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A comment on ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did. Parent comment

Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by esseph on Thursday March 12, 2026 @01:51PM (#47354655)
Not until power access/generation is MUCH cheaper. Long, long, long way off.

If I can run 50,000 fixed tasks that cost me $0.834/hr but OpenAI is costing $37/hr and the automation takes 40x as long and can make TERRIBLE errors why the fuck would I not move to the deterministic system?

Also, battery life of mobile devices.

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by hackyhacky on Thursday March 12, 2026 @03:27PM (#47355845)
These exact arguments could have been made 50 years ago about why laptops are impossible.

But now, we not only have laptops, we run horribly inefficient GUIs in horribly inefficient VMs on them.

The dollar-per-compute trend goes ever downward.

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by esseph on Thursday March 12, 2026 @04:19PM (#47356468)
It will never ever be as cheap as as cron job and a shell script. There is a certain limit to how efficient using an LLM to do a job vs using an LLM to create a job is. There is a large distinction in compute and power resources between the two. Don't mistake one for the other.
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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by hackyhacky on Thursday March 12, 2026 @06:02PM (#47357869)
> It will never ever be as cheap as as cron job and a shell script.

Yes. That's precisely why my company runs dBase 7 on a fleet of old 286DX machine from Compaq. /s

Running obsolete software will be cheaper, but the value provided by the newer technology will make the difference insignificant.

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by esseph on Thursday March 12, 2026 @06:24PM (#47358116)
I don't think so, because that carried efficiency scales.

Why do 50,000 tasks with an LLM when I can do 64,467,235 without an LLM that the LLM created for the same cost on probably far lower cost hardware?

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by duskdozer on Friday March 13, 2026 @07:34AM (#47363050)
Because in their ideal world, you won't have your own hardware beyond a secured thin client running only "approved" programs running on their servers.
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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by CamperBob2 on Thursday March 12, 2026 @04:30PM (#47356626)
If I can run 50,000 fixed tasks that cost me $0.834/hr but OpenAI is costing $37/hr and the automation takes 40x as long and can make TERRIBLE errors why the fuck would I not move to the deterministic system?

Because you'll be outcompeted by people who make the best of the nondeterministic system.

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