Notices by Jason Gorman (jasongorman@mastodon.cloud)

I've been trawling through all my old drives for a presentation I gave in, gosh, 1997 (?) that I recall was titled "Getting Shit Done?"

It was about stuff I'd learned through hard knocks about not being seduced by the *feeling* of being more productive.

Can't find the damn thing anywhere. I suspect I never backed it up. QED.

In a nutshell

In 2005, devs might have worried about things in our careers like "Am I specialising too much?", "Do I really want to move into management?" or "Is this technology going to be in demand in the future?"

In 2025, "Am I working for fascists?" is a real thing.

"gensplaining": the act of trying to persuade a customer that the code the model generated is what they actually needed.

US corporations frantically backpedalling on diversity are doing so entirely voluntarily.

NASA employees have been told to "drop everything" and spend their time scrubbing their website for mentions of women in leadership positions, diversity, etc.

That NASA workers actually did this is the most terrifying thing.

"A.I. is going to transform the way we develop software"

In what ways?

"Well, you need to be precise about your requirements, work in short feedback loops, be always cleaning up the mess it makes, and continuously test everything"

I see. Radical changes.

It's really starting to look like a coup's underway in the US.

The UK government seems to be discovering what so many other businesses have discovered: there's very few viable use cases for the technology

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/27/ai-prototypes-uk-welfare-system-dropped

I get a feeling I might not be alone in thinking this way

I can't help feeling that a "game-changing" technology that's going to "fundamentally transform" the way we work wouldn't need to be sneaked into products and price plans without the user's consent.

All I see is posts asking "How do I switch this f**king thing off?"

Copilot's the U2 album nobody asked for, except it's not free.

It's basically like if they decided to put a coin-operated toaster oven in every vehicle. You don't actually want toast, but if you don't keep feeding it coins, the car won't start.

@dalias The thing is, if products are redesigned so they won't work without the LLM (like putting a coin-operated toaster in every car and designing the electrical system to not work without it), then whether or not we actually *want* toast will be largely irrelevant.

@dalias And then expect productivity to double because they read it in Forbes

LLMs are a near-perfect rentier technology. The cost of training them to the point where they're even marginally useful is so prohibitive that only people with very deep pockets can do it. The goal then is to make us all reliant on them, by shoehorning them into as many products as possible.

And it doesn't matter whether or not we actually need them if products won't work without them.

There's a small window of opportunity here for software engineers at Meta where they might be able to get another job in this industry.

Engineers at X? That ship's sailed, I'm afraid. But presumably the concentration camps will need IT.

The "Here's a list of people I admire who just happen to have lots of followers" LinkedIn post is a classic of the genre.

Weirdly, when I suggested to the same executives who are currently pouring $gazillions into "A.I." that they could achieve bigger productivity gains by investing a fraction of that in their people and teams, they were like "Meh. We're good, thanks." It's almost as if it has nothing to do with productivity...

I've thought a lot over the years about what makes "work" feel like work for me.

Mindless/reasonless? Yep. Not a fan.

Repetitive? Sure. That's a chore.

Hard? It's better when it's easy, so I'll try to make it easier.

But I think by the far the biggest factor in whether something feels like "work" is when someone is telling me what to do. Suddenly, I don't feel so much like doing it.

Weird, right?

That's an actual thing, though. Search for "autonomy and intrinsic motivation"