Hacker News Reader

Comment by peab | Hacker News Reader

I saw a coworker using chatGPT the other day - they were in marketing, and trying to access a dashboard. One of the filters used a list of IDs, sperated by commas. I watched as she repeatedly copied a list of IDs from a spreadsheet into chat gpt, asking for them to be comma sperated, then into the filter.

There are loads of use cases like this that will most definitely be solved by local LLM.

View on HN

I'm convinced that most office work exists for social reasons, not for practical reasons. Just like every other office technology before, AI is going to replace workflows like that (and this: https://xkcd.com/763/) but it won't have an end effect on the total number of office workers, because they weren't really needed in the first place, and ebb and flow due to cycles of elite overproduction, not productivity.

> I'm convinced that most office work exists for social reasons

The powers that be are not competent/powerful enough to engineer a society-wide conspiracy like that.

A lot of waste (especially in big organizations, and the bigger the organization the more capacity for waste) happens, and the more the income is detached from production (e.g. governments get tax revenue regardless of how well they spend it) the less people care about efficiency.

But for the most part people get hired because somebody thought that makes business sense to do so.

I think it's the opposite. The powers that be are not competent/powerful enough to engineer a company that prioritizes productivity over relationships. It's human nature to prioritize relationships over everything else, and it would take a lot of micromanaging to do otherwise, except that micromanaging itself is susceptible to human nature, so managers who try end up micromanaging relationships, not productive work.

>I'm convinced that most office work exists for social reasons, not for practical reasons

Disagree. The receptionist recording something in excel manually, vs building an automation for it is a finance issue. Its opex vs capex.

When people make huge assumptions about the future of technology, they tend to miss that lots of people dont want to fork out the capital to buy robots or build new tools, when it works "just fine" having karen enter it manually.

Scary. A person with awareness of how LLMs would work would not feel comfortable doing that. It can hallucinate things, forget entries. It is just plain silly.

If it's 95% accurate on average for tasks, then that's probably better than writing an excel formula that's right on the first try. Especially for a marketer.

The issue is that 95 x 95 x 95 etc. Error rates compound.

Can we agree that 95% accurate for such tasks is really bad? I agree that we probably don't care all that much if marketing gets something wrong, but imagine the same applied to taxes or pensions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com