This is my first post for my new site - and the site is going to enter the world the same way I did → whining and yelling vaguely about my general discomfort with reality.

I've noticed something at my current work place (REDACTED), which was also especially prevalent at my previous work place (Microsoft). It was most prevalent at my 'work' before that (U.S.M.C.).
When I joined here, even as a senior engineer - I underwent the common tech ritual of the small, localized bugfix as your Hello-World.
I was strongly encouraged to use the latest and greatest A.I. model to tackle this daunting one-line change in HCL. The company had paid for it - and it shouldn't be wasted.

I got my environment configured and got the stochastic parrot up and running in my editor - and fed it my problem. The solution was pretty obvious, so it was a good sanity test for my newest programming buddy.
It failed.
Lucky for me, it had output its 'train of thought', so I could see WHY it had failed.
I could see the little "Thought for 1s" output above its 'reasoning' printout. I laughed. Sounds about right.

At Microsoft, after the senior leadership went all-in on A.I. and started laying everyone off (coincidentally when I started interviewing and planning my exit), I noticed this loop.
PMs, managers, or senior devs would sit down and ask A.I. to generate work items in ADO.
Devs would sit down, grab the work item, pass it to Copilot, and generate diffs.
They'd push the diff, and another team member would ask their own agent to review it.
Eventually, it would pass through whatever pipelines had been built, and make it out into production. Neat.

At the end of the 'Connect' (performance review) cycle (6 months at Microsoft), devs would ask the A.I. to summarize their accomplishments → all those A.I. generated PRs that had passed their A.I. generated review processes.
A.I. would generate a list of bullet points. Dev sends it to their manager. The manager asks A.I. to summarize the generated list, and generate feedback/guidance based on performance and vibes.
The Dev would get the feedback and - you guessed it, generate some sort of response to thank the manager for their time. And so on.
It continued this way up until I found a new place to work. Everyone being dramatically overpaid to prompt the latest model to generate some output that others could prompt the latest model to generate some response to.
For code. For Teams (yuck) messages. For business critical feedback. For high severity incidents. Didn't matter. Everything.

During my enlistment in the Marines, I got to taste a lot of different kinds of sand. My least favorite flavor was whatever mix they have going in Iraq.
We would do all kinds of things that would kick up sand.
Sometimes Da'esh would fire these improvised rockets and mortars toward the little collection of CHUs and drone 'hangars' we called a base (called Camp Havoc for more than one reason). They'd use fence posts for rails and never managed to hit anything but the DFAC, which was the largest building around. Usually whatever they fired would just land in the big No Man's Land around the base, which was like a donut (Camp Havoc being the donut hole, I guess).
This was especially annoying, because - for the uninitiated - the DFAC is the Dining Facility. The only place that didn't suck on the whole base - possibly in the entire Al Anbar AO. That's where we kept the RipIts.
Naturally, the DFAC taking indirect fire semi-monthly meant we were all hoarding as many RipIts as we could before it got closed again, sometimes with hilarious consequences - but those are stories for another time.
No, what this improvised rocket and mortar nonsense really meant, was that we'd be obligated to return fire in a similar fashion.
Sometimes there would be drone strikes from the guys at Shadow Hawk, which I won't get into. More often, though, the artillery guys would start firing paladins into No Man's Land as well. It was noisy, but rarely did it actually accomplish anything.
At that point in my Marine Corps career, I was in my 'salty lance corporal' phase, and would complain to whichever other junior enlisted were unlucky enough to be around about how noisy and wasteful it was.
"They come out here every week or so and fire off a bunch of bullshit at no one, knowing it won't do a damn thing to us or the base here. Then we spin up these giant guns and fire back, knowing they'll be gone way before the arty guys even make it out of their fucking rack."
We were doing all this bullshit for no reason. They'd do their little part of the dance. Then we'd do ours. All to such little effect.

I know I'm supposed to have a point here. And I kind of do.
There's less sand at my new job (not none) - but the bullshit feels the same. Both positions have me as part of some byzantine, kafkaesque machine where the rituals matter more than the outcomes.
We spend a ton of money, time, effort, and other resources to go through these little motions of ritual waste. My AI talks to your AI, my missiles fire into no-mans-land after your missiles. Everyone nods, everyone gets paid, and we do it again the next day. We are wasting billions (probably trillions) of dollars - whether that's AI or artillery - to damage the Earth and make it a worse place to live for everyone. All in this weird, perfunctory, culturally-accepted(?) way that no one (with the authority to meaningfully change things) seems to give a shit about.

I'm supposed to have some call to action here, I guess. It's the end of the thing. But I got nothing. I was laughing when I started writing this, but the more I wrote the less I laughed. I won't get all defeatist and say things can't change or we can't change them - but I do wish that anyone 'in charge' had Thought for 1s.

/endrant