ai
The rough idea is to model a bunch of people working in a company using queuing theory. Each person receives tasks to perform, completes each task in sequence, and passes the result onto another person. If a person is busy when they receive a new task, the task goes into a sort of inbox to wait till they're ready to work on it (the "queue" in "queuing theory"). Each person is modeled as a probability distribution, where the mean specifies the average or typical amount of time they take to complete a task, and the variance models the fact that sometimes tasks take more or less time to complete for unaccounted for reasons (you spill your coffee; the previous person did a bang up job that time; etc). You can model workplaces with many people, like factories and offices, in this way, and ask questions about how quickly the entire group can complete tasks (throughput, which relates to productivity), how much time passes between an initial incoming request and the output of a final product (latency or wait time), and how much variability there is in the throughput and latency. It's mathmagical!
Anyhow, baldur points out that the variance in individual task completion is the killer variable here. As you introduce more and more variability in the time-to-complete distribution of individuals, the group's throughput and latency suffer significantly. Depending of course on the structure of the group, there can be phase shifts from "throughput decreases" to "throughput effectively stops altogether" as this variability goes up. He argues, I think correctly, that forcing workers to use generative AI tools in their workflows can increase their task completion time variance. Even worse, even if it does make their individual throughput higher--meaning the tools locally "increase productivity"--an increase in the variance of that throughput can make the overall productivity of the workplace lower despite what seem to be individual gains! A manager that actually did care about productivity would at the very least consider this possibility before mandating the use of such tools.
I wanted to add that these sorts of phenomena can be even worse depending on how you model time-to-complete. Often a Gaussian distribution (bell curve) is used, reflecting that sometimes tasks can be completed faster and sometimes they take a bit more time, but tend to an average and do not skew towards faster or slower. This is largely the model baldur was discussing. However, knowledge work, and especially work like coding or R&D, are often better modeled by exponential distributions or similarly long-tailed distributions like the gamma distribution. With knowledge work, most tasks are completed in an average-ish amount of time, occasionally some are completed more quickly, but more often there are tasks that take 2, 3, sometimes 10 or more times as long as the average case. For the exponential distribution, roughly 5% of tasks take an "anomalously" long time.
A sequence of exponentially-distributed tasks has challenging throughput and latency behavior. The sum of independent exponential distributions is a gamma distribution, which is also long-tailed but usually with an even worse rate parameter that tends to lengthen the tail, meaning delays compound (in baldur's post delays tend to be compensated by symmetrical gains if the group is large enough, but that doesn't happen with long-tailed distributions). I don't know enough about queuing theory to say what the general behavior is, but intuitively it seems it must be equally challenging in real-world arrangements. This is one way to account for why software development projects and R&D projects are almost never completed early and can sometimes take 2 or more times longer than anticipated.
Adding variance to an exponential distribution--as mandated use of AI tools might do--has the effect of also increasing the mean time to completion. It also flattens/lengthens the tail. I haven't worked it out for other long-tailed distributions but I suspect similar phenomena with those. Overall this would be going in the wrong direction, making the killer problem--the long tail--even worse!
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #AIMandates #QueuingTheory #modeling #WorkplaceModeling #productivity
https://open.substack.com/pub/blueamp/p/sit-abc-news-sit-good-dog?r=j0lyx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
NEW SUBSTACK (Check it out/Subscribe!): A moment that defines our time. From Trump’s aggressive lying to the lack of pushback/weakness from Terry Moran & ABC’s corporate entanglements.
Also: David Shuster video (Hilarious!). NYT Pitchbot (Hilarious!). #news #usa #politics #russia #ukraine #press #us #america #unitedstates #tech #china #tariffs #stockmarket #donaldtrump #trump #press #media #podcast #eu #ai #canada #europe #nato
1. It's a mixed metaphor. AI is reactive, not propulsive (think through what the word "power" means)
2. AI is a mixed bag of a large number of different technologies, making the term imprecise at best ("AI" in video games frequently leans on old school A*, quite different from the LLMs that make the news)
3. LLM-based AI mixes up other people's words into a slurry that is full of content-free phrases like "AI powered". Why ape that?
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI
Let me be clear what I (don't) mean by "imagination". I do not mean "creative", "fictional", "imaginary", or "artistic"--those words can be related, but they've also been co-opted into exactly the trend I'm calling out. I also don't mean interesting images that appear in your mind or dreams but are then dismissed as lacking significance. I do mean truly imaginative acts arising within and from the mind, and not subjected to editorial scrutiny by logic, empiricism, or other instrumentalized forms of reason. Dreams are one way to access imagination; active imagination--stream of consciousness directed but not edited by the conscious mind--can be a way to explore it. Religious, magical, mystical, or meditative practices can too if that's your jam. So can psychoanalysis and some other forms of therapy. There are countless other ways and I don't pretend to have any special knowledge of this, I'm just riffing on an idea.
More and more I believe that we have to rediscover and exercise this aspect of ourselves if we're to navigate the current crisis. (*) Our collective imagination lacks force at a time when generative Anti-Imagination is reaching industrial scale.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #imagination #ActiveImagination
(*) "Crisis" has a medical definition: "that change in a disease which indicates whether the result is to be recovery or death" (Webster's dictionary). Its Greek root can also mean "decision", which I like to think about when considering "crises". They are decisions that need to be made.
What if "42" is just the hallucination of an LLM from the future? 🤔
Dear Mozilla what you're doing is stupid, dangerous, and opposed to your mission. You need to stop. #ai #aibrowser #mozilla #firefox #webbrowser
https://gardinerbryant.com/mozilla-ai-in-the-browser-is-disgusting-please-stop/
"Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.”"
This definition of #AISlop popped out of my head after a bit of un-entrainment (if you dig).
https://realityfragments.com/2026/02/01/a-definition-of-ai-slop/
Outlook not so good 🎱
Police tech doesn’t predict crime. It predicts policing.
Based on biased data, it brings more of the same – racist policing and poverty punishment.
Read our latest blog on why crime 'predicting' police tech must be BANNED ⬇️
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/why-predictive-policing-must-be-banned/
#policing #AI #precrime #justice #criminal #police #ukpol #ukpolitics #surveillance
"When you see someone who looks like Agatha Christie and talks like Agatha Christie, I think it’s easy for the boundaries to be blurred. What do we gain? Other than it being gimmicky?"
"We won 3 Supreme Court seats Tuesday. We won the Bucks County, PA, DA's race. No biggie, Dems have won it before. In 1891.
So went PA, which Fetterman betrayed days later. Fetterman's the guy you thought was when you first looked at him
https://www.blueamp.co/p/schumer-and-eight-senate-democratic #trump #news #politiics #shutdown #ai #tv #media #press #tech #democrats #donaldtrump #snap #healthcare #eu
NEW SUBSTACK: Go Read The Rest Don't Forget To SUBSCRIBE: https://www.blueamp.co/p/end-stage-democracy-has-a-mascot
"And now, we’ve arrived at the logical conclusion of all this—Eric #Trump, the barking embodiment of dumb-son nepotism. A laughable lout with inherited intellectual necrosis and the empathy of a Terminator wrapped in designer smugness.
In Eric we have the heir to a #political dynasty so corrupt it saddens Tammany Hall, b/c they’re not here to stand and clap. A guy whose gums allow you to shelter-in-place during EF4 tornadoes. Whose existence makes it so when you say the “the dumb Trump son,” you’re somehow not talking about Don Jr."
#news #politics #donaldtrump #tech #media #press #washington #maga #ai #usa #us #unitedstates #america #russia #ukraine #china #eu #tv
"A new report from Common Sense Media says that 72 percent of teens surveyed have used AI companions, and 33 percent have relationships or friendships with these chatbots."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/teens-are-flocking-to-ai-chatbots-is-this-healthy/
"#Anthropic Settles Major AI Copyright Suit Brought by Authors"
Precedent set?
Both of my #Scarfolk books were downloaded and pirated from the LibGen 'shadow library'.
Compensation would be nice.
Anyone aware of other class-action lawsuits I can join, or have any other legal pointers?
Warning: Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media now wants every human programmer to be replaced by Gen AI. Tim O'Reilly/company policy on book editing and writing went from "avoid Gen AI" to "you must use Gen AI as much as possible, we will monitor you through KPIs to use it as much as possible. So avoid O'Reilly books. Support an indie author. Plenty of them out there who write and sell books. No need to support corporate overlords. Source https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1kimr4a/warning_tim_oreilly_of_oreilly_media_now_wants/ #ai
🖥️🚲
A new type of career opportunity emerged from vibe coding because vibe coders didn't know what they were doing 😉
Not sure how many of you use ChatGTP, but you might want to scale back.
"The latest model of ChatGPT has begun to cite Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as a source on a wide range of queries, including on Iranian conglomerates and Holocaust deniers, raising concerns about misinformation on the platform.
In tests done by the Guardian, GPT-5.2 cited Grokipedia nine times in response to more than a dozen different questions."
#news #technology #TechNews #ChatGPT #OpenAI #AI #GenAI #grok #grokipedia
Please excuse the Substack link, but given that "84% of developers now use or plan to use AI tools"*, it is interesting to see measurable proof that this does not translate to increased productivity.
"We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice."
https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
"Yesterday, I published an article that began:
'Welcome to the Great AI Bubble, a metastasized trillion dollar tech tumour so massive it’s practically visible from space.'
And today, in a strange bit of timing, news lands that Peter Thiel - the closest thing the modern world has to a real-life Bond villain - has dumped his entire holding in Nvidia, the chip manufacturer."
~ Carole Cadwalladr
#AI #StockMarket #PeterThiel #broligarchy #TechBros #SiliconValley
/1
https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/peter-thiel-gets-out-of-dodge
Some of the pathological beliefs we attribute to techbros were already present in this view of statistics that started forming over a century ago. Our writing is just data; the real, important object is the “hypothetical infinite population” reflected in a large language model, which at base is a random variable. Stable Diffusion, the image generator, is called that because it is based on latent diffusion models, which are a way of representing complicated distribution functions--the hypothetical infinite populations--of things like digital images. Your art is just data; it’s the latent diffusion model that’s the real deal. The entities that are able to identify the distribution functions (in this case tech companies) are the ones who should be rewarded, not the data generators (you and me).
So much of the dysfunction in today’s machine learning and AI points to how problematic it is to give statistical methods a privileged place that they don’t merit. We really ought to be calling out Fisher for his trickery and seeing it as such.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #StableDiffusion #statistics #StatisticalMethods #DiffusionModels #MachineLearning #ML