Anybody who has worked in IT support in the trenches in enterprise IT will tell you there are some Excel power users who basically run the company, are macros wizards and actual ninjas.. about 0.1% of the workforce.
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In an era where companies need to become more efficient and diverse they’ve basically picked the least efficient way to do it, with the biggest risks and highest costs - because everybody else is doing it.
I know somebody at one of the big 4 who has written something in Claude that prompts Claude each twenty minutes for a question, then feeds Claude’s question back into Claude to use their tokens - because token usage is factored into employee evaluations. What are we even doing.
@GossiTheDog there’s an old tale about optimizing for the wrong things. Something about getting rid of rats only made a market for breeding them.
Guess that means we’ll burn the planet and use up all the drinkable water to autocomplete our homework and live life without having to deal with people.
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In an era where companies need to become more efficient and diverse they’ve basically picked the least efficient way to do it, with the biggest risks and highest costs - because everybody else is doing it.
I know somebody at one of the big 4 who has written something in Claude that prompts Claude each twenty minutes for a question, then feeds Claude’s question back into Claude to use their tokens - because token usage is factored into employee evaluations. What are we even doing.
@GossiTheDog @paninid That's actually the smartest use of AI (given the constraints imposed) that I've heard about so far
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@bontchev you're missing the point. This thread started with people talking about how AI was crazy expensive, and you saying, in my experience, it's cheap. The reason it's cheap for you right now is you're using a setup that subsidizes the crap out of it. Anyone using a path that doesn't have such subsidy is currently paying for it and it's not cheap. Those folks are paying those costs right now.
I'm not saying it's valueless, or don't use it, or you should change anything about what you are doing right now, i'm explaining why people are saying it's expensive. The employee at the beginning of this thread is easily costing a $1000 a day, just in AI usage.
@malwareminigun I don't dispute that it's cheap right now because it is subsidized - but that's besides the point. The point is that it *is* (or at least can be, as demonstrated in my case) very cheap right now compared to the value it brings.
Yes, that's likely to change. When it changes, I'll revaluate. I am not arguing that AI won't become too expensive to use. I'm arguing that AI can be quite cheap to use (while bringing tremendous value) *right now* - for whatever reasons.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@404mediaco/116908074107231828
Anybody who has worked in IT support in the trenches in enterprise IT will tell you there are some Excel power users who basically run the company, are macros wizards and actual ninjas.. about 0.1% of the workforce. About 99% of people can’t align a table in Word.
Giving the 99% of people tools which cost $$$ per user a month and letting them do anything is like giving a child a car, and being surprised when they ram the car into a wall three days later and cost $10k after achieving nothing.
@GossiTheDog
And the tech firms didn't even only give cars to their children but explicitly told them to drive as much and as fast as they possibly could 🤯 -
RE: https://mastodon.social/@404mediaco/116908074107231828
Anybody who has worked in IT support in the trenches in enterprise IT will tell you there are some Excel power users who basically run the company, are macros wizards and actual ninjas.. about 0.1% of the workforce. About 99% of people can’t align a table in Word.
Giving the 99% of people tools which cost $$$ per user a month and letting them do anything is like giving a child a car, and being surprised when they ram the car into a wall three days later and cost $10k after achieving nothing.
@GossiTheDog @blogdiva I am not an Excel wizard but I am a weirdo who can align tables in Word.
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@GossiTheDog honestly, isn't most of the stuff IT teams do nowadays extremely wasteful?
I look at CI pipelines and feel the need to scream.
Upgrade your OS image with hundreds of packages on every push,
Build all layers of your container every time...
Then migrate to the next git service and CI/CD framework every year, complete rewrites.
How many bloody Artifactory mirrors does a company need?!!!Etc. etc. These kids should start with a C64 or ZX80 before let loose on this hot garbage
@brnrd @GossiTheDog Wait wait wait. Is this why I have to update and restart my enterprise laptop all the time? And when I have to do it one time, I will probably have to do it one or two more times on the same day?
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@404mediaco/116908074107231828
Anybody who has worked in IT support in the trenches in enterprise IT will tell you there are some Excel power users who basically run the company, are macros wizards and actual ninjas.. about 0.1% of the workforce. About 99% of people can’t align a table in Word.
Giving the 99% of people tools which cost $$$ per user a month and letting them do anything is like giving a child a car, and being surprised when they ram the car into a wall three days later and cost $10k after achieving nothing.
@GossiTheDog I once had a colleague who wrote letters, official letters, with Excel.
When I asked why not word he said:
In Excel I can align the indent, tabs and the paragraphs better.Case closed your honour.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@404mediaco/116908074107231828
Anybody who has worked in IT support in the trenches in enterprise IT will tell you there are some Excel power users who basically run the company, are macros wizards and actual ninjas.. about 0.1% of the workforce. About 99% of people can’t align a table in Word.
Giving the 99% of people tools which cost $$$ per user a month and letting them do anything is like giving a child a car, and being surprised when they ram the car into a wall three days later and cost $10k after achieving nothing.
@GossiTheDog “A fool with a tool is still a fool”
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@GossiTheDog This is stupid, of course - but, as they say, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
Still, I don't quite understand the "cost" thing. If used properly, AI should reduce cost. By using Claude, I was able to do in 3 months what I previously couldn't do in 5 years. This is on a Pro subscription (the cheapest one) that costs something like 180 euros per year.
If we had hired a professional programmer for the same work, their *monthly* salary would have been more than 10 times higher - and they would have become annoyed with me and left after 2 months anyway.
That period is over since 1st of June. Actual billing schema is on a different level.
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@malwareminigun You might be right but I'm talking about the right now, not about the future. And even before the boss bought me the Pro subscription, I managed to do quite a lot of work with the free version, which offers like 9 times less tokens per 5-hour session.
@bontchev @malwareminigun maybe a Perspektive of rising costs. My employer uses GitHub Copilot (offering anthropic models) and they have usage based subscriptions (that still are subsediced). They have a spending Limit of 8000€ per Developer per month. Last Time they hit the Limit in the third week of the month.
So what ever you run, its nowhere near the real coompute costs.
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That period is over since 1st of June. Actual billing schema is on a different level.
@lepapierblanc @GossiTheDog This is a screenshot from today:
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@bontchev @malwareminigun maybe a Perspektive of rising costs. My employer uses GitHub Copilot (offering anthropic models) and they have usage based subscriptions (that still are subsediced). They have a spending Limit of 8000€ per Developer per month. Last Time they hit the Limit in the third week of the month.
So what ever you run, its nowhere near the real coompute costs.
@GrandmasterBash @malwareminigun Well, I can speak only from personal experience. I don't know what they are doing. With my Pro subscription of 180 euros per year, I often hit the 5-hour session token limit but the most I've ever used of the weekly token limit is 78%.
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@GossiTheDog This is stupid, of course - but, as they say, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
Still, I don't quite understand the "cost" thing. If used properly, AI should reduce cost. By using Claude, I was able to do in 3 months what I previously couldn't do in 5 years. This is on a Pro subscription (the cheapest one) that costs something like 180 euros per year.
If we had hired a professional programmer for the same work, their *monthly* salary would have been more than 10 times higher - and they would have become annoyed with me and left after 2 months anyway.
@bontchev @GossiTheDog that 180 Euros is not covering the cost of inference. And you're correct: for users who do not let their skills atrophy, GenAI can be of value. For the majority, it will be a provider of brain rot, unmaintainable code and vulns, and for society, the extinction of the senior in the workplace.
At $ORKPLACE, I've now run into the first case of a user who is patently wrong in his interpretation of some vendor docs but won't budge because AI summarizes it wrong, and he trusts the 'puter more than his colleagues.
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@bontchev @GossiTheDog that 180 Euros is not covering the cost of inference. And you're correct: for users who do not let their skills atrophy, GenAI can be of value. For the majority, it will be a provider of brain rot, unmaintainable code and vulns, and for society, the extinction of the senior in the workplace.
At $ORKPLACE, I've now run into the first case of a user who is patently wrong in his interpretation of some vendor docs but won't budge because AI summarizes it wrong, and he trusts the 'puter more than his colleagues.
@bertdriehuis @GossiTheDog I was talking about the financial cost, since people say that AI is too expensive. You're talking about something different - the potential harm of it. But even there, what I said applies - it has to be used *correctly*. Never trust it blindly. Know what it can and cannot do. And, yes, some skills will eventually atrophy - how many people can multiply 3-digit numbers in their head now that we have calculators? Do we still insist that we must multiply by hand because calculators atrophy our math skills?
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@GrandmasterBash @malwareminigun Well, I can speak only from personal experience. I don't know what they are doing. With my Pro subscription of 180 euros per year, I often hit the 5-hour session token limit but the most I've ever used of the weekly token limit is 78%.
@bontchev @malwareminigun I also have no clue. The current policy is that everybody should do as much as possible via LLMs (a policy that I don't follow aside from a few smaller usecases, productivity wise nobody really seem to notice ). I guess that changes since microsoft introduced usage based pricing in April and our budgeting is not really prepard for it.
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@GossiTheDog I’m starting to see some companies log all AI prompts and review them to see what people are using AI to do. The ones I’ve seen do this are positioning it as a way to discover additional training opportunities for their staff — to train them that they gave other, better tools to compare PDFs, for example. It makes sense if you have the tools and resources to put together this kind of analysis.
@deepthoughts10 @GossiTheDog Brian, is there any easy way for companies to log all AI prompts for review?
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@deepthoughts10 @GossiTheDog Brian, is there any easy way for companies to log all AI prompts for review?
@euroinfosec @deepthoughts10 depends on the tool but 'yes*'. Problems = log volume (it's very large) and who has time, responsibility, budget and knowledge in business to sit and review hundreds of thousands a prompts each week in a large org to police how people use tools and understand what they're doing?
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In an era where companies need to become more efficient and diverse they’ve basically picked the least efficient way to do it, with the biggest risks and highest costs - because everybody else is doing it.
I know somebody at one of the big 4 who has written something in Claude that prompts Claude each twenty minutes for a question, then feeds Claude’s question back into Claude to use their tokens - because token usage is factored into employee evaluations. What are we even doing.
basically loads more of these headlines over the next few years, then C level execs leaving on golden parachutes https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/execs-confused-horrified-huge-ai-135718505.html
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basically loads more of these headlines over the next few years, then C level execs leaving on golden parachutes https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/execs-confused-horrified-huge-ai-135718505.html
@GossiTheDog I'd actually pay for those parachutes to be literal gold, then let them jump with them
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basically loads more of these headlines over the next few years, then C level execs leaving on golden parachutes https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/execs-confused-horrified-huge-ai-135718505.html
@GossiTheDog that's a heck of a headline.
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