We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person(mcsweeneys.net) |
We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person(mcsweeneys.net) |
This is simultaneously hilarious and painfully familiar.
I was forced to go to an office, to sit in a room alone to work remotely with a team on the other side of the country.
Our manager was pushing for Claude Code, so we needed to use it a lot, our metrics were tracked.
Our sector lead forced Augment AI (absolute garbage btw, it has negative value, if a company uses it just run away) because he got enamoured by the salesperson - we also needed to use it a lot.
Someone in the C-suite decided to bet on Gemini, so we also had to use it a lot.
Then I failed my performance evaluation. I couldn't get any work done since I was too busy making my token use high across multiple tools.
I quit, found a company that rejects AI tools beyond Github Copilot, and I've never been happier. And I got a 2x raise with that move.
To name and shame, the company is Comarch. Stay away unless you're incompetent. If you're incompetent, you'll be right at home.
I can't remember the last time something I read on the internet got a laugh that hard.
The whole thing is brilliant.
The visual of this is completely hilarious.
If someone could tell me the difference between those last two at this point I'd be grateful and yes the entire thing is bitingly funny.
Heh.
Also: make it stop!!!
Whether or not humans break from those shackles, I for one, am hoping Hollywood supplies us with wonderfully dystopian sci-fi entertainment for years to come.
It feels very similar to teaching pair programming and TDD. I can do it over remote, but there's a magic spark that happens in person that is really not replicable any other way.
In a physical space, humans have built-in advantages over bots. Operating exclusively or primarily over IP levels the playing field, nullifying our advantages of expressive nonverbal communication, and makes 100% of our output accessible to agents.
And it minimizes our contact with each other. I know you can DM people on Slack to gossip about the boss, but do you? Figuring everything is logged, you'd have to create and nurture alternative private channels like texting, and doing that at scale carries at least some implication of subterfuge that limits participation, in a way that chatting around a table at the sandwich shop just doesn't.
All of us really do appreciate the savings on gas money and (in theory) the time savings, though I bet most people have given over some of that time savings to work tasks. I'm not saying it doesn't have benefits. But I don't think the companies still embracing remote work are doing it out of philanthropy, and I don't think it's necessarily good for us workers.
First, bullshitting in meatspace isn't much of an advantage. To the extent that it is, there is always video calling. What matters for agent training is going to be the output from said bullshitting. You're not really maintaining any moat by going to the office.
And then on the other side, going to the office pretty much sucks. Unless you live close to the office, you're probably looking at least an hour on either side of your day commutting. Using that saved time to work extra at home is an obvious tactical error that I hope people aren't making. I sure as hell don't.
had me ROFL
That's a choice though. I just lived where I worked. I can see the argument when you're talking about low-paid work, but if you are a software engineer, you can probably afford to not spend an hour commuting.
> going to the office pretty much sucks.
This is a highly personal thing though. For me, having children home in the afternoon drastically dampens my productivity, and the benefits from being there extend to greater awareness of what other people are working on, and decreased perceived barrier to collaboration. When you see another developer in the kitchen just sipping coffee or waiting for an elevator, you don't feel like you're interrupting to ask him how he got past a certain issue, or in telling him about a new tool that you just tried. You can post those thoughts in a public channel! But the person who "needs" to see it might not see it, and sending a DM is kind of a demand such that many people won't do it unless absolutely necessary.
Text is for many people just not superior to communicating in person. Slack is a simulacrum of in-person communication, not the platonic ideal.
In-office work might be worth it, maybe. Is it worth 20,000 dollars a year of your money? Probably not.
At that point, it’s probably still cheaper to rent a wework or something.
With remote work, you don’t have to work at home. Many simply work at a co-working space or similar environment that isn’t the actual office.
The colocated collaboration you’re talking about is also highly variable. It’s possible to be on a team where you’re working on projects that actually primarily involve others from other teams not in the same physical offices, or even the same company. So you’re describing benefits that are also highly personal, not a universal good. Software is an industry that would seem to have outgrown in-person communication.
I have done coworking, most recently for about 2 years of full-time at WeWork. Coworking is, depending on how busy the venue, just a quieter version of the home office, or, like working in a shared workspace at a very large university that you just transferred into: There are dozens of people around, but you don't know any of them, and they're all busy doing their own thing. You have no non-recreational business even talking to anyone. You can make a point of trying to chat people up around lunchtime, but you're starting from scratch, and also, as a 'stranger' subject to people wondering if you're talking to them with a motive to either sell them something or flirt with them. This is no substitute for social contact, except for the most extraverted who truly LOVE talking to new people.
> It’s possible to be on a team where you’re working on projects that actually primarily involve others from other teams not in the same physical offices,
I did this when working in person, a decade ago. Yes, we had zooms often. But also we travelled and met those people periodically. I learned important things from observing them using the software that I wouldn't have otherwise. I would not have scheduled zoom meetings for each of them to share their screen while they worked in the software. That would have felt burdensome. Today, most companies won't approve any travel for engineers, product managers, etc. Maybe for sales guys to take people to steak dinners. But they assume that for us, Zoom is an equal substitute.
> Software is an industry that would seem to have outgrown in-person communication
This is an idea that makes no sense at all to me. Look, I totally respect that some people really dislike all or most of these things: in-person talking, small talk, reading (or being aware of your own) body language and tone, wearing pants and shoes all day, being away from family, commuting... Maybe fully remote work is totally best for you! I'm just saying that it's not best for everyone, it's not an automatic 'most efficient choice,' it's not automatically best for morale, it's not best for all families. And to top it off, while businesses pushing RTO seem like the ones being cynical, it shouldn't be hard to see that the other businesses that are refusing to have a physical office today have their own cynical reasons that aren't for the workers' benefit.
Sounds reasonable for someone earlier in their career. More difficult later on, especially with an expanded household.
> I'm just saying that it's not best for everyone, it's not an automatic 'most efficient choice,' it's not automatically best for morale, it's not best for all families.
> it shouldn't be hard to see that the other businesses that are refusing to have a physical office today have their own cynical reasons that aren't for the workers' benefit.
Perhaps, but given that the pendulum has shifted towards RTO and away from remote work, the latter seems like a much rarer practice, less worth critiquing.
The core problem is whether in-office, remote, or hybrid (personally, I would be most in favor of a hybrid compromise, but at a less frequent in-office cadence than current industry standards), management is setting mandates rather than giving teams, let alone individuals, the flexibility to figure out what's best for their workflow.
And more often than not, it's companies that have physical offices that are mandating use of them, rather than remote work, for obvious reasons. And it's most likely true that most companies have physical offices rather than have eliminated them.
You'll get 100% of the way there, because, lacking any other training, it will only ever be able to reproduce this text verbatim.
Hence, 100%, hence mission accomplished.
Training tries to produce something that scores highly in training evaluations. With one data point, the evaluation is solely how closely the model output resembles the single input text.
Let's say you do that, and the training text is 58,100 tokens long. Let's say you ask the model to produce 58,101 tokens. Will it "reproduce [the] text verbatim"? No, it can't, because of the dissimilar requested length. Something "new" will come out.
It's also entirely possible that no matter how long you train, the model never converges on generating exactly the same output as its training data - you could end up with an average loss value of 0.001 instead of 0.0. It's not a perfectly deterministic process.
You're correct in principle, but in reality even with limited training data real-world models produce something that isn't exactly their training, especially when sampled stochastically. They're biased toward their training data, not forced to it.
... It's never been tried. Look, I was actually joking when I initially replied, but now that I think about it, it's never been tried!
So now I am left wondering exactly what will happen if I train a new model from scratch, on only a single short corpus of 50k words.
Not fine-tuning an existing model, but literally creating a new model by feeding a blank (or random) matrix the same poem 100k times.
(And I have a more weakly held belief that even if we do all die, Claude 3000 will still be thinking stuff like "Burning off Earth's atmosphere was the point that earns its keep." They just aren't optimizing these things to write legibly.)
++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start. +++