every company in 2025

It seems like the only way tech companies are able to compel AI usage is by coercion in performance review processes?

(via The Information "AI Agenda" newsletter)

"But when the team looked at the employees’ actual work output, they found that the developers had completed tasks 20% slower when using AI than when working without it. Researchers were stunned. “No one expected that outcome. We didn’t even really consider a slowdown as a possibility.”

🎁link

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

“In a new report, management consultants Bain & Company found that despite being ‘one of the first areas to deploy generative AI,’ the ‘savings have been unremarkable’ in programming.”

“When it comes to AI adoption, many companies aren’t guided by strategy but by ‘Fomo’,” said Haritha Khandabattu, senior director analyst at consultancy Gartner.

www.ft.com/content/e93e...

Two trials will be repeated endlessly despite always producing the same results:

1) Does UBI work? (yes)
2) Does AI improve productivity? (no)

Some therapists are using AI during therapy sessions. They’re risking their clients’ trust and privacy in the process.

LinkedIn is the opposite of punk rock.

we learned this already! there was about a one week period where everyone thought Google Glass was neat and then the realization kicked in and people were like, wait a minute, this is a privacy nightmare and the whole thing flopped

An M.I.T. study found that 95% of companies that had invested in A.I. tools were seeing zero return. It jibes with the emerging idea that generative A.I., “in its current incarnation, simply isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be,” johncassidysays.bsky.social writes.

#BeePosting

the thought of ai-generated music hurts my soul. same with art really. i’ll take a stick figure drawing or a three-chord punk song over an ai thing anyday. adding in predictions from statistical models just dilutes the message. i’d rather someone send me the prompt than its output

the thing that frustrates me is how often people conflate “RTO” with “working in-person”

if i had the option of RTO with a 20 minute commute and my whole current team in person, i’d take it

but my last job tried to make me “RTO” to take remote meetings from a corporate office, and i quit instead

User taps → API stalls → UI hangs → User bails. Sound familiar?

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Lots of folks know about Scotty always padding his time estimates.

But today I saw the episode of Stargate SG-1 where Siler says it’ll take 24 hours to fix the gate. Hammond says “You have 12.” And then Siler says “No, sir, that’s not how it works. It’ll take 24.”

I respect that.

They finally made a Gladiator 2?

When I lived in Beijing 20 years ago, one of my friends bought a “Gladiator 2” VCD from a guy on a street corner. I said “There is no Gladiator 2!” But he insisted I was ignorant.

Anyway, he ended up with a VCD full of episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess.

On macOS, I still use bash, because I’ve never seen any compelling reason to learn zsh, especially when it comes to config files and stuff. Am I missing out on anything?

Prompt engineer?

Sorry, I’m more of a tardy engineer.