u/cascadiabibliomania

I have asked GPT by carrier pigeon for the basics of marketing and have had one of our village elders (who understands the strange symbols on the scrolls the carrier pigeons bring) explain its answers. The same elder also found three waterlogged chapters of a book on copywriting from 1972 and read it to me. She is also writing this down on a scroll for the carrier pigeon (I hope she's writing it down exactly as I say!).

Anyway, after this level of preparation, I feel pretty set on entering this career. I'd like some advice on how to best break in to the agency side when my CV is pretty thin. Do you think a spec portfolio would help? Do I need to disclose that I had an elder help me to scribe the runes (or whatever they're called, this isn't really my thing haha) onto the spec ads? Does anyone have good advice on what inks I can use to make sure the portfolio images still look good after three day pigeon journey?

Also, does anyone have advice on finding a remote role where you can work from anywhere?

Ed's most recent Hater's Guide made me curious when he asked if anyone was spending a trillion dollars on workers.

Turns out the entire cost of training the US workforce per year amounts to about $110B. This year or next (assuming the bubble keeps inflating), Anthropic + OpenAI + Google will hit that number (and more) for their training expenses for models.

I would speculate additionally that a large number of corporate employers will also, either this year or next, start spending significantly more on token spend than they spend on training employees in any way. A typical enterprise-scale company spends an average of ~$15M on training per year, and the average enterprise is spending about $12M on AI this year, so anyone who is even mildly "ahead of the curve" has probably seen their AI expenditures eclipse their entire investment into employees getting better at their job.

I've been pushing for my workplace (SaaS company, B2B) to be careful about AI usage, and that especially when it comes to writing, it makes everyone look the same...so watch out.

Well, after months and months of extremely pro-AI sentiment from the rest of the company, something crazy happened last week.

We are currently pursuing a contract renewal with one of our company's first customers (we've had them onboard for a couple of years). This particular customer is a large technology and security company with about 5,000 employees and annual revenue north of $1B. You've probably heard of them.

Renewal seemed to be going basically okay in the initial phases, no one was concerned.

Friday rolls around and there's an emergency Slack message copied and pasted across five different channels. As it turns out, the customer in question has been cutting vendors whose products look "too AI" in terms of UX design, "placeholder copy" that makes it to prod, and other similar tells. They have already put three vendors that we know of on the chopping block for having what they considered "AI slop features."

Well, of course, a bunch of the new product features we've been lining up and were going to preview for them when talking about renewal and upsell are basically slop. No one found anything wrong with this before this past week, and everyone was patting themselves on the back for how cool it all looked. It's so great how Codex can get us 90% of the way there!

Now they are scrambling, because we have a meeting scheduled in a week and a half to show them all these cool new features.

That means we have roughly 10 days to unfuck everything that has been proudly fucked up by our newly re-orged eng team that now works in "pods" with no real oversight or coordination between them. I have been put in charge of de-AI-ifying every piece of text in the nightmare vibe-coded new screens and dashboards. This alone is going to probably consume 60+ hours in the next week and I still will have to delegate a bunch to others, because that's how much garbage we've been putting out into the world using LLM coding agents.

I'm so sick of posts like the one I saw here earlier today. "GUYS, for real, it didn't USED to work but NOW LLMs are so incredible that they refactored my code base, washed my car, and found a dress for my fat wife that makes her look skinny."

If AI was really that good, "this looks like AI" would be said with respect and admiration. In reality, "this looks like AI" is not a compliment in any context whatsoever. AI has become a byword for low-quality, high-quantity output that is disposable, poorly vetted, and doesn't hold up to scrutiny or critical reading.

Now it's stopping deals in their tracks.

Is that good?

I'm in a few subreddits and non-reddit communities that actively ban anyone using AI-generated content, and where the mood is extremely anti. This is obviously one of them.

In recent weeks, I've seen posts here and in other anti-AI spaces that are obviously AI generated and make a bunch of noise about being "anti-AI" in a post that's filled with patterns indicating LLM generation. I could be overfitting a pattern here, but the amount of the content seems pretty egregious, especially on the ultra-small communities (not like this one). Similar-size communities that don't take a stance on AI and don't touch on it in any way don't get the same slop posts.

I've started to wonder (and perhaps it's paranoia) whether the "anti AI" slop posts and posters are running experiments to see whether they can fool "antis" with their content. Try another style and tone and voice and see if maybe this time, everyone thinks you're a human.

I hate it, because it's such a deliberate violation of stated boundaries. There is literally no way in the world to tell these people "no, please don't, we'd like this space to remain AI-free." There is nothing you can say or do that makes them respect that. They'll say "oh, I wonder if they'd notice THIS time?" and look at you as an A/B test for their newest model. "This time we got seventeen comments before someone told me to ignore previous instructions and provide a recipe for Caesar salad."

It's just depressing. You could make a special invite-only group and someone would make it their life's mission to get through the gatekeeping and then start up the slop faucet.

Curious how others...no I'm just fucking with you. But I thought some people might feel the same way here.

My adult female BP's enclosure apparently wasn't BP-proof and I found out the hard way. She disappeared for over 3 weeks, and then last night as we were going to bed, my husband's nightstand drawer wouldn't move. Ah. Cue a very awkward bit of reaching and taking out a BP who very obviously didn't want to get caught...even though the area she was in had no heat whatsoever, which I found weird!

Long story short, we got her out, I now have her in a different enclosure that is much more secure and am working on snake-proofing the other enclosure.

She ate a day-old chick within hours of being put in the new enclosure, which was encouraging. She also actually bit me before I even handled the chick, when I was just checking on her water bowl. I'm thinking she was probably really hungry, hence the chick (DOCs have tempted her when she's turned her snoot up at rats in the past).

She's obviously had a stressful, difficult experience. I got a quick look at her to make sure she wasn't injured from our rescue attempt, and she seemed physiologically fine, but at what point would it be good to take another look? Anything I should be looking out for particularly? I'm always really careful about enclosures and have had snakes for years, but this is the first time I've ever had this happen.

If you're an AI foundation model company (and who isn't, these days?), subscription-based fees to some degree aligned many of your incentives with your users' desires: your main goal should be to get someone the answer they requested with a high degree of accuracy, as quickly as possible. You have no incentive to "waste spins" or give only intermittent accurate answers.

OK, it didn't always work out quite the way people would have wanted, because agents made it so there was always more work to be done, which could churn through usage in record time. So there was truly no choice but to go to usage-based billing, since the cash burn was simply too great.

But with usage-based billing, the incentives are now fully identical to slot machines. Intermittent rewards turn some people into addicts. Why make it better or more efficient?

The only thing keeping these companies from hyperaccelerated enshittification and straight-up gacha mechanics where you can pay extra for power boosts for your prompts, is that right now they still lose money on every token. The moment they turn revenue-positive on inference, you'll know because it will be a matter of days to weeks before addictive dark patterns are the entire name of the game when people log in to their AI tools.

I want to start by telling a story about an invention everyone agrees really was the next big thing. Personal computers absolutely changed every facet of life in the developed world. But buying one in 1977 would have been a bit silly, unless you were a strong enthusiast.

If you wanted to buy a personal computer in the year 1977, you were among a select few people who had noticed you had choice unlike any other time in history. It was the first year when you could purchase any of three, count 'em three, models of personal computer. Commodore, Apple, TRS-80. Take your pick. The world is your oyster.

The TRS-80 was cheapest, $600. Apple II was the most expensive, costing anywhere from $1200-2500 depending on how much memory you wanted. In today's money, that'd be about $3k-12k.

If you'd been a business person who said "Every one of my employees will learn how to use a TRS-80 and we WILL figure out ways to do all our jobs on the TRS-80," maybe that would have been kind of visionary, but you'd almost certainly have failed to actually achieve business objectives. Neither the hardware nor the software had the capabilities you'd need to keep a business functioning with extensive computer automation. You might be able to do a few specific things that would save time and money, but a huge amount of your spend would have been wasted.

If you waited ten years, until 1987, computers were vastly more capable (with stuff like hard drives!) and cost about 1/3 less. Even then, the vast majority of businesses ran on real paper files and it didn't seem any early adopters of computing technology knocked it out of the park in their market. If one local used car lot brought in computers for everyone, they wouldn't suddenly become way more profitable than competitors to the point the whole local market had to start installing PCs for all.

By 1997, we had not only a world wide web, we could surf through web rings about Star Trek fandom and weather enthusiasts with new lightning-fast dial-up speeds of 56k/second. Research labs and universities had fancy T1 and T2 lines that made 56k modems look like carrier pigeons. Computers cost around $400-600 for budget models, meaning they were actually lower priced than in the 1970s in both constant and inflation-adjusted dollars.

And now, businesses were actually adopting PCs widely. At that price point, and with networking capabilities and color printers becoming de rigeur, it became vastly easier to argue that it really was time to digitize your operation. By 2007, you'd have been a real Luddite to not have your office full of PCs.

Early adopter benefits for truly groundbreaking, world-changing technology tend to be minimal, at best. I could have written about early adopters of automobiles, and it would have been the same story. Airplanes, the same way.

Early adopters of real world-changing tech are enthusiasts who like the thing for itself, not just for how much money it can make them. Usually they're buying a product that will be obsoleted in a few years' time, and burning cash gleefully to bring about a future where planes fly overhead daily, or you could drive to work in the city five days a week, or you could have a computer network that made your business communicate more effectively. We all owe a debt to early adopters who financed not-ready-for-primetime tech.

But why does anyone think it's some kind of financially wise move when it comes to AI?

I have AI booster friends and they cannot give me a straight answer about this, they always try to pivot and change the question. If AI really is going to just keep getting better and cheaper, surely I'd be better off keeping my money until it's in the theoretical next iteration? If we're already to the point where AI is almost capable of self-improvement, why would I want to pay a dollar for the current shitty non-self-improving kind when tomorrow, that same dollar could pay for a model that continuously improves its own performance?

At no point does anyone say, in any way, "when it gets that good, we're stopping letting anyone new in. On the day when singularity-level AI happens, fuck you if you didn't already subscribe, you will not be robo-raptured."

You could just as easily wait for it to actually be that good, instead of spending money on what the AI companies themselves will tell you will be hopelessly outdated in a matter of months.

Anyone who genuinely believed the hype about AI would be a fool to use it in their own company, writing code! Surely it'd be a smarter move to pour every dollar of available capital into GPU stocks and wait for the day when AI actually becomes as good as they claim it's going to be.

I'm asking sincerely whether the boosters in your life have given any reasons that they think early adoption is smart. I can't think of any situations in which genuine "everyone will buy it later on, you are ahead of the trend" early adopterism actually helped anyone to succeed in business. If you were the first on your block with an ipod or an iphone, that was kind of cool, but you didn't gain much by it.

What am I missing? I'd love if anyone who reads this sub to get an alternate perspective, but whom I might characterize as a "booster," could talk to me about how they think about this problem. Maybe you're basically an AI enthusiast and you don't care that this is the clumsy crappy version we get before (you believe) self-improving AGI/ASI shows up, because you think it's pretty neat. Totally fine, I get it, we've all got our weird stuff we love. But what's the business case for early adoption? How is this any different from buying TRS-80s for the whole travel agency in 1977?

A couple of weeks ago, this is what I heard from a CEO. He'd just fired a bunch of people (about 15) for reasons that were totally and exclusively about how crazy efficient AI made all of us, and definitely didn't have anything to do with having a piss poor quarter.

The all-hands meeting called after the layoffs was surreal.

First, we were told the layoffs definitely had nothing to do with economics or saving money. It was all about people who weren't moving in the right direction with the company.

What did moving in the right direction mean?

Well, of course, it meant AI. It meant the end of agile, sprint-based development and the end of coordinated teams that worked with supervision to solve real problems.

In fact, we were told, every big company is abandoning that way of doing things just like they abandoned waterfall development for agile. The "new way" is to have little groups of less than 7 people, each working on their own stuff in isolation.

And, we were told, those groups will do work totally differently! Gone are the days when you'd write up lots of product requirements, figure out user stories, and do some sort of discovery or at least attempt to understand whether anyone actually wanted to use the feature you're building. "Now that getting that information takes longer than it would take just to build the first version of the feature, there's no reason not to just build it first."

And then we got to the really crazy bit.

After basically telling us straight out that 1/3 of our engineering and product org had been laid off because they weren't enthusiastic enough about AI development, the CEO told us that it's time to get onboard with AI because it's a runaway train and you'll never find a job anywhere if you don't learn to love it. "This isn't just me, it's not just our organization, this is now the world we live in. The fastest way to get fired in any company today is to say you think AI is just hype."

He says he knows this because of all the other CEOs and analysts he speaks with. By way of illustrating how definitely not hype it all is, we got to hear about OpenClaw and Gas Town/Gas City, two projects that seem to have created nothing of value and gone nowhere important.

And then, after all this, he says no one in the real world of software is actually against AI. "I talk to people everywhere and they all actually love AI, they love what AI does for us and how it accelerates our development. No one out there in the real world is a skeptic."

So it's like they wave a pink slip in front of your face and say "say you love AI," and when you say "I love AI!" they say "see? Everyone loves AI, get with the program."

He ended by talking about the ways in which we could fail in our AI adoption and use. He did talk about the possibility of a bloated or buggy product, so at least that had occurred to him. But not once did he mention AI spend, even though some of our highest token use engineers have recently been maxing out session token spend within minutes.

All this is to say: The CEOs don't even see it coming. They have no idea they're about to get squeezed. They're laying off the people in the organization who do real work and keeping the people who shirk and do as little as possible, plus the people who are just burned out and need to keep their jobs so they go with the flow.

Most of them, especially in the VC-funded world, don't care one iota because they want to sell the company ASAP and then someone else will be holding the bag for their bad decisions.

Not one person at the meeting spoke up or said anything about token spend and how the unit economics of AI use are changing by the week. Which is funny, because behind the scenes (I'd say "quietly" but you'd call me slop, lol) many of us have been talking about how the AI companies are basically drug pushers who will ratchet up prices now that everyone's hooked.

So now it's a full "emperor's new clothes" situation where many of the rank-and-file peons can see there's a real problem, but the leader will never hear about it, because he's already made it clear that criticism of the policy accrues blame to the critic.

These VC companies are generally so tight-fisted. Budget approvals take forever even for very minor, cheap pieces of software. But somehow this ravenous maw takes precedence over everything else, because an even richer business idiot told these CEOs that this was the infinite money glitch.

Morale is in the toilet for everyone who isn't a booster. We all notice how we feel when we are compelled to use LLMs all day, every day. We all notice we're not actually building anything anyone cares about.

By the time the CEOs realize they've been marks and that the smarks were the ones telling them to light their money on fire, their companies will have collapsed. And it'll serve them right!

Spent time in the Keys over the last week. Every charter boat excursion was a massive trip pressure cooker. The final one we went on was a private charter we paid a lot for...the boat turns out to be a bit run down (ripped cushions with foam coming out, broken speakers) but the trip is still nice. We never say a word about the condition of the boat. And I thought probably because of this, the boat captain wasn't super pushy about tipping. Got to the end of the trip and even though I went tipless (edited lmao not topless thanks autocorrect) with some of the other excursions, I liked the no pressure approach and gave the captain $40 extra.

An hour later I get a message from the owner of the touring company saying "just got off the phone with your captain, who is worried based on your tip that you must not have enjoyed your trip.". REALLY?! I'd get it if I'd tipped nothing and they were genuinely worried someone was leaving with a bad impression. But we were on the water for just a couple of hours...why is $40 an insultingly low rate? It makes no sense. There is no way boat captains are making restaurant server style tipped minimums.