This sounds like a real application for Doctrow’s “Chuffie” from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom… scan the “how’s my driving?” QR code on the lid of the bot and downvote… company’s bots gets enough downvotes it gets restricted out of the places it’s receiving the downvotes from.
These are the kind of things that could run on a lane built over the sidewalk…
expected to tip the fucking robot?
I think that’s more commonly like a sheep.
The world really needs transparency like that - tip your cook, tip the farmer that grew the amazing tomatoes, or stiff 'em all but at least know who they really were. Before placing your order, get a readout of where the fish was caught, and when… identify how close the chocolate’s cocoa was grown to toxic lead contamination sites - before you take it off the shelf.
After you tip it on its back…
Over-hype much? “an operating nuclear station” followed by “then it brought the reactor back online”…
creating busy work for each other
Welcome to the regulated service economy. We’ve got all the food and structure and infrastructure production we need, idle hands are the devils’ workshop, so keep the people busy making work for other people.
What I have found is: if the AI operator cares, they can tell it to make the instructions, or summary, or whatever it is, whatever length they want it to be. Just summarize the most important parts to half a page, or go into extreme depth on every section. Target 300-400 words, or 3500-4000… whatever you feel is appropriate for the topic and the target audience.
Not strictly about AI, when I write something explaining something technical for my manager (who is technical and can understand it all, but rarely has the time to) what I often find myself doing is getting to the end, then going back and writing a 25 words or less summarization of what he actually wants to know to communicate this up the line to his managers - then leaving the 3-5 pages of technical regurgitation of details that led me to that conclusion as reference for the one or two little details he’ll possibly be interested in for his own curiosity.
The problem I have with short instructions is: you never know what details you’re leaving out that are going to matter in the future until people start using your instructions and making bad assumptions because you didn’t over-emphasize a point - like: writing an instruction that says “accept all the defaults” - well, apparently our colleagues in the overseas office weren’t capable of following that particular instruction without an additional big bold NOTE: hitting them over the head to emphasize: no, really, you’re going to regret all the extra work you have to do if you don’t accept the default options.
It’s an iterative process, and should be the same whether or not you’re using an AI agent to do the writing for you. Try, fail. Try again, fail again, fail better next time.
Just don’t be poor, was always the answer - and they haven’t come up with a better one yet.
shocked that the “euphoria” hasn’t collided with the disappointing reality yet. At least not catastrophically.
I think part of the problem is that a significant part of the hype is being shown as not hype. By significant, I mean a small percentage, less than 10%, but with so much hype being pumped up out there, even 5% is highly significant.
It is absolutely one of the goals. The goals are many, the benefactors are few.
Investment banking 101.
they have the levers and means to come out on top of it.
To delude themselves that they’ll be coming out on top… they’ll suffer too, and the more they strive to climb, the more they’ll be risking everything.
start a garden
Just start with that one, because if you’re really prepping, you’ll never store enough food for a reboot from a real end of the supply chain shitstorm.
Don’t just talk about a garden, read some books, plant a few seeds and watch them sprout and bloom, really try to garden enough to grow your food instead of buying it from the store. My challenge: 10% - can you replace 10% of your grocery purchases with home-grown heirloom seed stuff that you can replant from year to year without having to buy new Miracle Grow soil for your raised beds every year. Most people will find that they can’t. That they don’t have enough time and attention in their busy lives to even supply 10% of their own food from a garden on their land without buying all kinds of inputs to the garden that will not be available right about the same time the food for purchase goes away. Those who are successful will find that the $600 worth of food they grow costs them 300+ hours a year of labor to produce, protect from consumption by birds, rodents, deer and other pests. Now add human neighbor poachers to that list of pests - which one of you will be running out of ammunition first?
Oh, those deer, we can shoot enough deer to make jerky all year! Yeah, it will have to be jerky because refrigeration isn’t a thing after the food stops coming to the grocery stores, and how long do you think it will take for 350 million Americans to harvest every single deer on the continent? After year 2 or 3, any deer remaining will still be alive because they run hard the other direction at the first sight, sound or scent of man.
CEOs are smart people who are legally bound to safeguard their companies and they wouldn’t be so heavily invested in AI if there was any chance of its being a bubble.
Reciting his training - were I your mother, I’d never speak with Lameman James’ Tool again and ensure that they receive no further comissions from her assets.
The rich ass financial types see it coming, they just think they have a handle on it - that they’re going to gain competitive advantage in the shitstorm it will unleash. Some will, most won’t, but when you’re rich and bored and have nothing better in your head than just climbing one more rung up the “mine’s bigger than yours” ladder, they’d rather bet on longshots than die comfortable on their perch.
It can be like that, and other times it can spit out perfectly good work that similar jobs have taken me a week in the past in under an hour. Depends on the task, depends a bit on how you ask, and depends on the model. Claude Sonnet/Opus 4.5 and higher have gotten pretty good about actually saving time and producing useful results.
Except when trying to draw 3D cats in Blender, I can say with authority now: Opus 4.8 on High/Max thinking still can’t pin the tail on a cat correctly without a half dozen very specific annotated views showing it where it goes. It claims it’s having trouble because the cat is lying down… our cat lays down 22 hours a day, suck it up and learn what they look like already.
The AI company marketing (and development) I see still seems to focus mostly on the “we can give a really non-specific prompt and get a functioning app out of thet” - which is missing the point for my uses of it.
My company is very interested in leveraging the new tools where we can, but not laying anybody off (yet) - I think the target is hoping that our exploration time is being roughly balanced with increases in efficiency, which is more or less how we’re managing it for the past few months.
How it’s being utilized should be the target of ire, not the technology itself.
try talking with an out of work actress about how it’s being utilized, their only answer is to ban it all.
That actress should have access to Universal Basic Income
As should we all have had for the past 25 years… keep wishing.
That would be my future, if you make me king. Since the offers for absolute unflinching loyalty are a bit thin on the ground for the past couple of decades, I’ll assume it’s probably not the future we’re getting.