Ian Muir explains the context for the Crowdstrike Microsoft disaster.
@Infrogmation @ReticentTurnip Tagging @tinker for having called it months ago.
@wendynather @Infrogmation @ReticentTurnip - I absolutely hate being right. I hate seeing these patterns. I hate seeing where they go.
That said, right now is a good time to build actual community and mutual aid.
I dont want to be right about this either.
@Infrogmation @TerryHancock Perhaps replacing some of these gigantically-expensive CEOs with an AI model would help the companies save money, hire their productive staff back, and deliver a better and more reliable product? Heck, we know general AI can spout as much bullshit as a real live CEO can, so what does corporate America have to lose?
@mjf_pro @Infrogmation @TerryHancock
Great idea! Have a short story about it:
https://redeem-tomorrow.com/layoff
@UnderTheDome @mjf_pro @Infrogmation @TerryHancock That's how I got laid off in 2023.
@Infrogmation oo i tried to see if they'd done layoffs too. Amazing how all those people everyone fired were probably doing something
@Infrogmation i remember the mcafee blooper well. Had no idea the same CEO is in play, that's interesting
I have been a working computer programmer for nearly 50 years. Over, and over, and over again, I have seen snake-oil products sold with the pitch (sometimes utterly literally), "Fire the programmers!"
Yet here we still are, writing the code that makes the world run. Until, in its latest round of log-rolling, management decides to "cut out the deadwood." This always works in the short term, because our code runs well by itself.
For a while...
@Infrogmation @trochee This explanation treats “replacing skilled tech workers with AI” as something that is actually possible with some effort
Which makes me wonder what else it gets wrong
It says that the managers **think they can** get away with replacing workers with AI but they haven't found a way to do it yet
@trochee @Infrogmation In the last paragraph he explicitly says the reason is cost.
I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the symmetry of all the other arguments.
Making AI "work" isn't possible because the current crop of AI tech actually isn't ever going to functionally replace skilled programming labor.
But this is beyond the horizon of the management consultants who imagine that it _might_ be "good enough"
And I agree that there was no need to say "someday AI might replace labor" at all here
@fivetonsflax @Infrogmation @trochee
For "AI" read "Indians with runbooks". After all most AI is basically overworked underpaid 3rd world "trainers"
Management has been using underpaid offshore runbook-readers instead of onshore support for years. And it works for a while.
@Infrogmation @akosma Tech people are not only expensive, they are also difficult and obstructive the more expensive/senior they are. An industry with quality motivation would call this the value of experience and listen to signals.
Reading that felt like I was in an echo-chamber.
@Infrogmation that's one way to put it indeed
@Infrogmation gosh, the author forgot to mention that 95% of tech people think that they're qualified professionals, but they are not. And it happened more than a decade ago, because of IT bubble.
@Infrogmation Why does he go back to 2010? It literally happened with the LINUX version of CROWDSTRIKE
3 MONTHS (THREE) AGO!
https://www.neowin.net/news/crowdstrike-broke-debian-and-rocky-linux-months-ago-but-no-one-noticed/
THREE. MONTHS. AGO. Same software, same problem, just with the linux version...
@Infrogmation maybe us tech people should start to frame information along the lines of preventing losing more money (and marketshare) than it costs
they don't pay the price for their mess.
society does.
also see:
data breaches.
regulatory capture.
climate change.
disaster capitalism.
move fast and break things.
Short-termism.
too big to fail.
@Infrogmation the missing piece of the puzzle for me is the risk to shareholders.
Shareholders don't care about systems being down if the lost revenue and repair costs are less than the money they made through the layoffs. CEOs mostly spend their time trying to delight their real customers, the shareholders.
@Infrogmation
Well at least 85% correct.
Buying a 3rd party product that claims to fulfil requirement X on your checklist, so you can tick off that item is almost always cheaper than building the capabilities, or even investigating if requirement X on that list even makes sense for your company, and properly documenting that X does not make sense for your company and hence you skipped it.
And if that 3rd party product happens to kill your company, , you have taken home your bonus already.
@Infrogmation
Such a difficult question!
Whether to trust your business to trained, experienced, human experts..
or
Trust your business to a psychotic computer misnamed artificial intelligence'.
So difficult!
#CrowdStrike
@Infrogmation Brilliant explanation!
@Infrogmation
Great explanation
@Infrogmation I see a pattern in that post.