cs137

19 ms·

121.
by cs137 4y ago
To start, I've written about what would happen in event of a violent revolution in the US. Mind you, I'm not advocating for it--completely the opposite, because the answer is: it would be fucking terrible and there's a very h
122.
by cs137 4y ago
I hate videos on the internet, so I started my blog (see profile) with an emphasis on text and photos. Funny enough, I have about 50 Youtube videos in my browser that I've been meaning to watch "some time" but haven't.
123.
by cs137 4y ago
I'm a writer and I'm good enough at it to have suffered some devastating real-life consequences. The terrifying thing isn't shouting into the void, and it isn't being visible to everyone. It's the adverse combinatio
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by cs137 4y ago
This sounds like a good thing, but I'm not sure it is. Capital wins under the current system because the bad guys control your reputation and career, but capital will win under a pseudonymous work system too because careers will cease
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by cs137 4y ago
Debateable. The reason rich kids turn into such pieces of shit isn't material abundance (since, after all, anyone born before ~1990 in the middle class also experienced material abundance) but the unearned high social status and the im
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by cs137 4y ago
Plus, a lot of that gas consumption is spent commuting, which makes people miserable. Murdering the daily commute is a good thing Covid-19 did, although I don't expect it to last long (WFH-ers will get fewer promotions, despite working
127.
by cs137 4y ago
I worked in a grocery store in the late '90s, and the older customers (who grew up in the Great Depression) always carried penny pouches, because they remembered a time when one had to keep track of cents to survive. This is how I know
128.
by cs137 4y ago
You know, I agree with 90 percent of what you're saying, but on this... > I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. ... I've got to say, you probably work for someone who is. It sounds like you're a dec
129.
by cs137 4y ago
You're correct. On the other hand, college tuitions are ridiculous, and the modern university is literally a billion-dollar corporation. There's no excuse for the academic job market being this lousy when universities have so much
130.
by cs137 4y ago
It sounds like he went ABD. In the US, PhDs can take 6-8+ years. There are some shitty advisors who delay their students' graduations to get additional low-wage labor. Also, the academic job market is terrible and has been for 30+ year
131.
by cs137 4y ago
In other words, the dysfunction (unemployment) on which capitalists rely, because it scares people into taking shitty deals, is a bit less of a problem... but it's also causing other dysfunctions, because it turns out that this is a sh
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by cs137 4y ago
The jobs are crap, and the pay is low. Postdocs used to be an exception, something prestigious you did before settling into a permanent role that might be a lower-ranked university. If you were really good, you might do 2 years at IAS or MI
133.
by cs137 4y ago
It depends on the nature of the work and also the project. You don't have to spend $10,000 if you're just looking to create a book that you can give to your friends. If you want it to have any chance of commercial or critical succ
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by cs137 4y ago
First of all, congrats. Writing a book is difficult, and writing one that people actually enjoy reading, even more so. Second, trade and technical publishing are completely different markets. You need a literary agent to even sit at the tab
135.
by cs137 4y ago
It's the exploit/explore tradeoff. In the cultural industries, most consumers (the majority of whom don't care to be more than that) prefer to exploit--that is, read or watch or listen to something very similar to what they a
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by cs137 4y ago
I would say that it's bad for writing, though. Ultimately, what he's doing exacerbates the absurdly lopsided distribution of visibility and rewards that writers experience. Most books sell horribly, and not for reasons of low qual
137.
by cs137 4y ago
My experience, unfortunately, is that good managers like you seem to be don't last long. They get replaced by manage-up sleazeballs who'll never, ever protect the people beneath them because it's not game-theoretically optima
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by cs137 4y ago
You're assuming that management actually cares about fixing bugs.
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by cs137 4y ago
> I guess the underlying reason is that engineers wont be promoted to (real) chief engineers with agency. Being a boss requires reports for some reason. Sadly, this is absolutely true. Manage or be managed. Capitalism invariably becomes
140.
by cs137 4y ago
There isn't a shortage of software developers. The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. In fact, if you control for the level of intelligence it takes to
141.
by cs137 4y ago
I don't think AIs will ever be capable of truly great writing, but within 30 years (if not sooner) they will be capable of (a) writing clickbait articles capable of going viral, (b) waging complex PR campaigns including the creation of
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by cs137 4y ago
I don't disagree with the general sentiment, but as someone who has faced literal attempts on his life for revealing unpleasant truths about powerful people and has PTSD, I find myself cautious in fully accepting the optimism. And I&#x
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by cs137 4y ago
This makes sense, and I imagine I'd have the same feeling if I went back. The stakes may or may not have been lower, but they felt lower. Today's world is one where if you make a mistake at 18, you're stuck with it for life,
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by cs137 4y ago
I read this whine-piece and it had the opposite effect of what the author intended. I read it and thought, "Well, fucking good." I don't have anything against most Stanford students. (I mean, the startup bros and spoiled lega
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by cs137 4y ago
I was in college in the 2000s and this bureaucratization was starting already. The class of 2006 having cell phones was a minor scandal--college students were no longer exploratory rulebreakers, but rich kids (back then, the assumption was
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by cs137 4y ago
To be fair, I do think that education and the trappings of expertise are overvalued, and that the same probably applies to general intelligence. These things certainly don't prevent people from arriving at wrong answers. I'm not s
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by cs137 4y ago
Big-company CEOs (and venture-funded startup CEOs are mostly big-corp wannabes) rarely produce good ideas. They're champion shifters of blame and takers of credit. When the company hits a rough patch, their first instinct is to fire pe
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by cs137 4y ago
This, precisely. That said, I think we're far too forgiving of companies that do bad stuff and far too unforgiving of people. Companies have huge PR (propaganda) teams. Individuals don't, especially not individuals who've bee
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Tech CEOs Seek to Create Public Permanent Record of Performance Reviews(vice.com)
10 points by cs137 4y ago|6 comments
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by cs137 4y ago
The more I learn about AI, the less I worry about artificial sentience, and the more concerned I am about human limitations. I think most of us agree that LaMDA isn't sentient, but I think almost all of us are underestimating how easy

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