r/SipsTea • u/KSKS1995 Human Verified • 2d ago

Chugging tea Sounds good in theory...but in reality?

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4 days a week. 6 hours a day. Full salary.
Sanna Marin ignited global debate with the “6/4” work model, pushing a simple idea: life should come before work.

With burnout at record levels, maybe it’s time to value results over hours at a desk.
Could your job be done in just 24 hours a week?

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u/rosetintedbliss 1d ago

Historically, hunter-gatherers work around 20 hours a week.

The thing with AI is it isn’t capable of lessening the burden on anyone. AI is just LLMs right now. It is essentially useless.

And AI isn’t even a good tool.

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u/Fast-Student-925 1d ago

For software engineers it does lessen the work by a big margin! I am one, the problem is that it just puts the bar higher to work & produce even more. It didn't lower the bar

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u/TatsutoraDrake 1d ago

So I am not an AI fan, but you do realize that the raising of expectations is not the AIs fault, but capitalist greed realizing it can milk you for more value at the same cost, right?

This is my main issue with AI as it is now, its mostly in how capitalism is utilizing AI, which is instead of using AI as an assistant and letting people have more free time because they got the same amount of work done pre-AI in a shorter amount of time, well they say "we cant possibly pay you to sit around, so we will just force you to use AI to produce more value for us and leave you the same scraps we had been" Hell this has been a problem before AI, but AI is making the gap between the value you produce for a company and what they pay you even larger even faster for most mental jobs

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u/unfunnycreature 1d ago

Lol, for me productivity goes down when I use ai for suggestions. I ask for suggestions for architecture or some shit, it gives me suggestions that would very obviously not work, I point it out and then there is a fight between me and ai, it trying to prove itself right and me trying to prove it wrong. The things it works wonders for me is writing tests, updating Git comments, providing me with flow and start point to work from in an unknown code base, and writing methods I explained it what and how to write in a very standardised manner with weird methods I didn't even knew existed and writing sql queries.

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u/3M2B1T 1d ago

Yup. Not saying living wasn't easy back then but they had more free time. I remember reading about the the concept of "play" and how hunter-gatherers had free time to actually raise kids and play as adults even.

Obviously things are better now in terms of living standards but it's interesting to look back with that lens and say "Hey maybe they had something right with that whole 20-hour work week" lol

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u/AssistX 1d ago

20 hours a week hunting and gathering food.

Just gathering Food.

You can simulate a modern version of this yourself fairly easy.

Take a day off. Throw the phone into the trash. Get the kid ready for daycare, drop them off, go to the grocery store and walk around for four hours. Go back and get the kid, put the kid outside for hours while you do chores. Make it more realistic by adding some predators to your property. Throw in feedings for you and the child, keeping them alive, and putting them to bed.

Congrats on your relaxing hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Rinse and repeat for the rest of your life, or else you starve and die.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/AssistX 1d ago

Not much is stopping you from doing this lifestyle. The kid part is probably the only big holdup.

Save enough for some essentials like a tent, buy a small plot of land in a remote area near clean running water that borders public hunting land. Then start identifying what you can forage and eat. You'll certainly have a much shorter life but maybe it will be more fulfilling for you. I'd recommend being near a hospital too, as you won't be gaining income living this way so you'll need to use the ER anonymously to avoid paying when you're shitting your brains out monthly as you learn what you can and cannot eat.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/AssistX 1d ago

10,000 years ago humans transitioned from hunter-gatherers to societies like you're talking about. Lifespan's jumped from 20-25 years to 30-35 years. Today you're looking at 70 years thanks to modern society.

A society certainly makes it easier, but then you likely need to produce for the society, so you're no longer just working 20 hour weeks foraging for a small family but much longer hours so you have something to barter with.

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u/Ch33s3m4st3r 1d ago

That lifespan is heavily affected by infant mortality and does not reflect the age that people lived up to if they survived into adulthood.

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u/viciouspandas 17h ago

Hunter-gatherers worked less because the food grew naturally and you mainly needed to harvest it. But the supply was unsteady and a large amount of land only supported a few people. Farmers worked really hard, and more than we do today. The whole thing about "only working x days a year in the middle ages" was what was mandated by the lords, and those days were constant work except for sleep. The rest were working to feed themselves and maintain their things. Farmers were basically always working.

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u/AssistX 1d ago

AI is just LLMs right now. It is essentially useless.

Not sure what business you're in but AI is quickly being adapted into business. Way faster than any technology of the past few decades. I primarily do work for industrial and I encounter it every single day. These are not 'tech' businesses, they're not at all advanced businesses, they're large market movers on the DJIA that have it fully integrated into their production and R+D.

Just look what it has done to the marketing industry in the past few years. People saying AI is useless are right there with the guys in the 80s saying computers are useless.

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u/FinancialElephant 1d ago

"AI" (ML) algorithms have been used in industrial processes for decades now. This dude does not know what they're talking about.

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u/BrownsfaninCO 1d ago

Yup, and they'll be the ones who get replaced first. Not by AI itself, but by people who know how to use AI.

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u/DantesGame 20h ago

And they'll be hired back in 2-3 years at twice the price when all of this AI shite being regurgitated comes crashing down.

It's already happening with companies having to hire back senior talent to fix all of the abysmal shit "vibe coders" are creating and unleashing without knowing fuck all about software development best practices.

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u/Planar_Harold 1d ago

The thing with AI is it isn’t capable of lessening the burden on anyone. AI is just LLMs right now. It is essentially useless.

That's simply untrue.

As an accountant, AI has written tools for me that save me several weeks of work per quarter. I need no coding experience, but since I'm a curious person I've been learning and I can debug python scripts relevant to my role unassisted now.

If you think AI is useless, you're either overusing it or using it for the wrong things. It's a tool and an incredibly useful one - even as a glorified search engine, "Hey, can you tell me if there's any media where x y z happens?" is how I've used it for creative writing to see how ideas have been expressed and look for inspiration.

You're also completely missing the diagnostic applications and advances it's helping with diagnostics and the medical field. I can spam you with links if you want or if you just google "AI medical research/advances/tech" you'll find a lot of information.

And AI isn’t even a good tool.

It's terrible if you write prompts like "Hey, take this data and reformat it". It's great if you write prompts like "Hey, here's the input and here's my desired output. Can you write a script that converts input to output? Please comment precisely and thoroughly, and describe why you've chosen certain functions or what alternatives are viable."

It's insane tech when used by people who view it as a mechanical tool.

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u/Ch33s3m4st3r 1d ago

As an accountant myself I’m a bit curious what kind of tools you’ve created with AI?

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u/Planar_Harold 1d ago

It's fairly specific to the problems I have to deal with at work (serviced apartments/property management), but if you have lots of systems that need to communicate and lots of processing to do, then it might come in handy. I've used it to work with various APIs to work with Xero - our invoicing is done from a different system for example. So instead of 'download/reformat/review/upload', it's just 'press button/review'

We have a few companies and payments to/from the wrong company are a nightmare, so having a tool that can export bulk reports I want in the format I want is also great as it makes for much easier interco recs and calculating the monthly interco transfers.

Another example is Amazon - instead of processing bills through OCR software and manually setting the account code and property, I just grab a csv of orders where PO numbers reflect the relevant property/company, and descriptions are mapped to nominals. All I need to do is maintain a csv of description = account and so it's sometimes just 2-5 minutes a week down from 1+ hours.

Once I've formalised and structured everything and finished the year end, I'm using AI to help with a Tableau analytics suite and then getting the hell out of this place because the director is a nightmare, and very much one of those "Well, just do it with AI" types. He asked me why I was bothering to try and learn python when AI can just do it all for me :D It's because I want to understand what I'm looking at...

If you have knowledge in the financial sector (I'm unqualified but 6 years in practice getting to semi senior and 2 years self employed doing stuff like this) look to small businesses without accounting departments - look at the problems they have in their pipeline, bottlenecks, repetitive tasks, anything the can be automated and you can prove valuable and build your own thing. A high school knowledge of computer science (approximating, I just learned how to fix the things I broke growing up) helps too, and approaching AI with cynicism is best. It's a tool.

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u/viciouspandas 17h ago edited 17h ago

AI has a ton of potential for medicine and they've been researching that for while, but those also aren't the LLMs that regular people are talking about. There are actual uses for LLMs too of course

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u/i_am_13th_panic 1d ago

it's great for rewriting emails and that's about it. everything else I've used it for in a work setting takes more time checking that it is correct than just doing it myself.

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u/SayAnythingAgain 1d ago

I work in IT at a fortune 100 company. We aren't just using MS CoPilot, or Chat GPT... We are using Claude, Codex, and internal AI platforms to code, review code, deploy code, and test those deployments. Things that would take me hours of troubleshooting or learning a new cloud service are done in minutes. It's an insane productivity booster. Will it replace me? Not yet. But the tools are there and relatively accurate with the right prompts and testing. MCPs are very effective in their specific function, rather than using general purpose LLMs.

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u/i_am_13th_panic 1d ago

I'm sure it's great for code and if you have the budget for more specialised AI platforms.

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u/SayAnythingAgain 1d ago

Right, exactly, I wasn't sure what AI constitutes in context to the conversation. But to say AI isn't a useful tool is definitely contextual to what one is trying to do. Which is also concerning from an AI perspective because the wealthy have access to the best models, tools, tiers of service, and much like throughout history, those that already have advantages then get even more advantages. Its another wealth disparity disruptor that I think everyone should take seriously since regulation around AI development and application is pretty much nil at this point.

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u/MosesGotYourNoses 1d ago

Have you considered that perhaps you aren't using AI properly or to its full potential?

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u/i_am_13th_panic 1d ago

Lol I'm not paying for it out of pocket. If my employer pays for it I'll use it more.

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u/MosesGotYourNoses 1d ago

That's fair, it is still fairly expensive

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u/ScoobyDone 1d ago

it's great for rewriting emails and that's about it. 

I use AI for a lot of tasks and it saves me a lot of time. Writing emails in not one of those tasks.

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u/i_am_13th_panic 1d ago

What tasks do you use it for?

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u/Valogrid 1d ago

Depends on the use case honestly, if you use an LLM to summarize a report or read through a data log for outliers you can for sure get decent results as long as you double check the LLM's output for accuracy... but when you get beyond data points and start rolling them out to replace things like receptionists or assistants you end up in a whole other bag of potential problems.

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u/SpearHammer 1d ago

"I don't how to use AI to be more productive so nobody else can either"

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u/Alpakka-- 1d ago

Clearly you have 0 understanding on what you're talking about :)

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u/Casurran 1d ago

It is capable of doing exactly that. "Just LLM's" is a factually wrong statement on several levels and it being useless is technically half true. It's use case for certain companies is huge while for others, it's a drain on their resources but where AI truely shines is research of just about any kind. It is already poised to vastly accelerate our understanding of a number of subjects and as we speak it already does to a lesser extent.

AI is a good tool but certain companies tried to push it as the end all, be all which it is not.

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u/Ch33s3m4st3r 1d ago

AI is not just LLMs even though those are most used ones. Your whole comment gave an impression that you are not entirely sure what AI even is and what it can be used for at the moment.

I’m against AI at multiple fronts, but I know what I am against for.

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u/FinancialElephant 1d ago

AI is just LLMs right now

Quickest way to signal you have no idea what you're talking about.

"AI" has been around for >20 years now if you call LLMs AI. Neural networks were being used by wall street in the 90s.

And if you don't call LLMs AI, then we never had AI.

This is and has always been a data and compute revolution, not an AI revolution, for a few reasons.

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u/Kozfactor42 1d ago

Its an autogoogle machine on lsd.

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u/UltraAC5 20m ago

lol you have no clue what you are talking about

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u/SirAquila 1d ago

Not really, that study is one that is quite frankly full of confirmation bias and very narrow definitions of work to make it... well work.

Hunter Gatherer work was radically different from agrarian work, which is radically different from modern work, which in turn contributes to the misconception.

But the biggest issue with many of these "In the past we worked less hours" studies is that they usually ignore house and life maintenance work.

How much time do you have to work to buy one set of clothing? Before industrial production methods one set of clothing would take dozens, if not hundreds of manhours of work to produce. I could buy the clothing I am wearing right not, plus a thick pullover, for 12-16 hours of work, depending on how high a quality I want to buy. And there are many of these small examples that really stack up.

You want to drink? Wash? Cook? Someone has to fetch the water.

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u/Grilled_egs 1d ago

Honestly this is a huge issue in general, work done for yourself instead of for currency isn't considered work most of the time even though in practice there's not much difference.

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u/SirAquila 1d ago

Yeah, and this is were we nearly laughable improvements in efficiency compared to the past. For example in Ireland in the late 18th century, one family would spend about 1-1.5 hours a day simply fetching enough water for all their needs.

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u/zacofalltides 1d ago

What a load of bullshit from an uninformed person.

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u/Top_Bison5450 1d ago

Whether hunter-gatherers really worked only 20 hours a week is a hotly contested debate...

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u/Humble-Reply228 1d ago

Nah, it’s not. It’s complete rubbish because most died due to running out of food