With CEOs - we need to switch to REAL grenades.
Billionaires do this to avoid income taxes.
The most infuriating part of this? Mr. Lütke endorses the idea of granting more votes to those who pay more income tax, including stripping the right to vote from people who do not pay income tax.
He has also called pensioners ‘dependents’ who shouldn’t get to vote:
New deal: when you get your pension deal it’s locked in and guaranteed. But now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age. Enjoy the deal, let people with a stake in the future decide.
https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/shopify-ceo-tobi-lutke-pensioners-voting-rights
Well, considering I paid more in income tax than Bezos did, I think that’s a pretty damn good idea
Dude donated a shit ton of money to slop Linux (omarchy). What did he expect?
Ok then why did you give money to your friend DHH for Omarchy? it’s literally a slop vibe coded “distro”.
Because of the complete vibe coding of Omarchy it takes longer the configure it than any other distro with a WM. I mean hell the AI cut the Hyperland config up into 6 damn LUA files AND THEN you have to unbind everything and rebind it as opposed to ONE file that you can literally just swap out binds. And yet you gave the guy a couple million for it.
So I’m so sorry Tobias but you did this to yourself. you were one of the first to embrace AI completely and use it completely wrong and now you’re whining about it and you continue to fund it. you can’t have it both ways bud.
I prefer the term “Meat Proxy”, but I get that it’s more of an ad hominem. I use both terms.
Has anyone noticed that when a teammate uses AI, their teammates also have to as well? Honestly it might be because they don’t want to bother reading the machine’s code when the original author didn’t put much thought into it. Another might be the mental fatigue from reading code that grows faster than you can parse.
He raises exactly that point in the interview when talking about slop grenades.
Lmao I am living this right now at work 🥲
Yep. We have a guy on the team who generates document after document for us to review and it’s all slop that he has no understanding of (not that anyone could understand the mostly nonsense)
Did you not get to reject all of that yet?
This is also what I don’t get. At worst people start ignoring the documents or requests for review (or code changes) because they have better things to do than review generated text.
At best you push back.
I wish. Our company is still at the “you must adopt and use AI” phase. I’m looking forward to the “Holy fuck that’s expensive! Be careful of your usage” phase
We passed the “Holy fuck that’s expensive!” phase a few months ago and have moved on to the “Use AI for everything but don’t actually do that just use it for some things why [didn’t/did] you use AI for that we can’t afford the [additional time/Azure bill] hahahahahahahaha.” phase. Swap the values in brackets at random on any given day.
My org saw AI as a threat and immediately banned it (blocking websites and restricting features in apps) until our IT folks could evaluate it and implement safeguards. Incidentally, they missed the window when vendors were more or less offering it for free. Now any AI solution doesn’t just have to be vetted against our security and privacy needs, but most likely requires a darn good business case, RFP’s, quotes, and contracts.
It never became a part of the culture here, much to our benefit.
Great, can we now abort this asinine “AI” bullshit and go back to normal GPU prices?
No, we’re going to continue on this path until we have to suck the liquids out of your body to cool the data center
Along similar lines, I’ve started calling it “copyslop” when someone dumps ai garbage into my comms.
Great sites and a new term I recently learned about:
They’re acting as a “meat proxy”.
I spent half my day dealing with a slop grenade.
Someone came in and dropped a (bunch of) AI generated PRs. Said person knows nothing about my world, but they want cost optimization and Fable runs through logs and gives them code. Second Fable review agent tries the code, it doesn’t work. Gives suggestions to first. New commit comes in with workaround, I decline this because it’s a shit and had another unnoticed critical integration bug. This goes on a few more times.
It comes back a fifth or so time with something that is now technically correct, but fucking horrifying. Great, now I don’t know what to do, because I’m getting told it’ll fix the billing issue and this is a huge problem, but the code is insane.
This is a cost optimization PR, advertising massive savings, but the numbers seemed way off. It turns out it looked at one day with a runaway process that racked up insane billing (90% of year-to-date total project cost) and “annualized” it, and that was the savings. But further, it calculated all the costs using the wrong billing system, so all the numbers were wrong.
When I recalculated and corrected it, the whole thing saves us $6/month, because we don’t have runaway outages very often.
This is on top of every ticket I get is Claude generated, they never just state the fucking issue, and 100% of tickets in 2 weeks plus today I’ve received were inaccurate and wrong.
I hate the slop. I hate the non technical users throwing the slop on me without knowing how it works.
Take whatever prompt you put in the AI and write exactly that for the ticket content, then spend 30 seconds summarizing it into a title. I don’t care if it’s “customer wants a button that shows a cat”, just write that.
I cannot take another “client has a load bearing contract dispute with sales. Genuinely the verdict here will secure the shape of the contract. Critically in foo.py function get_foo_blorp there is no reference to felis catus to satisfy hard customer requirement. Acceptance requirement: return felis catus when module controller clicked and client is logged in and client’s birthday is in same month, otherwise return error codes 412 404 526” word salad ticket that doesn’t just state the problem.
I think a good way around this is that any project submissions using AI must include draft material to show how much data was used vs generated. We will never get away from AI at this stage but we need to get to a trust but verify stage. Even if they built the whole thing with AI they should be able to show the amount of tokens used in the entire to generate it (more generally means they have spent time refining whatever it is)
We need to get away from AI=Bad and rather use AI as tools and don’t help it replace us by showing 100% generated work as your own. Me using AI to make something is going to be much more polished and refined vs your general office worker. We need proper AI classes to help show people how to use it responsibly and collaboratively so we can cut down on the amount of duplicate work being generated as if we can cut down processing power it also cuts down the pollution generated.
“SHIP MORE CODE!!! NO NOT LIKE THAT!!!” - CEOs
More lines = better
max-line-width: 20gotta get them klocs boiiiiii
They are hyping themselves. So is Fortune.
We all told you it was vaporware and you wanted to ride that bubble. Don’t pretend any of this was a surprise.
I’m finding it hard to reconcile the people who find it useless with those who find it useful. My own experience with languages is that it speeds me up for tasks I have the skills to verify, but with ones I don’t it can slow me down doing the verification and fixes.
I know software developers in a Fortune 500 company who swear that overall they are far more productive with “agents”. I don’t know if it’s a highly tailored system rather than the more all-purpose ones the general public have. So I do wonder if there are use cases for it.
It’s ruining the planet and our societies, though. And it’s distracting us from what really matters. Net negative for sure.
It’s like a flamethrower, if you’re clearing brush it helps you go ten times faster. But if you dont know what you’re doing you’ll burn the whole property to the ground.
Yeah strong black/white opinions on AI annoy the hell out of me. I find some AI tooling really helpful like fancy line completions and using conversationalLLMs as a last resort to solving problems, but I hate anything to do with agents or vibe coding in general if only just because I don’t want the field I enjoy so much being entirely replaced with being a project manager for a computer.
It makes me frustrated trying to talk about this stuff on Lemmy or other places though because it always ends up being two battling sides of “A SINGLE GENERATED CHARACTER MEANS THE ENTIRE PROJECT IS SLOP!!!” and “ANYONE WHO ISN’T VIBING OUT MILLIONS OF LOC WITH 100 DIFFERENT AGENTS GOING AT ONCE MAY AS WELL JUST KILL THEMSELVES!!!”
I can kinda get the sentiment behind that polarization. There’s such a strong drift towards LLM use that it takes hardline stances to try and slow it down
My code adjacent work is much faster, but programming itself is about the same.
So if I need to make a data visualization or UI for data input it’s way better, but if I have to do an analysis or build something it sucks all the knowledge out of the task and takes twice as long. At least. Because unless I’m forming a strong understanding of the information the task can’t progress.
I have no idea if LLMs actually make me faster in the aggregate, but I’m more interested in using them to be better. For example, having a LLM review some code, or share a plan for and have it point out all of the flaws in your reasoning or alternatives you never considered.
I find it can speed me up, but it’s very easy to become lazy and find myself asking the AI to do things I could do perfectly well myself, quickly and using far less electricity. And then before I know it I have a huge pile of slop that I don’t know my way around, and I spend the time on the other end trying to understand and check it all. It feels amazing up front, but you pay later.
Yeah, it seems like a new type of judgement is needed that I don’t normally encounter in a day. Like, I use a hammer to hammer nails, then I put it down. I don’t try to cook with it. This tool has a weird, abstract nature to it where you can drift between using / misusing / abusing without necessarily noticing. A strange position to be in while trying to work at the same time .
For corporate software, there’s so many bugfixes and features, which require so few additions/changes that it’s faster to do it than to write the prompt.
But obviously only if you’re able to hold the entire codebase in your skull, but a proficient developer should be able to do so.
If people begin outsourcing these changes to LLMs, then they’re cooked and no longer able to verify the output.
Agents is just the LLM prompting itself with subtasks. This can be helpful to compartmentalize larger and more complex tasks. I find the tool calls most important. An agent that can compile and test its own code will make fewer mistakes (assuming the tests weren’t also written by LLMs but even then).
So there’s a self-correcting feedback loop that will improve quality, but is also a lot more expensive. The problem is that the temptation is huge to give more and more complex tasks to the agents and then they go off for 30min or longer and may or may not create complete and utter bullshit because something led them astray or they forgot something one agent did wrong and never fixed it. The end result may work, but it may be less efficient or come with a share of dead code that’s never called etc.
You end up with hundreds of lines to verify. You could just ask an agent to do it, but at some point adding more agents to the pile is not going to help… and probably takes longer than just reading it yourself.
it speeds me up for tasks I have the skills to verify
The issue is that the executives only see the potential to speed up, and not the necessity of having skilled people who can do that verifying.
You shouldn’t expect AI to generate a finished work product yet. If you’re forcing employees to use it, teach them to used it as a starting point and then put their own personal touch on it.
If you’re making a deck, have AI generate the bones, you add the details, then polish it up with AI if you want it to look fancy. If you expect it to turn a bunch of docs into a presentation only using prompts, you’re going to have a bad time.
Or, or - now hear me out - ban the use of AI to do a job that requires a human thought process.
Yeah bc that worked for the Amish Empire.
Weird comment considering the Amish are still around and, if anything, get proven right every day (except for the sexism and racism)
Get proven right about what? Plenty of Amish sects explicitly use technology if it’s in the course of their work or business. They use power tools for furniture making, have computers to handle payments, cell phones, trucks, etc.
They just don’t use it in their personal lives.
Correct, glad you agree.
Aw, now kith
Dude you’re getting paid to not have to use your brain. I finish my work in an hour and spend the rest of the day doing a bunch of corporate culture BS that gives you visibility to the bosses that actually decide your pay. Put effort where you get the most return. Hang out with your friends in the cafeteria and talk about WoW. Tell your boss you are in a mentor circle and slap that on your quarterly review.
Other than chatting with friends, that sounds like a nightmare. I’d rather be just doing the job that I enjoy and doing it well.
Now I think I’m the problem. Great.
The problem in my experience isn’t as much the work forcing it, it is the people who are very enthusiastic because they didn’t know what to do and now they think the AI does it for them, but they still have bad ideas.
Think of the person who has this “great app idea” but just needs a developer to write it. Well now these messes are having GenAI churn out… something. They don’t know if it works or not, but now all they need is someone to help finish off the “essentially done” work, or to accept the pull request the AI generated for your project.
Similar story for the creative content like videos and text. These people were limited by not having enough care to bother to learn or invest the time, but they thought they had amazing ideas. Now we see their uninspired slop bright to life in painful time killing form. The ones that might use it as just an accelerator but care about the output are drowned out by the “prompt and it’s done” folks that just don’t care.
What I really want to know is, were the people putting out workslop, putting out anything better BEFORE AI. I mean, maybe they are just using a different tool to suck.
I think instead of stating that their performance was going to be measured by the quantitative measure of how much AI they used, instead of the qualitative measure of output, while making AI available to them, the CEO might have seen different results.
It’s almost like malicious compliance. “Hey everyone, do this.” Then they all do JUST that. What would you expect? LOL.
In my experience in a way it was better, because they had very low volume of output. Yes, pretty bad already but the GenaAI turned to their volume to 11.
This is one of the biggest downside, the worst people get the most volume out of it because they don’t know or carevto curate the output.
Looking at my last job before I left when AI was being pushed heavily I think I can see what you mean actually.
Before the incompetents would look at something and pass it on to second line without thinking. Now they copy paste the idiot AI outputs. It makes their stats look way better, wastes customer time much more and doesn’t help when it finally gets to me after 2 weeks of bullshit.
Customer satisfaction would be higher if you didn’t use it and did nothing. You are a net drain to the company now because you are trying to do things you don’t understand because of blind reliance on LLMs.
Heh, reminds me of an email thread. Someone stated a fairly straightforward, clear, and actionable course of action.
Then someone followed up with a GenAI email basically trying to be a sycophant to the person who wrote the plan and agreeing with them.
A VP did not get excited by the person that actually plainly declared what to do, but did announce that he was going to set up a meeting with the sycophant because he displayed so much insight, despite only repeating the first guy in a more confusing and buzzwordy way.
The AI generates corpo-speak in a very exciting way that further exacerbates an existing problem of promoting the wrong people.
“What separates workslop from low-quality work done by humans is that workslop looks legitimate on the surface while lacking the components that would make it useful.”
Lacking optional things like the truth/verifiable fact, substance/depth of any kind, a basic contextual understanding of the shared reality of the broader team or vendors, an actual point of view beyond the status quo and any creative thought or truly new ideas.
