I once worked at a company that sold industry-specific core-business software to deep-pocketed corps who couldn’t / wouldn’t / shouldn’t roll their own.
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@inthehands off topic to this thread, but damn Paul, you've been posting some amazing and on point thoughts and stories the past few days. Thanks for sharing!
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🔏 Matthias Wiesmannreplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands well Goodhart’s law applies, even if it was a crappy metric to start with.
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Óscar Morales Vivóreplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands or as I usually put it, the bullshit machine looks awful nice to the folks that have made it with bullshit.
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@inthehands ...this resonates...
a thought I had the other day:
"genAI is perfectly fine for things that don't really matter,or that you don't really care about "And to your point - in a big bussines, there is a LOT of stuff that matches that criteria.
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@inthehands this is a great thread, and i think you're right: companies care about making money, not giving users a pleasant experience. but your original example has mediocre software saving companies millions. whereas LLMs are mediocre software that is basically a money pit, with no indication that they will ever become profitable.
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@Npars01 We need to destroy business school as it currently exists. It is a training academy for sociopaths.
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It's not just business schools in need of reforms.
It's a set of systemic societal issues.
1. Policies & practices of immiseration
2. Billionaires (elite overproduction)
3. Faltering institutions
4. Cascading crises
An excess of billionaires is destabilising politics – just as academics predicted
Politicians have always courted the wealthy, but Elon Musk and co represent a new kind of donor, and an unprecedented danger to democracy, writes Guardian columnist Zoe Williams
the Guardian (www.theguardian.com)
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/peter-turchin-end-times/
The deep historical forces that explain Trump’s win
Our research shows that political breakdown, from the Roman Empire to the Russian revolution, follows a clear pattern: workers’ wages stagnate, while elites multiply
the Guardian (www.theguardian.com)
History’s crisis detectives: how we’re using maths and data to reveal why societies collapse – and clues about the future
Historian and complexity scientist, Dan Hoyer, examines why past societies collapsed when faced with crisis, while others founds ways to survive and flourish.
The Conversation (theconversation.com)
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@inthehands
The customers are just as bad.
My wife worked as a manager in a large city library in the 00s.
She was part of a group of people asked to evaluate software to manage book lendings and the catalogue across numerous libraries.They all reported back to management that it was fundamentally flawed and not fit for purpose in great detail with screenshots.
The local authority went ahead and purchased it. It was dreadful and they had to employ extra staff to manually fix errors.
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@inthehands you'll have to forgive I've not read the full thread. But up to this point I'd like to share an alternative perspective. I work with businesses that still have those 'outdated' processes today and one of the reasons they haven't migrated to more sophisticated software yet is that it offers marginal benefits. When you dig into the cost of employing people to do general admin sometimes the cost-benefit of upgrading is very tight. Often the sales and marketing is the actual 'hoax'.
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@inthehands Jesus Christ, Paul.
BANG!
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Plsik (born in 320 ppm)replied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands I have to say that the level of my pessimism about our civilization has risen again after reading this thread. And that's a good thing. I'm almost never pessimistic enough when I look back in time. Good job, thanks.
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@inthehands That's an almost impressive perversion of a perfectly good argument.
Somebody had interviewed the CEO of a software development company (can't remember who or which; doesn't matter). In a time when "you must fix all bugs before release" was popular dogma, they asked whether he was comfortable with shipping releases that he knew contained bugs.
"Absolutely!" he said with a big smile.
Then he explained. Their customers got more value from having the software as it was, even with those bugs, than from not having it. Perfect, good, enemy, value of "now" vs "eventually, when it's perfect" and all that.
I think he was also enthusiastic about fixing those bugs to improve the quality over time. I'm taking that approach, in any case.
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Very interesting! @pluralistic said that AI works for ”low-stakes low-value tasks” like ”political disinformation, spam, fraud, academic cheating, nonconsensual porn, dialog for video-game NPCs” but that ”none of them seem likely to generate enough revenue(…)to justify the billions spent(…)nor the trillions in valuation(…)” and that there are pbly no ”low-stakes, high-value tasks”
[https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle]
But maybe you’re right and most business is indeed low-stake, high-value
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@inthehands
Two other factors why products sucked back then, which I suspect may recall grim memories , were the executives who just wanted "it all computerising" with no idea of what "it" was either at the "as is" or "to be" stage and a furious impatience with any enquiry about it; and those (sometimes the same) who required full backwards compatibility with pen and paper because they'd be running both in parallel but laying off people on the strength of computerised efficiency. -
@inthehands you are absolutely right, this happens in tech, and all business. It just might not be what happens with genAI though. GenAI might actually be the hoax us cynics think it is and be a total wipeout of hundreds of billions of dollars (and emissions and wrecked jobs.) The church of Altman looks a lot more like a hoax than not. Part of it "sucking less" is like a psychic.
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@inthehands Sounds like chip design/CAD software. I remember in a startup my boss installing a new Cadence component and hitting a problem with it, and getting the response from support that they hadn't had anyone get that far before.
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@inthehands in a sane world, after you realized the whole health score was a hoax, you'd be able (or even required) to report them to some kind of institution that would send inspections and lawsuits their way.
We don't live in a sane world.
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@inthehands Also, regarding the customer support example:
Yes, it saves time for the company, and it was valuable human time that was being spent on pointless things.But it makes the *customer* waste *more time* doing pointless things
Moreover, it creates an assymmetry, where the company can spend relatively little time to make the customer waste a lot of time.
So AI is a weapon.
And as such, it should be regulated.
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@inthehands This thread started out as incredibly deflating and ended up flatly horrifying.
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@inthehands You're giving me so many flashbacks -- and not the good time -- to being an internal architect in "Big IT" in the early 00's
