Twonks | Bluesky
Transcript
TW😶NKS
A comic in four panels:
Panel 1. White text on black
AI Design Logic
Panel 2. A guy sits in a restaurant at a table with a checkered table cloth. A waiter stands near, hands behind back waiting attentively.
Guy: Get me a cheese pizza
Panel 3. The waiter returns with a pizza in hand.
Panel 4. The guy gestures proudly at the pizza. The waiter looks less than amused.
Guy: Wow, look what I made!
Obviously never used AI. How it really goes is that you ask for a cheese pizza and after you spend hours and a bunch of money on tokens, you get an onion and peanut butter pizza with no cheese and you go, “Fuck it. Close enough.”
You forgot the part where they steal the pizzas from other parlors to sell them as thier own.
Little bit fun little bit stupid and devaluating to human employees or is the waiter a probability robot?

This, but you don’t get a pizza, you get a wheel of iron, colored in brown with glue on top of it.
Rich people think this way for everything
That’s one of the core injustices of capitalism.
Rich person says “Build a thing”
Workers design, research, and build the thing.
Rich person keeps the profits.
Reminds me of when I heard someone talk about a recent experience when they “built houses”. I thought that sounded unlikely, as I could not picture this person wearing a toolbelt and hardhat and actually swinging a hammer. I asked for clarification, and they explained how they managed a construction company or something, and that in English, saying “I build houses” covers the management side as well, not just the people actually doing the building.
As someone who has actually physically built houses (i.e. nailing walls together, putting up the siding, hanging and mudding sheetrock, installing doors and windows etc.) this mindset pisses me off more than anything. “Management” does stuff like buying already-built houses, trucking them to our site and placing them on foundations, discovering the houses were built in the 1960s with 2x3s instead of 2x4s and thus needed to be torn down to the floors because they’re no longer up to code, necessitating us rebuilding the houses entirely from the floors up, and then discovering the houses were placed two feet too close to the property line so we have to literally chop two feet off of them and rebuild the walls.
True fucking story. And I forgot to mention that the floors were 3/4 rotten so we had to rebuild most of them, too.
It’s not that hard to say they’re a manager, they just wanted to feel included
and credit
“The Life and Times of Thomas Edison”
That’s why they don’t see any problem with replacing workers with AI. They think AI will do X better than humans do just like machines could build X better than humans could at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
But the cost benefit analysis often proves to be quite the opposite in the long-term, despite deceptive short-term gains. But a short-term gains seem to be all that businesses seem to care about.
They like AI because it doesn’t provide feedback about their ideas being less than perfect.
You’re absolutely right!
And here’s the thing
You’re not crazy!
on a slight tangent: that’s why I tend to prefer Claude (when I have to use AI), because it does actually provide push-back and doesn’t get all kiss-ass with me like ChatGPT
I sometimes have LLMs make and spin up single us UIs for things. It’s not uncommon for me to prompt “make it pretty” or " can you make it" pop " more" which makes me laugh quite a bit.
you know, i’ve tried to defend some usage in the past, explaining my processes and the many steps of manual refinement, masking, and layerwork i put in to things, how i only run local models with open weights, how all my power comes from hydro etc etc
but as the tools keep evolving i’ve realised nobody else seems to actually care about the process. the pro-people just want as much slop as possible. someone likened it to a slot machine, where you keep pulling just because. that’s where we are now.
Imagine if you put that much time into a useful skill.
I fully get where you’re coming from. I fully believe that you can’t vibe code correctly unless you already know how to code correctly. I’m against the shifting paradigm of “who cares what the code looks like aa long as it works properly and the LLM can read it quickly” bullshit that’s coming out of it. I want to read the code and understand it too. I want it to be object oriented and not just dumb ad hoc methods everywhere that’s 1,000 lines when it could’ve been 100 lines.
Now anecdotally, as someone who uses it for my main work and side project, I am still getting a lot of use out of it. I’m learning new things at a faster rate than I would have before. For my side project, I am trying to optimize gear sets for a game and there’s hundreds of millions of different configurations. The LLM I’m using knows about my code and the project and what I need and is able to suggest other algorithms, like I was able to learn about Dinkelbach’s algorithm. I have it write up design docs with formulas and pseudocode implementation and I review that and it takes my comments into account. I treat it like a junior developer and ask for questions to make sure I understand what it’s doing. I think a lot of people aren’t treating it like a junior developer or intern and that’s where problems come from.
Now, I wouldn’t be using it if it wasn’t free with my company, as this is more of “learning/research” for my job.
And for my job, we have semantic memory and a ton of MCP servers setup that guide it through the right code and can do internal documentation search so it’s way more powerful than just using base Claude Code or whatever. It has helped me stay more on track with my projects as an ADHD person (even though I’m medicated) by documenting what it does after it does it in a shared doc rather than me forgetting to do that because I run a command and log off for the day or something.
I do hate the water usage and energy usage though…
AI would bring you a big cheese wheel with salami on it, and temu Ratatouille in the background, in the wrong scale. Because that shit is DUMB!
I definitely get the sentiment. But in my opinion it’s closer to somebody going to the pizza shop, ordering and picking up a pizza and bringing it home to fam and saying “hey I got us a pizza”
“That’s a good looking pizza, look at that cheese”
“… Thanks! White glue is commonly used in the industry to get a picture perfect cheese pull”
That’s if you use AI at work. But instead of the fam, it’s your boss.
“Give me a cheese pizza in the style of a famous italian restaurant pizza kitchen. Use lots of cheese, tomato sauce, and bread. Cook it in an oven at a very high temperature. The cheese should be hot to the touch. The crust should be thin when the cooking is complete and have a few tiny black spots on it to show that it is crispy. Put the pizza on a metal tray and deliver it to my table within the next thirty minutes. Make no mistakes.”
Receives pizza
“Why is it covered with pineapple?!?”
You forgot to specify Italian DOP cheese, now you have a pizza oozing with shitty Kraft/Lactalis pseudo-cheese.
This is why no one wants to go to Altoona.
Also you’ll get framed for murder there
Architects to engineers? Engineers to construction workers?
Every food channel showing the food they purchased on instagram, youtube or other
That server didn’t make the pizza.
Who claimed that they did?
The server never presented a list of credits for the pizza, so I assume they made it.
They can still be offended on behalf of their coworkers who did.
A thought experiment you could take further.
The chef didn’t even make the dough. That came from a Cisco truck, from a factory maintained by a team of maintenance workers. The base was good, but made better because the chef added some flour and oil to it.
Pointless observation, but…many people contribute to most things we only associate to one “maker”.
I feel delighted by the implication that the pizza dough came from Cisco, and not Sysco. It’s a $300,000 pizza, with a $15,000/mo support contract. You only get that discount if you’re buying it as part of an 8+ figure contract though. It can handle 20 billion pepperoni per second though, and if you figure out how to eat it you can get a degree in it that pays pretty well.
You also get the best waiting music known to man while you wait.
I used to work for Cisco as a programmer, and when I got laid off by them I found out that my mom thought I had been working for Sysco the whole time. She had never understood why I was working for a food services company, although I expect they employ a large number of programmers too.
Did working for Cisco suck? I can’t say as I never did a lick of actual work for them. They acquired my original company and then we all sat around for a fucking year doing nothing until they laid most of us off. Weirdly, everybody who got laid off was childless – the only people from my original company who were kept on had one or more children. I don’t know what to make of that.
My only regret is not saying that my work macbook had been stolen. That’s what all of my coworkers did and they all ended up with free macbooks.
They have good hold music? Can you elaborate?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N7xn5zeJ4D4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_on_hold#Cisco’s_Opus_Number_One
Cisco also sells phone systems, and one of their phone engineers wrote a song with a friend once and used it as the default on what went on to become a very common phone system.
It’s not the best song ever, but it’s definitely the best hold music. Can elicit a proper, heartfelt “not bad” from most people.
It’s also common enough that there’s a decent chance any random person has heard it and had no idea where this song came from.I attribute it’s quality to it being an authentic piece of music, and not a corporate design creation, that was created on lower fidelity hardware, because that’s what they had to muck around with, and so it had some actual creative feeling to it and it coincidentally didn’t lose much being piped over a 90s voip phone system to a household landline handset.
Peaches come from a can. They were put there by a man. In a factory downtown.
Ahh shit I guess game engine designers should get a cut of the games too?
The engineers of the AI should get a cut I guess
Photographs: 🤨













