cs137

I think R.K. might have been right. I don't believe machines will become sentient, but I think we're going to see more of this. The Turing test was misposed; it is not about machines passing, but humans failing. We're going to see more and more people failing.

One of the fatal flaws of this kind of capitalism is that the only quantitative central management mechanism--lawmaking is central but qualitative, which wouldn't be a problem, except that we're in a state where the laws are written by rich people for the benefit of other rich people, so the qualitative nature of it enables willful obfuscation--is to vary the interest rate. If you lower it, you're giving connected people disproportionately more money; if you increase it, you're causing a capital strike. Either way, it's bad for the 99%.

When speaking about investors, one has to differentiate between passive capitalists (i.e., the people whose money is being invested) and the career decision-makers. They have very different sets of incentives.

As for what passive capitalists want, it doesn't matter all that much, 95 percent of the time. They have objectives (X amount of annual income, Y growth rate of principal) but don't really care how those goals are achieved. It's important not to piss them off, but they don't decide on strategies.

The career decision makers, notably, are optimizing for their own career goals. Corporate capitalism would be bad enough if it were oriented toward profit maximization (paperclip maximizer) and from the outside, it looks as it's so; but the internal experience of a worker in capitalism shows something else entirely--that managers and executives care about one thing--staying in charge, advancing their personal reputations--more than anything else.

A twenty-year investment might make sense to a company or to a nation-state, but it makes no sense at all for an individual manager, whose definition of success is to be two levels higher than he currently is in one quarter of that time. He can't make the case for himself as someone who deserves (whatever that means, in this degenerate context) to be a career decision maker if it's going to take 20 years (or even 2 years, in many cases) to know how his decisions played out. In any case, for a project of that size and duration, attribution becomes difficult: it's impossible to know whether the results (whether successful or otherwise) were caused by one set of decisions and circumstances vs. another one.

In sum, it doesn't matter what passive capitalists (the principal investors) think, and the decision makers (agents) aren't interested in long-term wins because there's no career benefit. I don't know how to fix this. Capitalism is obviously a dead end--invariably, it becomes corporate capitalism (corruption), which itself becomes managerial capitalism (stagnation). However, in terms of proposing what will be better, we are to some degree speculating. A gradual transition to democratic socialism (as in Scandinavia) seems optimal, but (a) the world right now is going the other way (toward inequality and nondemocracy), and (b) there's no guarantee that fixing our social and economic problems will suffice to restore Cold War levels of innovation and dynamism.

It's probably different in Hollywood in publishing, but the reasons agents are such a weak link in traditional publishing (to the point of nearly ruining the industry) are: (1) inaccessibility (you can't actually query agents who have any pull; you have to know someone even to get read), and (2) locus of power. To be more specific on the latter, the agent knows that connections inside the industry are her power base, whereas authors are basically interchangeable--from a humanistic standpoint, I don't agree; but commercially speaking, it's the case--so she has every incentive to put the publisher's interests ahead of those of her authors, even though her job is the opposite.

Hollywood is probably a bit different because movie stars have a lot more leverage than midlist authors. So, it may be that there's the opposite problem. Literary agents often push authors to lower their expectations and take crappy deals; a Hollywood agent's probably more inclined to push the client toward aggressive decisions while the iron is hot, so to speak.

Those Google and Facebook workers are one bad boss from their lives going to shit. And, whether you like to believe it's the case or not, bad references do happen sometimes and, if word (or rumor) gets out that you were fired "for cause" (which doesn't actually mean anything, but sounds bad) you are basically fucked.

"Middle class" is an illusion. The cultural armor you think you have is paper-thin in a real conflict. If you're a worker, you're on the side of the proletariat; there's no honor in persisting in delusion to the contrary.

This is, of course, the argument that capitalists use to justify their disproportionate take, but it doesn't hold water, because they don't really take on much risk. They risk capital they have. often in massive amounts; laborers have to work because they don't have capital to put at risk in the first place. The only thing the bosses are actually risking is becoming workers again, which they'll fight furiously to avoid, because they know how much it sucks, because they're the reason why it sucks.

I have a couple guesses as to what it would be, but don't want to dox myself, because they're usages that are still in the early stages of catching on.

I don't know what shitshit is, although Y Combinator probably funded it if the founders were young enough and seemed to know how to talk to rich people.

I believe it is the Serbs who use "May the Pope fuck your 18th-great-grandmother." (How the Pope shall choose which one of the insultee's 524,288 candidate ancestors, that's not clear.)

The famous "Go fuck yourself" directed at the Russian warship by the Ukrainians translates, literally, even better: иди нахуй (idi nahui) = "go to dick".

Therefore, as the company sees it, they deserve the bulk of the rewards since they are (magnanimously) giving the opportunity to the 10x engineer. He'll still get his 10% bonus if he performs well, won't he? So why should they feel compelled to give him more?

Obviously, this is bad for workers and bad for society, but it makes sense from the corporate viewpoint.

They've left the world worse off than it was 50 years ago, and they're destroying the planet--and all for nothing, too. The corporate system has to be scrapped before it's too late.

The tropics don't usually get as hot as the worst days in the midlatitude zones; what defines the tropical zone is temperature consistency. This means that many species won't adapt to serious climate change if it happens so rapidly, but it also means we can expect labor productivity to drop by 50% or more, because if tropical locations start posting 31-32 WBTs, they won't be doing it once per year (as you see on the hottest days in the midlatitudes) but hundreds of days per year.

If corporate workers become 50% less productive, that just means fewer passive-aggressive emails get sent; but if global farm labor becomes 50% less productive, we're in a shitload of trouble.

That said, most people in the world cannot afford to sit on their couches to wait out the heat. Agricultural workers will start dropping dead once we see 30 WBT on a regular basis. If things get bad enough, we'll see a collapse in food productivity that will utterly destroy the global system, and while the downfall of corporate capitalism is something all people of conscience want, I don't think any of us want it to happen in that precise way, because it'll be replaced by something worse (widespread war and slavery).

In a state of severe motivational crisis (true burnout, not the yuppie-flu decline-of-interest that is often given this name), people aren't thinking clearly and are not equipped to do that. At that point, you're in survival mode and you're barely passing at that. Fencing with existential dragons is not going to help.

People burn out for a variety of reasons but--again, if we're talking about true burnout--the cause is usually not just stress but distress: a subtype of stress that is relentless, purposeless, acutely dysphoric, and often imposed by external forces. The problem is that sometimes those external forces are wholly imagined (delusions and hypervigilance brought on by nervous exhaustion) and sometimes they are real and malevolent (such as in the case of the need to work to survive, which is imposed on us by an upper class we lack the organizational capability to remove from power and eliminate) and the burning-out person is never well-equipped to sort out which is the case.

I don't think an inverted pyramid is as bad as it sounds. It's a check against ageism and falling wages (there's no longer a horde of hungry young people who want the jobs) and, given how little of the work people do is actually necessary--white-collar jobs are 85% sending passive-aggressive emails--I think society can afford it. It might be the only thing that provides enough value of labor to keep conditions relatively humane.

These days, not only is the world population more urban, but people are also more consistently aware of the inequality problem. People are realizing they have no hope of providing the best opportunities for their children, and are deciding not to have them. I don't see that as a bad thing. Voluntary population decline might be the best outcome for humanity at this point, at least until we get our political, economic, and ecological shit together. We don't need 10 billion humans to be on the planet; we need to get through this era of war and capitalism without making ourselves extinct.

Unless you're asking a question, posing it as a question comes off as passive-aggressive, even if it's not what you intended. A simple declarative statement of, "I would do it this way", is probably best. You don't know why he did it the other way, and he might have had a very good reason (for example, to be sure the subroutine would be inlined).

The best tone to use is one that is neutral and efficient; prefer active voice but avoid imperative mood unless you're 100% sure you're right, in which case it's usually fine.

It probably goes without saying, but you should assume the change was made in good faith. It's possible that the other programmer hasn't seen before what you consider to be good practices; it's also possible that she's great at her job but just made a mistake. It's also possible that you're wrong. So, for this reason, it's always best to be conservative with tone and stay as factual as you can.

The presumption, except in high-frequency trading, is that the talented people go to the coasts (which is bullshit, because I've spent a lot of time on the coasts, and it's all socioeconomic) and so a certain fratty culture dominates.

If WFH is permanent, it could be one of the best things for Chicago in a long time. It really is a great place to live--if you can find a good company. I also didn't find the weather to be that bad. April-November is a slightly cooler (nicer, in summer) version of the same thing we have on the east coast, and the winter tends to be mostly fine with only an occasional -20 cold blast.

In my view, Chicago's biggest negative is its 1-2 hour drive radius. The city's beautiful. Northern Illinois, not as much. Starved Rock is nice, and the Indiana Dunes are alright, but most of the cool stuff in the Midwest is 3-5+ hours away. The flat landscape also suffers due to billboards and powerlines; the topography makes the city itself so much more more compelling, but it means the outlying areas get really ugly--because if there's any garbage within a mile radius, you're going to see it. On the other hand, it has one of the cheapest and most connected airports in the world, so that might make up for it.

Wait till they bring Jira and Agile to your tech job, though. You'll find yourself "needing" expensive toys again.

Also, while lattes may be a luxury from your standpoint--personally, I prefer black coffee--expensive purchases, for white collar workers, are not. You have to play those "status games" or your infinitesimal chances of getting promotions will go straight to zero. It's not always lattes. It could be something else: eating lunch with the popular kids, drinking with the bosses, etc. But you have to do it if you want any chance at all of having a career.

Furthermore, you need to take a course in remedial math. To be able to afford a starter house in the U.S. where there are decent jobs, you need to skip about (wait for it) a hundred thousand lattes. That's about 5,000 months (416 years!) of forgone coffee. The life expectancy from age 20 is about 58 years. Wrong; play again.

It's funny how Boomers and cappies love to talk about our need to take "personal responsibility" for surviving in the shit-ass world they've left us, but never consider that they should take responsibility (or be held responsible, because that's Bolshevism!) for having made the world the way it is.

I wish it were that easy to grind this economy to a halt, but it doesn't really work that way. Consumer shortfalls cause hiccups in the system, but the ruling class is still making steady progress on its mission to reduce the rest of us to generational peonage. You can boycott Black Friday, but so long as you have to show up for work to survive, the bad guys are going to keep winning.

Also:

* You're broke in 2030 with a machine learning degree -> you should have been born a robot.

Have an upvote, good sir.

The culprit is probably work. Think of how much of the typical office job involves ingesting low-quality information at high speed. The jobs aren't mentally taxing, but they do burn you out from serious reading, because of all the time wasted on peoples' shitty emails. You basically need to become a skimmer to survive modern life, especially if you work an office job, and there's a nonzero amount of mental effort in code switching from serious reading to half-assed work email reading.

If only they had the gumption to time travel and get cushy BoomerJobs instead of gig-economy nightmare labor under tight quotas and constant surveillance, they'd even have the time and money to enjoy it.

It'll be interesting to see the evolution of all these companies that've invested in mobile, now that mobile is so crapflooded, no one wants to pay for apps anymore. I don't know what the future of consumer computing looks like; I do know that I'd prefer not to have any part in it.

The game is different and it's too early to tell if things are better now than before. We're seeing a lot of no-talent rich kids ("influencers") as they take over the commons. Facebook used to be a way that anyone, in theory, could gain social influence. Now, it seems to ratify one's lack of influence; if people (e.g., employers, literary agents) look you up on Twitter and see less than 5,000 followers, they assume they can get away with shit.

This being said, I think we are past the nadir. We're going from an age in which we had incompetent curators to one in which we don't know who the curators are. As they say about traditional vs. self-publishing, the problem for self-publishing is that there are no gatekeepers, and the problem with traditional publishing is that it has lousy gatekeepers (lousy because they care more about short-term marketability than literary merit). How this is all going to shake out is anybody's guess.

What concerns me is the amount of power tech companies now have. It's great that a talented nobody can become a Youtube star, at least now... but what happens if Youtube decides to change its algorithm to punish leftist content? How do we prevent spurious copyright strikes? How do people who are de-platformed for illegitimate reasons (this literally happened to me) seek justice? How do we make sure we're not just building another reputation market that rich people will corner? That's what the tech companies want, after all, for the sole reason that it's most profitable.

We're living through another tragedy of the commons, but the culprit isn't human nature itself, so much as it is capitalism. The corporates have made sure they have absolute dominion over human usage of time and space, and anything they don't value (or that might represent opposition to them, now or later) dies.