Can you name something worthy from German public TV? Imho it’s too political with greenwashing and other shit I don’t want at home. We had a discussion at home for whole week after Checker Tobi complaining about deforestation in Brazil. Germans want to know it better for the whole world while their home country is not performing well at all. The quality is good, but the content should be curated better.
KiKA is the program for children, it only runs (at least as far as I recall) during hours which kids should be awake anyway, and ends in the evening with some silly programming.
Germany is very political, and very "green" in its programming, everywhere. People have an acute awareness of the impact their actions have on the planet, and the ability to vote and cause change.
This might be quite foreign to foreigners (lol) especially from countries where voting makes no actual difference, but since we have so many political parties, so much choice, and your various elections actually make a meaningful difference, its good for kids to get involved and be aware early on.
If your kids' show talks about deforestation in Brazil, I don't see the issue with that. You can give your kids a balanced viewpoint by discussing other arguments, and teach them that way. It's not a bad thing to teach kids that things said on TV might not always tell the full story, and this seems like a harmless way to do that.
Only without intervention does TV indoctrinate. With intervention, such as discussions at dinner about current political topics, at least in families that aren't extreme/radical, discussions should yield pretty reasonable, varied results.
That is not greenwashing. Germany and Norway are the largest supporters of anti-deforestation programs in Brazil, because there is not much they can do domestically, and it aligns with conservation goals. It is a real issue when you’re losing thousands of square km of forest every year to cattle farming and soy exports.
Nothing wrong in making kids aware that we have a duty as a species to preserve nature, and that this type of collaboration can happen across borders.
That’s a very nice theory. Decent real estate first buyer will not even consider rented property. But there are enough unscrupulous shady people who will buy the property at a great discount and get the tenants out. You will be right according the law, but still mistreated. Will you enjoy abuse waiting 3 years for a court? Probably not. It’s not their first rodeo.
most rented property in germany is owned by large firms who make renting out homes their business. for them, that is not an issue. most homes that people buy for themselves are not even available on the rental market. as you say, people who want to buy a home for themselves will not consider rented property. i believe that is true in germany too. if it happens then it is a rare edgecase, and they will be able to find out in advance if the tenant is willing/able to move out.
When you inherit property, it comes however it comes. I've been displaced twice by heirs. A lot of rental houses in the Bay Area are second/empty nests.
Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hardware from rudimentary GUIs. That’s awesome. I see software companies sending internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts… It’s like steroids - cleverly used they bring more advantages, though one shouldn’t take double dose with every meal.
This too shall pass. Among my software engineering friend group bubble: Every single individual (~12 of us) are actively and seriously tokenmaxing. We have middle-managers who have been given an AI mandate, upper-managers saying "uhh...maybe that brush stroke was too broad" when they look at the bill every month, and zero people in that chain have the authority or even ability to roll it back. This week one of my friends cobbled together an agent that runs in an infinite loop, grabs whatever song they're actively listening to on Spotify, writes it in a file, then instructs the agent to emit tokens for 2-3 minutes on what that song and previous songs that day might mean for that person's mental state, like a little music-based diary. Repeat, run all day, 24/7. Kinda cool. But its just a way to use tokens, because the first thing all these AI labs built was a good coding model, and the second thing they built was a dashboard for admins to track how much their users are using the good coding model.
A TON of companies are getting looted by the AI labs and AI users. Many will not survive. I think Meta will be one of them (a shell of their former selves by 2030). The ones who survive to thrive in the 2030s will be the ones that are relentlessly focused on their customers and products, not the process. If you don't regularly hear both "AI would be awesome for that" and "actually AI probably won't be good for that", your company won't make it. You'll either get lapped by the companies who find the strong use-cases, or you'll get looted by infinite and aimless tokenmaxing. The path through the middle is far more narrow than most companies realize, and some major, major companies are waking up to that harsh reality; for some, too late.
In case this anecdote is not made up, I would implore you or your friend be a bit more subtle at tokenmaxing (ugh). At $JOB, I'm under the same mandate, and it turns out that every prompt is logged and aggregated. When someone else at $JOB asked the team PM who's in charge of the logging, s/he replied that the log is only used to correlate with commits, and nothing else, trust us (wink). I doubt this is unique to my $JOB.
Therefore, sigh burn those tokens, but make sure your prompts are at least superficially defensible, in the unlikely event that you get audited. Use multiple models for the same prompt / task, for instance. It's well know that LLMs are prone hallucinations, so it's only prudent to double / triple cross-check the results with multiple models.
The situation is insane at the company my friend works at. There's no central oversight, because, as I understand it, someone in leadership had the idea that they didn't want to prescribe which AI tools their engineers should use. So they just let their engineers expensify any tools they want. Afaik he hasn't yet hit the upper-bound; last month he said he reimbursed a ~$500 anthropic bill. The same company also makes their engineers go to the Apple store to buy laptops, with their own money, then reimburse it. The credit card points must go crazy over there.
But definitely yeah, normally: be careful about these things. In his case when I said "admin dashboard" i moreso meant the general idea of admin oversight; he's said he's been complimented internally about how much he's using AI.
The same type of executive who will instil a tokenmaxxing mandate will be the same type of executive who decides layoffs are the best way to improve margins when the token bill comes due with no revenue to back it up.
> This too shall pass. Among my software engineering friend group bubble: Every single individual (~12 of us) are actively and seriously tokenmaxing. We have middle-managers who have been given an AI mandate, upper-managers saying "uhh...maybe that brush stroke was too broad" when they look at the bill every month, and zero people in that chain have the authority or even ability to roll it back. This week one of my friends cobbled together an agent that runs in an infinite loop, grabs whatever song they're actively listening to on Spotify, writes it in a file, then instructs the agent to emit tokens for 2-3 minutes on what that song and previous songs that day might mean for that person's mental state, like a little music-based diary. Repeat, run all day, 24/7. Kinda cool. But its just a way to use tokens, because the first thing all these AI labs built was a good coding model, and the second thing they built was a dashboard for admins to track how much their users are using the good coding model.
What the actual quack, are we being really serious? What is even happening at this point and what have I even just read. This might be worse than burning money in a fire pit.
The sad part is the perverse incentives have made it so that these datacenters and gpu's and ram prices and energy costs are going up in price for this...
Why are people tokenmaxxing? Why are these companies literally burning (actually worse) of their money and their investors money? AI psychosis, what exact reason is the cause behind such things?
It may be useful outside the current tech rat race. One possibility is that a decade of openly user-hostile business decisions will reach their logical conclusion even faster, and those that haven’t fried our brains with CC may be in a position to pick up customers from these behemoths as they disintegrate.
I work in infrastructure (backups, networking etc) and no longer in software. I just don't see llms being that useful right now. If I have a problem and ask an LLM the answer is either fabricated or useless, rarely does it know what it's talking about. And yes I know how to describe the problem so that it has a chance to give an useful answer.
Also even with agents, you can't just try and error your way out of some (most) of the problems I encounter without doing harm if the solution fails.
Might be different if used for infrastructure as code or ansible or some such. That I can see.
Well Coding agents are being tackled. Infrastructure agents that would read your host event logs, device configuration, ilo, etc, etc - that is probably the missing piece.
Having a chat with chatgpt may give you clues or ideas when you have gone throught your own checklist of what could have went wrong, but can go only as far.
Agent on the other side will decompile .dll to find out issues if needed to go deep enought.
Providing access to the data is easy. It is just an MCP or equivalent, and coding such CRUD is cheap now.
Applying the actions is unsolved. Unless you YOLO the LLMs, taking stateful actions automatically requires a lot of protective infrastructure, solid testing infra etc.
It’s all just more code, but a “create me a shopping website” LLM is likely not going to be doing the infrastructure level thinking required to handle it for now.
Might be but I just can't imagine a customer being fine with a loose cannon agent in their environment. E.g. coding agents are ignoring instructions. Who is to say that Claudes solution to a, say, slow backup isn't deleting the backup?
Imagine an agent shadowing all your terminals, providing ideas and asking to run commands that will let it verify the hypotheses it comes up with, while at the same time doing research on vendor docs, etc...
Quite safe, and already a force multiplier - this would be a harness. Maybe have it be able to write to a shadow system with similar (ideally same) hardware to verify it's hypothesis on how the system works, etc...
Some people live paycheck to paycheck in tech. Where do they walk away to that isn't or won't be impacted by AI? Or are you assuming they have the financial support for such a risky switch?
Indeed, here’s a prompt snippet to help you afterwards”.
“Create me a resume for [newjob]. Ensure that it is properly embellished so that my two years of superficial, directionless AI-driven learning seem equivalent to the multi-decade experience and domain expertise the company is actually hiring for”.
Companies that use AI well will replace the companies that use AI badly. There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward.
I agree, with the caveat that I don’t think any company is using AI well at the moment, specifically because I think our tooling around AI is woefully inadequate and immature.
Right now the AI marketing paradigm is to create rockstar superusers who can (supposedly) do the job of hundreds of individuals at the speed of light! Which bleeds into the design paradigm, which is trash. I’m bullish on AI that can be used more cooperatively and collectively by a company.
I'm less sure of the fact that ending subsidized token consumption (in isolation) will happen and change this. I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.
I'm slightly _more_ convinced (still not all that strongly) that the rising cost of memory and chips, data center construction that gets outpaced by computing demand, increasing energy costs, and low switching costs for customers will force the model labs to make changes that increase the barrier to entry (either via higher pricing, more restrictive rate limiting, etc.). or force their customers into longer term commitments.
> I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.
We've also seen failures who were convinced "they would make it up in volume." I guess the bet is that infra will get that much more efficient, but it's not clear how much slack there is.
A lot - and over the coming 2 years, even more. Utilization rates are under 50% across the board, and special and cheaper chips are coming out all the time for inference. And a truckload of research - TurboQuant, HC (deepseek), etc, etc..
How is that possible when the cost of memory and hard drives have gone up 3x+ in the last six months? Maybe cheaper if you're OAI or one of the lucky companies Nvidia is propping up. Everyone else is getting screwed.
Sorry but I don't really see how this contradicts what I said in context i.e. both our statements are compatible in the context of what I was replying to
Even so, frontier models get bigger and more complicated, and agentic workflows consume exponentially more tokens than the simple chat windows of two years ago.
I agree that the amount people pay for these services is very unlikely to decrease (i.e. Blinn's Law but for tokens). Still, the current level of "intelligence" will eventually become available for a very low price almost surely. Really I simply don't see how you can disagree with the parent's comment "There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward." Honestly I'd like to understand the mindset, is it mainly that you dislike working with these tools/hope they don't get imposed on you or did you actually find them harmful in your work in some way and think they are overvalued?
That's just a baseless assumption. To use AI well you should do the things that allow you to use stuff well. You shouldn't just use it any way you can because you assume that 'not using it at all' is not the best option.
This is literally the same with every single technological development.
Ironically, companies overusing it will probably die at a similar speed. Maybe faster, even, depending whether cash burn or technical debt catches up to them first.
That's like saying farmers that don't use pesticides will die out. There's whole industries around doing things not the way big companies say you have to. Human-centric firms will pop up and proposer.
Maybe. But I used to have unlimited Claude Code usage but now I’m relegated to whatever the subscription happens to give me and when I run out of tokens I need to trad code until my limits reset. My manager saw the bill and nearly fell out of his chair. Small companies just can’t afford the added cost of AI at the real price (and we aren’t even in the real price territory yet).
Hell, even Microsoft is having trouble paying Anthropic’s API rates.
There is a ceiling to how much people are willing to pay for work slop. Just look at the backlash to GitHub Copilot’s token based billing changes.
I don’t want to live in a world where the barrier to entry on entrepreneurship is how much you can pay Anthropic or OpenAI.
The copilot token pricing is going to wake a lot of companies up. Even with our smaller company only using around 1/3 of our allotted requests, next month the bill will easily twice as much.
If by "using AI well" you mean kill off customer service; maybe customers will want to switch to other companies that are more expensive but have customer service.
This is basically the next step of all the AI trainings and hacktons that many of us are now required to take part into, with KPI metrics on how each one is using their tokens.
It’s not like code base written by developers before AI were manageable. The term tech debt was there way before AI coding, and was mainly due to changes made by developers.
I see the point of your argument when this is done by inexperienced developers, as they wouldn’t know what’s happening but for those who knows and guide what has to be done, I don’t see much difference. It’s about understanding the outcome, and evaluating the risk.
Technical Debt is not a developer skill issue. It’s a management planning, capacity and budget issue. It’s a bet that the cost of servicing the debt will be less than the cost of paying for it outright with cash. I’ve been in the industry for decades and 95% of the dysfunction in an engineering organization is always management.
AI doesn’t really fix that or is really even that suited for it. In many cases it makes it worse.
That’s why you see software quality going down. Developers aren’t told to make better quality software even though AI does really make that easier. Instead they’re told to make more software faster for cheaper.
Cheap, Fast, Quality. Pick two. Business will pick cheap (short term) and fast every single time.
It’s a question of degree: technical debt has a carrying cost trying to balance features against your ability to support the codebase. LLMs change both sides of that equation but I think most companies are going to struggle with maintaining a balance when it’s so easy to push past concerns and get something which seems to work.
Tech debt is a debt taken to reduce development time. It's a time debt actually. Patching something that would work until the team has the time to do it correctly.
...and that time never comes in most cases. Because monies are earned in exchanged for that debt and, management cares about monies. They don't see that debt as important, or as debt at all.
Integrated solar panels into the tiles are batshit crazy expensive compared to regular big solar panels from China. I was looking how to install them (some other vendor, not Tesla) and was shocked - you can’t plug the small tiles connected together directly into inverter. There is additional power electronics box in between. Economically it makes no sense. The single installation around is at the guy‘s house who had successful 7 figures exit. Of course, the roof looks awesome.
No. It’s pure greed dominating the world. My employer is owned by bigger private company and the shitshow is the same as in big megacorporation. There are hordes of colleagues to stab one for 100€ more salary a month. Disgusting.
The company is manufacturing special computers. The initial owner/founder
ordered CPU modules and memory cards always looking at the price break. His question was always „how many to buy to get best price?“. So he ordered sometimes 200-300 parts more than needed immediately. Then the follow up order came and he emptied the storage. Now new manager always orders EXACT amount memory cards as ordered computers. Price is secondary thing, most important thing to work without warehouse and get things delivered just in time. What doesn’t work at all for the while already. The high prices buying small quantities is eating up the profit, so people are getting fired to save costs. It is pure greed dominating western world. Everything is done to look accounting nicely at every cost, get whole bonus despite ruining the company long term. I see this pattern recently very often.
Absolutely this. No one cares about privacy. 99,9% population has no clue how tech works. “Oh, it’s an app on my phone.” That’s what typical consumer understands. How text travels from one phone to other is something magical.
Got WhatsApp, because there is no other channel to communicate with customers. It’s literally used by everyone without exceptions. Really scary.
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