My work mandated we use the copilot. And the only thing I have found it really good at is converting or extracting information from a PDF to build me a spreadsheet. The native conversion programs in both Adobe and Excel suck so bad.
I have some suppliers who won’t send a spreadsheet or CSV nothing that is data, only a PDF.
It’s a stupid and computationally expensive way to do it but does solve a problem for me, a problem that doesn’t need to exist at all but has frustrated me for years.
Two birds, one stone. I can honestly say to my boss that I am using the copilot for work, and it’s a workaround for the insufficient reporting I get from our payroll provider in particular, but also some bulk invoices that are detailed and only come as PDF.
So yes I am in this group. I’ve only used it for file type conversion, and once to “write” a process document just so it would be formatted in Word, I went in and wrote over most of it.
Wow, terrible news that companies that use ai are completely fcking themselves over. Whatever will we do to save the selfish prcks?
Really? Been a minute since I have done a presentation, but:
Pandoc PDF to Markdown.
Markdown to paste into your favorite HTML presentation tool.
Nobody is stupid enough to still use Powerpoint right? Right?
Or the ‘modern workflow’ version of tell the AI you want to convert the PDF, so it burns a bunch of tokens installing pandoc and converting it for you!
Unless mandated by the corporation (which are the same people forced to use AI for absolutely everything now)
Mandated to use PowerPoint? That would suck. Html markdown presentations are easily shared, require no additional software and make so much sense.
Oh right, “make sense”. Nevermind, I get it. The corporate world has no time for that!
Yup, can attest. It sucks. Unless the application is listed on our approved app list I can’t even request it. Let alone the months it can take IT to get around to installing it for me.
try a hedgedoc hosted by a random someone. maybe cryptpad.
Any markdown render will do. VSCode, pandoc, heck many web pages, etc.
You just write in markdown.
Edit: unless you meant pandoc, but I don’t think it requires an install either.
If my boss would mandate the use of LLMs I would definitely abuse it to rack up the bill.
I already am.
I just debugged a report, found the issue almost right away. A missing number in a GROUP BY clause.
Well if you’re measuring what I do through LLM use, the Claude is fixing it instead. Hope that dollar was worth it!
I like to race the ai on most tasks and find myself winning on anything of substance. Sure SOME mundane tasks can be done but does it out weight the energy and infrastructure costs as well as reputation and morale.
Even after all that you STILL need a human double checking and inputting the information.
Ooh, I think I’ll start using CoPilot to do basic math and unit conversions in addition to doing them the correct way. Then I can note in my goals & reviews how I have been utilizing the AI resource and keeping tabs on its advancement.
Switching from human labor to AI is like going straight to a unionized workforce, except it’s not a collection of reasonable human beings with human needs, it’s a well funded machine with only exponential profit in mind
Seriously. A human workforce could never dream of being capable of the same insatiable greed as the gigacorps trying to sell AI.
Reminds me of companies getting their cloud computing bills.
“We need cloud computing!!!”
5 minutes later: “Ok a monolith is good enough”
Both of those statements hurt my soul, damn, why do you have to do that to me. On a Friday no less
It’s friday and your boss wants to move everything over to a blockchain. He says it will only take an hour tops.
Its top priority because it’s part of our new AI strategy. Make sure it’s well documented for your weekly report you will have to deliver to the c suite.
Yup. I’ve had the same thoughts. There are many who still think its insane to have your own equipment. Now there will be those who think its insane to do your own thinking.
Yeah, but you get to exchange cap-ex for op-ex!
Nevermind that running a 48 core server in Azure with 16TB of managed disks is going to run about 21k a year, and you can practically buy a new server for that price.
My company is tossing out their “old” equipment right now, which is why I have a nice server humming away in my basement right now.
a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentations
I haven’t been this happy in over a year.
The funny thing is that even with this massive overspending, AI companies aren’t profitable. They need these companies to spend 10x the amount per token, and 10x the number of tokens. Probably 10x the number of customers too.
Burning energy, draining water, spending massive cash so they can lose money on a product that doesn’t even do its job. How the hell has the bubble not popped yet…
The Stock market is literally just vibes. As long as everyone believes, it will somehow be profitable in the future, the line will keep ging up
and building more and more datacenters, replacing AI chips faster and faster, the more people use it, which of course is wasting a ton of money.
- Replace workforce with AI because it’s easy to be lazy with AI.
- Remaining workforce uses AI to be lazy.
- SurprisedPikachu.webp
Ew, webp. Chatgpt, convert that shit for me
Hey, webp is awesome! Both lossless and lossy compression work great with it. Only thing lacking is software support
Okay fine. ChatGPT, convert it back.
But not all browsers support it!
Damnit ChatGPT, convert it to BMP!
Awesome! It works everywhere now!!. MemoryError Error in sys.excepthook: Traceback (most recent call last): File “shit.comment”
Shit comment? I resemble that remark! :)
Grok, add webp support to all browsers
afaik AVIF is even better quality/size? just has even worse software support 😅
The response you’re trying to save was a web page
Yeah, that’s the eww part :( I hate when I find great memes and I know exactly the friend to share them to… and I can’t DM them.
Especially if it’s animated. Easy enough to change the extension on PC to a PNG without issue yet. But anything too large to screenshot, or with multiple frames? Many a DND meme have I let pass by
This is the most profitable consultant in the world, can’t they just afford to run a local llm?
I heard about a company that was looking at purchasing machines to run local llms for their developers to use.
If more companies do this, rather than using the massive ai data centers being built…. the RAMpocolypse will get way worse.
That is the part that pains me to admit - running local LLMs is not a solution to the RAMpocalypse. In that case we’d just have more GPUs and RAM idling for ~90% of the time in someones basement, without being shared. As bad as it sounds, having data centers for AI stuff is actually the more ecological solution. I can’t believe I said that. Excuse me, I have to take a shower now *shudder*
So you say I have to destroy the AI thing?
Just a little thought for my professors who overuse AI. Thanks guys for eating the tokens.
This is 100% the thesis I’ve been shopping personally… Many Boomers and Xers in executive positions had a “magical millennial” that they quietly kept as a secret “AI” to split/edit PDFs, set up an Airtable base, add columns to a google doc, etc. There was a tacit, silent agreement in this symbiotic relationship for the bulk of the last 20 years - you’ll make sure I don’t look completely incompetent in tech matters and I’ll backchannel on your behalf to senior leaders and people who “matter” to help you advance.
Gen AI essentially allows the laziest input, gives a half competent output that “feels” fine and has the bonus of telling the boomer/Xer that they are actually amazingly capable, and could have done this themselves all along even, but they rightly delegated the task to their magical millennial, and now to the AI of choice.
So they fired all the magical millennials, because they knew too much about the before times. Now that they are fucked without a life raft, costs soar and they will cling for dear life because they will be exposed otherwise.
Edit: through a twist of fate, the iPad kids grew up technically incapable and relied on the magical millenials as well. They could only offer praise and loyalty really, or a boomer, Xer recruited them in and talked the MM up as a “wiz” to seek out. Anyway, now that the MM are gone, the Zoomers and gen Alpha kids only have one strength remaining, the old people have no idea what they are doing or how to quantify their success, outside of “use more AI”. So the fragile balance remains for now, with a vulnerable, hollow center where the magical millennials used to live.
I’m a Millennial and work in IT. We aren’t magical. There’s competent and incompetent people in all age groups. I wouldn’t even say we had better starting conditions overall because being good with tech was seen as cringe nerd stuff when I grew up.
I think your theory is mostly right though, just along the lines of competent/incompetent. So many people constantly choose what they believe the path of least resistance with tech, even if it actually isn’t. Don’t spend one or two minutes to learn how to save to PDF in Word, instead google “word to pdf” and upload whatever sensitive data you have in that DOCX to some shady website.
I’m surrounded by this shit, and it seems to come from all generations. My boss, who is my age, called me because her computer was frozen and she wanted me to fix it. “I was like, turn it off and on again, this is the first, most basic rule of troubleshooting.” Meanwhile the boomer next to me is having me do shit like attach files to a fucking email.
I don’t know why you think it’s a generational thing. There has always technical people that filled in the gaps that the more extroverted management types didn’t care about. How do you think things worked when millennials were still in diapers?
What you’re saying indicates you’re one of those people that don’t understand how many gaps other people are filling in for you. You’re talking about splitting PDFs, who do you think designed the PDF format? Or the http protocol that you use to open that google doc?
Honestly the issue I see happening lately is that because iPads (and now AI) made things too easy for the young people they don’t actually know how things work at the low level, not interested in learning it, and often react with “this is too complicated, make it easier for me!”
I said it was my own thesis, built from a decade plus in the trenches. If you read what I’d stated again, you’ll see that the implication was not purely generational, but boomers/Xers with power who drove the change. You also over emphasis technicality here as I was purposefully discussing the more mundane, beginner to intermediate level daily tasks that the millenials were fulfilling here. The millennials in this group are typically in rightful awe of the old timers talents to build on the foundational level, and also envy their circumstance of walking into a more open sandbox and with more stakes to claim in the early days.
So basically, the above preceding doesn’t really concern you unless you found your way to VP level or really to the csuite especially, and even then, always exceptions. That understood , I won’t spend more time debating exceptions to the general rule, as I see it. I respect my elders, as long as they are decent people struggling to do better within these inherently broken systems.
I don’t know why you think it’s a generational thing. There has always technical people that filled in the gaps that the more extroverted management types didn’t care about. How do you think things worked when millennials were still in diapers?
Uh… Unless you worked at the forefront of technology where more people probably WERE qualified, by and large these things worked on paper/transparencies I would presume. If PowerPoint and PDF were people, they are themselves millennials and gen z (ish) respectively.
Now, when millennials were about 10 you’ve got a decent point ;).
by and large these things worked on paper/transparencies I would presume.
You have to presume because you weren’t involved in helping the people who were used to doing everything on paper learn how to turn on a computer. Do you think people in the past were super qualified and just magically knew how to use a computer in the past? Nobody ever needed help loading a file on a floppy disk and printing it to paper so they can present it to their boss?
There have always been clueless bosses and tech people that had to make things work. If you go back further, why do you think they all had secretaries typing things up?
This post was a fuckin rollercoaster, well said
AI is about to join the list of “stupid technologies that people should really wait and see before investing on”, which includes
- 3D TVs - complete dud
- Blockchain - useless for real world problems already solved by typical computing
- Metaverse - still one of the best jokes around
- Folding screen phones - overpriced junk
- Fully autonomous self driving cars - “Just around the corner” for the past 10 years
Don’t forget NFTs… though I guess that can fall under blockchain.
yeah but NFTs were so stupid that they deserve their own dishonorable mention here.
NFTs are so fucking stupid the satirical yearly award for this shit should probably be the NonFungible Trophy cus it’s a literal fucking physical trophy.
It’s just the same as crypto
Literally, even. NFTs exist on crypto blockchains themselves.
I know. I’m a BCH developer.
Cool, welcome to lemmy, where it’s assumed that you aren’t the only person reading your replies and that every answer may be tailored to a broader audience. I hope you someday find as much experience with it as you have BCH.
I’m also the developer of Mbin (Lemmy alternative) btw.
Thanks for the warning.
Folding Phones Sales Continue To Increase since 2019, showing people seem to like them
Two time buyer, can confirm. They’re legitimately useful and durable enough for me.
I don’t think they are for me but I honestly would not include them in that list above. First of all, there is no investment bubble around them and secondly some people seem to like them and are ready to pay for them. They also do have legitimate benefits (but also downsides)
Yeah I didn’t dislike the 3d monitors/tvs they just had too many caveats at the time and VR kind of ate its lunch.
3D stuff has the fundamental issue that VR and 3D views are just incredibly straining on the human user. Folding phones have no such issue and their durability is also good enough to be competitive (yet clearly worse than regular smart phones). They are really not comparable to 3D monitors and VR.
I think the strain is really dependent on the person as it never really bothered me, it definitely is a problem for some people though. Either way I don’t think it belongs in the same category as blockchain bullshit
It is straining for everyone but yes, some can handle the strain better than others. It just takes so much more mental energy to handle. Most can’t handle it well though, which is why those technologies never manage to break out of their niche.
I do agree however that it is quite different from NFT and other scams. It is a really fascinating technology with real use cases but just some foundational issues that prevent it from leaving their niche.
Two time buyer as in you liked it so much and bought another, or two time buyer as in the first is already inoperative and got another?
My fold4 lasted 3 years, and still works. I’ll concede it was only able to unfold to about 85% open at the end when I decided to upgrade. I was happy to upgrade to the fold 7 which has a redesigned hinge and better dust protection. I acknowledged the risk of mechanical failure as a possibility compared to a slab phone and after using it for years I decided I was still very impressed with the flexibility of having a tablet in my pocket. The fact that my 7th generation is significantly thinner and has a 200MP camera compared to the 4th is what sealed the deal.
It’s not perfect for everyone, but I wouldn’t go back to using a slab, there’s too much functionality I’d be pissed giving up.
Granted, I tend to upgrade my phone every 2 years or so anyway.
I find only 3 years of durability to be absurd 0_0
I find keeping a phone longer than three years absurd, guess we like different things!
Not the same guy. But I’ve been using foldables since 2019 as my primary phone. Samsung fold 1 -> 3 -> 5. No case, no protectors, keys with phone in same pocket. Never had an issue.
I like the one that folds like a GBA SP.
Not that I’m gonna buy one based on that.
But if I’m choosing between two identical models but one folds (and I guess it isn’t that much more expensive), I’d go for the folding one.
Except, of course, for the fact that the next phone I buy will be Commodore’s Callback.If it lasts 5 years, maybe its durable enough.
…7
I just replaced my S21 which I bought new, and it still works fine for everything but being a phone because it had a short or blown cap or something that kept the SIM reader from working.
I had the Fold 2 and Fold 4, both broke so I just went back to a Pixel 🤷
This could also be explained by the entire rest of the market being different flavors of the exact same thing. A little over a decade ago, we actually had choices in what type of phone we wanted. Now, if you want anything other than an identical slab, foldables are your only choice.
I wish someone would make another widescreen slider already. Droid 2 was the shit at the time.
Disco Stu says disco record sales have trended upwards for the entire decade of 1970’s. If this trend continues… eyyyyyyyyy!
All of these have one thing in common. They are viable technologies for certain use cases but not widespread technologies for everyone and everything.
3D TVs - complete dud
The real issue with 3D TVs had nothing to do with the tech, but 100% to do with lazy implementation on the media side. Everyone was always trying to make things pop out of the screen, which was the complete wrong approach. Nevermind the fact that companies got so lazy to the point of just filming in 2D and then “adding” 3D in post.
No one wanted to put in the effort to do it right (aside from James Cameron). So no wonder no one liked it.
Because whenever they tried to use it properly, the plebs demanded their money back because it wasn’t noticeable enough.
Cold fusion. Green hydrogen. Hyper loop. Just off the top of my head.
Hyper Loop was an insane idea (in a bad way).
Motherfucker wanted to invent subway, but for cars, making cities even more dependent of cars.
Actually not entirely true.
He was proposing transportation method similar to how the communication tubes are. Where vacuum would be used to transport capsules with people.
He knew it was bunk, so initially just published that idea and let anyone do it. His actual goal was to kill California’s high speed rail, which he did.
Eventually he purchased Boring company and started building tunnel in Las Vegas and called that (as you called it, subway for cars) a hyper loop and pretend that it was the original idea.
hyperloop was very low air pressure subway tubes for high speed trains. Works for research tesring tracks impractical to infeasible for real world applications. But it apparently what killed high speed rail in california (because wait this will be better)
The cars in tubes thing was a seperate stupid idea.
I don’t know that he really wanted to fully execute on Hyperloop so much as build hype (and Tesla stock price) around the idea while sabotaging funding for California’s high speed rail project. But yes, end goal to keep people buying his cars.
Average massively shitty car CEO idea
Cold fusion is a scam, not a bad idea. There is no scientific basis for that. Is as bad as “infinite energy engine”.
All of the things I mentioned are scams lol
Green hydrogen is water electrolysis with solar power, not scam, it works, it is just a question of making it economically viable. Hyperloop is just stupid, but within the realm of possible. Cold fusion is the only scam here.
The scam isn’t always “fake tech” so much as “distracting from better alternatives for monetary reasons”. Even if hyperloop worked perfectly, they’re not going to build it, because not building high speed rail was always the point.
Your definition of “scam” is not what other human being use. Causes unnecessary back and forth.
Oh, put a sock on it.
Fully autonomous self driving cars - “Just around the corner” for the past 10 years
It exists, but they realized that why should they do that, when they can make money by creating taxis without drivers.
There is no benefit for us, ordinary people.
They aren’t making any profit with self driving taxis, though.
Are you sure? I see Waymo driving around picking and dropping people off. I would imagine that charging more for the novelty and not having to pay the driver would actually generate a lot of profit.
They run for Uber and don’t charge extra. Regardless, they aren’t profitable, and last year they lost $5 billion, see https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2026/02/waymo-losses-about-5-billion.html
Some of these turned out to be useless, some just haven’t been adequately delivered yet.
In 2040 folding phones and autonomous cars might be great, but blockchain will still be a solution in search of a problem.
Problem: You can’t walk from America to Europe.
Metaverse - still one of the best jokes around
This one I slightly disagree with. I got my headset on a black friday and it was super cheap, but VR documentaries are friggin’ amazing and I hope museums will invest heavily in it in the coming years.
Fully autonomous self driving cars - “Just around the corner” for the past 10 years
Definitely. Makes me feel good for people who make their living driving trucks.
The metaverse isn’t VR in general, it was meant to be a virtual space in VR where users could be advertised to and buy/rent things and space like in a physical city.
It failed because those were the intended starting points, and it didn’t solve any problem other than a shitty attempt at a “I want to live in a ready player one world” and didn’t have any compelling reasons to actually use it, let alone use it and pay ridiculous amounts to do interesting things there. They always just wanted to be the middlemen, offering space for others to pay for and do something interesting in. The most interesting thing they came up with is having a meeting with avatars instead of faces on a screen (and most people don’t even want to turn on their video and just do a voice conversation instead).
Plus Second Life already tried the same idea and failed, and did so without requiring several hundred dollars of specialized equipment per user like the Metaverse did.
Though they did have the advantage of their name not being poison. When fb bought oculus, I stopped considering them an option for VR setups.
Until someone come up with things like sword art online, they gonna flop lmao
Yeah, what we call VR is just a pale imitation of the VR that made things like SAO and The Matrix so cool.
I watch a lot of YouTube about everything nerdy and celebratory to every detail and facet about the global apocalypse. Yesterday for the first time in months, a novel idea got through to me… dude was talking about the overblown reactionary movement to which I initially ate my own vomit… yes, I consume this drug, but yes, I am cognisant it’s really bad, so don’t tell me it’s all okay… Something along lines of “everyone thinks it’s like the industrial revolution. It’s not. It’s like the Internet or mobile devices. We just forget how big a change those were now that they’re normative, so it sounds psychotic to compare AI to such “small” shifts in society like the Internet or mobile”… and I felt a fuck ton better. Copium or not, it’s nice to hear a grounded take (he backed it up), and neither a sycophant or chicken little diatribe that feel respectively like sociopaths with heads in the ground or click bait unsubstantiated drama.
Not undermining what AI is doing to people, society, and the ecology. But now that I type that, thinking what to follow, anyone remember Mary Poppins? How normal it was for little kids covered in soot missing fingers at the dawn of the industrial revolution. We just need regulation which is the actual fundamental shift problem, as demand for political action is no longer democratized now that the Citizens have United.
Am I a douche? Lying to myself?
Eat shit you greedy corporate assholes, i hope all of your companies are damaged beyond recovery, you useless fucking tools.
