We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person

331 pointsposted 4 hours ago
by cainxinth
(mcsweeneys.net)

49 Comments

ARandomerDude

3 hours ago

> I am one of fifteen rank-and-file workers, and we are privileged to be led by thousands of Senior VPs.

This is simultaneously hilarious and painfully familiar.

noir_lord

3 hours ago

> We began a heated affair. A contractor hit a pipe above us, so rancid mayo splattered onto our bodies as we embraced, but we were too absorbed in our passion to mind. Try doing that from home.

I can't remember the last time something I read on the internet got a laugh that hard.

The whole thing is brilliant.

cafebabbe

3 hours ago

Gosh it's so soothing to read that after those months of drowning into the turbulent deluge of dAIrrhea that are blogposts now

selwoot

3 hours ago

I reminds me of something I read years ago. Maybe sometime around 1984...

donquichotte

2 hours ago

Feels a bit more light hearted and humourous, more like Brazil?

copperx

3 hours ago

Wasn't 1984 released in 1949?

Insanity

3 hours ago

Yup, it was written around 1948. Easy to remember as you just swap the final 2 digits.

bee_rider

2 hours ago

Oh wow, if they’d changed the title to match the release date (1994) that would really change the vibe, haha.

ddoolin

3 hours ago

It really does have a very similar feeling.

pjc50

3 hours ago

It takes the structure, the affair with Julia, the "we have always been at war with", best buddy/big brother, and the forced rehabilitation from 1984. This is also part of the joke, the reader is expected to twig.

sctb

2 hours ago

I'm getting major DFW vibes.

burningChrome

2 hours ago

> founded as a mayonnaise company, which now sells consumer packaged goods, software as a service, and surveillance technology.

The visual of this is completely hilarious.

noir_lord

2 hours ago

> software as a service, and surveillance technology.

If someone could tell me the difference between those last two at this point I'd be grateful and yes the entire thing is bitingly funny.

jgbuddy

3 hours ago

AI could never write this

cbg0

3 hours ago

It will now be able to.

nunez

an hour ago

It will now be able to write _almost_ the exact same thing. Except the main character will be called Elias...

xena

3 hours ago

No, there is soul in this that a soulless automaton cannot replicate. It is the difference between making something to be consumed and something to be felt. This is something to be felt.

meowface

2 hours ago

Current LLMs couldn't write this. Ones in a few years possibly could. Betting AI will never be as good as humans at [X] is usually not the hill you want to die on.

no_multitudes

2 hours ago

LLMs have been getting worse at long-form prose recently (and they were never good at it to begin with.) They're good at writing software because writing software is a much more restricted domain.

streb-lo

an hour ago

I think it's more that software is verifiable and RLVR can optimize in the correct direction. Harder to do with prose.

meowface

an hour ago

That is true, but I think within three years that will likely change.

no_multitudes

an hour ago

Maybe! I think that within a year or two, either the sigmoid curve will flatten out or we will all die. But these beliefs are currently unfalsifiable. It will be interesting to see.

(And I have a more weakly held belief that even if we do all die, Claude 3000 will still be thinking stuff like "Burning off Earth's atmosphere was the point that earns its keep." They just aren't optimizing these things to write legibly.)

Autious

2 hours ago

If I train my 1000 billion parameter blank AI on this text and only this text over and over again, we may get 99% there.

lelanthran

2 hours ago

> If I train my 1000 billion parameter blank AI on this text and only this text over and over again, we may get 99% there.

You'll get 100% of the way there, because, lacking any other training, it will only ever be able to reproduce this text verbatim.

Hence, 100%, hence mission accomplished.

Borealid

2 hours ago

That's not how training works.

Training tries to produce something that scores highly in training evaluations. With one data point, the evaluation is solely how closely the model output resembles the single input text.

Let's say you do that, and the training text is 58,100 tokens long. Let's say you ask the model to produce 58,101 tokens. Will it "reproduce [the] text verbatim"? No, it can't, because of the dissimilar requested length. Something "new" will come out.

It's also entirely possible that no matter how long you train, the model never converges on generating exactly the same output as its training data - you could end up with an average loss value of 0.001 instead of 0.0. It's not a perfectly deterministic process.

You're correct in principle, but in reality even with limited training data real-world models produce something that isn't exactly their training, especially when sampled stochastically. They're biased toward their training data, not forced to it.

lelanthran

an hour ago

> You're correct in principle, but in reality...

... It's never been tried. Look, I was actually joking when I initially replied, but now that I think about it, it's never been tried!

So now I am left wondering exactly what will happen if I train a new model from scratch, on only a single short corpus of 50k words.

Not fine-tuning an existing model, but literally creating a new model by feeding a blank (or random) matrix the same poem 100k times.

x86x87

3 hours ago

it could given enough slop doulas

BLKNSLVR

3 hours ago

I'm assuming ButtFuckers demerged to become CageFight Pharma and SodaPorn.

flir

3 hours ago

"More leaders means more leadership"

Heh.

Also: make it stop!!!

gmiller123456

2 hours ago

This guy is a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.

indoordin0saur

3 hours ago

Hilarious read, and strangely accurate in a way.

bethekind

3 hours ago

RTO4AI should be a slogan. Or some variant thereof

lbrito

2 hours ago

Sounds like Amazon pivoted to the mayo business!

liquid_thyme

2 hours ago

We used to develop AI to convince us its human (turing test). The future is about convincing AI/Automated Systems that you're - competent (hiring), not a bot (anti-spam), doing your job (KPIs), not a threat (ala social score, AI powered weapons targeting), worthy of being saved (insurance claims), etc, etc.

Whether or not humans break from those shackles, I for one, am hoping Hollywood supplies us with wonderfully dystopian sci-fi entertainment for years to come.

talhaanwar

3 hours ago

Remind of covid days. But i prefer wfh

_doctor_love

2 hours ago

This was very funny! Paradoxically, I have found that working with people in person is the fastest way to enable them on using AI.

It feels very similar to teaching pair programming and TDD. I can do it over remote, but there's a magic spark that happens in person that is really not replicable any other way.

mhd

3 hours ago

I hope "slop doula" sticks around…

iou

3 hours ago

I thought mcsweeneys did satire?

nunez

an hour ago

1984 Mayo Company Slop-Doula edition. You'd love to see it. McSweeney's is a treasure.

neuroelectron

2 hours ago

Returning to the office doesn't solve the problem of replacing office jobs with AI

downrightmike

an hour ago

Or just outsourcing them overseas. That's most of the problem

neutrinobro

3 hours ago

> Associate Slop Doula

had me ROFL

phplovesong

3 hours ago

RTO is the worst shit managers try to push.

xp84

2 hours ago

It's your position that remote work is an unvarnished success though? No notes? Personally, I feel that remote-only in 2026 is mainly a cost-savings scheme, and probably functions to make the ground much more fertile for replacing knowledge workers (us) with AI agents.

In a physical space, humans have built-in advantages over bots. Operating exclusively or primarily over IP levels the playing field, nullifying our advantages of expressive nonverbal communication, and makes 100% of our output accessible to agents.

And it minimizes our contact with each other. I know you can DM people on Slack to gossip about the boss, but do you? Figuring everything is logged, you'd have to create and nurture alternative private channels like texting, and doing that at scale carries at least some implication of subterfuge that limits participation, in a way that chatting around a table at the sandwich shop just doesn't.

All of us really do appreciate the savings on gas money and (in theory) the time savings, though I bet most people have given over some of that time savings to work tasks. I'm not saying it doesn't have benefits. But I don't think the companies still embracing remote work are doing it out of philanthropy, and I don't think it's necessarily good for us workers.

tyrust

an hour ago

You might have a bit of an argument here, but I think there are two major problems.

First, bullshitting in meatspace isn't much of an advantage. To the extent that it is, there is always video calling. What matters for agent training is going to be the output from said bullshitting. You're not really maintaining any moat by going to the office.

And then on the other side, going to the office pretty much sucks. Unless you live close to the office, you're probably looking at least an hour on either side of your day commutting. Using that saved time to work extra at home is an obvious tactical error that I hope people aren't making. I sure as hell don't.

xp84

an hour ago

> Unless you live close to the office, you're probably looking at least an hour on either side of your day commutting

That's a choice though. I just lived where I worked. I can see the argument when you're talking about low-paid work, but if you are a software engineer, you can probably afford to not spend an hour commuting.

> going to the office pretty much sucks.

This is a highly personal thing though. For me, having children home in the afternoon drastically dampens my productivity, and the benefits from being there extend to greater awareness of what other people are working on, and decreased perceived barrier to collaboration. When you see another developer in the kitchen just sipping coffee or waiting for an elevator, you don't feel like you're interrupting to ask him how he got past a certain issue, or in telling him about a new tool that you just tried. You can post those thoughts in a public channel! But the person who "needs" to see it might not see it, and sending a DM is kind of a demand such that many people won't do it unless absolutely necessary.

Text is for many people just not superior to communicating in person. Slack is a simulacrum of in-person communication, not the platonic ideal.