________, yellowcake@awful.systems

The major shift of not needing SaaS middleman products because AI can spin them up instantly at scale never happened. Instead we see lay-offs to pay for AI tokens while quality plummets and services offered do not increase.

Bunch of missing stops and unlabeled dots on the green lines. Even with MBTA green line projects this is wrong. Boston metro is full of turbo transit nerds who argue nightly at breweries about how to build a proper spoke-hub model for the T so these clowns could have popped into any of the many local establishments and had about a dozen experts chime in to volunteer help. But of course AI is used by the non-experts because if they do not know it already then that means no one knows it.

Wasn’t there also a local celebrity MBTA expert on a reality dating show too? Cmon MA officials, do better.

Sold to private equity a few years ago and then purchased by Sony most recently

The slop startup dubs this “Audience Intelligence” and claims pixar experience. There are two “interactive movies” by them, Pickford AI. No employee there should even consider themselves adjacent to artists.

Alamo Drafthouse built a reputation on strict viewing rules to provide a pleasant immersive experience at their theaters.

All of that is gone. They switched to you using your own phone to order food/drink so people are on the phones more often than a regular theater. And now they are doing AI “audience immersive presentations” where the audience remains on their phone to submit prompt garbage to AI generate dumb movies.

Support your local theater. This chain got too much love the last decade. Being in the northeast we only recently got an Alamo but plenty of small local theaters exist in and around the city (brattle, coolidge, west newton all if you are in Boston).

unfortunately AI tools do exist in the company and there are some expectations of use on some teams but it varies depending where in the product you work. anything OS, kernel, bootloaders, filesystem, etc is a strict no AI policy. All the front end teams seem to use something sparingly, couldnt tell you what it is or why.

without revealing too much personal info, companies like mine aren’t too hard to find but they tend to be somewhat old school. Lots of C programming, some assembly, and digging into the guts of stuff. Anyone doing firmware, infrastructure (like all the big storage guys), or even some of the trading world is highly sensitive to genAI tools because of the risk. Especially if you ship a box rather than some fully cloud connected always updating app. The companies may even say they do something with or about AI then you talk to the loader or kernel team and they will say “absolutely not”. I cannot tell you over the years across a few jobs how often I hear management lamenting how we can never fill recs because we need actual C people or someone not afraid of a terminal debugger. And two of these shops are hugely popular in the tech world. Hope these hints help

sorry to thread hijack but I have been trying to hire software devs and during interview process we reveal our zero-AI policy for the product codebase (corporate allows it for “debug tooling” in limited amounts). weirdly many candidates are disappointed to hear this and unwilling to proceed.

in a way we find it refreshing because we want to hire folks that know and learn things. but it is wild how many have expectations to set up an ide day one and it start churning out patches

cobol is old and scary, so a chat bot spitting out cobol that someone without grey hair cant fully comprehend is enough for them to deem it fully automated and defeat of the dinosaur. reality you are right, it wont move the needle.