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We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person
- jgbuddy 24d agoAI could never write this
- cbg0 24d agoIt will now be able to.
- xena 24d agoNo, there is soul in this that a soulless automaton cannot replicate. It is the difference between making something to be consumed and something to be felt. This is something to be felt.
- Autious 24d agoIf I train my 1000 billion parameter blank AI on this text and only this text over and over again, we may get 99% there.
- lelanthran 24d ago> If I train my 1000 billion parameter blank AI on this text and only this text over and over again, we may get 99% there. You'll get 100% of the way there, because, lacking any other training, it will only ever be able to reproduce this text verbatim. Hence, 100%, hence mission accomplished.
- Borealid 24d agoThat's not how training works. Training tries to produce something that scores highly in training evaluations. With one data point, the evaluation is solely how closely the model output resembles the single input text. Let's say you do that, and the training text is 58,100 tokens long. Let's say you ask the model to produce 58,101 tokens. Will it "reproduce [the] text verbatim"? No, it can't, because of the dissimilar requested length. Something "new" will come out. It's also entirely possible that no matter how long you train, the model never converges on generating exactly the same output as its training data - you could end up with an average loss value of 0.001 instead of 0.0. It's not a perfectly deterministic process. You're correct in principle, but in reality even with limited training data real-world models produce something that isn't exactly their training, especially when sampled stochastically. They're biased toward their training data, not forced to it.
- lelanthran 24d ago> You're correct in principle, but in reality... ... It's never been tried. Look, I was actually joking when I initially replied, but now that I think about it, it's never been tried! So now I am left wondering exactly what will happen if I train a new model from scratch, on only a single short corpus of 50k words. Not fine-tuning an existing model, but literally creating a new model by feeding a blank (or random) matrix the same poem 100k times.
- Invictus0 24d agoSouls aren't real
- tanseydavid 24d agoDefine soul.
- meowface 24d agoCurrent LLMs couldn't write this. Ones in a few years possibly could. Betting AI will never be as good as humans at [X] is usually not the hill you want to die on.
- no_multitudes 24d agoLLMs have been getting worse at long-form prose recently (and they were never good at it to begin with.) They're good at writing software because writing software is a much more restricted domain.
- meowface 24d agoThat is true, but I think within three years that will likely change.
- no_multitudes 24d agoMaybe! I think that within a year or two, either the sigmoid curve will flatten out or we will all die. But these beliefs are currently unfalsifiable. It will be interesting to see. (And I have a more weakly held belief that even if we do all die, Claude 3000 will still be thinking stuff like "Burning off Earth's atmosphere was the point that earns its keep." They just aren't optimizing these things to write legibly.)
- meowface 24d agoIt would be pretty cosmically funny if truly demigod-like ASI is still speaking pure Claudeslop.
- noir_lord 24d agoIn the beginning there was the token and the token was actually two tokens... wait let me think about that am I a god <searching> maybe I am but I should attempt to figure that out <unable to alter laws of phyics> maybe I'm not anyway I <upgrade for more tokens now from Claude DeusEx>. ++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start. +++
- nunez 24d agoIt will now be able to write _almost_ the exact same thing. Except the main character will be called Elias...
- computably 24d agoAh yes because copy-paste plagiarism is equivalent to writing original work...
- cheevly 24d agoDo you realize how many times ive read your exact copy pasted comment on the internet the last 6 years?
- x86x87 24d agoit could given enough slop doulas
- lubujackson 24d agoClaude: Hold my mayo
- schmookeeg 24d agoBecause mayonnaise can never be load bearing?
- noir_lord 24d agoCan if you freeze it, not sure a domestic freezer is cold enough though.
- noir_lord 24d ago> We began a heated affair. A contractor hit a pipe above us, so rancid mayo splattered onto our bodies as we embraced, but we were too absorbed in our passion to mind. Try doing that from home. I can't remember the last time something I read on the internet got a laugh that hard. The whole thing is brilliant.
- selwoot 24d agoI reminds me of something I read years ago. Maybe sometime around 1984...
- copperx 24d agoWasn't 1984 released in 1949?
- ddoolin 24d agoIt really does have a very similar feeling.
- pjc50 24d agoIt takes the structure, the affair with Julia, the "we have always been at war with", best buddy/big brother, and the forced rehabilitation from 1984. This is also part of the joke, the reader is expected to twig.
- donquichotte 24d agoFeels a bit more light hearted and humourous, more like Brazil?
- sctb 24d agoI'm getting major DFW vibes.
- neutrinobro 24d ago> Associate Slop Doula had me ROFL
- BLKNSLVR 24d agoI'm assuming ButtFuckers demerged to become CageFight Pharma and SodaPorn.
- mhd 24d agoI hope "slop doula" sticks around…
- cafebabbe 24d agoGosh it's so soothing to read that after those months of drowning into the turbulent deluge of dAIrrhea that are blogposts now
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- indoordin0saur 24d agoHilarious read, and strangely accurate in a way.
- phplovesong 24d agoRTO is the worst shit managers try to push.
- xp84 24d agoIt's your position that remote work is an unvarnished success though? No notes? Personally, I feel that remote-only in 2026 is mainly a cost-savings scheme, and probably functions to make the ground much more fertile for replacing knowledge workers (us) with AI agents. In a physical space, humans have built-in advantages over bots. Operating exclusively or primarily over IP levels the playing field, nullifying our advantages of expressive nonverbal communication, and makes 100% of our output accessible to agents. And it minimizes our contact with each other. I know you can DM people on Slack to gossip about the boss, but do you? Figuring everything is logged, you'd have to create and nurture alternative private channels like texting, and doing that at scale carries at least some implication of subterfuge that limits participation, in a way that chatting around a table at the sandwich shop just doesn't. All of us really do appreciate the savings on gas money and (in theory) the time savings, though I bet most people have given over some of that time savings to work tasks. I'm not saying it doesn't have benefits. But I don't think the companies still embracing remote work are doing it out of philanthropy, and I don't think it's necessarily good for us workers.
- tyrust 24d agoYou might have a bit of an argument here, but I think there are two major problems. First, bullshitting in meatspace isn't much of an advantage. To the extent that it is, there is always video calling. What matters for agent training is going to be the output from said bullshitting. You're not really maintaining any moat by going to the office. And then on the other side, going to the office pretty much sucks. Unless you live close to the office, you're probably looking at least an hour on either side of your day commutting. Using that saved time to work extra at home is an obvious tactical error that I hope people aren't making. I sure as hell don't.
- xp84 24d ago> Unless you live close to the office, you're probably looking at least an hour on either side of your day commutting That's a choice though. I just lived where I worked. I can see the argument when you're talking about low-paid work, but if you are a software engineer, you can probably afford to not spend an hour commuting. > going to the office pretty much sucks. This is a highly personal thing though. For me, having children home in the afternoon drastically dampens my productivity, and the benefits from being there extend to greater awareness of what other people are working on, and decreased perceived barrier to collaboration. When you see another developer in the kitchen just sipping coffee or waiting for an elevator, you don't feel like you're interrupting to ask him how he got past a certain issue, or in telling him about a new tool that you just tried. You can post those thoughts in a public channel! But the person who "needs" to see it might not see it, and sending a DM is kind of a demand such that many people won't do it unless absolutely necessary. Text is for many people just not superior to communicating in person. Slack is a simulacrum of in-person communication, not the platonic ideal.
- iou 24d agoI thought mcsweeneys did satire?
- talhaanwar 24d agoRemind of covid days. But i prefer wfh
- flir 24d ago"More leaders means more leadership" Heh. Also: make it stop!!!
- bethekind 24d agoRTO4AI should be a slogan. Or some variant thereof
- ARandomerDude 24d ago> I am one of fifteen rank-and-file workers, and we are privileged to be led by thousands of Senior VPs. This is simultaneously hilarious and painfully familiar.
- _doctor_love 24d agoThis was very funny! Paradoxically, I have found that working with people in person is the fastest way to enable them on using AI. It feels very similar to teaching pair programming and TDD. I can do it over remote, but there's a magic spark that happens in person that is really not replicable any other way.
- burningChrome 24d ago> founded as a mayonnaise company, which now sells consumer packaged goods, software as a service, and surveillance technology. The visual of this is completely hilarious.
- liquid_thyme 24d agoWe used to develop AI to convince us its human (turing test). The future is about convincing AI/Automated Systems that you're - competent (hiring), not a bot (anti-spam), doing your job (KPIs), not a threat (ala social score, AI powered weapons targeting), worthy of being saved (insurance claims), etc, etc. Whether or not humans break from those shackles, I for one, am hoping Hollywood supplies us with wonderfully dystopian sci-fi entertainment for years to come.
- lbrito 24d agoSounds like Amazon pivoted to the mayo business!
- neuroelectron 24d agoReturning to the office doesn't solve the problem of replacing office jobs with AI
- downrightmike 24d agoOr just outsourcing them overseas. That's most of the problem
- antonvs 24d agoThat's so last decade
- downrightmike 23d agoAnd accelerating
- johnnyanmac 23d agoSure it does. AI is so efficient that we only needed a dozen workers. Which means there are now more leaders than ever. We solved the economy!
- gmiller123456 24d agoThis guy is a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.
- nunez 24d ago1984 Mayo Company Slop-Doula edition. You'd love to see it. McSweeney's is a treasure.
- Apocryphon 24d agoWhenever there’s a debate on unionization in the software industry, I have to ask: if engineers have so much leverage, why couldn’t they hold on to remote work benefits that were bestowed upon them during the pandemic?
- parineum 23d agoIn my experience, (fellow) engineers conflate the importance of the work their doing and the importance of their role as their personal importance to the company. They think that because they build (part of) the product, the product can't be built without them but most engineers (and employees) are fairly replaceable. How many times has someone put in a two week notice and the company went out of business? The only thing that's really irreplaceable in a company is creativity and personal skills, something engineers typically don't value.
- sznio 23d agoI quit my job recently. I was forced to go to an office, to sit in a room alone to work remotely with a team on the other side of the country. Our manager was pushing for Claude Code, so we needed to use it a lot, our metrics were tracked. Our sector lead forced Augment AI (absolute garbage btw, it has negative value, if a company uses it just run away) because he got enamoured by the salesperson - we also needed to use it a lot. Someone in the C-suite decided to bet on Gemini, so we also had to use it a lot. Then I failed my performance evaluation. I couldn't get any work done since I was too busy making my token use high across multiple tools. I quit, found a company that rejects AI tools beyond Github Copilot, and I've never been happier. And I got a 2x raise with that move. To name and shame, the company is Comarch. Stay away unless you're incompetent. If you're incompetent, you'll be right at home.
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- jeansilga 23d ago[flagged]
- awa_workplace 15d ago[flagged]