I got a call from someone I don't know.
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
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@stefano I don't know, feels like the +500 is punishment for reaching to AI instead of a person, and you chose that instead as a teaching moment of "don't trust AIs ever again".
I know lots of non computering people who use AI for one reason or another, and I don't scold them, but I take every opportunity to try to teach them. Last Sunday I explained some issues about AI data centers, and the people honestly didn't know. The one that asked most questions said themselves were "a total ignorant".
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@mdione no punishment at all. If you call me and say "I need to upgrade my server", it's one thing. If you call me and say "my server isn't working, not booting anymore, I do not have any backups, I don't know what happens", I need to investigate first.
I'm not punishing anyone, but you can't expect to call me and fix it in 10 minutes, offering a coffee as a payment.
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@stefano ah, so your prices are like that, the way you put it in the toot sounded like "the same you already spent in IA plus the hours of work".
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@mdione No, prices aren't like that. They may vary. In this specific situation, considering what they told me, I was quite sure it was going to be a complicated task. So that's why I kept myself higher than usual.
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@stefano yeah, maybe... TBH I don't do freelancing; I have done some in the past, but not as my main income. OTOH, I once recovered a partition table for free (I even wrote about it; it's part of my CV :) because it was interesting to do, I knew the person, and their PhD depended on it. I never took into account if it was their fault or not (it wasn't).
But again, not my breadwinner. And you seem fine with not taking jobs.
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