On one hand, you’re right.

On the other hand, you’re missing the point.

Jobs aren’t the the goal of life. People need to remember that. Our current system of distributing resources is broken if we don’t have enough jobs, but we could change the system rather than forcing everyone to work when it’s not needed.

British Columbia, $0.12 canadian dollars for Tier1 rates

The simple answer is most desktop PCs will not come even close to that at idle. Even just having a few case fans may draw more than that, without involving the CPU at all.

Laptop devices can do that in some cases with their extra power management features.

That being said, do the math to see if it matters. The difference between 10w and 40w is 0.7kwh per day, at least where I live that’s about 7 cents or about $25 per year.

In my case it would be more expensive to purchase a dedicated low power device than it will save me in 4-5 years compared to just using something I already have laying around.

I mean, the same could have been said for computers when they first came out. Most people had no idea how to improve their workflow by using one, and only as training and new software was developed did it manage to get reproducible results across the population.

The AI companies are definitely a bit ahead of where they should be right now, these last couple of years have happened too quickly for people to adapt their thinking.

There are specialists (myself included) that are implementing some absolutely transformational automations using these things. That being said, my job for the last 15 years has been automating and streamlining business processes, so this is just an extra tool in my kit to boost those automations to new levels.

I built a simple one the other day using a basic prompt integrated into an existing longer work automation process that’s probably going to eliminate an entire FTE worth of admin work for that task, and it only took about 3 hours to implement.

The question then becomes, are the remaining staff on this task “using” co-pilot because the process they support has it integrated? They’re not typing or pasting things into co-pilot themselves, they’re not developing prompts, but if you removed it, the workload would go up.

If you had to re-invent everything that came before you, there would never be any progress.

Humans achieve progress by learning from other humans.

I actually learned O notation from an interview question for a job I applied for, I’d never actually had a program run too slowly before that.

Repetition doesn’t improve programming in many situations. Even when you get stuck. I could write a bunch of nested if statements every single day, and If they work, I wouldn’t get stuck and ever learn that there can be better ways to do it in many cases.

Especially for people like me, who self-learned and didn’t take any courses, I simply don’t know what I don’t know.

Everything from O notation to Object oriented programming is abstract in a way that you can’t accidentally learn it. I had to find these concepts and learn them, and not because I got stuck.

Companies and workers are both scared of these systems, trying to figure them out, and yet completely uneducated on how to use them.

If you want to sell it at $30 a seat, you need to teach every single seat how to make $30 or more in gains a month by using it.

And a 1 hour lunch and learn isn’t going to fix that.

These systems shouldn’t be priced per seat, and regular users shouldn’t be doing almost anything with them until they get trained.

I have a couple Tapo cameras set up with HA, I had to use the tapo app initially to set up but once they’re set up you can ditch it and run the system entirely locally. I saw someone had a way to configure them locally too, but it wasn’t simple enough for me to bother and I was fine with the one time step.

… What?

Did you forget your /s tag

If that’s all you want to do, one of the cheaper Ubiquiti managed gateways would probably work and not break the bank.

If you want to tinker even harder, an open source router running https://openwrt.org/ (or even their own device) may be a good option.

the difference between unqualified and exceptionally unqualified means very little, neither of them can accomplish their basic tasks.

This is exactly how most developers are being asked to use it, it’s literally how most of the IDE integrations work.

The vast majority of people are unqualified individuals.

If the AI is writing ALL the code for an entire application it would be a problem, but as an assistant to a programmer, if it spits out a single line or even a small function, you can read it over very quickly to validate it before moving on to the next component.

Why?

You aren’t going to find a useful AI system for personal use in Finance, you simply don’t have the scale needed to benefit from it. You don’t make enough transactions per month that looking over it yourself is going to be any slower than reading the AI summary.

The question as with most process optimization and data analysis is, what’s the actual result you’re hoping for? If you want it to be able to summarize WALMART, WAL-MART and WMART so you can see those numbers added together, you already know you spent a lot at Walmart. Whare are you going to actually do with that information?

Saving money doesn’t really need an AI, there really aren’t many ways to cut budgets down short of paying attention to the most obvious spending problems (Too much housing, too much vehicle, too much food (especially eating out), and too much entertainment(too many subscription platforms))

It’s usually a far better investment of time to improve your earning power (upskill, change jobs, add hours, etc.)

Cutting $40 per month from your budget by not going to the movies every week just isn’t going to have the impact you need in your life.

Our ERP system that is used for Vacation entry doesn’t have that, it wants start date, end date, hours, and vacation type code. We have a small number of employees who work on stat holidays, so defaulting to all users needing that wouldn’t even work.

The LLM fix is cheap as shit compared to buying an entirely new system. It costs less than half a cent per submission. The power use for a single query is nothing, and this request isn’t some crazy agentic thing that’s using a million tokens or anything, more like 500-1000 tokens combined input and output.

Normally I’d agree, and we used some of that in the original form (like maximum hours, checking for negative submissions, etc.) but requests don’t always follow simple logic and more complex logic just led to failures every time a user did something other than take a standard full day off.

Some employees work 7 hours, while others are 7.5, some have flex days and hours that change that, sometimes requests are only for part days, sometimes they may use multiple leave types to cover one off period.

I spent a few hours writing and testing the prompt against previous submissions to fine tune it.

So far it’s detected every submission error in the two weeks it’s been running, with only one false positive.

I just implemented an LLM in a vacation request process precisely because the employees are stupid as fuck.

We were getting like 10% of requests coming in with the wrong number of hours requested because people can’t fucking count properly, or understand that you do not need to use vacation hours for statutory holidays. This is despite the form having a calculator and also showing in bright red any stat holidays inside the dates of the request.

Now the LLM checks if the dates, hours, and note from the employee add up to something reasonable. If not it goes to a human to review. We just had a human reviewing every single request before this, because it was causing so many issues, an hour or two each week.