“Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff…”
Tell me you’re completely out of touch with your company and what it does without telling me you’re completely out of touch with your company and what it does. FFS how is this guy the CEO? Oh, he’s one of the founders? Brilliant.
Vaughan says he didn’t want to force anyone. “You can’t compel people to change, especially if they don’t believe.”
But he did. Change or be fired, basically.
“You multiply people…give people the ability to multiply themselves and do things at a pace,” he said, touting the company’s ability to build new customer-ready products in as little as four days, an unthinkable timeline in the old regime.
Ooh I bet some nefarious hacker types will be salivating at the incredibly rushed code base that is probably a spaghetti mess and as insecure as fuck.
Vaughan disclosed that the company, which he said is in the nine-figure revenue range, finished 2024 at “near 75% Ebitda”—all while completing a major acquisition, Khoros.
I had to look up EBITDA - some interesting points to consider when you look at this metric he used:
A negative EBITDA indicates that a business has fundamental problems with profitability. A positive EBITDA, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean that the business generates cash. This is because the cash generation of a business depends on capital expenditures (needed to replace assets that have broken down), taxes, interest and movements in working capital as well as on EBITDA.
While being a useful metric, one should not rely on EBITDA alone when assessing the performance of a company. The biggest criticism of using EBITDA as a measure to assess company performance is that it ignores the need for capital expenditures in its assessment.Hmmm… I’m no accountant (I leave that to my actual accountant), but surely if they were being profitable it would sound better to say something like “We’ve remained profitable throughout and our earnings per quarter are on par if not greater than before.”?
I’m no accountant but surely if they were being profitable it would sound better to say something like “We’ve remained profitable throughout and our earnings per quarter are on par if not greater than before.”?
no, because profitability isn’t the key figure they are interested in. it’s growth. i recently got fired because of disappointing growth; e.g. the increase in profitability was not as large as they expected. which means they still made more money than last year.
this is why expenditures get relegated to “externality” status; because otherwise projections would make it look like a company can not grow infinitely large, and surely that’s not true
“Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels.”
So the people that understood it best were sceptical, and this didn’t give him pause.
Can someone explain to me why all these empty suits dick ride LLMs so hard?
They’re easily conned and they love yes men.
Because they try the tools, realize that their job is pretty much covered by LLMs and think it’s the same for everyone.
The bullshitters were quick to adopt the bullshit factory.
Technical staff were skeptical because they actually know what AI can and can’t do reliably in production environments - it’s good at generating content but terrible at logical reasoning and mission-critical tasks that require consistancy.
So it’s the CEO they should replace.
it’s good at generating content but terrible at logical reasoning and mission-critical tasks that require consistency.
Thank goodness nobody is crusading to have AI take over medicine.
…which is why I categorically refuse to use the term Artificial intelligence .
Can someone explain to me why all these empty suits dick ride LLMs so hard?
$$$$$$$
AIs are cheaper than humans.
Cheaper NOW, when OpenAI operates at huge loss
Not really. Because they don’t work and then they have to hire more humans which is more expensive than just keeping them on for the 6 months it’ll take for the CEOs to realise that.
“It enabled us to shit out products in 4 days.”
Glad they incorporated such thorough testing in their process.
I’ve never heard of this jackass nor his shitty software. I feel privileged.
Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels. They were the “most resistant,” he said, voicing various concerns about what the AI couldn’t do, rather than focusing on what it could. The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.
Imagine that.
Yeah I have a CEO like that, it makes me want to strangle him. He constantly considers the raising of valid concerns to be some sort of personality failing. Meetings with him are an utterly pointless exercise, they’re not meetings, they are times where he tells us what he’s already decided to do.
Fortunately the held on Teams now, so I just joined the meeting and then go make a cup of coffee.
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No, I disagree. The CEO is by far the most replaceable person when it comes to AI if the directive is to simply make more money for shareholders based on market research. I would argue that the CEO is being a parasite here.
CEOs are invariably the parasites in virtually any company where they earn more than 10× than their median employee.
Nothing that can be done inside the business can justify compensation like that. Ergo: parasitism of the profits, of siphoning away more and more value that the workers produce just for themselves and those of their fellow parasites.
Today, I ran into a bug. We’re being encouraged to use AI more so I asked copilot why it failed. I asked without really looking at the code. I tried multiple times and all AI could say was ‘yep it shouldn’t do that’ but didn’t tell me why. So, gave up on copilot and looked at the code. It took me less than a minute to find the problem.
It was a switch statement and the case statement had (not real values) what basically reads as ’ variable’ == ‘caseA’ or ‘caseB’. Which will return true… Which is the bug. Like I’m stripping a bunch of stuff away but co-pilot couldn’t figure out that the case statement was bad.
AI is quickly becoming the biggest red flag. Fast slop, is still slop.
AI thinks in the same way that ants think, there’s no real intelligence or thought going on but ants are still able to build complex logistics chains by following simple rules, although AI works on completely different principles the effect is the same, it’s following a lot of simple rules that lead to something that looks like intelligence.
The problem is a lot of people seem to think that AIs are genuinely simulations of a brain, they think the AI is genuinely conjugating because they kind of look like they do sometimes. The world is never going to get taken over by a mindless zombie AI. If we ever do get AGI it won’t be from LLMs that’s for sure.
I do find AI useful when I’m debugging a large SQL / Python script though and gotta say I make use of it in that case… other than that it’s useless and relying on it as ones main tool is idiotic
That CEO:
I wonder if he thinks we’re dumb or just doesn’t care. They’d have been laid off either way. “Return to work”, “Stack ranking”, “AI refusal”, whatever you say bro.
Late stage capitalism rewards management for any appearance of change. It really doesn’t matter whether the results of that change are good or bad. And even a CEO who keeps destroying companies can always find a similar position elsewhere. The feedback loop is hopelessly broken.
Reminds me of the song Just Movement by Robert DeLong
Has ai ever disagreed with anyone? That’s probably why it’s so popular with rich ‘people’
Granted, my ideas are all baller as fuck. But still…
Those people don’t hear no often…
Of course he would. He could probably give hitler lessons on oven design.
Just like an AI. Instead of learning from mistakes, he repeates them, and denies any wrongdoing.
“You’re Absolutely right!”
Because he asks the ai what’s best but the chatbot always treats it as a loaded question and it wants to be seen as helpful so it finds a way to agree yes-man style.
Does he still have a company at all?
This type of shortsightedness should be punished. I mean AI can be useful for certain tasks but it’s still just a tool. It’s like these CEOs were just introduced to a screwdriver and he’s trying use it for everything.
“Look employees, you can use this new screwdriver thing to brush your teeth and wipe your ass. “
You can use this new screwdriver to fuck yourself. We’re working late boys!
One guy is like “Friday is forced AI ‘training’ day” (as if one must ‘train’ to write prompts. Using natural language rather than a unique language or syntax and trusting the computer to make a comprehensible and accurate output is the whole point), and then he has the gall to claim “turns out people hate learning!”
Writing prompts is definitely a thing users must learn to do properly, to get the right results.
But anyways, any company that fires people in favor of AI is only digging their own grave anyways. I personally believe AI (of which LLM is only a small part) can definitely serve as an automation tool that can increase output. Great companies will use this tech to give their employees more time to work on things that are meaningful to the company, that the AI cannot do. For instance, a company could free up some time of highly skilled engineers to help a couple hours a week on the most complicated service desk issues to increase customer satisfaction. Or the LLM can create more time for sales to have meetings with customers, instead of doing admin they already hate, etc… Use it to grow, not to shrink.
Besides, if your company can be completely run by AI anyways, then congratulations, you just reached the end goal of open sourcing your company. Because why the heck won’t anyone be able to replicate that quickly?
Besides, if your company can be completely run by AI anyways, then congratulations, you just reached the end goal of open sourcing your company. Because why the heck won’t anyone be able to replicate that quickly?
Yeah that’s the thing these tech bros never seem to understand. It’s obviously not going to work because if it did work it would have already been done by somebody else, it’s called the Law Of Mediocrity. It’s simply requires the base assumption that you are not the smartest person in the universe, which of course is where it all falls down, because they always assume they are.
