The global economy is probably already dependent on some Claude code instance updating an Excel spreadsheet on someone’s laptop with a note ”don’t close the lid!” attached to it
When I was a teenager I used to work at an airport and they had critical infrastructure running on things like Basic and Assembly, to transfer data between the computers and modern systems you have to use floppy disks because the computers that they ran on didn’t have drivers to support USB and we couldn’t upgrade the computers because the software wouldn’t work on any other hardware.
So the AI laptop will be at home amongst all the ancient but supercritical junk that seems to be necessary to run our world.
At a previous job, I had to build laptops that would multi-boot DOS, Win95, Win98, and XP, all on one laptop. Our field-tech’s software had to have those specific versions of windows for the machines that they serviced, because of how the software interacted with USB and embeded floppy drives.
If you want to scare yourself:
spoiler
They serviced Medical devices: X-rays, MRIs, CT-Scanners, etc.
Honestly, I’d prefer those medical device run on older software than even Win10 lol
That’s dumb. The “work” in maintaining this excel file was the prompting and overall agent logic. In reality you’d be using something like openrouter and the instant claude “dies” for whatever reason you swap to whatever the freshest AI is. This never becomes ancient, it keeps up with the times.
I don’t know about that the entirety of European airspace was closed early in the year because of a pilot inputed some malformed data and it crashed both the primary and backup system. The backup system just fed the primary systems inputs into it, so that was inevitable.
I’m not sure what your point is. Garbage in garbage out, that’s just the law of computers. That would br the pilot’s mistake.
The point is there’s zero error checking.
That’s on you, when using AI you always have a verifier script afterwards, it’s basic common sense. And if a script can’t do it then human, if you’re saving 90% of the time instead of 100% it’s still fine.
This is a perfect example of why I’ve never used AI and never will.
when using AI you always have a verifier script afterwards
LOL. Sounds like you’re wasting 110% time here.
How’s it my job to fix the aviation industry?
I wonder if Proton can run these old softwares
Proton would be over the top unless they’re using graphics APIs or other common gaming related libraries.
That said, Wine/Bottles would be a possible solution. But so is a VM that runs the software in it’s native environment with pass through ports or even port device/emulation.
Linux /POSIX is great, but its not always the right solution.
Reminds me of some stupid company maybe a few months ago that had their PRs failing due to copilot being down the dumbasses didn’t build an “if no AI” failsafe into their workflow. And no one knew how to recover it
I know my work already has reports built by running data through Claude and having it spit out an xls. Though, it’s not quite as integral as the all-important closet laptop.
This guy ITs
As a millennial the only positive of LLMs is that younger generations won’t threaten my career
Younger generations are, by and large, as technologically illiterate as boomers are. It doesnt apply to all of them, but the majority of them grew up with nothing but easy UIs. They may not chicken-pick to type, but they still cant troubleshoot anything and tend to know nothing outside of interacting with a typical interface. They definitely grew up with nothing like Windows 95 or 98 (or even XP) where you had to actually understand how a computer works to some extent to use the thing (or fix it)
Millennials, particularly the younger millennials especially, grew up right in the sweet spot to be at a tech advantage. At least as far as the average person goes. Obviously anyone passionate about tech will be far ahead of the average person, regardless of age
Wholeheartedly agree. This is from 2013, and I feel it’s only gotten worse since then.
Oh, I remember reading this … 13 years ago … . 👴
We tried to teach ours and got “dad can you just fix it I’m in a game”. Then no desire to learn in free time.
Would you mind sharing how you tried to teach and what you think went wrong?
When we built his PC we invited him to learn about it as we picked components and as we put them together. Every time he had a computer problem, we’d try to explain why it happened and how we fixed it. Just no interest at all unfortunately.
I think all the time about how a lot of boomer guys know how to work on cars real well.
This is because most of them took auto shop classes in high school.
As a millenial, I’m great with computers… because I learned how to use them in school. It appears that after I left school, educators were like “welp, kids know how to use computers now!” and stopped teaching kids how to use computers in school. This is both bonkers and mind numbing. I also wish I knew more about working on cars. Anyway.
The older gen z too I would say
As a millenial looking to change careers, because I was done with the old one. No, it sucks!
I agree. I am more than happy to pass the torch when the time comes. I certainly don’t want to work forever, but I also want to be able to train competent replacements at some point.
They will if you don’t use AI though
Don’t believe you, seems like useless nonsense to me
Considering how much competitive jobs have become refusing to use a powerful tool like AI won’t help. I’m not saying that you should use it just that people using it will be advantaged over these who don’t
I work in a creative industry, as far as we are concerned it is plagiarism
It is also non deterministic crap that developers should know better than to use
I work in a creative industry, as far as we are concerned it is plagiarism
AI can be useful in pretty much every field, if you are shoveling snow llms can help you making a plan and draw a route to do it faster
I know enough to understand it’s useless, it will fall apart when the psychosis wears off
Video generators are becoming excellent and image generators already are, what makes you think people will give up on these tools? The industry is already adapting, 1/3 of the ads you see now are made with AI
We have path finding algorithms. Large Language Models aren’t suited for that.
Probably speaking to the choir here, but I do feel it is worth pointing out that those same algorithms were considered AI until like 3-5 years ago when the zeitgeist shifted to AI=Transformers/LLMs
Why don’t you actually try this and see how it goes?
I work for a landscaping company, my boss tried to get us to use AI to develop site plans… we went back to doing it the old fashioned way because AI is fuckin useless for stuff like this.
give it a bunch of years and you will see taking it over any other industry, same as computers and mobile phones
Here’s the funny thing … they never worked to begin with!
I cannot stress enough how correct this is. It feels like it’d be similar to early Covid lockdown. People with real jobs that contribute to things are still working while everyone else with the cushy meaningless jobs are sent home to do nothing where they complain and make things harder for the people actually doing things.
I literally quit my job to join them because I couldn’t take it anymore and was met with an insane amount of harassment. Apparently I had be lucky to be considered essential.
The Covid lockdowns made me feel crazy. There I was, sitting at home playing video games and smoking weed all day, every day, like God intended. Meanwhile, my roommate was going stir crazy because he really wanted to go back to work. I still don’t understand it.
That’s a good comparison, because it illustrates very well why LLMs are so (seemingly) successful. If this useful technology were used primarily by the people who actually worked during COVID, there wouldn’t be a problem, because these people are very good at assessing what’s possible and what isn’t - since they actually understand their work. The problem - and the absurd hype - arises simply because LLMs reinforce the completely absurd ideas of incompetent people - and these are the ones who had nothing to do during the pandemic, since they do nothing but schedule pointless meetings and waste the time of those who are actually doing something meaningful.
So far, so good.
Outages via https://downdetector.com/This implies that the brains worked before.
Looking at the world, this is quite a bold assumption, I would say …As a software engineer, please do.
I’ve actively started doing tickets manually again. Just reviewing is exhausting, and yes, in part because I’m overwhelmed by what I don’t understand. I’m somewhat new in our codebase and letting AI do all the work means I’ll never get to know it in depth. That means I’m not meeting the productivity goals managers have already adopted, though. :/
I write well enough for the e-mails I’m required to send, I don’t code, I have no use/desire to generate “art,” and I don’t like search results I have to double check so I’ve been blessed (cursed?) to not have to use “AI” in my daily life.
If we shutdown AI there’d also be a massive hiring spree and wages would probably tick up a bit to compensate. AI is just the latest scam to suppress workers and wages. They want perpetual suffering for us and infinite gains for themselves.
They weren’t using their brains before ai, what made you think they would now?
Are YOU using your brain right now?
Please turn it off… I am currently dealing with a
bunch of fuwell meaning but intellectually challenged individuals at an IT team who just reimaged a machine running the master database for one of their sites based on what a chatbot told them.Now what concerns me most is that this site operates critical life saving equipment. While our software isn’t too important, some minimum wage workers are about to have a very high stress weekend is about the worst that will happen and then early next week it should be back to normal. But the same IT team has access to the life saving equipment as well.
The funny thing is my friend was all on the AI train. Lately he finally agrees with me that it’s trash, they had him use it at work and he spent more time fixing the code.
Something similar happened in January 2013. In protest of the SOPA/PIPA bills that threatened section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Wikipedia went dark.
It got everyone’s attention, especially students, who had grown accustomed to Wikipedia’s ubiquity as a resource.
oh okay
But how should I feel about that
Not sure who needs to hear this but… the average person isn’t using AI for anything important, nor likely anything that really involves much thinking. Heck they aren’t even choosing to use it, they are just doing a google search. Some of us use it for work. But for that case, I refer back to my first sentence.
the average person isn’t using AI for anything important
You’re discounting all the students who are using AI to make it seem like they’re learning something.
I guess I also discounted all the people using AI to generate the stupid report their upper management wants but never read. That really does improve their quality of life. :)
Or forever.
I wouldn’t mind seeing how bad the withdrawal is.
I hope the withdrawal symptoms are gonna be on par with alcohol withdrawal.
An actual picture of 2026 from the “no pivot to AI” universe
