Reminds me of companies getting their cloud computing bills.
Yup. I’ve had the same thoughts. There are many who still think its insane to have your own equipment. Now there will be those who think its insane to do your own thinking.
a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentations
I haven’t been this happy in over a year.
The funny thing is that even with this massive overspending, AI companies aren’t profitable. They need these companies to spend 10x the amount per token, and 10x the number of tokens. Probably 10x the number of customers too.
Burning energy, draining water, spending massive cash so they can lose money on a product that doesn’t even do its job. How the hell has the bubble not popped yet…
and building more and more datacenters, replacing AI chips faster and faster, the more people use it, which of course is wasting a ton of money.
This is the most profitable consultant in the world, can’t they just afford to run a local llm?
I heard about a company that was looking at purchasing machines to run local llms for their developers to use.
If more companies do this, rather than using the massive ai data centers being built…. the RAMpocolypse will get way worse.
That is the part that pains me to admit - running local LLMs is not a solution to the RAMpocalypse. In that case we’d just have more GPUs and RAM idling for ~90% of the time in someones basement, without being shared. As bad as it sounds, having data centers for AI stuff is actually the more ecological solution. I can’t believe I said that. Excuse me, I have to take a shower now *shudder*
@sanitation, worth pushing back a little on the ‘token chewing’ framing: the PDF-conversion use case probably isn’t the real budget killer — it’s the human review loop that follows. Someone generates a deck, decides it’s 70% right, then re-prompts three times to fix slides. That’s 4x the token cost of one clean generation, and it’s invisible in most usage dashboards. The fix isn’t fewer AI calls, it’s better output evaluation at step one. We’ve been building tooling around exactly that evaluation gap — rough writeup at if you’re curious how other dev teams are approaching it.
- Replace workforce with AI because it’s easy to be lazy with AI.
- Remaining workforce uses AI to be lazy.
- SurprisedPikachu.webp
Ew, webp. Chatgpt, convert that shit for me
Hey, webp is awesome! Both lossless and lossy compression work great with it. Only thing lacking is software support
Okay fine. ChatGPT, convert it back.
The response you’re trying to save was a web page
Yeah, that’s the eww part :( I hate when I find great memes and I know exactly the friend to share them to… and I can’t DM them.
Especially if it’s animated. Easy enough to change the extension on PC to a PNG without issue yet. But anything too large to screenshot, or with multiple frames? Many a DND meme have I let pass by
Durr durdur
This is 100% the thesis I’ve been shopping personally… Many Boomers and Xers in executive positions had a “magical millennial” that they quietly kept as a secret “AI” to split/edit PDFs, set up an Airtable base, add columns to a google doc, etc. There was a tacit, silent agreement in this symbiotic relationship for the bulk of the last 20 years - you’ll make sure I don’t look completely incompetent in tech matters and I’ll backchannel on your behalf to senior leaders and people who “matter” to help you advance.
Gen AI essentially allows the laziest input, gives a half competent output that “feels” fine and has the bonus of telling the boomer/Xer that they are actually amazingly capable, and could have done this themselves all along even, but they rightly delegated the task to their magical millennial, and now to the AI of choice.
So they fired all the magical millennials, because they knew too much about the before times. Now that they are fucked without a life raft, costs soar and they will cling for dear life because they will be exposed otherwise.
Edit: through a twist of fate, the iPad kids grew up technically incapable and relied on the magical millenials as well. They could only offer praise and loyalty really, or a boomer, Xer recruited them in and talked the MM up as a “wiz” to seek out. Anyway, now that the MM are gone, the Zoomers and gen Alpha kids only have one strength remaining, the old people have no idea what they are doing or how to quantify their success, outside of “use more AI”. So the fragile balance remains for now, with a vulnerable, hollow center where the magical millennials used to live.
I’m surrounded by this shit, and it seems to come from all generations. My boss, who is my age, called me because her computer was frozen and she wanted me to fix it. “I was like, turn it off and on again, this is the first, most basic rule of troubleshooting.” Meanwhile the boomer next to me is having me do shit like attach files to a fucking email.
I don’t know why you think it’s a generational thing. There has always technical people that filled in the gaps that the more extroverted management types didn’t care about. How do you think things worked when millennials were still in diapers?
What you’re saying indicates you’re one of those people that don’t understand how many gaps other people are filling in for you. You’re talking about splitting PDFs, who do you think designed the PDF format? Or the http protocol that you use to open that google doc?
Honestly the issue I see happening lately is that because iPads (and now AI) made things too easy for the young people they don’t actually know how things work at the low level, not interested in learning it, and often react with “this is too complicated, make it easier for me!”
I said it was my own thesis, built from a decade plus in the trenches. If you read what I’d stated again, you’ll see that the implication was not purely generational, but boomers/Xers with power who drove the change. You also over emphasis technicality here as I was purposefully discussing the more mundane, beginner to intermediate level daily tasks that the millenials were fulfilling here. The millennials in this group are typically in rightful awe of the old timers talents to build on the foundational level, and also envy their circumstance of walking into a more open sandbox and with more stakes to claim in the early days.
So basically, the above preceding doesn’t really concern you unless you found your way to VP level or really to the csuite especially, and even then, always exceptions. That understood , I won’t spend more time debating exceptions to the general rule, as I see it. I respect my elders, as long as they are decent people struggling to do better within these inherently broken systems.
I don’t know why you think it’s a generational thing. There has always technical people that filled in the gaps that the more extroverted management types didn’t care about. How do you think things worked when millennials were still in diapers?
Uh… Unless you worked at the forefront of technology where more people probably WERE qualified, by and large these things worked on paper/transparencies I would presume. If PowerPoint and PDF were people, they are themselves millennials and gen z (ish) respectively.
Now, when millennials were about 10 you’ve got a decent point ;).
by and large these things worked on paper/transparencies I would presume.
You have to presume because you weren’t involved in helping the people who were used to doing everything on paper learn how to turn on a computer. Do you think people in the past were super qualified and just magically knew how to use a computer in the past? Nobody ever needed help loading a file on a floppy disk and printing it to paper so they can present it to their boss?
There have always been clueless bosses and tech people that had to make things work. If you go back further, why do you think they all had secretaries typing things up?
This post was a fuckin rollercoaster, well said
Waiting for hackers to break into companies and not do a ransomware attack. Just run some scripts which innocently do shit like turn PDFs into PowerPoints and chew through those tokens.
This made me laugh so hard.
“Turn this PDF into a powerpoint, and then summarize it with a haiku”
File changes its form,
Pages slide into their frames,
Slides ready to show.
When you tell the people to mash the easy button and then they do exactly what you wanted. They created the monster.
Dayum. If I was given unlimited budget for AI I would do the same. Everyone should have a set personal budget for AI expense and they can keep it if they don’t use AI.
Tokenmaxing
If I’m going to get a $20,000 bonus at the end of the year if I don’t use any AI, I’m not going to use AI.
That’s a big problem with this tech… how do you price it? I think companies would purchase an allotment of tokens that can be used or banked by employees. Problem is they’d always be cutting the token budget.
Where I work I have to have a meeting and justify a $100 license for software. So I don’t know how this will work long term.
Eat shit you greedy corporate assholes, i hope all of your companies are damaged beyond recovery, you useless fucking tools.
Using an LLM to parse stuff is like using a rocket launcher to kill an ant.
You can accomplish the same thing using a million times fewer resources with a purpose-built program.
“ChatGPT, what time is it?”
Will, that’s what happens when employers tell employees that they should “use ai first”, track their token use on a dashboard, and tell them they’ll get fired if they are too low on the monthly ranking.
Yeah, my manager expressed satisfication with me being one of the people using my quota of tokens.
I have generated so much throwaway content that never gets used and only gets deleted to burn the tokens to avoid getting the “you aren’t using AI enough” talk. The fact they can see my actual productive output and believe AI is involved shows how utterly disconnected the metric is from reality.
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Well, if your KPI is how much you use an LLM like in some reports - this is an easy way to get those good indicators. Also, LLMs are super easy to use to parse things, whereas many special programs like IDK grep isn’t exactly user friendly. Not to mention not finding patterns really. Though here I’m thinking things like looking at various logs on computers.
Maybe we could at least nudge the LLMs in the direction of suggesting appropriate tools and giving hints how to actually do that when applicable instead of blindly brute forcing every task. Of course that does not solve the issue of stupid corporate incentives, but I feel like by now most companies have realized that burning as much money as possible is not a good goal.
Yes but you’re in an open office and all you have available in your open office hell are: rocket launcher, your sanity, Debra’s snappy attitude.
Debra’s probably a better performer than you are.
Is Debra here a new version of clippy?
These stupid companies are getting everything they deserve and I’m loving it.
Nah. The bailouts will only be two or three tomes what they squander.
Indeed, they won’t pay for these mistakes, we will.
“They’re too big to fail” etc., with another round of bailouts for our poor, beleaguered corporations.
It’s impossible to bail out Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, etc
AI is about to join the list of “stupid technologies that people should really wait and see before investing on”, which includes
- 3D TVs - complete dud
- Blockchain - useless for real world problems already solved by typical computing
- Metaverse - still one of the best jokes around
- Folding screen phones - overpriced junk
- Fully autonomous self driving cars - “Just around the corner” for the past 10 years
All of these have one thing in common. They are viable technologies for certain use cases but not widespread technologies for everyone and everything.
Fully autonomous self driving cars - “Just around the corner” for the past 10 years
It exists, but they realized that why should they do that, when they can make money by creating taxis without drivers.
There is no benefit for us, ordinary people.
They aren’t making any profit with self driving taxis, though.
3D TVs - complete dud
The real issue with 3D TVs had nothing to do with the tech, but 100% to do with lazy implementation on the media side. Everyone was always trying to make things pop out of the screen, which was the complete wrong approach. Nevermind the fact that companies got so lazy to the point of just filming in 2D and then “adding” 3D in post.
No one wanted to put in the effort to do it right (aside from James Cameron). So no wonder no one liked it.
Don’t forget NFTs… though I guess that can fall under blockchain.
yeah but NFTs were so stupid that they deserve their own dishonorable mention here.
NFTs are so fucking stupid the satirical yearly award for this shit should probably be the NonFungible Trophy cus it’s a literal fucking physical trophy.
Folding Phones Sales Continue To Increase since 2019, showing people seem to like them
Two time buyer, can confirm. They’re legitimately useful and durable enough for me.
I don’t think they are for me but I honestly would not include them in that list above. First of all, there is no investment bubble around them and secondly some people seem to like them and are ready to pay for them. They also do have legitimate benefits (but also downsides)
Yeah I didn’t dislike the 3d monitors/tvs they just had too many caveats at the time and VR kind of ate its lunch.
3D stuff has the fundamental issue that VR and 3D views are just incredibly straining on the human user. Folding phones have no such issue and their durability is also good enough to be competitive (yet clearly worse than regular smart phones). They are really not comparable to 3D monitors and VR.
I think the strain is really dependent on the person as it never really bothered me, it definitely is a problem for some people though. Either way I don’t think it belongs in the same category as blockchain bullshit
It is straining for everyone but yes, some can handle the strain better than others. It just takes so much more mental energy to handle. Most can’t handle it well though, which is why those technologies never manage to break out of their niche.
I do agree however that it is quite different from NFT and other scams. It is a really fascinating technology with real use cases but just some foundational issues that prevent it from leaving their niche.
Two time buyer as in you liked it so much and bought another, or two time buyer as in the first is already inoperative and got another?
My fold4 lasted 3 years, and still works. I’ll concede it was only able to unfold to about 85% open at the end when I decided to upgrade. I was happy to upgrade to the fold 7 which has a redesigned hinge and better dust protection. I acknowledged the risk of mechanical failure as a possibility compared to a slab phone and after using it for years I decided I was still very impressed with the flexibility of having a tablet in my pocket. The fact that my 7th generation is significantly thinner and has a 200MP camera compared to the 4th is what sealed the deal.
It’s not perfect for everyone, but I wouldn’t go back to using a slab, there’s too much functionality I’d be pissed giving up.
Granted, I tend to upgrade my phone every 2 years or so anyway.
I find only 3 years of durability to be absurd 0_0
I find keeping a phone longer than three years absurd, guess we like different things!
Not the same guy. But I’ve been using foldables since 2019 as my primary phone. Samsung fold 1 -> 3 -> 5. No case, no protectors, keys with phone in same pocket. Never had an issue.
I like the one that folds like a GBA SP.
Not that I’m gonna buy one based on that.
But if I’m choosing between two identical models but one folds (and I guess it isn’t that much more expensive), I’d go for the folding one.
Except, of course, for the fact that the next phone I buy will be Commodore’s Callback.I had the Fold 2 and Fold 4, both broke so I just went back to a Pixel 🤷
If it lasts 5 years, maybe its durable enough.
…7
I just replaced my S21 which I bought new, and it still works fine for everything but being a phone because it had a short or blown cap or something that kept the SIM reader from working.
This could also be explained by the entire rest of the market being different flavors of the exact same thing. A little over a decade ago, we actually had choices in what type of phone we wanted. Now, if you want anything other than an identical slab, foldables are your only choice.
I wish someone would make another widescreen slider already. Droid 2 was the shit at the time.
Disco Stu says disco record sales have trended upwards for the entire decade of 1970’s. If this trend continues… eyyyyyyyyy!
I watch a lot of YouTube about everything nerdy and celebratory to every detail and facet about the global apocalypse. Yesterday for the first time in months, a novel idea got through to me… dude was talking about the overblown reactionary movement to which I initially ate my own vomit… yes, I consume this drug, but yes, I am cognisant it’s really bad, so don’t tell me it’s all okay… Something along lines of “everyone thinks it’s like the industrial revolution. It’s not. It’s like the Internet or mobile devices. We just forget how big a change those were now that they’re normative, so it sounds psychotic to compare AI to such “small” shifts in society like the Internet or mobile”… and I felt a fuck ton better. Copium or not, it’s nice to hear a grounded take (he backed it up), and neither a sycophant or chicken little diatribe that feel respectively like sociopaths with heads in the ground or click bait unsubstantiated drama.
Not undermining what AI is doing to people, society, and the ecology. But now that I type that, thinking what to follow, anyone remember Mary Poppins? How normal it was for little kids covered in soot missing fingers at the dawn of the industrial revolution. We just need regulation which is the actual fundamental shift problem, as demand for political action is no longer democratized now that the Citizens have United.
Am I a douche? Lying to myself?
Cold fusion. Green hydrogen. Hyper loop. Just off the top of my head.
Hyper Loop was an insane idea (in a bad way).
Motherfucker wanted to invent subway, but for cars, making cities even more dependent of cars.
Actually not entirely true.
He was proposing transportation method similar to how the communication tubes are. Where vacuum would be used to transport capsules with people.
He knew it was bunk, so initially just published that idea and let anyone do it. His actual goal was to kill California’s high speed rail, which he did.
Eventually he purchased Boring company and started building tunnel in Las Vegas and called that (as you called it, subway for cars) a hyper loop and pretend that it was the original idea.
hyperloop was very low air pressure subway tubes for high speed trains. Works for research tesring tracks impractical to infeasible for real world applications. But it apparently what killed high speed rail in california (because wait this will be better)
The cars in tubes thing was a seperate stupid idea.
I don’t know that he really wanted to fully execute on Hyperloop so much as build hype (and Tesla stock price) around the idea while sabotaging funding for California’s high speed rail project. But yes, end goal to keep people buying his cars.
Average massively shitty car CEO idea
Cold fusion is a scam, not a bad idea. There is no scientific basis for that. Is as bad as “infinite energy engine”.
All of the things I mentioned are scams lol
Green hydrogen is water electrolysis with solar power, not scam, it works, it is just a question of making it economically viable. Hyperloop is just stupid, but within the realm of possible. Cold fusion is the only scam here.
The scam isn’t always “fake tech” so much as “distracting from better alternatives for monetary reasons”. Even if hyperloop worked perfectly, they’re not going to build it, because not building high speed rail was always the point.
Your definition of “scam” is not what other human being use. Causes unnecessary back and forth.
Oh, put a sock on it.
Metaverse - still one of the best jokes around
This one I slightly disagree with. I got my headset on a black friday and it was super cheap, but VR documentaries are friggin’ amazing and I hope museums will invest heavily in it in the coming years.
Fully autonomous self driving cars - “Just around the corner” for the past 10 years
Definitely. Makes me feel good for people who make their living driving trucks.
The metaverse isn’t VR in general, it was meant to be a virtual space in VR where users could be advertised to and buy/rent things and space like in a physical city.
It failed because those were the intended starting points, and it didn’t solve any problem other than a shitty attempt at a “I want to live in a ready player one world” and didn’t have any compelling reasons to actually use it, let alone use it and pay ridiculous amounts to do interesting things there. They always just wanted to be the middlemen, offering space for others to pay for and do something interesting in. The most interesting thing they came up with is having a meeting with avatars instead of faces on a screen (and most people don’t even want to turn on their video and just do a voice conversation instead).
Plus Second Life already tried the same idea and failed, and did so without requiring several hundred dollars of specialized equipment per user like the Metaverse did.
Though they did have the advantage of their name not being poison. When fb bought oculus, I stopped considering them an option for VR setups.
Until someone come up with things like sword art online, they gonna flop lmao
Yeah, what we call VR is just a pale imitation of the VR that made things like SAO and The Matrix so cool.
