> More mundane tasks such as providing employment verification letters or moving employees between departments will likely be fully automated, Krishna said.
...and if some employees quit out of frustration about being managed by AI (being "moved between departments" at the whim of an AI sounds pretty spooky to me at least), even better!
It says "moving" employees which maybe implies voluntary, so "internal mobility" in other words which can create a lot of admin (business need, cost centres, levels, specs, visas etc etc). It'll perhaps be a while before the AI overlord runs the entire company and just moves us at it's whim and treats us all as Amazon Mechanical Turks[1] :)
I actually can't wait till I'm managed by AI. At least with an AI there's the high probability it will get better. In fact most likely it'll just be the same gradually improving system which I can converse with for the rest of my career.
Whereas with human managers who knows? Maybe they're good, maybe they're bad, it's a reset every time.
If it's trained on data human managers then it'll just burn you out and emotionally manipulate you into staying with the company longer to maximize corporate profits.
My experience is that there are lots of BS consulting jobs where I would wonder “what do these 10 people do?”
This included lots of offshoring companies, like IBM, that seemed more about filling out whatever the budget sheet given to them than actually making software or even any evidence of software (commits, issues, etc).
I expect that there are firms out there right now using ChatGPT to produce the facade of work so instead of messing around and billing 8 hours times 30 people every day, they just have a few people fiddling with prompts and checking in the generated text.
I actually think this might have the same impact but would hope that the value just goes back to the client in having employees do the AI work directly.
The joke was that behind every successful offshore project was one or two really busy onshore engineers manically covering and integrating work from the away team.
The question is, can IBM place those consultants at customers and get paid for them? Then they're definitely not "BS jobs" for IBM. They might be BS for the person interacting directly with them, yes, but I see no reason for IBM to reduce them.
I know a company that already reaches test coverage metric goals by feeding chatgpt with code that they need test for. These are tests based on mocks, running trivial things, providing little to no value to the overall codebase. But if the requirements are garbage, the delivered items will be garbage too.
Consulting jobs are largely bullshit because their main role is to be a corporate mercenary that makes up solid data supporting the direction that management wants to go. Their job is weaponizing confirmation bias.
As the length of a thread about software design increases, the probability of someone mentioning a "general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory" approaches one.
> The joke was that behind every successful offshore project was one or two really busy onshore engineers manically covering and integrating work from the away team.
To me, ChatGPT's output is indistinguishable from what I've seen offshored coders produce. Only difference is you get the results in 30 seconds in a chat window instead of overnight in a zip file emailed to you.
There are whole businesses here in America that only do rewrites for offshored projects.
> The joke was that behind every successful offshore project was one or two really busy onshore engineers manically covering and integrating work from the away team.
After getting ChatGPT to write some code for me, this could happen again except with AI instead of an outsourced team.
So far, it understands the requirements better and writes pretty good code on average. Its unit tests are pretty good too. It always requires some fixes and integration, of course.
IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. They are a very large and a former tech company that mostly coasts along on doing expensive consulting projects around me-too clones of things that other people have invented just so they can still pretend to be a tech company. So you can do things with AI, cloud, and databases with them. But they aren't really leaders in any of that for a long time. And having been exposed to some of that stuff, they aren't very good at it even but they can still get some things done. They still have lots of ancient tech from last century that they support of course. But mostly a new company starting their business today would have very little reason to engage with IBM on anything. There's very little that they do that you can't get cheaper and better elsewhere.
So, IBM using this opportunity to cut down their own org tree a bit more and "replace it with AI" (or simply drop some people) is not unexpected. Because consulting related to doing exactly that is probably what they'll be selling a lot for the next few years. Basically, as world + dog is trying to figure out how to fit AI into their businesses, consulting related to that is going to be booming. And IBM is a consulting company. A lot of their previous efforts are actually powering the backoffice of course. So now that AI is going to replace all of that, that basically means there is going to be a lot of consulting happening as to how that would work. So that's a good business opportunity.
That's a very cynical view. It might be true, but I hardly think they were just waiting for the perfect opportunity. If it made business sense before, they would've already been halting their hiring.
A lot of corporations are replacing humans jobs instead of enhancing them with new tech like what the tech gurus say during their TED talks about the benefits of X tech. Another reason to flip cars.
They've been going through cycles of doing that for many years. Their head count has dropped by about a third in the last decade. It peaked at 460K people in 2012 and they are now closer to 340K. So -120K people in ten years.
That source doesn't seem too accurate, 2020 is shown as a decrease but it's when RH was acquired, and 2021 or 2022 should have had a -90K from the Kyndryl spin off.
Also I am not sure if the 2014 decrease is also related to the formation of GlobalFoundries but I couldn't right away find news about a -80K layoff that year.
The irony of that is they are probably going to use AI services of competitors to do that despite pioneering the marketing on it for years, thus closing the loop.
There's nothing ironic about it. They invested only in the marketing of AI, but not in the serious R&D of it, pretty sure internally they never believed in their own AIs. Plus they got the publicity benefit from Watson, which is important for a consulting company.
IBM had / has an army of sales types running around trying to insert Watson into health care, always reminded me of the Dick Jones character from Robocop trying to pedal the fundamentally flawed ED-209:
"I had a guaranteed military sale with ED209! Renovation program! Spare parts for 25 years! Who cares if it worked or not!"
Such an ethically questionable decision, trying to push unproven / non-functional tech into life or death decision making.
They were trying to insert Watson into everything. I used to work at a company that worked with building management systems and we had Watson sales people all over our senior managers trying to get 'collaboration' projects going.
Not usually in this habit, but really needed to commend you bringing in not only Robocop, not just stopping with Dick Jones, but including his quote as well. This really made my day.
Signed,
A fan of Robocop as dystopic corporatocracy preview
Their in house stuff is mostly based on OSS anyway. There isn't a whole lot of IBM proprietary tech that they have to bring to the table anyway. I wouldn't be surprised to see them do some acquisitions to buy some street credibility though.
Unlike many other tech companies they provide unprecedented backwards compatibility which makes a very solid foundation for their customers... There don't do "automatic-updates" which break software like Microsoft is doing with Windows...
Keep in mind that a lot of B2B transaction use in tech is about passing responsibility and liability. Executive or director somewhere has to solve this internal problem. IBM claims they solve it and provide some degree of guarantee. You're now able to pass that problem, responsibility, and liability off by pointing to the contract and saying legal pursuit is an option. Obviously this strategy isn't great from a business perspective. If the problem is actually critical to the business function, simply having a hired scapegoat to complain and point at doesn't help you get past that problem.
If you're this massive inertial machine and the problem is to some degree artificial and a waste of internal resources but someone thinks it isn't, having someone like IBM on the hook gives credibility to the argument that they did their due diligence to solve the problem. Business at scale has a lot of childish fingerpointing. "No one ever got fired for hiring/buying IBM" as the saying goes.
You have no idea what you are talking about. IBM does more cutting edge research than the entire HN bubble combined. Hard research like materials science and semiconductors.
Consulting is less than a third of their revenue and regardless of how you feel about consulting, it seems kind of idiotic to claim that this "barely makes sense at all at this point". Are the only companies that make sense the ones that work on fad bullshit that makes the front page of HN?
I think the true thing is that IBM has ceased to be a leader in Computer Science. They used to be! But they gave that up long ago, and have resorted to various publicity stunts (e.g., remember Jeopardy?). But sure, they may be a leader in materials and semiconductors (though honestly I have no idea, that's not my space).
They have seemingly 1000 products so it's definitely not fair to apply experiences with one of those, to all of the others.
That said, I've hated the handful of IBM software products I've needed to use.
Another anecdote: I've never met a fellow developer that spoke highly of IBM. That includes the folks who used to work there.
I think it's remarkable how rare it is to meet someone that speaks highly of the company. Companies don't usually achieve such reputation without reason.
For a company that's done so much tech, and had such a huge impact on the computer industry, there are very few "true blue" IBMers who you can hold up as engineering pioneers. Tehy've always been bog-standard salesmen.
I never realized how much I hate ties until I spent 3+ years working essentially in t-shirts and jeans. Never again, outside of interviews or formal events (weddings, funerals, et al).
> Another anecdote: I've never met a fellow developer that spoke highly of IBM. That includes the folks who used to work there.
Worked with a buncha folks in the NC Research Triangle area, all former IBM. None had good things to say about the engineering culture there. Most did long stays regardless -- it's that kinda of org -- talking like 10+ years, but jumped to other companies like Red Hat (ha!), Clorox, Splunk, and Uni research after the last big shakeup.
IBM also bet the farm on AI about 10 years ago and belly-flopped. Their Watson AI suite was pretty advanced and they famously beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, but they didn't get vary far making their tools practical or profitable. And now they've just been crushed by OpenAI. I wonder if the subtext to their announcement is that they're ditching their entire AI department and buying services from OpenAI instead.
Sure, those 24 consecutive quarters of revenue decline under Rometty is an obvious indication of cutting edge. Cutting edge research on how to turn investors money into into option traders profits.
I'd point out at that Ginni Rometty was a bad CEO, but that doesn't mean that people there didn't do good research. Like, they're pretty unrelated. Research and Development is notoriously hard to commercialize. Over here in HN land, we just say that product market fit is poor or that products didn't get traction, but those are just as akin to R&D as anything.
A better model was that Rometty was not good at choosing what to fund and which bets to make. kinda a failed VC fund.
What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized? To me, that is just good research followed by bad development. No one investing in IBM is expecting it to be a public works project.
Lookup the saga of HP's memristor followed by "The Machine" for a similar story.
> What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized?
Then I guess we can throw out Xerox Parc's NLS because they never commercialized "windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor." They were commercialized by others later on.
Income and cutting edge technology are at best orthogonal to each other. Now I'm not saying that IBM has cutting edge technology, I'm just saying that a ponzi scheme that profits 24 months in a row is cutting edge under your definition.
her role crashing the company into the ground is completely omitted in her book, which has been popping up on my linkedin feed. Her gender and former title is clearly more important than what she accomplished, much like Marrisa Mayer.
It's a matter of how well they do it. They're not known for creating customer value.
> Are the only companies that make sense the ones
... who don't lay off entire arenas full of people and discuss stupid platitudes like replacing them with AI.
Pretty much. Management's messaging around this was so delusional - "replace with AI" - that it's obviously a stock play from a company desperate to cut losses, not a positive statement from a going concern.
it is possible to hire the research division, you just have to be a multi-billion dollar enterprise. They do joint research partnerships and outsourcing for large organizations to build out new technology. IBM is not very good at commercializing IP, so the partner takes on that responsibility.
This is the strange side of IBM. Very muddy and mild "normal" software engineering, and all of a sudden, top 3 (maybe top 1) Quantum Computing research.
Former IBM Research employee here (At the turn of the last century, and I did database stuff for them, not research). They spent 6 billion dollars a year on research. They had a chip fab in my building (Yorktown NY) had chemists, physicist, mathematicians... The really seemed to be struggling to try and turn that R&D into profits though.
The hot new thing at IBM was "global services" consulting. Since I left they've sold their chip business, laptop business and really doubled down on consulting..
bro, I'm not holding my breath for the next Benoit Mandelbrot to come out of today's IBM. The comment above might have been hyperbolic, sure, but IBM isn't the omnipresent Goliath it once was. Maybe it's for us older folks that the comparison rings more true.
IBM is a bunch of businesses, some of which still likely make sense -- their mainframe hardware line (S/360 successors, currently branded as z/System), and associated products, are still actively developed, and very likely profitable, considered on their own. But that may not be enough to carry the rest of the business.
It was always the case that IBM stuff was way overpriced compared to alternatives but a senior manager who bought it could rest easy, knowing that if he called and complained, they'd be right on it. Even 10 years in the future, they'd be right on it.
That's worth something to some people, who really don't give a shit about technology and just want the problem solved.
Not to me but to the company/institution and all its users. Of course the person who arranged it doesn't care because they are in a situation where they are immune to those particular consequences. e.g. they never use the system and nor do any of their senior managers so they can dismiss all complaints and report on how much money they saved.
If one innocently wants to do what's right for the institution, the shareholders or the taxpayers, one has to care. Its usually a tactical mistake to care of course - people who don't have a lot more freedom of action.
IBM’s MO now, especially for the Global Services arm, is Dazzle Them With Bullshit.
They come up with solutions so baroque that it’s exhausting even to hear them talk about it. So you just hire more IGS people to take care of the problems they created. It’s a racket, based on them literally not making sense.
IBM is a company in the same way Hawaii is a state. There's a lot of great of stuff going on, most of it is done "at the other island" and a lot of the stuff will be consumed by a live volcano without anyone really noticing.
> IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point.
I started my career at IBM in the 1980s. My dad worked there before me.
It's impossible to convey how much hubris existed in the company then, at the peak of the "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" days. IBM was a god.
The company had never laid off a single employee. The talk was that the R&D divisions had multiple generations of innovative tech up their sleeves and if any competitor ever got close, well they'd just pop something out like from a vending machine to kick their ass. I believed it.
It became obvious when the company started losing the PC market that things weren't actually that rosey at all, and there were serious issues.
Later it became obvious that the company was turning into a consulting company instead of a technology company and the glory days were well over.
Nothing's changed since then. Things have only gone from bad from worse for IBM.
My point - nothing really but disagreement with this observation.
IBM still makes sense, as a dying beast but with customers that can still be milked. As long as those customers can be mikled, IBM will continue to make sense.
> The talk was that the R&D divisions had multiple generations of innovative tech up their sleeves and if any competitor ever got close, well they'd just pop something out like from a vending machine to kick their ass.
It's amazing that this story just keeps popping up over and over. People also said this about Intel (nope, 10nm was a total wash and during that time AMD and ARM started eating their lunch) and Google (no, there is no secret Google lab with the "good AI", it's just Bard and it sucks compared to GPT-4).
I think parent comment was talking about Lemoine, who never claimed the AI was dangerous, but rather that it was sentient and not being given the rights it deserved.
Strangely I think they would have saved face better if they said "we are letting 7800 people go due to poor business practices" rather than some BS line about LLMs being ready to replace humans.
IBM hasn't been making logical decissions recently (past decade or so) and this fits the pattern. It's actually rather embarassing they even mention the term AI considering they've been playing with it for a while and nothing came out of it. They should stick to low quality consulting and call it a day.
Nah, you have to look at this from the perspective of IBM's target customers. A bunch of Fortune 500 execs who can barely use a computer are going to see this and say "That's brilliant! Can you do the same thing for us?"
I won't comment on whether this is good or even workable idea, but I will acknowledge this announcement is kinda genius.
Playing into fears about AI replacing large segments of the labour force in the coming years invites calls for regulators to slow down their competition. While at the same time this announcement makes investors happy because IBM is signalling that they're looking to both cut costs and embrace AI.
This assumes that IBM is not serious about trying to replace jobs, but is trying to make a strategic 3D chess move. I'm very skeptical that this is the case.
But, let's say it is. It might play well with investors, but the idea that it's going to spur regulation or legislation to slow down AI development seems optimistic at best. That assumes a government and elected officials who are looking out for workers and not the investors who are going to be giddy about this.
In the U.S., at least, government has been actively trying to suppress wages and maintain higher levels of unemployment. Why would this spur any action to slow down AI?
I would note that IBM is like 80% middle management. At this scale, one could easily make an AI tool that generates powerpoint presentations from an email, present it to a different AI that can create an email with the bullet points that can then be read by another AI...
This is like how Kodak pivoted to crypto. It's chasing a short term stock market bump at the cost of being absolutely bollocks. Or maybe I'm being unfair and they're smarter and actually this is just a ruse to avoid more lawsuits for age discrimination in their firing practices. Either way, it's more of a sign that IBM is in trouble than AI is really breaking through.
AI will not replace humans. IBM's CEOs and managers will replace humans with AI. Shareholders will force IBM to replace humans with AI. Let us stop blaming the only thing that is _not_ making any decision.
Capitalism is a powerful idea that will kill the same people that vouch for it.
This makes as much sense as “guns don’t kill people, people do.”
AI tech is being driven by capitalism. The reason companies are so eager to embrace it is to replace people. If you’re in the AI business or advocating for it, you’re (at least in part) an arms supplier for cutting jobs.
Remember when IBM was claiming all kinds of imminent breakthroughs in healthcare via their Watson AI project? Sad that they have to now resort to digital outsourcing to pump the stock price.
>Krishna said in an interview he believes around 30% of about 26,000 non-customer-facing positions, like human resources jobs, could be replaced by AI over a five-year period—amounting to about 7,800 lost jobs. HR duties like documenting employee moves to different departments and writing employment verification letters will likely be among the first rolled over to AI, Krishna told Bloomberg. Jobs focused on interacting with customers and developing software at the 260,000-worker strong company should not be impacted in coming years, according to Krishna.
Starkly reminiscent of blockchain. Many "blockchain problems" were really just software problems. Coincidentally, IBM also went all-in on blockchain before quietly abandoning it sometime last year.
This is just using the AI hype as cover to not get slammed by the markets. If they came out and said "We are pausing hiring..." the markets would rightly be like "Man they are screwed..."
Expect to see more of this from zombie companies in the future, as long as they spend $20/mo on a ChatGPT subscription somewhere they are probably not violating SEC disclosures either.
Yep if you read what the CEO said the quote was that they "could" replace workers with AI over five years and as the tech improves. That's just pure speculation and bullshitting, like when Elon said Tesla cars will be fully self driving vehicles in five years. It's market pumping talk from a company with a vested interest in selling "AI" to enterprises.
I mean, are they wrong? Elon promised coast-to-coast summoning in 2016 with a time horizon of two years! there were supposed to be a million telsa robotaxis by the end of 2020!
Like, putting aside everything else, it had to have been very obvious internally that neither of those goals were plausible in that timeframe without miracles happening.
Yep was at a small startup and the owner insisted we go with IBM, over the protest of everyone. Months of work and we got infrastructure moved over. Only to find out the stack we were sold on was being sunset.
Owner insisted we move to the new stack. Month later we were on new stack. This happened twice more.
IBM is a public company, doesn't that mean they have to give some details to shareholders? I would hope so, this is a big ambitious plan, I hope they have to present an actual plan somewhere. You can't just say stuff, right?
> If they came out and said "We are pausing hiring..." the markets would rightly be like "Man they are screwed..."
This hasn't been the case with the ongoing tech layoffs though? Investors for the most part congratulate these companies for diligently cutting costs in preparation of a recession.
That is the case for companies that overhired during the bull market. IBM, on the other hand, has been losing employee counts steadily for over a decade.
If a company that people are expecting to be losing relevance does a layoff, it’s still not a good sign.
I know they got rid of OS's and laptops a while back; I assume they don't make or service mainframes/minicomputers anymore. Do they do any software/hardware development, or is it all consulting?
Through their various acquisitions over the years they are basically now a "Big 4" consulting Co with a name we typically don't associate with that industry
IBM has acquired Red Hat, UStream, Alchemy, Cloudant, SoftLayer, Vivisimo, Blekko, and a lot of other companies. They have, in fact, almost everything needed to build anything the FAANG companies are building.
The missing pieces (in my subjective opinion) are: (1) happy AND talented employees and (2) a rapid execution culture.
You mean they acquired a bunch of infrastructure stuff, but no consumer products (unless you count failed blekko). That's not a fair match for anything that FAANG companies are building.
They do have consumer products too, but by and large, yes. And a lot of consulting-oriented stuff too.
I was making the point that they have a solid platform available to build almost anything the FAANG companies have. Of course, they will have to build them. For that, they need to hire great engineers and they need to retain and keep them happy.
(Quick note: Traction is a whole different ballgame, but there are companies who gained initial traction through the customers of their business clients. In IBM's case, that is almost every major government agency and Fortune 500 businesses.)
But the market has actually rewarded companies pausing hiring and doing layoffs. In other words, if company is saving money by reducing fixed salary costs, market appreciates that move.
IBM felt to me like the last holdout of the shiny shoed salesmen when I briefly worked for them. Before the internet and big tech companies with leaders who were theoretically technical there were the companies dominated by salesmen because selling was the critical part.
I imagine that getting a board to spend a lot of money on some project is hard and you need the support of the kind of people that can influence board members.
So to get your project past a lot of people who basically don't respect or believe in nerds you had to hire a company with non-nerdy salesmen to back you up.
i.e. the entire thing is social. And just because the nerds (us) have trounced them for the last N years, it doesn't mean that the world has converted into 100% nerd. Shiny shoed salesmen are probably still quite necessary.
I joined as part of an acquisition. I am probably biased but they spent a year making the product multilingual and not fixing anything. Everyone knows the name of the Open Source knock-off of that product but not the name of the product anymore. It's probably still there taking almost no investment of effort.
So I got the impression that IBM is a company where software goes to live out its old age and die. I think of Redhat (perhaps unfairly) with their super complicated Linux distribution which must be a nightmare to maintain because it does so many things and needs to keep long compatibility guarantees. I'm not expecting any innovation whatsoever from them. Perhaps this is very unfair and ignorant of me. I'm happy to be corrected.
The salesmen have adapted to a new style with smart casual clothes. They have a new vocabulary and perhaps ride mountain bikes instead of playing golf.
They still mock technical knowledge by wading around in a new sea of acronyms which they don't truly understand or care about. Think of the CEO of a company that makes a build system - every 10th word at one point in time might have been "CD" which means Continuous Delivery which is something his own company never did. But it's the most important thing in the world for that year or two and lots of sententious things are said about it without any connection to the possibility of "walking the walk" to use one of their favorite and least honest terms.
As a technical person one listens to them and wonders what planet they came from and how they could possibly have any connection with the reality of the business they're supposed to be running. But... they're salesmen and have sold themselves as the first product. They know what impresses non-technical people and it isn't the plain honest truth.
I think it boils down to some facts: we have it better than it has been for a long time but there are real situations where one must be a master of bullshit and have the ability to appear supremely confident and all-knowing whilst actually knowing very little. This confidence founded on nothing transmits itself to other people. If you are lucky and appear to be a winner or if you can hide your mistakes and advertise your success then people will take your lead or offer you opportunities.
I am more of a Debian/Ubuntu guy, but it is indeed unfair to call RedHat's distribution super complicated. RHEL is not that difficult to maintain. CentOS was the default OS used by many hosting companies in the past, before technology changes occurred. It was fairly easy to maintain.
Agree with you that many of the salesman are typically technology-agnostic [I use the term "agnostic" in the sense it is used to define religious belief :) ]. They have capable technical guys supporting the salesmen, though.
I use Artix now - love it because it is so easy to make packages or at least update one that you need to update for some reason. RPMs are super super difficult much of the time.
I think the most horrible bit is selinux - that really upped the level of difficulty a lot. I'm also really fed up with Fedora's frequent releases - so hard to keep your machine current because upgrading usually only works properly once or twice and then you need to do a reinstall. That might be harsh - maybe 3 times but you still end up having to do it or lose updates.
For me this feels liked they've reached a peak of complexity. Now there are flatpacks and other things to torture us with and it's obviously not just them.
I found something that suits me at last and am typing to you from it now. Rolling updates so I NEVER have to do a full upgrade - it's so liberating. I can make choices like not having systemd - I use dinit and it's fine. Development packages are always installed so I want to build something from source and I never have to worry about whether the header files I need are there.
So far I cannot find a negative. OK it was a nuisance to make pipewire start automatically and I probably haven't done it right yet - not good for any new users - but that's it.
The most horrible bit about Microsoft is that pesky release of new mandated security features! My windows 7 has everything just the way I like it /s
your characterization of red hat makes sense from where it sounds like you’re coming from but you miss the mark a bit I feel
RHEL isn’t meant for the everyday developer and red hat does a lousy job enabling them. Ubuntu and Debian do a much better job as is proven by the wide availability of developer tools on Ubuntu/Debian.
But look at the enterprise software market share, of which red hat focuses on entirely — canonical has a sub 5% market share for enterprise Linux or something pathetic along those lines while RHEL is over 85% or something close. Canonical has done the opposite by catering to workstations and developers and have done exquisite things with their workstations but their real enterprise servers suck.
SElinux isn’t meant to just run static on your box while you’re using it to everyday browse or develop that’d be brutal. It’s meant to secure an application or files with predefined egress based on business logic.
Now on the other hand, fedora— it’s upstream my man. Frequent releases is… the point? it’s community based upstream development if you’re looking for the latest features it’s perfect but you’re also getting the latest bugs.
Ubuntu sounds appropriate for you! That doesn’t mean RHEL or fedora “has reached peak complexity”
If you wanted RHEL or Cent/Rocky/Alma:
- disable selinux on your home or personal workstation. you can get granular with how to do it too if you choose.
- automate your patching it takes 5 minutes one time
- if you want RHEL benefits with Fedora-adjacent (but not as buggy) releases you’re describing what is now CentOS Stream which is also a rolling-release distro
I felt similar to you last year but my company uses RHEL and we just did some worth while quick training. When explained in ways that make sense, it makes sense. Unfortunately I think red hat has been lackluster several times over on how to say what I just said
Sure, if you're looking to write some commercial application you don't want to recompile it twice a week and then you go for something stable with compatibility guarantees like RedHat. Plus it's a big company and it fixes security bugs and you can probably get some kind of guaranteed support (never bought it but I expect it's true).
I think the whole purpose of RedHat in a way (and of Ubuntu LTS) is the limiting of change.
If you WANT change though, Fedora doesn't compare well to rolling distributions IMO. It has lots of updates but with lots of inconvenience. Rolling distributions just take change continuously forever - there's never a discontinuity so they're very easy to use.
IBM is known for its marketing BS over “AI” (see the previous fiasco surrounding the trail of unfulfilled hype with Watson) but this one really takes the cake.
IBM has long been struggling. They could release a press release saying they’re pausing hiring because businesses are underperforming. Or they could play the news cycle and say it’s because of how awesome their “AI” is. Interpret that as you wish.
I see this as a sales pitch for consulting, they want people to hire them to transform their companies from overseas outsourcing to AI outsourcing. Doing it to themselves first serves as a case study.
I am sad J. G. Ballard is no longer with us to comment on IBM's plan.
IBM is replacing humans, who can identify an exceptional events which weren't anticipated by planners, with AI, which only regurgitates past training data.
I'm sort of imagining IBM human resources department now as some hellish mashup of Ionesco, Nietzsche and Ballard (with a piquant dollop of THX 1138 to provide that absurdist, institutionalized aroma IBM seemed to love.)
At least the TVA was smart enough to recruit biological entities to run it's bureaucracy.
Hmm, all my experiences with the old, more-human IBM (randomly powering off VMs, randomly breaking the UI for cloud admin, etc.) have been pretty much Kafka all the way, so maybe this will be an improvement (though not for the 8K employees who will be replaced).
I can only talk to my experience at IBM on-and-off from '89 through '94. There were many things wrong with IBM, but at least through '94, internal processes were fairly solid. Compare that to my current firm, where we wasted three days of employee time trying to figure out how to get Workday to properly render the text area I was supposed to use to provide employee evaluations. (This doesn't include the days it took to find someone in HR who understood what Workday was and had an idea who in the company managed it. It turns out that employees are given access roles in Workday (not really a bad idea) but our humans didn't understand that only people with specific roles could create surveys with form elements regular users could fill in. We apparently fired the people who knew that during the last round of layoffs.)
As has been posted in a few submissions today (including one of my own) - Chegg stock lost half its value today after announcing how ChatGPT is affecting its business. Pearson stock tanked today too. Meanwhile Nvidia stock hit its 365 day high yesterday.
obviously AI is moving quickly, but every mainstream news article about AI is incredibly gullible. Good time to be the Simpsons monorail salesman but for AI.
Wow. Finally, Watson can replace the ppl. you get in the first five levels of phone support for hardware. Then again, they could be outsourcing it to Amazon.
From what I've read/heard from others, if they try and replace those people with Watson-based AI, they'll need to hire another 10,000 consultants to try and implement it.
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