A small, quiet life

Re. Are these people tactical or are they idiots?

There is a lot of good stuff in "Are these people tactical or are they idiots?" so do read that first.

From the outside, scared appears to a big one--the ostracised coworker is being shunned in order to bring everyone else in line, as much as for what he said, as that's how that kind of thing works--although yes, there are a certain number of people who will just go along with anything and not stop to actually think about consequences. (Tactical, I will leave up to people more qualified to answer.)

I'd also add a fourth consideration, which is that we are still in process of documenting the repercussions from how multiple covid infections affect the human body. We are only six years into this virus. That's not a lot of time, in the grand scheme of things, and while we've done a lot of fucking around, the finding out is a long and complicated process. Especially when brain fog is a unique result of covid vs flu infections. If you take millions of people newly disabled with brain fog and give them a way to outsource their thinking? When they're also scared for their livelihoods in this fucked up economy? In a time when the surveillance state and fascism have many people being really damn careful to not draw attention to themselves?

It's a long-simmering soup that will poison a lot of things, I suspect.

Anyway. A company my workplace does business with has gone all-in on genAI and it's entirely noticeable from the outside that their customer service is getting worse. Like, 'clearly didn't bother to test the thing that many, many people documented on their own dang listserv, but then close the tickets anyway' levels of incompetent. They're forcing us into genAI "features" that we absolutely do not want, and that make our work more time consuming because of all the checks that have to be performed. I'm starting to be concerned about the long-term functionality of the product--which is absolutely foundational. Like, we can't operate without it. We're starting to look at replacements. It's expensive and we're facing budget cuts, but they aren't helping their own case.

#genAI #response #work