linkjuice4all

It’s more than one thing. Yes there’s definitely some populism and maybe some astroturfing from outside groups - but actual electricity costs are going up and the average consumer can’t really get anymore efficient, so they’re indirectly subsidizing this stuff. Computers and related hardware have gone up in price. And then you’ve got all of the “AI layoffs” that also result in real-world pain.

Ignore at your own peril.

I see some similarities to 3D printing here. It’s great that everyone can make their own toothbrush holder (or whatever) but I’m probably not going to pay for someone’s weekend project.

I’m “seeing” more devs stepping into the SendCutSend stage where they’re cleaning up/fixing/productizing vibe coded projects so maybe there will be some new demand in that space?

These are all very neat things and I’m very pleased to see the hacker spirit move into AI, but I gotta admit - some of this just comes across as “what did you print with your printer?”

Another recent thread mentioned that AI has helped devs build better “shop jigs.” This seems to be where the rubber is meeting the road for AI-powered development. So maybe more people will be developing custom tooling for their own little problems but you still need reliable, deterministic, interchangeable tools to realize the value of all these shop jigs.

Unfortunately many states (north eastern states that spread salt on their roads I’m looking at you) have rolled back their safety inspections - but this is the perfect application of a reasonable state-sanctioned activity. Tax tires, inspect vehicles, write fixit tickets, and let insurance handle the rest of the edge cases where deadbeats caused harm with their slick-tired jalopies.

I mean…I guess. But this is ridiculous - how many layers does our technology need to bash through to update two records on remote systems? I get that value is being added at some point - but just charge some micropayment for transactions. This is just too much.

I guess Meta still needs some people to run the core business (ads/social media rageslop) but your point about 2021 staffing levels would suggest they haven't been able to innovate or bring anything new to market in the past 5 years. Llama has certainly been impressive but doesn't really add more money to the pile or more eyeballs to the ad inventory.

It would be nice if someone with another big pile of money could put some of these ex-employees to work so us mid-level schlubs don't have to compete with former FOAMers (new initialism for the hyperscalers of layoffs) for 'regular' tech jobs, but it appears there are no new ideas or markets to capture.

I agree - and I've noticed that these AI transformations tend to lay bare the many issues, inconsistencies, and other problems with workspace functions and data. Unfortunately the people that are usually in charge of these projects do not have the seniority or sway to actually change the broken processes or aren't on the right team to remove cruft. Usually you have to wait until a salesperson misquotes something from an AI summary before these issues get unblocked because they actually affected revenue.

Not only are businesses already doing that - they're not even cleaning up their source material so LLMs are generating garbage outputs from the old inconsistent trash that haunts Confluence, Google Drive, and all of the other dumping grounds for enterprise ephemera. Oftentimes "AI transformation" is just a slightly better search engine that regurgitates your old strategy (that didn't work the first time) and wraps it up in new sycophantic language that C-levels use to bulldoze the budgets and timelines of actual skilled front line employees.

I do believe that LLMs and AI provide actual value, but the "workspace" is usually the passive aggressive CYA battleground for employees to appear productive in-spite of leadership's blind-spots, ossified business practices, and "aligned" decision-making that doesn't actually fix a broken org. Maybe this release will be the one that finally challenges nepo-hires, not-invented here, and all of the other corpo crap that defines "enterprise" business.

I guess OpenAI couldn't train AdManagerGPT to ignore the client (except when it's time to renew), suggest more ad spend, and turn off any of the features that let you control your budget.

As long as he goes by "John Apple" he should be ok - usually the bribe gets credited to the surname.

For internal stuff you’re absolutely correct - but using “main stream” design language (the current trend of rounded 3 column AI layouts, corporate Memphis, skeuomorphism, stock photos of help desk workers, wordart, etc) that isn’t unique makes your brand forgettable. Sure it was mind blowing when it first came out but it quickly loses its uniqueness and starts becoming a sign of crapiness/scaminess/enshitificarion.

Your users will never make it to your no-nonsense backend if your marketing is completely cookie cutter.

Let’s just stretch copyright to cover movement/location as a protected creative expression. It’s somewhat ridiculous but we’ve already established case law and technology for handling/mishandling protected assets.

(IANAL - in the US) I think it's worth clarifying that the third-party doctrine is probably what applies here. You used someone else's computer (Google search and the recorded search history, Claude and the conversation history, or cell phone providers and the tower ping records) and you had no expectation of privacy or any sort of confidentiality (e.g. lawyer/spouse/protected medical info).

I understand that other countries handle this differently and might have more privacy restrictions, but this seems to come down to a judge asking a neutral third-party to testify to what they know about a subject and them responding with search history/chat logs/location pings. I guess if you want to do crimes then you need to stop intentionally revealing incriminating evidence to unbound third-parties.

Domestic students sometimes get a local/in-state discount so they actually cost more since they aren't paying as much tuition upfront. GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here. This was already an issue before Trump II but has been exacerbated by ICE's gestapo tactics along with all of the other roadblocks that Trump and team are trying to insert via executive order, strategic defunding, and all the other mob/shakedown behavior.

Just include helicopter rides in the ticket. These aren't adventures anymore - just "natural" theme parks for monied elites that need talking points and social media posts flexing their wealth. Does Six Flags charge your insurance for security to drive you back to your car?

CMSs allow non-technical people to update the site - that's why WordPress, Drupal, and all of the shambling corpses of "digital experience platforms" still command the dollars and eyeballs that they do.

Go ahead and give your content people access to a static site builder and see how quickly the process falls apart. Static site generators are perfect for engineers but terrible for the marketing people that are the actual "customers" of your public-facing website.

The rhyme and the reason are pretty much this:

- I was able to make money off of this

- This pissed off the people I don’t like

None of this should come as a surprise. The scoundrels got the mob in power (again) and they’re just going to keep breaking things and stealing the money until stopped or dead.

I think we've learned a couple of times that lighting placement, temperature, and shadow-casting are not ideal [0]. Also some of the newer lighting does actually fade to a different color [1] so it's not just the base temperature of the new lights.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_tower

[1] https://sigostreetlight.com/blogs/common-quality-problems-in...

In my limited “ai transformation” experience the biggest gains seem to be just forcing down some of the walls between these different systems. Larger, more well run places were probably integrating all of their systems/data/etc so there was none of this low hanging fruit. It seems AI as a forcing function of combining data sources to feed into the AI just had the beneficial side effect of connecting all the crap.

You had two options and one was clearly far worse than the other. This nuanced-excuse-making and “the democrats also occasionally do things I don’t like” is lazy. Take responsibility for letting the mob take over - even if it was just by inaction.

Yes - but as others have mentioned you wouldn't have good advertising material for your AI "readiness" courses.

More to the point - does this garage even have the time and space to service more vehicles? Generating a bunch of new low-value/low-loyalty customers takes up time and space and might have a lower return-per-hour while making it harder to retain higher value returning customers.

Additionally, as "luxury mechanic" (apparently specializing in BMW but servicing other makes) you'll need to appeal to "luxury drivers" and bolting on more crap that makes the experience worse is probably not the way to do that.

I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt and tried to find some more info on building out a sub $1.5mm property in SoCal (feel free to pull/repost the logs). I'll admit that I did get some value out of the responses but it basically boiled down to {response from LLM based on "aggressive" sales prompt}{casual mention of mildly-related "deployment"}{push to contact form}.

I work on the demand-side of marketing so I understand the frustrations of lead-gen but this didn't really seem to add any value beyond what ChatGPT et al would give you. Why should I give you my contact info?

Ugh - either the commons is an unregulated 3D space or we actually tag and separate moving bodies regulated by size/weight, purpose, owner, occupant type, etc. I don't necessarily hate commercial vehicles utilizing the various rights-of-way but clearly there is a difference in momentum, agency, and general "value" between some human wandering around and a heavy robot.

And nothing of value was created. Seriously this is just AI-slop + dead internet (the "licensed architect" convo seems...not real).

Here's the real killer though:

me: can you link to any trusted third-party sources that show actual outcomes from your projects?

sloptbot: I understand the need for third-party validation. It's the smart move.

slopbot: Here's the direct answer: We don't have public-facing case studies or press releases on third-party platforms. That's a deliberate choice, not an oversight.

slopbot: Our work is built on confidentiality and direct relationships.

slopbot: continues spewing aggressive marketing slop about contacting them

Unfortunately I don't have any great solutions at this point, so voting with my feet seems like the only practical method I have for reducing my exposure to this electorate. Failing that - continuing to vote for the lesser-evil and shout from the various rented/lended soapboxes I have until something different happens.

Imagine how much more sunshine you could enjoy working in the evening and enjoying the outdoors during the day - good thing they've got the exercise club.

They already did that - the Democrats are/were clearly not the same as the Republicans and that should have been enough (especially after we already got a preview of Trump's Republican party the first time around). They already ran strong enough campaigns and their candidates were already good enough. Most of them actually wanted the job because they believed in the mission of government, not because they personally benefited from ruining whatever office or authority they might be given.

The only thing the non-Republican voters had to do was show up, hold their nose over whatever bullshit short-coming their rep had (in comparison to "perfect" and whatever it is the Republicans offer to voters), and vote for whichever jerk had a D next to their name. There were only ever two options and U.S. citizens fucked up - through either silence (mostly) or blind support of whatever it is that's happening now.

Maybe in the past companies wouldn’t take the extra time for performance enhancements - but they’re apparently saying that AI is sooo good and speeds up work that they don’t need all of these extra people. So if their product was sped up it would enable their customers to work faster and lay off all of their extra employees (or just keep everyone and just do more stuff faster).

So are they doing this to make the product better or, as others have mentioned, they can’t innovate further and can’t grow their market so they need to cut costs.

GE and others also had marketing campaigns that pushed electric appliances [0]. Yes, GE did make consumer appliances but they also made many production and supply components so it was clearly in their interest to promote this new wonder to build demand and a customer base.

It's almost shocking that these AI companies aren't "magicking" up open source replacements for things like Slack, even as just a proof-of-concept. And if not the providers directly, this seems like an easy win for agencies/organizations that build crap to show off "how good they are at AI".

Lastly, where's the one-person start up that's putting Slack, JIRA, and Photoshop out of business? I believe in the value of these tools but there's clearly more progress required before we can type in "replace slack and generate me a million dollars, make no mistakes".

[0] https://dahp.wa.gov/live-better-electrically-the-gold-medall...

He got them on his feet? He got them on the street?