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I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

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Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#411

Post by bigfatkitten »

rjbwork wrote: post #317
Aurornis wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several people I know have already gone through phases like this. When you're doing it alone there is a moderating factor when their friends and family start calling them out on their behavior or weird things they say. I can't imagine how bad it would be if your employer started doing this from the leadership. You'd be pressured to get on board or fear getting fired. Nobody would be trying to moderate your thinking e…

I have a friend that is a junior in a security-oriented sys-admin/network engineer type role. They have been doing the job for only a bit over a year. No background in programming. Their entire organization has been handed Codex/Claude and told to "go all in on AI" and "automate everything". So the mandate is for people that do not know how to code and have the keys to the castle to unleash these things upon their sy…

There has never been a better time to be in incident response and adjacent fields.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#412

Post by tonymet »

sebmellen wrote: post #397
bastawhiz wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you optimize for MTBF, you optimize for it to be a long time between failures. You optimize for the system not going down in the first place, but when it does do down it might be Pretty Bad. If you optimize for MTTR, you don't care how often you go down and instead optimize your recovery time to be as short as possible. The concepts are pre-computing.

Not the GP commenter, but I'm still struggling to understand how this relates to the AI world, or perhaps more importantly, what the historical context was. Did people end up switching to MTTR optimization over MTBF optimization? If so, is the implication that the recovery times got lower but software instability went up as a result?

MTBF = optimizing quality (reliability, uptime, correctness) of AI product

MTTR = optimize the ability to correct failures when they occur.

He's describing leaders who believe quality no longer matters because any faults or deviations can be corrected so quickly that it doesn't make any sense to waste time on quality.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#413

Post by wiseowise »

sebmellen wrote: post #397
bastawhiz wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you optimize for MTBF, you optimize for it to be a long time between failures. You optimize for the system not going down in the first place, but when it does do down it might be Pretty Bad. If you optimize for MTTR, you don't care how often you go down and instead optimize your recovery time to be as short as possible. The concepts are pre-computing.

Not the GP commenter, but I'm still struggling to understand how this relates to the AI world, or perhaps more importantly, what the historical context was. Did people end up switching to MTTR optimization over MTBF optimization? If so, is the implication that the recovery times got lower but software instability went up as a result?

Same grifters optimizing for MTTR are now pushing even more reckless use of AI, because “accidents will happen anyway, so we need to prioritize speed”.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#414

Post by rustystump »

impulser_ wrote: post #48

I'm pretty sure he's talking about companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself. I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis. You see this a lot with financial people and VC on twitter. They literally post screenshots of ChatGPT as their thinki…

I am starting to come around to a similar sentiment. I have seen several large projects cook now for almost a year are not done. These are not trivial projects but the leads are heavily using ai at every opportunity.

I wasnt before but I am 100% confident that AI has done nothing to speed the delivery. It hasnt slowed it down either. It is a wash. The job is more miserable though.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#415

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

vasco wrote: post #353
malfist wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You just have to get the high level design right, or explicitly ask it critique your design before building it. Do you think people are not giving their agents specs and asking for input?

A thing I've noticed is that everyone thinks they prompt better than the next guy.

This. I have this buddy, who is not an idiot by stretch of the imagination and more adventurous than me in some ways ( I don't really run agents on my machine ), but when I was looking at his prompts, I sometimes question how he gets anything done at all. It is vague and angry demands.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#416

Post by HNisCIS »

I'm in a company going through this. Everyone outsources their thinking to LLMs and the results are painfully mediocre. The smart ones will use it to get their bearings on the topic then go to primary sources, the not so bright just ctrl-c ctrl-v.

Have you ever been in an HN thread where you're an SME on the thread topic and just been horrified by the confidently incorrect nonsense 90% of the thread is throwing around? Welcome to the training set motherfuckers.

LLMs do the same thing for what should be obvious reasons. If you search things that have some depth and you know the answer you'll be flooded by how often the models will just vomit confident half truths and misrepresented facts. They're better than they used to be, not just lying whole cloth most of the time, but truth is an asymptotic thing, not an exponential one.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#417

Post by tonymet »

miek wrote: post #18

My very large employer has always been glacially slow on modernization and tech adoption. It may now, oddly enough, become a competitive advantage.

do you mean this aesthetically or quantitatively? Are they actually outcompeting / making more money ? Or do you mean they are now looking more desirable because their competitors are racing to the bottom (though likely making money on the way down)

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#418

Post by tonymet »

Good point but he didn't go far enough. I would expand the AI psychosis to include all local optimization based on phony measurements , even time spent , DAU etc (which are mostly bots & synth accounts). In other words AI psychosis has been going on for 20+ years.

The only reason it worked has been expansive money policy and a larger share of the cost of goods being dumped into marketing value while manufacturing costs dropped abroad. so no one bothered to check.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#420

Post by shridharxp »

sebmellen wrote: post #397
bastawhiz wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you optimize for MTBF, you optimize for it to be a long time between failures. You optimize for the system not going down in the first place, but when it does do down it might be Pretty Bad. If you optimize for MTTR, you don't care how often you go down and instead optimize your recovery time to be as short as possible. The concepts are pre-computing.

Not the GP commenter, but I'm still struggling to understand how this relates to the AI world, or perhaps more importantly, what the historical context was. Did people end up switching to MTTR optimization over MTBF optimization? If so, is the implication that the recovery times got lower but software instability went up as a result?

There are concerns that AI might/will make mistakes. Instead of optimizing for producing perfect code, they think that AI can fix bugs as fast as it produces code and are optimizing for MTTR. Sounds like decision made by people who don't write code regularly, as there is this Architectural drift that happens where you are no longer aware of what's happening in your codebase. As a junior guy I so want this to happen.
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