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some things you've got to live through to learn

this has happened with literally every efficiency increasing technology in modern history, maybe ever, so it's exactly what everyone should have expected tbh

Kinda obsessed with this thread. I feel it in my bones.

@karlbode.com I've been retooling from Java and C to Rust and Python, with code assist from Claude. I wrote good C for 40 years. Maybe AI has made a shitty human being of me and I don't know it, yet. Here's the TL;DR : Beginners ask for code. Experience asks for spec. It's working for me […]

The execs at every company are obsessed with organizing yap sessions and are way more concerned with who they're yapping to than ever doing anything productive. LinkedIn lunatics try to go to 40 conferences a year.

Too many Lumberghs who should let workers do their jobs instead of looking for reasons to fire them.

That’s a good way to put it. Like, my county can’t afford a bus driver (evil govt spending), so 100 parents in cars line up for 45 minutes every morning and afternoon to drop off kids (free market!). I hunk a lot lately about how extractive private companies hate free efficient govt services.

Core artifice of this tech bubble: claiming non-intelligent algorithms are AI; a fallacy repeatedly reinforced by media. I continue to feel bad for the fictional character of HAL9000 used as illustration for today’s “AI“ discourse (his psychotic break was BECAUSE OF shitty people! See “2010”).

meeting phenomenon you mention reminds me of the same thing with some regulatory/legislative efforts to implement good ideas such as HIPPA (when it has just started being implemented I read the statute and then attended an implementation meeting; I came out knowing less). U can't have dialog w no 1

100%

Copilot has told me that it's working on deliverables multiple times over the last week and a half and then just never delivers anything... And if you ask it about missed deadlines, it just sets new ones that it misses without comment.

Wow! Could be one of the many meetings I had been in throughout my working career. Productivity 😑 Working harder 😑 Okay.

True story: I wanted to know what time of day a local store opens. One AI search result told me the store was permanently closed. Google AI told me that the store was under construction with a grand opening soon. Normal Google results provided me the answer: the store (open for 10yrs) opens at 9am.

RIP David Graeber you would have loved writing an appendix to Bullshit Jobs about this

I'd much rather just follow the Costanza strategy

It’s as though the oligarchs behind a climate killing scam for manipulating mental minority control over the masses don’t care about any consequences. bsky.app/profile/karl...

The true beneficiaries of AI tech has always been spammers, scammers, and thieves.

It's rather like Ellison now owning all the imaginable different media outlets. Independent journalists, filmmakers, artists, and social media influencers are going to have to find the resources somewhere to make our own valid, creative, inspiring work to counteract the slop.

It's a lot easier for you to put something in my inbox than it is for me to respond to it. Slack intensifies this asymetry by making it easier still to generate work for the recipient (reading, responding) and by rewarding rapid responses. AI removes almost all costs on the sender.

Related: www.theguardian.com/technology/n...

Professor here. Teach a lot of undergraduate writing courses. Thanks in part to AI, I've been thinking a lot more about retirement lately.

As an attorney, I waste a ton of time responding to AI generated motions filed by pro se parties. It is often harder to respond to nonsense than to a well-written and thoughtful argument by a professional attorney.

also, quite generally, this country (especially corporate america) wouldn't know efficiency if it ran us over

Ironically these studies about the so called "AI efficiencies" are themselves a waste of time

It’s almost like productivity always goes up and what’s going to make life better for the working class is collective bargaining and strong labor rights. 🤷‍♂️

bet you a hell of a lot of money that cleaning up ai slop will pay much less well than creating shit properly to begin with does

There was another study I recently read about too, on usage in the insurance industry – www.theregister.com/2026/01/16/a...

it's really quite insane

Gonna add” mouse jiggling” to my resume! With your permission, of course.

Being told at uni it's okay to use Ai to find sources to read, like WHAT?!? It is NOT that hard to find sources, 5 words in Google scholar, read the last paragraph of the introduction, that's all you need to do. Ai doesn't do shit.

artifice and appearing productive is why everyone is so fuckin stressed out and why mediocrity is winning over every aspects of society. big tired!

that was the first experience CNET had when they tried to replace half their staff with AI It cost them more money to hire human editors to fix all the fake quotes and plagiarism. I assume it's improved some in two years, but still.

The biggest thing in seeing is an assumption that people should be more efficient when using AI, regardless of whether any empirical data or experience supports that. So people who use AI are given more work under the assumption that they can do everything faster when they can't yet (if ever).

I can now more efficiently pretend to be efficient and productive

Dont show this to that lazy bsky dev

This tracks with most of my workday for the last year becoming wading through documents people clearly generated and didn’t read, pointing out all the obvious mistakes

thank you! glad you chose to link it because it’s such a solid exemplar of how this shit is counterproductive

Congrats to the overpaid time wasting idiots who spent billions developing an overpaid time wasting idiot simulator.

If you think that's strictly an american artifice may I suggest a visit to Japan.

lol, yup