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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

That's corporate eco-terrorism. How did we sink so low?

It's even worse/better. It's corporate financial malpractice. At some point they will wake up after the AI psychosis dies down. That might take 1-2 more years. After that most companies will realize that AI is a tool, as OP said, and adjust budgets accordingly.

Importantly, "adjusting budgets" here is for most companies, you know the ones you have to fight to even get an IDE license, a euphemism for zeroing the budget.

Hello, I am from a company whose IT leadership that saw this silliness 3 months ago.

Yes, all developer-focused AI subscriptions have been cancelled, and only AI features tacked onto existing subscriptions are part of the AI strategy (eg: Jira+AI, Confluence+AI, Analytics suite du jour+AI, Microsoft Copilot Pro (SHUDDER), etc etc etc.)

Yes, it is virtually impossible to get any additional spending approved.

Yes, there is no more Claude, there is no more Codex, it is all gone now. The AI hype occurs only in company-wide emails about commitment to modernization (with AI), reorganization (with AI), and consolidation (with AI), where no actual strategy is proposed other than what the management consultants advise (with a caveat that there is no budget for anything other than AI features that are tacked onto existing subscriptions at no additional cost.)

@ihsw you’re currently greyed out so I can’t reply, but lol holy shit i’d be updating my resume if i were you

Or maybe that's the wrong direction and this is where most of the world is headed once the true costs and ROI are fully revealed.

If your manager is asking you why you aren’t hammering 500 nails a day with your company hammer under threat of replacement, you’re going stop worrying about the surfaces your driving nails in to and simply start swinging.

1. It is not comparable. Idk the environmental toll of 500 nails, but tokenmaxxing definitely has one. Especially when it doesn't have any provable and substantial benefit.

2. Your responsibility doesn't end because your manager says so.

3. It's not just about the employee who actually burns the tokens, but also about the rest of it: the idiocy up to the top, and the irresponsibility of the companies offering the service.

> 1. It is not comparable. Idk the environmental toll of 500 nails, but tokenmaxxing definitely has one. Especially when it doesn't have any provable and substantial benefit.

Then pretend it was 5 million nails a day from a newly invented nail machine gun. This also has no provable and substantial benefit. Build a house that way and it will quickly be more nail by mass than everything else combined.

I don’t disagree. The point is capitalism operates entirely on incentive to keep our jobs or die on the streets. If they say “use all the nails or you lose your job,” people aren’t going to care about the waste or broader costs. Nails, AI, choose your example. It’s the same result unfortunately.

The point about capitalism isn't really accurate. Communism had the same problem. It's more about greed and power, and a system that sustains it than about the ideology behind it, I think. However, their ideological opposites, anarchism and liberitarianism, offer false ways out, too, as humanity is simply not capable of sustaining that.

I'm sounding a bit like a broken record, but the only political system with a proven track record in modern society is still social democracy: educate the people so they don't bash each other's heads in, distribute wealth and power better, and regulate the markets. It unfortunately died through the unholy matrimony of material well-being and social media.

The reason I’m saying capitalism is because the context is employment + the US. In the US employment is everything. It’s social status, it’s the roof over your head, it’s healthcare, it’s your identity.

Similar issues exist in communism too. It doesn’t mean you can just go “but communism” to dismiss me when I raise an accurate and valid critique of the system Ford operates in.

It wasn't meant as a riposte or anything. I just didn't read "capitalism" as "the system" but more as "the root cause" and hence what has to be changed.

In the US context, it is certainly a root cause among others.

Stock prices have always been more important than a habitable environment.

The really stupid thing is that shareholders are also rewarding useless burns of their money. It's capitalist Stakhanovism.

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