You know, if we were taught to use something like LaTeX, this wouldn’t be an issue because of BEAMER
I’ll take typst any day over latex lol
And Accenture itself reportedly started requiring senior staff to start using AI or risk losing out on promotions.
Every time companies urge employees to use AI and then regret the cost. The fuck is wrong with people? Why are they pushing it so hard? Does Sam give them hand jobs if they use the most?
I don’t understand this need to pressure staff into using something and threatening punishment if not. Are they worried that their employees are not efficient enough? Pay them the token prices on top of their salary and see how stuff changes.
The fuck is wrong with people?
That’s the corporate hive mind, all afraid of missing out of a great productivity tool. And they think that because media these days just copies what the richest people say and hype it up because the rich these days only speak to yes-men.
and then regret the cost
Reality doesn’t need to obey yes-men.
This is actually very common across businesses. My company actually has our bonuses tied to AI adoption, so we have dashboards showing people’s AI usage. Other major companies have done the same, which lead to the practice of “token maxxing” where people were using AI to make more AI calls to boost their numbers up.
Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides
Sounds the people they hired to do the shit work don’t actually want to do that type of work. I, for one, am shocked. Shocked I tell you!
This dumb bubble can’t pop soon enough and wipe away most of the US economy while doing so.
True except the 80% of people who will suffer further because of it, and the 20% that will gleefully be laughing to the bank and buy up everything at a discounted price. Few of us should be cheering for the failure or success of AI.
If it’s going to fail I’d rather just get it over with.
The problem seems to be that it takes competent employees to get anything useful out of an LLM in the first place. However, it is these very employees whom the greedy CEOs want to replace. So the result is that an incredible amount of money is being spent on absolutely nothing.
The logical conclusion, then, should be that it would make more sense to replace these useless CEOs with AI. Since they’re just making idiotic decisions for a lot of money anyway, there could be lots of savings.
Unfortunately, however, that will never happen, because contrary to all that talk of KPIs and such, what really matters in the upper echelons of management is never efficiency, but rather ruthlessness and brown-nosing.
I recently learned of a term “reverse centaur” and found the ideas in that article were very entertaining as a way to explain why CEOs are obsessed with LLMs. The author of the book being interviewed has a few hot takes that I think are pretty relevant here too. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-bubble-strike-at-its-roots/
Indeed!
“The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things: big foundational models that lose billions of dollars every year. When the AI investment mania halts, most of the models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the data centers running. The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100 billion IOU. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.”
I think that pretty much sums it up.
converting pdfs to presentation
I don’t get this, We’ve had OCR for a while. All around San Francisco Ive been seeing ads for “llamaparse” with the tagline “we parse pdfs”, like is that all you do? How do you afford this marketing budget?
PDFs are so shitty to work with, it’s like translating them, it’s impossible without using a tool like Google translate.
I fucking hate PDFs as much as I hate Adobe.
I HATE PDFS TOO. I hate them! 99.999% of the time I’m given a PDF file it would be more useful as an HTML file.
All this money that is being spent, where does it end up?
Various designing firms.
After the bubble bursts, law firms, because everyone starts suing everyone to get back money they didn’t necessarily have, but still spent, because somebody will soon sue them.
Nvidias pocket maybe. CEOs? Billionares?
To build new data centers
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
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.
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?
If it lasts 5 years, maybe its durable enough.
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.
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.
Disco Stu says disco record sales have trended upwards for the entire decade of 1970’s. If this trend continues… eyyyyyyyyy!
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
its not a presentation
its a “deck”
i fucking hate these people
that came after Uber told employees to use AI as much as possible and Uber’s CTO said the company had blown its entire AI budget in four months
Further evidence that most CEO’s and SLT’s are just confident, lucky, and born wealthy; not competent, smarter, or much better than average.
Can’t read the whole article bc paywall… But if they are really worried about token cost for converting PDF to a Powerpoint, they ain’t seen nothing yet. Agentic coding the way AI companies push it (multiple agents in parallel with Claude, looping etc) uses way way wayyyyy more tokens than this.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/c6DSo
Have you used Opus 4.8 at API costs? Without using agents, I can burn $20 an hour no problem. I use Kimi K2.6 and GLM 5.2 these days.
How do you use it without agents? Just prompt the chat interface?
When I used claude code, I’d go through the smallest tier subscriptions 5h limit in half an hour sometimes if I used Opus lol, reckon at API pricing it would’ve been 100 bucks an hour
Chat prompts and then accept the changes when they are worth using. LLMs are entropy apparatuses, injecting that shit straight into your code base is crazy. It took one module/subsystem done with agents for me to realize that it was completely unmaintainable. Not a single eng can make a change to it and the only option is to rewrite. So I banned agents. I know some people still try to get away with that style of LLM coding but I encourage people to instant deny a PR if it looks like garbage.
If you accept changes then you’re probably using an agent though?
Agent mode is disabled, only chat mode works. This is with GitHub Copilot harness in JetBrains Rider or Visual Studio Pro. Agentic coding means it can make decisions without a human.
Leadership are mostly idiots. They don’t know how work gets done. They think like “wow it produced so many lines of code!” and don’t know that’s not a useful metric.
My job had Microsoft do a four hour copilot demo for the entire team last week. (Surely an immense expense. They won’t pay for most people to be full time with benefits). The guy used copilot to make a regex to parse html. A little surprised zalgo didn’t show up.
I’ll one up you.
Google’s “principal evangelist” for Gemini did a 2hr presentation for almost 1,000 people at my company on Google Meet a few weeks ago.
40 mins late due to nobody knowing how to get more than 500 people in a meet.
He then spent 90 minutes showing everyone how to do shit that literally everyone knows how to do with AI nowadays; touch up old photos of your grandparents, make shitty marketing mascots and logos, etc…
Here’s an image I took during the presentation. For a laugh, look at the background text:
A C-Suite exec got impatient and asked when we were going to cover how to use agentic tools and he said “oh I’ve got a little section at the end for that.” Ffs
Literally nothing useful happened during this meeting and nearly 1,000 employees were idle for no reason. A complete and utter waste of fucking time. Gemini dude didn’t even bother to consider what use cases we might be looking into, he just did a boilerplate ELI5 of AI that would have been outdated in like 2022.
Absolutely insane.
Never work with children or animals (or do a live demo)
ROFL. Thanks for the screencap, that’s priceless.
Lastly, poor Buc-ee the beaver deserves better.
CEOs them to make power points using the already pre built company presentation template then talk about how they couldn’t have made it without AI like that’s supposed to show how useful AI is and not how incompetent they are
Yeh but the people trained ‘number’ widget went up on their numbers dashboard. Good reason for another self awarded bonus!
I used to understand what computers were for and how they worked.
