YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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1 yr. ago

"Black people are late sometimes" but in a racist way instead of a "Repent, Harlequin" kind of way.

Past a certain point it's a little bit like learning to type on a typewriter. On one hand it forces you to think about certain types of mistakes and forces you to avoid making errors. On the other hand it gives you a whole bunch of trained habits that are either useless or actively harmful once you're working with better tools.

I feel like Ed is underselling the degree to which this is just how businesses work now. The emphasis on growth mindset is particularly gross because of how it sells the CEOs book, but it's not unique in trying to find a feel-good vibes-based way to evaluate performance rather than relying on strict metrics that give management less power over their direct reports.

Of course he's also written at length about the overall problem that this feeds into (organizations run by people with no idea how to make the business do what it does but who can make the number go up for shareholders) but the most unique part of this is the AI integration, which is legitimately horrifying and I feel like the debunk of growth mindset takes some of the sting away.

Truly, we are blessed to have a candidate willing to represent the freedom to sell anything on a darknet market and hire a hitman to take out your previous partners or detractors or whatever.

Nah, it's the Nazis who are dumbasses, not that that makes them less dangerous. They certainly think they're smart and the want to present themselves as curious, but in reality they reduce knowledge to another political tool. There is no true spirit of inquiry or asking questions, only trying to marshal arguments in favor of their pre-established answer. Intellectual discourse becomes both a source of power to give their preexisting ideology a veneer of legitimacy and also an arena of conflict where they can prove that they're the biggest bestest boys.

These people possess neither a desire nor a willingness to engage with the world as it actually is. Instead they want the power to impose their vision of what the world should look like (a strict hierarchy with them at the ostensible top) onto reality, and when it inevitably fails because that's not how any of this works they end up uselessly doubling down and retreating into conspiracies. Next time they'll have more power and it'll work, even though it's the basic underlying shape of Creation that they're ultimately at war with.

Man, I didn't even know how to react to this nonsense. The obvious sneer is to point out that if the alternative is to interact with people like ER here we really shouldn't be surprised to see a declining birth rate. But I think the more important takeaway that this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious.

Like, there's plenty of surveys and research into why people are having fewer kids than they used to, and it's not because toddlers are little hellions more so than in the past. And "generational insolvency" is a pretty big fucking part of the explanation actually, as is empowering families to choose whether or not to have children rather than leaving it entirely up to the vicissitudes of biological processes and horniness. The latter part cuts both ways, in that people who want families are (theoretically; see above re: financial factors) able to take advantage of fertility treatments or IVF or whatever and have kids where they historically would have been unable to do so.

But no, rather than actually engage with any of that or otherwise treat the world like other people have agency they have identified what they believe to be the problem and have decided that the brute application of state power is the solution, so long as that power is being applied to other people. For all that we acknowledge the horrors of fascism, I think the stupidity of these people is also worth acknowledging, if for no other reason than to reinforce why this shit shouldn't be taken seriously.

I would fucking love to throw that man in prison for one of his dozens of crimes, but I also recognize that I don't have the power to do that. I do have some small amount of power over whether or not he goes into the fucking white house.

Shit, someone make me a time machine so I can go make a joke back in 2016 when it would have been relevant.

Wait we created a market and people are manipulating it in order to profit because it turns out market manipulation pays the same or more than being a banker investor "superpredictor" but is much easier?

Is my product concept fundamentally bad?

No, it's the customers who are wrong.

There's a certain spirit of online debate about trivial or nonsensical things like this that can best be understood as happening purely for the sport of it.

Had a first-hand AI encounter today at the grocery store. The self-checkout now has a script that monitors an overhead video feed to make sure you're not getting tricky about what scanned and what got put into the bagging area, and if it thinks you're shady it will stop you from proceeding and summon an employee with no notification that something is wrong.

The new self-checkout process is as follows:

1. Scan your item
2. Hold the item plainly before you so the overhead camera doesn't get confused, looking like a Catholic priest about to deliver communion.
3. Place item in bagging area. Try not to have to shift things around to find a place.
4. Swear as the nom-mutable voice instructions tell you to bag "your... Item." Legitimately feels like they got as far as assembling the voice lines before anyone realised that having the compu-checker read every purchase out loud would lead to at best an unworkable cacophony if not several immediate lawsuits.
5. GOTO 1

Even as antisocial and impatient as I am I've found self-checkout to be a UX disaster, but somehow it keeps getting worse.

Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right.

I wonder what major world events were happening in the 1930s-1940s that would line up with this...

As it turned out, Meyer did take the side of the Republican party on some issues. He was opposed to FDR's New Deal, and this was reflected in the Post's editorial stance as well as its news coverage, especially regarding the National Recovery Administration (NRA). He even wrote an editorializing "news" story under a fake name

THERE IT IS!

But back to Jeff.

You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests.

Yep. We're protected from intimidation and extortion so long as we pay our dues to the consiglieri when he comes around and don't get too chummy with the cops.

I mean, he is their VP of Autoplag, so I imagine he's got even more reason to believe than the average MBA. That doesn't undermine your point, but I think the fact that adobe has appointed a VP of Autoplag should be part of the story to begin with, rather than being assumed. Did they ever have a VP of blockchain? Or a VP of copyright fraud?

...I feel like there's a story here.

Godspeed, Bonnie. I'm gonna call this a good omen for the week.

I think it's pretty telling that as aggressively Ratpilled as this writer seems to be (in that they still seem to be accepting rationalist framing uncritically, including a high level of discomfort in calling a spade a racist, as it were.) their toned-down critique here still cuts against the heart of who Scott tries to present himself as. Even if you interpret the subjective parts of this analysis as favorably as possible for Scott, the picture that emerges is still of a right-wing idealogue who is either hiding it or is in denial about the limitations of the worldview they've built for themselves.

Heroclix is so last month. Heroscape on the other hand, has some legs.

I think the problem is that it portrays them as weird exceptions, possibly even echoes from some kind of ghost in the machine. Instead of being a statistical inevitability when you're asking for the next predicted token instead of meaningfully examining a model of reality.

"Hallucination" applies only to the times when the output is obviously bad, and hides the fact that it's doing exactly the same thing when it incidentally produces a true statement.

It would be easier to list things that the CIA didn't use in a failed Castro assassination.

Man, I remember being 14 and thinking I was having radical new takes on ethics. Then I grew up and realized that killing people* is* probably just bad.