Quothling

I don't think it's quite as black and white. LinkedIn is just one channel, but I imagine you're going to have a hard time finding a workplace where social credit isn't a big part of internal politics. Whether that's being charming, great at your job or using SoMe, it's all about people.

I doubt any company primarily uses LinkedIn for promotions, but it does help your career if you are known for something positive by the people who run the company you work for.

What? It's how the job market works. It's like 90% connections and bullshit. I use GP somewhat similar to GP. Not as directly, but still targeted at helping my career. I've got a few people who write a lot of buzz that are also actually good for a couple of interesting comments back and forth. Once in a while they'll share someone new and I'll link up with them. This keeps you in the algorithm and it doesn't require you to be fake.

Then when something pisses me off at work I'll dig through my "hey this is a brilliant idea, I gotta write it down" ADHD notes I have in apples notes thing. I'll give it to an AI who will rewrite it to a load of crap that sounds way too professional to be something I would write. It will give me a great structure for the sections I want to write out of my crazy mess of a note. So I'll re-write every paragraph using basically none of what the AI output aside from the skeleton. Then I'll post it right before all the middle managers and c-levels take the train home on fridays. This will get me in right when they are LARPing on their linkedin.

Sometimes I'll get a tens of thousands of views. I've even had likes from one of the equity fund managers that owns the company that owns the company I work for. Those times I'll get some comments from the big bosses at the coffee machine or during lunch.

Maybe it's silly, but it works. At some point you'll also get enough followers or recognition or whatever it is they meassure you on that you'll start getting job offers from "real" people. I've had managers contact me directly for positions they were looking to fill. It've never actually gotten a job through linkedin though, but then again, all the jobs I've gotten after my first one has been through my real world network some of which have grown out of linkedin relationships.

I do wish the corporate larping platform our society has decided to use was decentralised though.

Around here "google it" has been replaced by "spørg botten" which means "ask the bot" or "spørg GPT". I've been putting an effort into saying "look it up" and stuff like it instead of "google it" for a couple of years now. Looks like it'll probably be wasted effort soon though.

It probably got lost in translation, but what I was trying to say was that when you're in non-tech enterprise. Nobody is responsible for the IT.

People said the same thing about higher level interpreted languages. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw the same movement into a new abstraction like we did when people moved from assembly or C and into Python, Java and C#. This is probably also why LLM's are so good at low-abstraction, explicity, fail fast programming in something like Rust.

Considering how digitally inclined workers are already building various tools on their own. Even though these tools are completely vibe coded and the creator has absolutely no idea how to build things. I imagine we're going to look into a future where the LLM and the prompting becomes the "programming langauge".

I also think we'll see the personal responsibility shift because of this, and I think some traditional IT and software companies will struggle with this. We're an energy company, and where we would've bought a specialized piece of software and a team of consultants to implement it. We can now, not only build a better tool but also rewrite it enough to actually deploy it, all with a handful of people doing other tasks and 4000 Euro worth of credits. 6 months ago I would've laughed into your face if you told me this woud happen, but now, here we are.

I suspect that in a few years (if not sooner) you'll not need any form of software developer in the process for this. You need a buisness domain expert and you need it-architecture + cybersecurity, and most of the architecture + cybersecurity can be done through company wide AI skills. But the code itself never really has to be read for a really large part of software running in companies. You wouldn't do that for something critical, like the software running on your plants, but the web portal with a dashboard containing the status of your devices? Sure, especially because AI lets you do these things with 0 external dependencies.

I'm Danish, but how is this terrible? I should show these people a video of my twins sleeping in a snow covered trolley outside the bar I was having a beer and a board game by the window at.

I may be in the minority here, and maybe I'm jaded. Having worked with cyber security in both the public sector and the energy industry in Europe, however, I kind of like what the AI's are doing. A lot of our infrastructure is vulnerable because c-levels have been ignoring the issues, even when repeatedly warned. Now they reap what they sow.

It looks like they're not quite set on that. There is a very empty part of the repo here: https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO/src/branch/main/compone...

The German Defense sector did something with Nextcloud, Collabora Online, Open-Xchange, Element/Matrix and Univention Nubus I believe. With things like Euro-Office and Nextcloud really stepping things up. Even Proton getting an office suite, I don't think the M365 platform is the big hurdle it once was. Especially because Microsoft lost the private market. 25 years ago you'd get employees who knew how to use Microsoft Office, today they all grew up with Macs, Chromebooks and similar.

What is the alternative though? If you piss off Trump you risk getting all your digital infrastructure shut down over night. It doesn't even have to be you who pisses him off. Obviously using Anthropic AI service has it's own issues within the EU trade zone, but it's been what... 3 months? Since they were ordered to shut off EU access to their most powerful models because they ran afoul of the US government.

Furniture is actually an ongoing service on the scale of public organisations. When I worked for a Danish city we had a set of subscriptions for furniture, depending on what sort of institution it was. This probably won't surprise you but city hall had the supreme plus subscription which meant that furniture was replaced regularily, while schools had the shit tier subscription meaning the furniture almost had to break into pieces before it got replaced. It's done with purchase agreements for an entire sector.

I think the comparison is fair enough considering that self-hosted would work sort of similar. In that you'd rent the physical space for your hardware (and possibly the hardware itself) at local suppliers, and not actually have it in your basement.

I'd personally rather see Haskell become part of the options for https://arrow.apache.org/, but this is still a cool project.

> Do you want the commenter to post list of people?

If you're not providing any form of evidence for your argument, then it's not really valid. Similarily, who are these influencers you refer to, and where on earth did I say that I was surprised LG is spying on me?

You seem very angry, but you blame everyone else. What have you done to combat this? I've personally actively worked in the FOSS community to prevent anti-privacy laws here in Europe. I'd say that Snowden wasn't the wake-up call we hoped because nothing seems to have consequences. Epstein files caused a few arrests in Europe, so did the Panama papers, but really, the elite is largely untouched by consequences.

I would probably called pro AI these days considering how much I've worked on getting the people in my organisation to adapt and learn how to use it, and how much I use it professionally. I've not always been pro AI, I'm sure my previous comments have been quite the rollercoaster over the past year. These days I'm part of a process which will probably replace quite a lot of jobs with AI down the line. The morals of which is a different discussion.

I don't use AI personally though. So when I found out that apple intelligence is currently taking up 10gb on my macbook m1 with the tiniest configuration at the time, that's massive. I've turned everything off and denied it access to training on any sort of apps and it's still using up 10gb of my 128. Meaning that Mac OS now takes up 53.76% of my drive. The AI I don't use being 12.8 of that. If Apple sold devices with large drives as default that might be less of an issue, but they don't. It's a little ironic, but I originally switched from Linux to Apple because I want my technology to work out of the box, but now it looks like I'll soon be going back for that same reason.

I think this might be a miscalculation on disney's behalf unless they don't turn it on, on the childrens profiles. Like, I'll watch 5 sections of gaming adds on the last episode of reacher because I'm too cheap to pay the extra 29 dkr before I cancel my subscription anyway, but I canceled Disney the monent they added the advertising to things my children were watching. It wasn't even real advertising, just testing the waters where they'd put a 40ish second add for one of their own movies that you could skip, but I don't want that for my children.

I doubt I'm unique.

Who are these people that you talk about? Everyone I know who dislike modern survailance cared about the Snowden files. Of course they also cared about echelon before this and so on. I absolutely think you're on point with the last sentence thouhg.

The recent revelation that LG tv's were recording everything going on around them at all times and sending it to the cloud... Should've frankly outlawed LG tvs here in Europe, and maybe we will see some sort of legislation down the line. Who knows though, because the different privacy factions within the EU certainly war on what mass survailance to allow.

I worked with C# for a decade around the transition from .net to .net core to .net. I've come to really dislike it as a language because of it's implicity and abstractions but I'm surprised that you're not finding the new features intereting. All the work on immutability seems pretty awesome to me at least. Sure it's still this bastard version where you build "readonly" objects and put them into immutable collections, but I assume they'll work on this going forward.

I'm never going back to it, but I do think it's the best it's ever been.

Others have gotten into how OSM fights vandalism, but I can tell you a little about what it is like to consume the data. About a decade ago I was in the public sector and we wanted to switch from google maps to OSM in our route calculation tool for the Danish travel-to-work tax deduction (translated). Initially we didn't change how the app worked, so we paid some organisation for an api access which worked similar to how a google maps api work. After a year or so we eventually rebuild the engine to keep a local copy of OSM where we had our GIS team do incremental and reviewed updates.

This was not because of vandalism, but because of how hard it was to update OSM when you don't do it often and might not look trustworthy. In Danish cities we have a complicated relationship with cars, we don't want them, but we do want the people they bring. One of the obstacles we create is having a lot of one way streets, and when OSM gets an error on those... well... suddenly there is a lot of addresses you simply can't reach. I once updated one of these errors with a photo from the internet, and it was rejected after a few miniutes because I had used an image from the internet which is (was?) against the TOS. Unfortunately the company we bought the API from was not doing any form of validation, so we had a week where our 5000 employess couldn't registerer driving to the most commonly used adress in the neighbouring city. I posted all sorts of documentation proving my official function, and had a discussion with the admins and even though they agreed I was right they refused to let me correct the mistake without real evidence. So eventually I drove my bicycle the 50km to the location, took some pictures and a couple with silly hats and submitted them and got my correction.

Once we had a local copy of the danish map we had no issues. I assume you would do this for any app relying on working routing data.

What do you mean "might"? I can crank Fable or Sol up to max intelligence and they'll spend an hour reviewing my rust SDK for working with our ADLSgen2's, and it'll still be done before the rust compiler has compiled the same project.

I live in Denmark. So yes. I have seen a map of Scandinavia. People didn't travel. Even here in Denmark which is tiny compared to Norway and Sweden, if you only ever go in a 10-15km radius of your home then there is a good chance you won't see the ocean.

You can't vibe code your way around the security policies you'd apply to management groups in Azure. If you don't have those policies, you're frankly doing it on purpose. For the fun of it I asked Sol to give me architecture for a blob storage as bicep and it's response was that it wouldn't do that unless I setup the appropriate security policies first. So I turned our internal safeguards off and did it again, and it still gave me bicep which would not have allowed this.

You'd have to specifically task it with disabling default safeguards to make this happen.

> the data looks good to me that knows little about this stuff

I majored in history. I'd say the data is misleading. I drew a boy "In the Ganges Plain, 1411 BCE". According to the summed up data he had a 54% risk of dying of neonatal tetanus, sepsis or dysentery. Which isn't wrong as such, but it would probably have been better to sum it up with all the other diseases, parasites and infections that would be needed to reach the 54%. Like resporatory infections... "Other causes" is listed at 14%, I assume that malnutrition is part of this, but malnutrition would be the leading cause in the 4-8 year age group, and less so in others.

The life stories themselves are over dramatic. Which isn't weird, considering you don't have a lot of source material dealing with the "boring" lives. Like if you think of Scandinavia in the VIKING ages you'll find a lot of research and data on the people who went viking. In reality 95% of the populations were farmers who didn't even see the coast in their lifetimes. Unless the AI is specifically tuned to value the few sources on everyday farmin in Scandinavia higher than the ones published on viking culture in general... Well.. I think you get it.

That being said. Many people probably don't know that you could have 18 children at only see one of them grow to the age of 20 a few hundred years ago. So the data is accurate enough to be educational in my opinion.

I do think the "typical marriage age" might be suffering from AI safe-guards. For most times I've tried it seems to land oddly close to 18. Which is unfortunately much higher than reality.

Your perspective is correct. We call them shadow developers, but it's a massive issue and security threat. The more tools Microsoft adds to their AI admin center (and put behind that ridicilous Agent365 DLC license) the more we see just how big of an issue it has become. People are using their personal credit cards to buy AI tools and use them wildly irresponsible.

In the big threat picture a vibe coded web tool that's not on the internet and runs in total isolation on it's own management group on the "this might get hacked" tenant in Azure is nothing though. I'd worry more about all that OT which was compromised from the factory which sits around in the energy sector. Especially because it's very easy to draw you a risk analysis that will tell you that unless you're running a Nuclear Powerplant then it makes no financial sense to secure your stuff. The audits are so rare and the consequences so low that it's cheaper to just pay the fine (if you ever get one).

Most actual security happens when someone on the ground decides that it's just too stupid that something clearly labeled "DO NOT PUT ON THE INTERNET" was put directly on the internet.

Are you purposely twisting things to fit a certain narrative?

If you really want to go into it, I've previously talked about how we used AI tools provided to us by one of our major investors who do so for all the companies they are invested into. These were also Anthropic and OpenAI models. The main difference is that Cowork has access to files on a users one drive (and that we get a lot more control over what goes into it).

I don't think they are opposite. We still don't let AI run anything we do. That being said, things have changed. 4 months ago I wouldn't touch the M365 Copilot thing if you paid me to, now it's basically the only AI I use professionally. Cowork changed the way we work, and I've previously spoken about how I think Microsoft sort of won the AI enterprise "war" by selling the tools and not the mode. If you'd asked me a year ago I would've been very anti AI in general. I got proven wrong. I do think it's going to be interesting to see where the EU goes with things though. Currently you can't use all features of Cowork as an example, because they are illegal in the EU. So you can't let it run your browser session for you as an example. I wonder how long that will last.

I still doubt we will ever give an AI access to run code on our systems directly though. In isolation, sure, but other than that.

This is a side note, but my personal favorite part of Cowork is that I can roll out our compliance policy to every developer as a Microsoft Teams app (no, that makes no sense to me either). So when they try to install some package that isn't pre-approved their Cowork agent won't let them and will instead explain how they might get approval. If they then continue to reference it, Cowork will even alert us.

I doubt it would be better served as a customized off the shelf software. They certainly could have done it with our existing systems with SmartSheet, Microsoft Fabric and/or Power Apps with SharePoint for document storage.

From an enterprise perspective this becomes complicated for various reasons. RBAC is one area. In the perfect world you have a system to handle roles and rights to every system, something that you can give managers access to so they can maintain the access available to their employees, something linked with HR. In reality you have EntraID with a hieracy which is sort of automated by HR data, but not really, because sometimes HR puts everyone on the CEO level by mistake, and, if you trusted HR as authoritative that would've just broken all the EU laws. So you have all those Entra groups and you need IT Operations to maintain them and since you want to build it on job roles and not people you'll typically not be able to maintain them in the off the shelf system. Which means that you would have had to build a web portal for the plant managers manager where they could maintain a couple of Entra groups in a web interface. That or you'll have to setup an IT support flow where you add yet another system that IT has to maintain access for.

Then we get to the actual customization. Maybe you buy a custom API on top of your BC365 platform. Maybe your C-levels deciced that paying €50k a year to avoid outages on major updates isn't worth the cost. Then when things predictably and completely avoidable fail you're going to hav to deal with the literal shitstorm. You'd think that all the people being locked out of their jobs and the €150k cost of getting an immediate and prioritised update to the system would mean you'd start paying for that $50k service after this. You'd be wrong. Ok, to be fair, in this particular example it would be a different scenario. For a small system like this you'd find a cheap consultant house in your area and get them to build the customization for you. Only they would outsource it to some solo developer who will build it in a way that basically requires that specific person to alter it. Then when it breaks or needs to be customized futher a year down the line, that person is no longer a solo developer. So you reach out to another cheap consultant house and do it all over again, from scratch.

This doesn't even mention how poorly all those 300 off the shelf systems work together. I mean, I don't maintain a SDK delivering a way to use Apache-Arrow to write and read parquet files from our datalake in the same manner for fun. I do it because those 600 container apps which basically simply translate data from one system to another need it to be as slim as possible.

Am I jaded? Sure. But who isn't in enterprise IT?

I don't think you should keep AI away from software development for security reasons. We're in the European economic area and are completely NIS2 compliant and we use LLM's to aid in our software development for high risk systems. None of that is vibe coded though, so it's not like I disagree with you either.

As you point out this portal isn't that, but what protects us is the processes around compliance. This can't grow from X to Y because not even the CEO has the authority to overwrite our compliance gates. The EU is a tremendous help in this area since personal liability changed things completely.

I think it depends on what area of the world you work. We recenty had one of our plant managers build a web portal to keep track of some of our operational tech, with features you wouldn't find in standard products. I've been turning it into a container app that can actually deploy safely into our cloud infrastrcture. It's quite frankly better quality than what most external software companies have provided us with in the past.

Don't get me wrong. It's not great. It would never pass any of our policies for things that actually operate stuff on the power grid, but as an administrative tool that can live in total isolation from the vital networks. It's perfectly fine. It's also not like we would have hired the best software companies to build it otherwise. We'd hire some low-level cheap consultant house who would then likely get cheap student labour to build it. With that in mind though, the AI is much better than what the realistic alternative would be.

Money wise it's also cheaper. It's been roughly €1000 + the time it's taken us both. If I had known they were doing it, I would have rolled out the developer cowork app/skills/whateveryoucallconfigurationsthesedays to them. This would have avoided their AI building it to be depoyed on a VM rather than in our managed k8s in our Azure. It would also have written the code a little different, used UV and maybe django rather than flask. But hey. For what it is, it's like a 90% cost saving compared to buying what would've been a less maintainable and lower quality system.

I think perhaps the greater issue will be finding people who want to extract the gold from the heap of shit and getting it to run in production. I don't personally mind, but it's not like any of my colleagues would've wanted the task.

I think it was similar to all the early MMO's. They were a platform to create a community in a time where that was hard to do in the real world. Back when I started playing Asheron's Call there were basically two "nerds" on my school of like 1000 students and the town computer club had 5 members. It wasn't like today where you can easily find someone to play DnD or board games with and you couldn't really play video games online. Hell, how many people under 35 knows what the internet chatrooms were?

MMO's let you go online and be social and build communities. WoW did that really well back then. Eventually as things went on, MMO's got more and more tools that let you avoid building those communities. Like the dungeon finder in WoW. I think a lot of MMO's and games in general turned to letting peope get their dopamine fix from increasing numbers through RNG rather than being social.

I know people who stuck around with WoW because of the social communities they build. One of the guilds I was in 20 years ago still meets up in the real world, I know because one of my old friends still plays. I also know people who stuck around because of what is essentially the idle gambling. I became a jock of sorts back around the burning crusade release because I had to put a lot of focus into water polo training. Which meant I didn't do a whole lot "nerdy" stuff for a decade. Once I started doing "nerdy" things again it was easy to find people near me because everyone is a "nerd" these days.

Maybe it's because I live in a country where e-mai isn't really used that much for personal communication, but wouldn't this mainly be a gmail issue? If mails I wanted ended up in the spam folder I'd not use gmail. I mean, I pay for protonmail, so I wouldn't use gmail to begin with, but if mails I wanted ended up in my protonmail spamfolder and I couldn't do anything about it, then I'd switch away from protonmail.

I'm not GP but I assume the point they were making was that throwing away the old printer a buying a new one would consume less world resources than using Claude to build this driver.

I got sort of lucky early in my career because I had a talent that was discovered in a national network. Which meant I found myself writing national strategies for IT in our public sector (Denmark) at my late 20ies. It felt great for a year, or maybe two. When it stopped being fun though, it sort of hit me hard. I did enjoy writing and working on the strategies with other people. All the "glamour" around it, advicing politicians, going to conferences, networking with all sorts of "important" people. That got to me on one of the many train rides I had to take. I know a 3 hour commute might not be a lot to Americans or people in larger countries in general, but here it's a life time. Eventually I didn't know why I was going on them, so I quit and went back to being a nerd in a basement. Having my first child was the kick I needed to push me to where I was already heading though. I would've likely ridden the career ladder for a lot longer if I hadn't become a dad.

I rarely speak about it but something about reading you accepting the failure of your ambitions made me want to do it. Are you sure it's a failure? For me family life turned out to be what I wanted and work is just a fun place which makes me money, but I totally get why people want to do it the opposite way. In some ways you could say that I did something significant, but it made me misserable. So I failed just as much as you, if not more.

I don't regret any of it either though. It's what made me who I am.