I got a call from someone I don't know.
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano AI did take your job away.
Thankfully there's a new one that's promising to be much more lucrative, if entirely more stressful. Either that or societal collapse when people refuse to admit they were wrong to give spicy auto-complete admin access to things.
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@stefano I recently had someone ask me to set up WordPress for them. I agreed and they asked if I would be using AI to do the work. I assured them no, it is a simple (for me) task which takes just a few minutes.
They then clarified they were asking me to use AI to do the install. They thought using AI would somehow make the vanilla WordPress setup better. They were fine with it taking longer, even, if I somehow involved AI in the process they had already offloaded to me.
@distrowatch @stefano We live in hell.
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@82mhz Maybe I should
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano Sounds to me like AI is creating work for you rather than taking over your job!
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@wizbean @stefano showed this to a friend and they just said "i love the difference in value when the money goes to an expert compared to the shart machine" and the reply was "It's literally gambling. A professional is a known quantity. But like a gambler, the sloperator hopes that they will beat the averages."
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@stefano@bsd.cafe Some people do not deserve the privilege of being your customer.
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano I thought €500 was remarkably low place to start but it sounds like it was an effective deterrent.
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano and that's why you need an AI voice receptionist to handle these calls
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@stefano wait, what’s the FreeBSD equivalent of “apt update && apt upgrade” ?!
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano the app ecosystem and social networks have created a
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano@bsd.cafe just desserts for that IT guy, I won’t say IT professional, because he’s a clown in a clown suit.
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano apps and social networks have spawned a generation of people who think they shouldn’t have to pay for anything. Only they should make money not you.
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@stefano apps and social networks have spawned a generation of people who think they shouldn’t have to pay for anything. Only they should make money not you.
@Ox1de @stefano : well, they are perfectly fine paying a lot of money to big corporations (Microsoft or Google, Apple for the laptops, OpenAI, Anthropic…)
They just don’t want to pay an human.
Probably because they are uncomfortable with the fact that this human will know more about the subject than they are.
(I mean, 500€ is cheap ! They already wasted as much without batting an eye )
But very good call: 500€ to undo the shit done by LLMs!
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano I bet the LMM agent upgraded and rebooted FreeBSD without updating the boot code, something which is documented in both the FreeBSD upgrading instructions and in the FreeBSD handbook.
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@stefano and that's why you need an AI voice receptionist to handle these calls
Ai Receptionist: Ciao, I'm your friendly AI voice receptionist. How can I help you?
Customer: Eh, ciao... Our LLM botched our FreeBSD server upgrade, didn't take backups, and we already spent a lot of tokens and it's still trying... Can you help?
AI Receptionist: You were absolutely right to reach out. I assure you I can help. You want me to support your AI Agent in further botching your upgrade and spend more tokens on the task. It's good there's no backup in the way, so we both won't be running out of disk space.
Hang on while I make contact with your bankaccount for more tokens, and access to your network to team up with your AI. Thanks for calling. -
I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano I honestly have to wonder if they will learn from this -- any more than, say, Tr
mp voters have learned from their experiences over the last decade... -
Ai Receptionist: Ciao, I'm your friendly AI voice receptionist. How can I help you?
Customer: Eh, ciao... Our LLM botched our FreeBSD server upgrade, didn't take backups, and we already spent a lot of tokens and it's still trying... Can you help?
AI Receptionist: You were absolutely right to reach out. I assure you I can help. You want me to support your AI Agent in further botching your upgrade and spend more tokens on the task. It's good there's no backup in the way, so we both won't be running out of disk space.
Hang on while I make contact with your bankaccount for more tokens, and access to your network to team up with your AI. Thanks for calling. -
I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano Good thing they didn't hire you to get blamed for the whole thing.
We've had a similar thing (alas without AI, just lack of maintenance because they didn't pay their only admin) to a medium sized hosting company in Poland in 2016 (Adweb/2be.pl).
An IT company offered to help in incident response mode, after everything got fixed the hosting company said they won't pay the high fees for the response, IT company restored old snapshots, then got blamed for all kinds of made up issues.
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@stefano I recently had someone ask me to set up WordPress for them. I agreed and they asked if I would be using AI to do the work. I assured them no, it is a simple (for me) task which takes just a few minutes.
They then clarified they were asking me to use AI to do the install. They thought using AI would somehow make the vanilla WordPress setup better. They were fine with it taking longer, even, if I somehow involved AI in the process they had already offloaded to me.
It is truly wild that this idea that things are more trustworthy if they're said by a computer somehow took hold among so many people.
