With AI you can fake engagement, which convinces shareholders you are much valuable. Share price go up, free money

You mean sarcasm is nuanced and LLMs have no real thought, missing all nuance?

Thanks for all of this, I’ve been reading into these options since you left your comment. You trust them then? No logging, secure? Good endpoints?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (born 2001 or 2002[1]) is a German artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and investor. He was part of OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team before he was fired in April 2024 over an alleged information leak, which Aschenbrenner disputes. He has published a popular essay called “Situational Awareness” about the emergence of artificial general intelligence and related security risks.[2] He is the founder and chief investment officer (CIO) of Situational Awareness LP, a hedge fund investing in companies involved in the development of AI technology.

Wikipedia

So, I’m calling bullshit. I’ve read the papers, I’ve kept up on everything. I run AI models myself to keep up with everything, I’ve built my own agents and my own agentic workflows. It keeps coming back to a few big things that unless they’ve suddenly had another massive breakthrough - I don’t see happening.

• LLMs already have the vast majority of data associated with them, and they still hallucinate. The docs say that it will take exponentially more data to train them on a linear trajectory. So to get double the performance, we’d need the current amount of data squared.
• LLMs and Agentic flows are very cool, and very useful for me. But they’re incredibly unreliable. And it’s just how models work - it’s a black box. You can say “that didn’t work” and it’ll train next time that it was a bad option, but it’s never going be zero. Businesses are learning (see Taco Bell and several others), that AI is not code. It is not true or false. It’s probably true or probably false. That doesn’t work when you’re putting in an order or deciding how much money to spend.
• We’ve certainly plateaued with AI for the time being. There will be more things that come out, but until the next major leap we’re pretty much here. GPT5 proved that, it was mediocre, it was… the next version. They promised groundbreaking, but there just isn’t any more ground to break with current AI. Like I said agents were kind of the next thing, and we’re already using them.

Thanks, basically take it as you do something well, and they hire you because you do it well. They ask you to do the thing you do well, you build out plans, you build out solid options, write it all up and present it all. Then your manager who has about 4 months of experience doing what you do for a living tells you that he doesn’t like it, and that you should do it in the worst possible way forward. You don’t get a say. Then it all rolls from there.

It does make me feel better. I do know that morale tanked after I left. Not me being self centered, I’ve had multiple people tell me that there was a noticeable drop in morale because people knew it was bullshit. They had to have several meetings saying “They didn’t fit our culture” but my colleagues weren’t stupid. They knew who I was and what I was like, they knew it was a political move. I don’t expect they’ll all leave because of me or anything, but I do hope that it’s just the first couple rocks in an avalanche.

Know that I completely empathize with everything here, even the consultancy bits. It kills me when companies won’t do basic things like CI/CD. In fact, that’s one of the major red flags. If a company isn’t minimum doing some sort of pipeline to go to prod it’s pretty much a no from me at this point. It’s such an important critical security step that if you didn’t do that, you’re not doing a lot else either.

Sounds like you’re where I was, but you’ve had a longer timeline luckily. Don’t let them blame you, don’t let them put it on you. Sounds like you’re walking that political tightrope pretty well.

Thank you for the kind words, I’ve been feeling pretty low since then and your last few words made me smile :)

A nod to our former Admiral Patrick, who sadly has left. Captain Swift!

I’m hoping for being “that swiftie person”

They had one single Prometheus node for the entire company and couldn’t figure out why it needed so much CPU. They never once thought that maybe they set it up incorrectly

This whole new version of material is god awful. Makes all my apps look like they’re for preschoolers. Marketing and design had to justify themselves again

That 8 hours is a godsend. You reminded me of another story there. My first week, my first few days I went into office. I had about 5 hours of work because you know, onboarding. After that I sat around for an hour or two, asking people what to do, reading documentation, you know. After 7 hours I was like (to the same manager), do you have anything else for me? Or should I get going for day. He said nope! Great first day, see you tomorrow! I literally thought nothing of it, it’s the first week, that’s how all first weeks are. Onboarding is always slow.

That bastard sat me down in my second week saying they had a strict 8 hour in office policy and that “I had been noticed”. I reminded him that he was the one who said I could leave early and that on even that day I was in earlier than he was. I learned that it didn’t matter if I showed up at 7am, if I left at 3 they would think I’m “leaving early”. My ride unfortunately dropped me off every day at 7, so I ended up having to work 9 hour days every day in office so they wouldn’t think I was slacking off.

That’s exactly how it is. Every project now I’m worried everyone is against me and that one slip up will be it. My confidence is at zero and all because that of that shit manager. I appreciate the words, it’s something I’ll have to overcome over time.

This was recent, and it’s still pretty sore for me. I doubt anyone will be able to pinpoint who I am, but if you for some reason are in this forum and recognize me please DM me. Try to count all of the red flags.

I was hired as a software engineer and was immediately thrown onto a “high-visibility project”. My service was the middle man between two other mission critical services. Essentially downstream provided metrics and needed to get to upstream.

I laid out several different architectures that I recommended. First was prometheus. It’s literally designed to do this, downstream is spread across many servers, prometheus is literally built to do this. Upstream then can scrape prometheus, any other future dependents can also scrape. This was rejected. “We did prometheus once, it didn’t work.” I check, it’s a single tenant instance of Prometheus running on one 24XXL AWS VM. So, they didn’t know how to properly configure prometheus. I tell them I can kill 2 birds with one stone. No, prometheus bad. Rejected.

Second, we use a highly reliable queue setup. Downstream publishes to queue, Upstream reads from queue. Seems simple enough, can have many producers and many subscribers, and we already have a kafka service. Rejected. For why, I ask. Literally “Upstream doesn’t know how to work with queues”. Literally got that as an answer. Read that as “We need to choose a subpar architecture because we openly admit our engineers don’t have the necessary skills”. I even offered to help them, to write that part of the code. Rejected.

Third option came straight from the CTO. We love datadog here. Everyone does. Datadog. Oh you feel that pit in your stomach don’t you. The mandate came down from on high that Downstream would push metrics to Datadog. I then would need to periodically scrape Datadog, and then have an API that the upstream could then periodically scrape me. I looked into Datadog’s API. They don’t really support this. I reach out to Datadog, talk to their engineers, and they confirm this is a horrible pattern. I bring this up, say it’s just not a good decision, there are better ways. Literally rejected by the CTO himself.

So, I build this rickity ass service, brand new built with thumbtacks and glue. Along the way more is mandated to me. We’ll have literally 8x the number of metrics we originally planned for. We’re well over Datadog’s API limitations. I am mandated to put it into a Postgres instance. Every decision I am overridden.

On top of this, Downstream is completely overworked and doesn’t have time to answer questions about specific metrics. Upstream then asks me, who has been there now for a grand total of 4 months, and I don’t know the specific questions. I refer them to Downstream for helping describe what specific metrics are and do. They report to my superiors that I am not being a team player for this. They also don’t know how to use my API, I have to explain concepts like GET and POST to them, how to serialize datetimes. I end up writing some of their code for them just to make it work.

In the end, we shipped late. There was an arbitrary deadline set by the CTO that we missed - we were not consulted on this deadline, there was no reason for the deadline beyond “We should be live on this date”. We missed it by 5 days. During those 5 days I am online every waking moment, sleeping an average of 4-5 hours per night. I’m a walking zombie trying to patch this thing.

A week after release I’m called onto a meeting with my direct boss, who reports to the CTO. He tells me that due to my “Lack of Ownership” and “Lacking team spirit” they are letting me go. I’m stunned. This entire time literally any decision I tried to make was overridden. They chose the worst possible architecture, forced me to implement it, forced me to talk to third parties about designing this anti-pattern. I had 2 other teams actively work against me, and on top of that I had no support from anyone. I was alone, and isolated. I got off that call, and I just cried. I felt like such a failure.

I’m at a new job now, and I’ve realized what a toxic environment that was. Horrible engineering practices, way too much pressure on me alone. I had developed health issues that I wasn’t even aware of that now have subsided. I literally tried my best, and they just let me go. I found out later that my boss who fired me was being chewed out over the horrid project, and he put 100% of the blame on me to save his own ass.

Thanks for listening

Welcome to the family! I can’t remember the last time I needed windows for a game!

I won’t talk politics, but I will say after going out and seeing other countries I completely agree, it’s way different than what I was told. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t left NA has any right to compare us against anyone.

They said it’d be on par with a Pixel, so either a reasonable Sony or not Sony…

So who do we think? It’s not Fair phone and it sounds like it’s not oneplus. I’ll be needing a new phone within the next couple of years, if they roll it out soonish

Once downloaded, MusicBrainz Picard is going to be your best friend in organizing everything. Then choosing how you host it, I just have it in Jellyfin with my other media.

People who just disappear I assume are going to have it much worse later on. I’ve literally been connected with hiring managers from people I’ve handed notice to. I don’t think they realize that you’re not just giving the finger to your boss, but everyone you worked with. Not everyone there was bad, chances are someone else someday will have a sweet job, and it’s better for them to think of you as someone who left politely just like they did vs disappearing and leaving them with a ton of work attempting to pick up the pieces.

Through who if I may ask?