I have a business. Sometimes I buy things on Amazon. At tax time, I search for the big business items and categorize them in QuickBooks until I give up.
You know who doesn't give up? Claude, who doesn't seem to realize how shitty and slow QuickBooks Online is. It's even happy to click 19 times to do a split because I dared to add a router and shampoo to the same Amazon cart in a weak moment of convenience one night back in February 2025.
Some so-called skills are worth letting atrophy. Whatever I used to do with a janky browser plugin and two monitors full of Excel windows at tax time is one of them.
> Whatever I used to do with a janky browser plugin and two monitors full of Excel windows at tax time is one of them.
Yeah the amount of time the taxman has wasted in my life is beyond belief. I automated a lot of it myself over the years but now having the help of LLMs to fill the bullshit, pointless, Brazilian (the movie, not the country) crap to please mister taxman is a godsend.
What I think this was intended to say was that a lot of nonsense work can be done by AI, so let’s eliminate the nonsense work. Valid, but consider that you may be protected too by the amount of paperwork it takes to hurt someone.
> this was intended to say was that a lot of nonsense work can be done by AI, so let’s eliminate the nonsense work
I'm not sure this makes sense, since there is no getting away from "nonsense work", which is shorthand for low value return on time and cognitive overhead.
I understood the post to mean something different...with my own added context.
The digital age has increased the complexity of life and various processes by orders of magnitude. Programming is at the forefront, having had to deal with implementation for decades. The complexity necessarily grows every day, as the easiest problems are solved first, before tackling more nuanced or difficult ones (very different). Understanding how to identify these, track the tradeoffs, and choose specialized approaches, grows in every vertical. There are many subjects that a person can study for their entire life and not fully comprehend the totality. We have been living in a time where specialists must be increasingly specialized, for decades, due to the breadth of human knowledge and social progress.
One of the best ways to deal with this complexity, has been to be smarter. Have a better memory. Have high cognitive function. This leaves an ever-growing amount of the population in uncertainty. Families all have (or had) a "smart" resource they tapped to answer the tough questions and find paths through seemingly-intractable legalities, kafka-esque bureaucracy, medical emergency, financial advice, et al. AI has given many of the less-gifted (the majority of the population) a "wise" resource that seems to be informed enough to provide solutions and even offer opinions that can be reasoned, for some value of "reason". AI has also granted easily accessible automation. This will make the situation worse. A form of specialized logical processor would have been necessary at some point (mentat or AI). It came earlier than many expected, but this is the form and it's here now.
instead of me using my brain to figure out the web of emails and contacts for an integration project, I can connect [AI] to my email inbox and say "who the fuck do I need to talk to to get an answer for where this project is”
Huh? What kind of project are you working on where you don’t even know who you’re working with?
I have a business. Sometimes I buy things on Amazon. At tax time, I search for the big business items and categorize them in QuickBooks until I give up.
You know who doesn't give up? Claude, who doesn't seem to realize how shitty and slow QuickBooks Online is. It's even happy to click 19 times to do a split because I dared to add a router and shampoo to the same Amazon cart in a weak moment of convenience one night back in February 2025.
Some so-called skills are worth letting atrophy. Whatever I used to do with a janky browser plugin and two monitors full of Excel windows at tax time is one of them.
AI's superpower might be it's ability to serve as versatile and easy to use interface on top of systems with terrible UI, inconsistent data, etc.
> on top of systems with terrible UI, inconsistent data, etc.
Like dating, marketing, politics, war, etc. That's what I'm afraid of.
> Whatever I used to do with a janky browser plugin and two monitors full of Excel windows at tax time is one of them.
Yeah the amount of time the taxman has wasted in my life is beyond belief. I automated a lot of it myself over the years but now having the help of LLMs to fill the bullshit, pointless, Brazilian (the movie, not the country) crap to please mister taxman is a godsend.
What I think this was intended to say was that a lot of nonsense work can be done by AI, so let’s eliminate the nonsense work. Valid, but consider that you may be protected too by the amount of paperwork it takes to hurt someone.
> this was intended to say was that a lot of nonsense work can be done by AI, so let’s eliminate the nonsense work
I'm not sure this makes sense, since there is no getting away from "nonsense work", which is shorthand for low value return on time and cognitive overhead.
I understood the post to mean something different...with my own added context.
The digital age has increased the complexity of life and various processes by orders of magnitude. Programming is at the forefront, having had to deal with implementation for decades. The complexity necessarily grows every day, as the easiest problems are solved first, before tackling more nuanced or difficult ones (very different). Understanding how to identify these, track the tradeoffs, and choose specialized approaches, grows in every vertical. There are many subjects that a person can study for their entire life and not fully comprehend the totality. We have been living in a time where specialists must be increasingly specialized, for decades, due to the breadth of human knowledge and social progress.
One of the best ways to deal with this complexity, has been to be smarter. Have a better memory. Have high cognitive function. This leaves an ever-growing amount of the population in uncertainty. Families all have (or had) a "smart" resource they tapped to answer the tough questions and find paths through seemingly-intractable legalities, kafka-esque bureaucracy, medical emergency, financial advice, et al. AI has given many of the less-gifted (the majority of the population) a "wise" resource that seems to be informed enough to provide solutions and even offer opinions that can be reasoned, for some value of "reason". AI has also granted easily accessible automation. This will make the situation worse. A form of specialized logical processor would have been necessary at some point (mentat or AI). It came earlier than many expected, but this is the form and it's here now.
> I look at Apple crushing decade old bugs and technical debt
Specifics on this? There is zero evidence of this.