts to fall they jump ship and blame it on workers.

[pkw@snac.d34d.net]

I regret being intimidated by C-levels as intelligent.
I wish I had my attitude from now when dealing
with them then.
(everything you said rings spot on to my anecdotes.)

CC: @tante@tldr.nettime.org

[dzwiedziu@mastodon.social]

@tante
And when they do Goodhart law strikes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

@glyph

[larsmb@mastodon.online]

@glyph @tante

"AI is going to make us more productive at shipping our software."

"Great! Amazing! That must be several phd theses you got there! Well done! Didn't know you had it in you."

"?!?"

"Well, I mean, you must have figured out how to measure software development productivity reliably, right? What's our baseline at?"

[otherdog@mastodon.social]

@glyph Thank you for sharing that, a very thought-provoking read.

[carstenschridde@norden.social]

@tante could you please write an essay about this top, i really need to read it!

[ehproque@neopaquita.es]

@jaredwhite @tante why wouldn't they? The people who bullshit for a living are (ironically) not threatened, they're having the time of their lives instead

[missconstrue@mefi.social]

@glyph @tante I had to walk away from being an information architect because everyone wants to pivot to ai, when there is no such thing. I specialize creating information flows that get the right information to the right people. C-suite doesn’t need code docs, and SRE doesn’t need customer service scripts. But all aspects of an enterprise needs documentation for some user in the enterprise. Someone has to create the documentation, map the information, define users, create channels, etc.

Csuite seems to think that it’s magic. That an LLM can talk to both code creators and end users and define requirements from those interviews, and document both the code base, the user docs, the service docs, the marketing docs, etc, and they can just get rid of the tech writers, marketing writers, graphic designers, usability designers, and the people that manage those teams. I mean, good luck with that.

[arrrg@kolektiva.social]

@tante @glyph I've come to realize that the "leaders" in most companies are mostly people who can't build, who aren't creative, and lack any truly marketable skills. They're good at making other executives feel good about themselves.

Most, if not all, companies would be better off without any executives, but rather they are run by a committee of employees.

These little cults of personalities that corporatedom creates are highly ineffective and prone to eradicate and unpredictable results.

[missconstrue@mefi.social]

@olafke @tante When the goal of every new company is to get purchased by a bigger company, end stage capitalism is eating itself.

[pathunstrom@ngmx.com]

@glyph @tante I'm literally the last MIS major at my college, we had to pull my course requirements from the school archives when it was time to graduate.

Business as an industry was training people to have exactly that skill set, and then just stopped ~15 years ago.

(Mostly, the position got replaced by analysts or data scientists as close as I can tell.)

[nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social]

@tante Truly, they're the real problem behind all this... It never would have even reached this point without their complete inability to live inside reality due I suppose to the complete disconnect with the real world all that money seems to give them. The scam would have fallen short positively ages ago and it never even would have been pushed on people in the first place.

[reallylazybear@mastodon.social]

@tante All in the name of "efficiency" and maximum profits. Number must go up up up! idk.

What I do know is that CEO's are usually out of touch with reality, same with rich people as well.

[richrarobi@mastodon.social]

@tante @glyph

Mostly 'Managers' don't have a clue.
Sales run rings round them, with half truths and promises.
Tech-Staff have to clean up the mess, underpaid,
often without adequate training.

It is the history of #britain , the charge of the light brigade enacted time after time, Tommy Atkins in the trenches, the many wounded in the Boer War

Incompetence of management. Upper class twits.
Thin red line, you aren't allowed to duck.

AI will fail eventually - bad management

[snoopj@hachyderm.io]

@tante I struggle to remember a time in my life when CEOs were "okay"

but what's goin on right now, phew