“I’m a prototype. You can tell, can’t you…?”

Disclaimer: this is not really about code, but about using IT in my non-IT workplace and I realized this just yesterday. A rant.

I work in the social sector. Our boss seems to have slipped into position sideways (they did not do our work for a significant amount of time before).

I got zero onboarding when I started working there; everything I know about the organisational ins and outs I learned by asking my colleagues.

The boss seems to actively want to not inform me of things, i.e. even if I ask about something they reply in the most cursory manner or immediately refer me to somebody else. I have no idea why they do it, my guess is that they sense that they’re woefully inadequate for the job, plus me being much older triggers insecurities?

For example, when I could not log into an app to see my future shifts, I asked the boss about it first but they immediately refered me to tech support. Calling them, after a while we found out that the boss had mistyped my name. Then I could log in.

Last week I was sick and waited til Sunday noon to check this week’s shifts - but again I couldn’t log in. The boss answered neither phone nor email. Fair enough I guess, on a sunday. Thankfully tech support was working and after a long while we found out that the app for checking my shifts only allows log-ins from within the workplace network, not the open web.

I almost missed my monday shift because of that. Boss calls me, enraged. I explained the situation. They clearly did not know that the app only allows log-ins from within the workplace network.

All my coleagues tentatively/silently agree that this boss is useless. How do we keep the workplace running, and why is it me who is left in the dark? Turns out they have a Whatsapp group. I don’t use Whatsapp. They asked me repeatedly and urgently to join.

tl;dr: this workplace would fall apart if people wouldn’t communicate through Whatsapp instead of official channels

secondary definition breakfast table

Smaug Bezos

I wish the father had expanded on why people shouldn’t strive to be dragons. Maybe explain the value of being a sharing member of a community, as opposed to a hoarding sociopath.

malicious compliance

Ok, I didn’t catch that’s what you’re going for; what you described didn’t sound like a too bad strategy to get at least a little bit out of AI. And every employer should support your motivation. Should.

And when they come back in they look at you half hurt, half accusingly, like the whole thing was your fault.

That’s a pretty weak and evasive follow-up to your strongly voiced opinion.

Could you please clarify?
The fact checking is in the phones he presents; what I’m interested in is how he got them; he explained that well in the beginning, but I’ll admit I took him at his word. Maybe you have more on that?

OTOH, a web search shows a few articles that find the exact same things on separate devices.

What exactly is your criticism here?

That was extremely interesting, thanks for sharing.

So well explained, in-depth yet not too jargon-y.

In the end, analyzing this device gives a pretty good picture of what it’s like in North Korea, not just wrt smartphones.

The issue

What’s with the comments? “Hi mom”

the PR

So “LuminaX-alt” is an AI?

I certainly couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to do that indefinitely.

You mean the topic of the article, or what you just wrote?

That’s such a bearish attitude.

…and who put them there in the first place.

Yeah, the whole thing is pretty fucked up. The world’s societies & systems need a complete overhaul. Doesn’t sound likely, does it?

That’s the (American) spirit!

Aren’t datacenters more like the factory halls for the looms?

And in any case, who is destroying them (who are the weavers)?

Yes, different article, also on Not The Onion.

Didn’t read, but I suspect the LLM was prompted to reply in this way. Still funny, considering it is known that Musk tries to tweak it in his favor. (edit: this comment puts it better)

Fully agree with the class struggle aspect here.

Weavers destroying industrial looms. How would that translate to today?

GOOD

half a billion

peanuts for Meta I guess - but keep them coming, the EU has 27 member states

“For example, we had our own Github, so we couldn’t use their Github Copilot license,” he explained. “We were still required to find some ways to use AI. The one corporate AI integration that was available to us was the Copilot plugin to Microsoft Teams. So everyone was required to use that at least once a week. The director of engineering checked our usage and nagged about it frequently in team meetings.”

“To satisfy the boss, I started using the Teams Copilot AI to get answers for questions I would previously have Googled,” he said. “Questions such as the syntax for a particular command or an idea for setting up a new (to me) process. Sometimes the answers were perfect. Sometimes they were useless. Once, I spent three hours trying to get the AI’s suggestion for a Docker problem to work before I gave up and Googled the correct answer in two minutes.”

doG help us all.

We thought these new technologies would help humanity, to have more time to concentrate on the real work. Instead they’re being used to exploit us even more, and in such a stupid way.

It’s one of those things where having even the slightest bit of insight, you can predict that this is going to crash big time, eventually. Yet the people who should don’t listen. And then, when it inevitably happens, everyone is very surprised indeed. And somebody who knew it, just like you and thousands of other people, will be celebrated as some sort of prophet. We truly live in a dark age.

Yes, all this shit is still happening while the world is looking elsewhere. China is also neocolonialistically active on the African continent, and I’m guessing the USA as well (still, despite MAGA).

I was wondering what happened to Wagner after Prigodzin died. Wrt Africa, it’s now the MoD’s Africa Corps.

They are continuing where Wagner left and if anybody ever tells you that Wagner is “not active in Africa anymore”, that’s the truth behind that.