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Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes

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  • All the leadership who made this mistake should be fired. They are clearly incompetent

    But i guess it's always labor that pays the price

    What’s sad is that the AI hype did inflate stock prices.

    Most c suites’ job is to look out for the interests of investors.

    Technically they did a good job. I hate capitalism

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    What these companies didn't take the time to understand is, A.I. is a tool to make employees more efficient, not to replace them. Sadly the vast majority of these companies will also fail to learn this lesson now and will get rid of A.I. systems altogether rather than use them properly.

    When I write a document for my employer I use A.I. as a research and planning assistant, not as the writer. I still put in the work writing the document, I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.

  • Jup. But the same goes for developers that go way too fast when setting up a project or library. 2-3 months in and everything is a mess. Weird function names, all one letter vars, no inversion of control, hardcoded things etc. Good luck fixing it.

    This is what I fight against every goddamn day, and I get yelled at for fighting against it, but I’m not going to stop. I want to build shit that I can largely forget about (because, you know, it’s reliable and logically extensible and maintainable) after it gets to a mature state, and I’m not shy about making that known. This has led to more than a few significant conflicts over the course of my career. It has also led to me saying “I fucking told you so” more than a few times.

  • As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I've been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.

    A lot of is pretty bad. It's a mess. But like I said I've been at it for awhile and I've seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn't learn anything. It's literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it's AI pretty much stating the same shit.

    I've been getting so many requests for gigs I've been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I've burned through all my contacts that now I'm just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.

    yes it's that bad (well bad for companies, it's fantastic for developers.)

    We've hired a bunch of Indian guys who are using AI to do their work... the results are marginally better than either approach independently.

  • What these companies didn't take the time to understand is, A.I. is a tool to make employees more efficient, not to replace them. Sadly the vast majority of these companies will also fail to learn this lesson now and will get rid of A.I. systems altogether rather than use them properly.

    When I write a document for my employer I use A.I. as a research and planning assistant, not as the writer. I still put in the work writing the document, I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.

    I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.

    If you're conscientious, you check AI's output the same way a conscientious licensed professional checks the work of an assistant before signing their name to it.

    If you're more typical... you're at even greater risk trusting AI than you are when trusting an assistant who is trying to convince your bosses that they can do your job better than you.

  • I don’t know if it even helps with productivity that much. A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc. I mean, it’s fine for a quick Python script or whatever but that might save an experienced developer 20 minutes max.

    And if you “write” me an email using Chat GPT and I just read a summary, what is the fucking point? All the nuance is lost. Specialized A.I. is great! I’m all for it combing through giant astronomy data sets or protein folding and stuff like that. But I don’t know that I’ve seen generative A.I. without a specific focus increase productivity very much.

    And if you “write” me an email using Chat GPT and I just read a summary, what is the fucking point?

    Fuuuck, this infuriates me. I wrote that shit for a reason. People already don't read shit before replying to it and this is making it so much worse.

  • Vibe coding is 5% asking for code and 95% cleaning up the code, turns out replacing people with AI is exactly the same.

    I'm still not sure how this is any different than when I used stack exchange for exactly the same thing.

    Well, SE code usually compiled and did what it said. I guess that part is different.

  • Vibe coding is 5% asking for code and 95% cleaning up the code, turns out replacing people with AI is exactly the same.

    Stack Exchange coding is 5% finding solutions to try and 95% copy-pasting those solutions into your project, discovering why they don't work for you, and trying the next solution on the search list.

  • This is what I fight against every goddamn day, and I get yelled at for fighting against it, but I’m not going to stop. I want to build shit that I can largely forget about (because, you know, it’s reliable and logically extensible and maintainable) after it gets to a mature state, and I’m not shy about making that known. This has led to more than a few significant conflicts over the course of my career. It has also led to me saying “I fucking told you so” more than a few times.

    It has also led to me saying “I fucking told you so” more than a few times.

    I have had several situations where I didn't even have to give knowing looks, everybody in the room knew I told them so six months ago and here it is. When that led to problems working with my leadership in the future (which happened more often than not), that was a 100% reliable sign that I would be happier and more successful elsewhere.

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    Oh noes, who could have seen this coming

  • As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I've been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.

    A lot of is pretty bad. It's a mess. But like I said I've been at it for awhile and I've seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn't learn anything. It's literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it's AI pretty much stating the same shit.

    I've been getting so many requests for gigs I've been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I've burned through all my contacts that now I'm just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.

    yes it's that bad (well bad for companies, it's fantastic for developers.)

    Sometimes it is a bunch of Indian guys pretending to be AI!

  • I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.

    If you're conscientious, you check AI's output the same way a conscientious licensed professional checks the work of an assistant before signing their name to it.

    If you're more typical... you're at even greater risk trusting AI than you are when trusting an assistant who is trying to convince your bosses that they can do your job better than you.

    yes, 100%, do not use an LLM for anything you’re not prepared to vet and verify all of. The longer an LLM’s response the higher the odds it loses context and starts repeating or stating total gibberish or makes up data to keep going. If that’s what you want (like a list of fake addresses and phone numbers to prototype an app), great, but that’s about all it’s going to really do.

  • We've hired a bunch of Indian guys who are using AI to do their work... the results are marginally better than either approach independently.

    a negative times a negative is a positive?

  • youre in luck, i offer consultation for consultancing, now give me money

    This person sounds confident! You’d be stupid not to take them up on it.

  • I don’t know if it even helps with productivity that much. A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc. I mean, it’s fine for a quick Python script or whatever but that might save an experienced developer 20 minutes max.

    And if you “write” me an email using Chat GPT and I just read a summary, what is the fucking point? All the nuance is lost. Specialized A.I. is great! I’m all for it combing through giant astronomy data sets or protein folding and stuff like that. But I don’t know that I’ve seen generative A.I. without a specific focus increase productivity very much.

    So some places started forcing developers to use AI with a quota and monitor the usage. Of course the devs don't go checking each AI generated line for correctness. That's bad for the quota. It's guaranteed to add more slop to the codebase.

  • I'm still not sure how this is any different than when I used stack exchange for exactly the same thing.

    Well, SE code usually compiled and did what it said. I guess that part is different.

    Practically negligible then...

    However how the heck have you all been using stack exchange? My questions are typically something along the lines of:

    "How to use a numpy mask with pandas dataframes"

    Not something that gives me 50 lines of code.

  • I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.

    If you're conscientious, you check AI's output the same way a conscientious licensed professional checks the work of an assistant before signing their name to it.

    If you're more typical... you're at even greater risk trusting AI than you are when trusting an assistant who is trying to convince your bosses that they can do your job better than you.

    Oh I check the citations. I'm fully aware of A.I. hallucinations.

  • As a senior developer, my most productive days are genuinely when I remove a lot of code. This might seem like negative productivity to a naive beancounter, but in fact this is my peak contribution to the software and the organization. Simplifying, optimizing, identifying what code is no longer needed, removing technical debt, improving maintainability, this is what requires most of my experience and skill and contextual knowledge to do safely and correctly. AI has no ability to do this in any meaningful way, and code bases filled with mostly AI generated code are bound to become an unmaintainable nightmare (which I will eventually be paid handsomely to fix, I suspect)

    Getting to deprecate legacy support... Yes please, let me get my eraser.

    I find most tech debt resolution adds code though.

  • As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I've been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.

    A lot of is pretty bad. It's a mess. But like I said I've been at it for awhile and I've seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn't learn anything. It's literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it's AI pretty much stating the same shit.

    I've been getting so many requests for gigs I've been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I've burned through all my contacts that now I'm just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.

    yes it's that bad (well bad for companies, it's fantastic for developers.)

    Would you happen to be willing to throw work to random out-of-work devs who aren't in your city? I may know a couple over here in England...

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    And no doubt struggling to blame their bad decisions on each other and preserve their salary bonuses.

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    lupusblackfur@lemmy.worldL
    Welp, queue up some more multi-million dollar "donations" to have these cases dropped... Not like the TechBros don't have the funds. ‍️ ‍️
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    C
    I love how they put up the English name after the first outcry of "where do I send the ambulance again" fears.
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    F
    I imagine not, though I haven't looked into it.
  • Using Signal groups for activism

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    ulrich@feddit.orgU
    You're using a messaging app that was built with the express intent of being private and encrypted. Yes. You're asking why you can't have a right to privacy when you use your real name as your display handle in order to hide your phone number. I didn't ask anything. I stated it definitively. If you then use personal details as your screen name, you can't get mad at the app for not hiding your personal details. I've already explained this. I am not mad. I am telling you why it's a bad product for activism. Chatting with your friends and clients isn't what this app is for. That's...exactly what it's for. And I don't know where you got the idea that it's not. It's absurd. Certainly Snowden never said anything of the sort. Signal themselves never said anything of the sort. There are other apps for that. Of course there are. They're varying degrees of not private, secure, or easy to use.
  • Teachers Are Not OK

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    curious_canid@lemmy.caC
    AI is so far from being the main problem with our current US educational system that I'm not sure why we bother to talk about it. Until we can produce students who meet minimum standards for literacy and critical thinking, AI is a sideshow.
  • Google confirms more ads on your paid YouTube Premium Lite soon

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    undefined@lemmy.hogru.chU
    I had to look it up, what I was thinking of was MQA. Looks like they discontinued it last year though.
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    D
    I don't think accuracy is an issue either. I've been on the web since inception and we always had a terribly inaccurate information landscape. It's really about individual ability to put together found information to an accurate world model and LLMs is a tool just like any other. The real issues imo are effects on society be it information manipulation, breaking our education and workforce systems. But all of that is overshadowed by meme issues like energy use or inaccuracy as these are easy to understand for any person while sociology, politics and macro economics are really hard.
  • Microsoft Bans Employees From Using DeepSeek App

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    L
    (Premise - suppose I accept that there is such a definable thing as capitalism) I'm not sure why you feel the need to state this in a discussion that already assumes it as a necessary precondition of, but, uh, you do you. People blaming capitalism for everything then build a country that imports grain, while before them and after them it’s among the largest exporters on the planet (if we combine Russia and Ukraine for the “after” metric, no pun intended). ...what? What does this have to do with literally anything, much less my comment about innovation/competition? Even setting aside the wild-assed assumptions you're making about me criticizing capitalism means I 'blame [it] for everything', this tirade you've launched into, presumably about Ukraine and the USSR, has no bearing on anything even tangentially related to this conversation. People praising capitalism create conditions in which there’s no reason to praise it. Like, it’s competitive - they kill competitiveness with patents, IP, very complex legal systems. It’s self-regulating and self-optimizing - they make regulations and do bailouts preventing sick companies from dying, make laws after their interests, then reactively make regulations to make conditions with them existing bearable, which have a side effect of killing smaller companies. Please allow me to reiterate: ...what? Capitalists didn't build literally any of those things, governments did, and capitalists have been trying to escape, subvert, or dismantle those systems at every turn, so this... vain, confusing attempt to pin a medal on capitalism's chest for restraining itself is not only wrong, it fails to understand basic facts about history. It's the opposite of self-regulating because it actively seeks to dismantle regulations (environmental, labor, wage, etc), and the only thing it optimizes for is the wealth of oligarchs, and maybe if they're lucky, there will be a few crumbs left over for their simps. That’s the problem, both “socialist” and “capitalist” ideal systems ignore ape power dynamics. I'm going to go ahead an assume that 'the problem' has more to do with assuming that complex interacting systems can be simplified to 'ape (or any other animal's) power dynamics' than with failing to let the richest people just do whatever they want. Such systems should be designed on top of the fact that jungle law is always allowed So we should just be cool with everybody being poor so Jeff Bezos or whoever can upgrade his megayacht to a gigayacht or whatever? Let me say this in the politest way I know how: LOL no. Also, do you remember when I said this? ‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires’ is wearing kinda thin You know, right before you went on this very long-winded, surreal, barely-coherent ramble? Did you imagine I would be convinced by literally any of it when all it amounts to is one giant, extraneous, tedious equivalent of 'Won't someone please think of the billionaires?' Simp harder and I bet maybe you can get a crumb or two yourself.