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AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

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Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#231

Post by esafak »

another-dave wrote: post #216
esafak wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why stop there? The LLM can synthesize the results and spare you the work.

I'm talking about the scenario the GP referenced — where if you search for say "holiday" but get no results because the pages only use the word "vacation" which AFAIK is still a problem in regular search. LLMs inherently would introduce the possibility of hallucinations, but just using the vectors to match documents wouldn't, right?

No, llms still use similarity search for candidate generation, unless you don't give them any tools.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#232

Post by MonkeyClub »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #84
crazygringo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is no different from the personal computer, and it is to be expected. The initial years of adopting new tech have no net return because it's investment . The money saved is offset by the cost of setting up the new tech. But then once the processes all get integrated and the cost of buying and building all the tech gets paid off, it turns into profit. Also, some companies adopt new tech better than others. Some d…

> transformative business processes Many new ideas came through promising to be "transformative" but never reached anywhere near the impact that people initially expected. Some examples: SOA, low-code/no-code, blockchain for anything other than cryptocurrency, IoT, NoSQL, the Semantic Web. Each of these has had some impact, but they've all plateaued, and there are very good reasons (including the results cited in TA)…

> [...] S-expression manipulation.

Can't wait for Lisp to be the language of the future again.

Some of my friends reckon it'll happen the year after the year of Linux on the desktop. They're on Windows 11, though, so I don't know how to read that.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#233

Post by jajko »

motbus3 wrote: post #225
jajko wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No engineer is smart and overall capable enough to be called a 10x one and yet doesn't realize their price in western value. And we still talk about corporate cogs, the truly brilliant simply start their own gigs

I never knew a single 10x. I know lots of them who say they are 10x though, but my parrot does a better job then most of them

I knew 2 at least. They could run literal circles around whole experienced team and achieved sometimes, ie if given ie a week things that would be hard for seniors to do at all.

I talk about ie taking ActiveMQ, building it on your own and tweaking various calls and internal parameters to achieve cca 10x performance boost compared to just vanilla installation. Companies bundling it as part of the product would kill and pay serious money for such distro. Guy did this in maybe 3-4 days from never touching ActiveMQ or any other similar messaging system before to have it reliably working and moving to next thing.

These folks can be dangerous though, they come up with complex solution that can be extremely hard to maintain, debug and evolve by others. So their added value on long enough time scale can be actually negative even for quite senior but not absolutely top notch brilliant team. Not something 'code ninjas' (or as I call them brilliant juniors) care about, but if you work on something long term you will see this pattern from time to time.

Also these folks are hard to keep since they get bored when things slow down and big challenges are not around, and quickly and easily move on. Making the issue above pretty serious item to consider.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#234

Post by bluefirebrand »

hereme888 wrote: post #228
pluc wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're going to browse through a manual every time you need to fix something in some app in some particular OS version? Yes, that's literally how you learn things. I can't understand how anyone on this forum thinks otherwise. Hackers are supposed to be people who thrive in unknown contexts, who thirst for knowledge of how things work. What you are suggesting is brain atrophy. It's the death of knowledge for profit…

My cognitive energies are reserved for other things. This is the point of AI: do boring tasks so humans can spend their energy on loftier/more important things.

If you can't be bothered to do the boring stuff ever, you won't ever develop the skills that you need to make anything loftier

They might be boring but they are nonetheless foundational

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#235

Post by Jensson »

simianwords wrote: post #107
PhantomHour wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is no different from the personal computer, and it is to be expected. What are you talking about? The return on investment from computers was immediate and extremely identifiable. For crying out loud "computers" are literally named after the people whose work they automated. With Personal Computers the pitch is similarly immediate. It's trivial to point at what labour VisiCalc automated & improved. The gains a…

I highly doubt that the return in investment was seen immediately for personal computers. Do you have any evidence? Can you show me a company that adopted personal computers and immediately increased its profits? I’ll change my mind.

I know people who bought a computer and automated away a massive amount of work and thus paid it back in a single day in the 70s.

Back then companies needed a massive amount of people to sit and do all the calculations to do their accounting, but a single person using a computer could do the same work in a day. This was so easy and efficient that almost every bigger company started buying computers at the time.

You don't need to automate away accountants, you just need to automate away the many thousands of calculations needed to complete the accounting to save a massive amount of money. It wasn't hard to convince people to use a computer instead of sitting for weeks manually calculating sums on sheets.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#236

Post by Gazoche »

gruez wrote: post #115
bilsbie wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great but most customer support is actually designed as a “speed bump” for customers. Cancel account- have them call someone. Withdraw too much - make it a phone call. Change their last name? - that would overwhelm our software, let’s have our operator do that after they call in. Etc.

>Change their last name? - that would overwhelm our software, let’s have our operator do that after they call in. That doesn't make much sense. Either your system can handle it or it can't. Putting a support agent in front isn't going to change that.

Having been a customer to a half-dozen different banks in almost as many countries, I can assure you that this is very common. You'd be surprised how often the user interface stonewalls you with a "please call support" for even the most basic contact details update operation.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#237

Post by another-dave »

com2kid wrote: post #219
another-dave wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of which, could we apply vector embeddings to search engines (where crawled pages get indexed by their vector embeddings rather than raw text) and use that for better fuzzy search results even without an LLM in the mix? (Might be a naïve question, I'm at the edge of my understanding)

> Speaking of which, could we apply vector embeddings to search engines (where crawled pages get indexed by their vector embeddings rather than raw text) and use that for better fuzzy search results even without an LLM in the mix? Yes, this is how all the new dev documentation sites work now days, with their much improved searches. :-D

ah cool right! I didn't know that. One for me to check out and understand more. Thanks!

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#238

Post by charlieyu1 »

grues-dinner wrote: post #36
candiddevmike wrote: post #12

> Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. Oof

These are probably the same people who are "surprised" when 100 offshore agency dredgings don't magically do the app 10x faster than 10 expensive onshore workers. To be fair, the PowerPoint they were shown at that AI Synergies retreat probably was very slick.

I just don't understand why offshore agenies are so prevalent. Surely hiring directly would be cheaper and gives your more control when you are hiring >1000 workers

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#239

Post by AbstractH24 »

kldg wrote: post #227
Nextgrid wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This occurrence has nothing to do with AI? The reason AI doesn't want to grant you the refund is because it's not been given the ability to do so. It would be no different with a human. If Amazon wanted to give you the ability to get a refund for unused Prime benefits, it would allow the AI to do it, or even give you a button to do it yourself.

I can't really argue this except to say trust me, bro, I've been an Amazon customer for over 20 years, and there has never been an issue, no matter how unusual, the CSR was not able to resolve inside about five minutes. The LLM was completely on rails with only specific whitelisted actions available to it. Even if a human couldn't do the specific action, they could explain why instead of word-for-word repeating an ir…

I know exactly what you mean, but its hard to tell if its something they are ok with because they are slowly becoming less user-centric and willing to make refunds/exceptions. Or if its the rigidity of AI.

If it was the former, they would help you when you esclated it. So I think they are just becoming more greedy.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#240

Post by hereme888 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #234
hereme888 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My cognitive energies are reserved for other things. This is the point of AI: do boring tasks so humans can spend their energy on loftier/more important things.

If you can't be bothered to do the boring stuff ever, you won't ever develop the skills that you need to make anything loftier They might be boring but they are nonetheless foundational

But the point is that the boring things I refer to are not foundational or even related to my field. I have zero formal education in computers. LLMs are my personal IT experts, for pennies on the dollar. I'm not interested in formally learning programming, yet vibe-code apps I want.
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