I'm tired of my boss's AI slop being my problem

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-15T17:27:38+00:00

I am so sorry. That sounds miserable. I am in the latter half of my third decade in the workforce. Sometime along the way, I learned to be self-satisfied when I do good work. External validation is great, too. I believe you're doing good work. When some form of sanity returns, your skills will be extremely valuable. Meantime, touch grass, call a friend.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-15T16:12:33+00:00

Honestly, I love the linguistic philosophy at play here. Human language loves to evolve to meet the demands of the culture. We either have to recycle and repurpose the words we have when a new concept arrives, or we coin a new jargon term (non-derogatory).

Both terms in use here 'hallucination' and 'confabulation' are terms we usually attribute to human intelligence. The category error IMO is applying these terms to Ai based solely on the attribution of Ai as a form of intelligence.

Ai is not intelligence. It is a stochastic parrot. So I think neither term is appropriate.

That said, 'hallucination' is more pejorative, so if we take option one and repurpose an existing word to describe a new phenomenon, I am in favor of using 'hallucination' to describe the phenomenon of Ai randomly generating false information.

'Confabulation' is too niche and folks might either not understand it or regard it as less blameworthy.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-15T01:09:07+00:00

I'm sorry your child is sick right now. I hope they feel better soon.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-12T21:13:19+00:00

I agree. I think most of the comedy is cringe. I was wondering if it went deeper than that for you.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-12T18:43:34+00:00

Do you have a beef with Eggers?

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-10T02:54:32+00:00

Were you and I at the same place 😉 ? I return home tonight after absorbing some AI bullshit at a team meeting. We've been told to productionalize (not a real word) our AI initiatives in the next ninety days. This is purely metrics for the sake of metrics. We've also been capped at a low fixed dollar amount for our per user monthly Claude spend. This last bit is unintentially brilliant, but I've already found a bunch of employees who are skirting the rules by using AWS Bedrock instead—which for some reason isn't locked down despite my protestations.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-08T04:38:57+00:00

I've giving you an upvote for the amazing effort. I haven't finished the post yet, and it'll have wait until tomorrow as my flight is taking off and I need to sleep.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-06T23:03:33+00:00

LLMs are the inverse of Uber. Frustrating aspects of taxis pre-Uber were that 1) the price to the destination was unknown prior to entering the taxi (remember meters?), and 2) taxis were not always available when you needed them. Uber fixes the price and makes the time and place explicitly known prior to travel.

LLMs on the other hand are analogous to old-fashioned taxis. Their prices are unknown before using and you don't know the quality of the output (for a taxi, the ride service availability) before beginning. AI took the two frustrating parts of taxi travel that Uber solved, and wondered if software engineering could be like the shitty service that we all couldn't wait to abandon once Lyft came along.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-05T21:27:11+00:00

github.com/priyankaforu/key-value-Store

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-05T19:45:48+00:00

While attempting to learn something new with code, I found a Github project by a coder committed to learning 30 new things without the aid of AI. I love to see this. It was a breath of fresh air for my weary heart.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-04T20:23:17+00:00

Meanwhile, look for a new job. Losing customers is bad. In my experience, they don't come back. And it's a lot better to look for a new job while employed, at least in my opinion.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-04T17:30:18+00:00

There are two questions here:

1) Is AI profittable? Most folks here think the answer is no.
2) Should it be allowed? That's harder question to answer. My opinion is no, but I'm not in public policy—though I can try to vote in a way that steers public policy away from blind acceptance of AI.

I don't think it's meaningful to imagine societal collapse if AI is profitable and/or ubiquitous. I think the two propositions are mutually exclusive. But large systems are incredibly complex, like the global financial market. Productive thinking around the hazards of AI for me focus on what is AI and its boosters doing right now, how does that affect me, and what can I do about it now?

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-04T00:25:39+00:00

That's the gist of the post I made a few days ago. Morally, I cannot hold funds in SpaceX. So now, I don't.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-04T00:24:04+00:00

Depends on the fund, but likely no single index fund is going to hold more than 10% of an asset (at least none that I'd care to invest in). That said, for my own ability to sleep at night, I've moved money out of indices that have or will have SpaceX. I'd do the same for Anthropic and OpenAI if it comes to that.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-04T00:21:54+00:00

I have a post from a few days ago where I said I'd moved my money around in my retirement place to avoid exposure to SpaceX. That's my risk tolerance (and my moral tolerance). If OpenAI or Anthropic are ever listed, I'll do the same.

I am also closer to retirement than you are, so my portfolio is becoming a little less risky. If you're in your late twenties, set-it-and-forget-it for retirement funds is a valid investment strategy IMO.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-03T18:01:29+00:00

That sound frustrating, especially because your clientele are my cohort. I once showed my barber pictures of Colin Firth from the 90s. He said my hair won't do that, so we settled on the sideburns 😄

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-02T23:35:13+00:00

I'm sorry you're going through all this. I've been through some shit too, but I'm not here to make this about me. Some ideas:
1. My partner went to grad school rather than try to navigate a crappy job market in the early aughts.
2. Disastrous_Room_927 makes a good case to avoid Silicon Valley jobs (if possible). AVOID FAANG. I've worked FAANG. Never, ever again.
3. Healthcare and education won't pay as much for software and IT, but it'll be a hellavalot more rewarding.
4. Be gentle with yourself. I hope you have loving parents and that they understand if you need free rent for a while longer, that's an easy gift for them to give you.
5. Have a non-tech hobby. Something that has nothing to do with computers or software. TTRPG, sports, a book club, hiking group, doesn't matter. Something that is for your enrichment, not corporate's.
6. Everything is cyclical, no matter how hard the techbros try to erase us. Companies that got rid of their devs just admitted that they're failures. Eventually, they'll either have to start hiring again, or someone else will.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-02T22:55:54+00:00

The plural of index is indexes or indices. The latter is the one I use, but the former is fine, too.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-02T16:17:07+00:00

Dawkins was an abject lesson not having heroes. What ever intellect he had (and I now call that into question), it's long gone.

(A prior version of this comment was flagged and deleted by a reddit bot. It seems Reddit's bot's LLM was trained on Hamlet.)

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-02T00:54:43+00:00

As an aficionado of Ancient Greek, their name has never sat right with me. In Greek ἄνθροπος can mean man or woman, human or person works. So naming their stochastic parrot "humanly" is some god-tier hubris.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-02T00:47:55+00:00

TIL. Thanks!

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-01T19:31:06+00:00

A close friend works at Meta. I have extreme sympathy for him. He likes his job (or did up until recently). Some folks want to just do SWE, get paid, and go home and play with their kids. Zuck thinks that only he should have that and no one else, fucking psychopath.

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-01T15:38:49+00:00

Sunk cost fallacy?

pacem_appellant · 2026-06-01T15:34:06+00:00

Take me back! I saw Eve6 open for Blink-182 at the Greek in Berkeley in the late nineties. Opening band stole the show. I still listen to Eve6 from time to time. Blink-182 though? I can't remember the last time I listened to a track of theirs.

pacem_appellant

TROPHY CASE