cs137

A FAANG would fuck up any MMO it tried. Trust me on this. I could say more, but I'd dox myself. They simply don't have the DNA for it. What would happen is that control of the thing would be given to CEO's pets and corporate bikeshedders and the product would be mediocre.

If a company is going to create a new great MMO, it needs to be a single-purpose company dedicated toward just that... and, of course, that means it's taking a huge risk. It will also need to resist the temptation to get bought by an existing FAANG, because as soon as it is, the quality will decline.

AI is the most interesting and mathematical thus far, but I think the most employable field (and one in which age is an advantage) might be security. I'd also really like to take at least a course or two in compilers... and probably one or two in graphics/CV just because I don't know anything about it.

A very talented (sadly deceased) acquaintance of mine became unemployable in the US due to his left-wing politics, although he was quite moderate (e.g., he never advocated violence). He ended up doing very well at LSE.

Given the way things are in this country, movement abroad is something I've been thinking about for a while, but it's not a decision to be taken lightly.

Bosses definitely pick their successors based on the "one of us" metric, much more than actual merit or job performance, and this usually means one has to live in the same expensive neighborhoods and send one's kids to the same expensive schools as theirs. Is it possible to succeed, without playing that game? Yes, of course. However, it's unlikely, and so I wouldn't bet my life on it.

They might be related, though. The ruling class has deliberately destroyed local communities and forced people to become an on-demand proletariat that will move (often at personal expense!) "where the jobs are". If you want to have a career in tech, for example, you pretty much to live in one of 5 or 6 highly expensive cities, because you won't be taken seriously if you live anywhere else. It's not necessarily pathological that Americans move so much; what is pathological is that they have to do so, just to survive.

Some people in our society really want to turn women into passive baby-making machines, just as some people in our society want back the legal right to own people, just as some people think capital's leverage over labor is morally legitimate. Human rights and civil rights are non-negotiable and we must give our adversaries no quarter.

The reason Silicon Valley sucks is that Wall Street started sending its failures into tech to boss nerds around, and they drove out the real people, the ones who actually cared about technology and steering its role in society to the good. Now, tech is full of FAANG bros who don't mind open-plan offices and daily interviews for their own job, because they're all going to be CEOs in three years (in their minds).

The Paradox of Tolerance is how Burning Man got infested by networking billionaires. California's death is the Paradox of Tolerance in action, and Austin is in the same danger.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Are you implying that all critics of inequality dislike cishet white males? Because I am a cishet white male and not only is that simply not true, but it misunderstands what we on the left are saying when we talk about systemic issues (e.g. systemic racism).

To say there is systemic racism does not say that all whites are racist. It doesn't even say that most whites are racist. (I don't think it's true.) It doesn't even mean that most police are racist. (I don't think that's true, either.) It simply means that our society is configured in such a way that produces racist results, sometimes through emergence and sometimes through hidden intent.

All that said, our society is way more classist than it is racist or sexist, but all those problems are intertwined, because the upper class benefits when the rest of us are divided.

The more precisely realistic one is his geometric-variance model, in which some end up in massive debt while others end up very rich--a permanent division of society into landlords/bosses and peons. In theory, the state is supposed to prevent this through taxation and policy, but what we observe in capitalist countries is that the wealthy inevitably corrupt the state that is supposed to constrain them. The US is already at third-world levels of corruption and inequality, and the EU is only 20 years or so behind on this neoliberal roller coaster to nowhere.

Capitalism promises equilibrium, but it diverges. The people in charge will always have the power and resources to see to it that (a) they stay in charge, and (b) the gains from economic growth go solely to them.

In corporate, it's always an attack on a person, because ideas don't matter in corporate. In theory, ideas can matter insofar as they can drive a P&L, but in practice, corporate is not about P&L at all so much as it is about how P&L are attributed to oneself personally. This does mean people are less ready to criticize an idea (or a person) in the open, although that's mostly because the real gaming happens behind the backs of those being gamed.

Government research labs tend to have decent cultures, but it seems like the replacement of old, decent noblesse oblige companies by new-style psychotic McKinsey-esque startup-culture ones is complete. What I've heard is that places like Google X are ultra-political (which isn't surprising, because all FAANGs are nasty places run by nasty people). I've had decent R&D jobs; the problem is that they're unstable. You are a resource to be pulled into someone else's war.

It'll be best for all of us if technology slows, except perhaps for those innovations that reduce energy usage and GHG emissions, until corporate capitalism is overthrown (which may be 50 years or more away). It's actually a good thing, under our current economic system, that technological capabilities are so low compared to what they could be.

An industry job is fine if you're protected from the politics and valued for your knowledge and intelligence, but that's rare, and it usually doesn't last. The people making major decisions don't value intelligence or curiosity and, worse yet, they often have malevolent intentions. Getting "screwed" in academia means getting a B because of a tricky question on a final, or having to publish in a less prestigious journal than you think you deserve. Getting screwed in industry means you lose your right to an income and might never get it back.

The thing is, people in industry (meaning for-profit businesses that expect every member to work on some line-of-business concern... I'm not talking about research labs) have better social skills than academics are used to, so a lot of ex-academics jump into it thinking they're getting into a non-toxic environment, because the corrosive behaviors are not immediately visible. It takes a few years before people realize they haven't just entered "industry"--they've gone into literal corporate America.

In theory, this could be a good thing, because parallel and concurrent computing are hard and something has to flush out the mediocre programmers (the ones who put with Agile Scrum and Jira) who've flooded the market. In practice, though, it seems to be pushing society in the wrong direction. Just as regular people don't benefit from low or negative interest rates (since they'll still pay high interest on personal loans), regular people aren't going to be able to set up a cluster on AWS--or even know why they might want to. The result, then, of the move toward cloud computing seems to be worsening, not improvement, of the power imbalance between capital and labor.

In the long long run, we're still seeing technical advances, which are cause for hope. In the short term, though, the picture is ugly because the technical gains are mostly going to the few who have the capital necessary to profit from them.

If we don't regulate employers and the decisions they make, people will continue being denied jobs for stupid reasons.

In the ongoing war against fascism, moderation is no virtue and extremity is no vice.

If someone with a million followers says on Twitter, "I don't like Bob", then Bob is never going to get hired anywhere, but there's no legal case. Indeed, the person voicing the opinion didn't break any laws or do anything wrong--the problem, rather, is with employers who refuse to hire anyone remotely controversial (and who, in doing so, implement "cancel culture", although it's always been the left that is most viciously cancelled).

Free speech is important, but we need to regulate the shit out of search engines and employers in order to protect people from unearned reputation damage.

I knew someone who worked as a "reputation hit man". I don't know what his rate is today, but back in the 2000s, he would, for $500, impersonate and defame a person all over the internet. Most of his clients were corporate executives trying to take out competitors for promotions. He may be out of that business, but it still exists and the practice is widespread.

Google knows about this problem, and in the EU, there is a right to be forgotten. If you're American, though, there could be "Google dirt" about you or about someone with the same first and last name, keeping you from getting decent jobs, and you probably wouldn't even know.

I don't know of any Google-specific stories, but this has happened to people reliant on other tech companies and, more often than not, it was intentional. Most of the targets are foreign nationals, because they try to buy American "troublemakers" off first, but there are a couple high-profile cases of this sort of thing happening in the US.

We live in a strange time wherein corporations can act with a complete absence of accountability, especially if the out-of-touch, rich, geriatric men who write our laws can be hoodwinked into thinking that abuse of technological leverage is somehow impossible (because the mechanisms are beyond what they personally understand).

The only reason we haven't seen 85% of society give up all at once is that some people still hold out hope that the BoomerJobs, once vacated, will be given to them. That isn't going to happen, though.

People work "hard" in our society, because they have no other choice, since there is no social safety net and employers can do whatever they want in this country, but no one really cares anymore. This has manifested itself as survivable mediocrity for quite a while, but as soon as our society finds itself in any kind of serious crisis it will collapse. It almost did, during COVID.

It's good for cappie PR to create a narrative of empowered, entitled workers. It's just not true, though. Most of the current worker attrition has to do with COVID-related disability (long COVID), gas prices, and displacements caused by rising rents. It's not that people are suddenly deciding not to work because the Capitalism Fairy is putting seed capital under their pillows--it's that people who had few options now have even fewer.

He's undeniably talented, which even his detractors will admit. (The complaint of literary snobs isn't that he's a bad writer, but that he puts his talent toward genres of writing they don't like.) His quality profile is also notably variable, which is also part of why he has so many detractors. He also came up in a time when publishing was more forgiving of idiosyncrasies and personal difficulties. (In today's world, a literary agent will fire and cancel you on Twitter if you get a pronoun wrong by mistake.) Finally, he was always a high-functioning drug addict, and there are a lot more of them than most people think (although it seems rare to stay high-functioning for more than a few years).

The thing about King, love him or hate him, is that he loves to write. Most people, even among successful novelists, don't--and that's OK, because it's extremely difficult to do well, and the rewards are astronomically uncommon. I think this explains why he was able to write decent books even while battling these demons.

Hard to say. I think they're both damaged, for lack of a better way to put it. The easy-mode player doesn't know what he's doing, but the impossible-mode player has developed a bunch of a heuristics that are probably counterproductive in a fair game.

In a two-player competitive game, this wouldn't be such an issue, because facing more adversity (a tougher opponent) will make you a better player in a theater that is strictly and always competitive. This doesn't apply as well to real life because sometimes you need to cooperate and sometimes you need to compete, and most people who have come up under adversity (which is far from a rare condition) will end up over-competing.

You see this in education, too. A lot of people think that Harvard Business School or Yale Law would be hyper-competitive environments. They're not, because it really doesn't matter if you get B's with that kind of brand-name school. The most competitive places are the ones in the midpack where some of the graduates will get good jobs but many won't. Harvard Business School is where people learn how to cooperate with douchebags, in the hope of being invited to join the douchebag class. Whereas graduates of, say, second-tier law schools make fantastic litigators but are never going to become biglaw partners because they don't have the social pedigree.

The easy-mode winner learns how to make people like him, which is all it really takes in business, because reliable mediocrity is quite enough. The impossible-mode player becomes hyper-competent but will usually fail socially because he can't get anyone to follow him. He knows exactly how everything works, but his knowledge is fucking depressing.

That might explain why a lot of what's currently happening in society comes across as ridiculous, nonsensical or hypocritical to the majority. Clown world.

Absolutely. And we live in a world where becoming famous or an "influencer" is all most people care about. I'm a novelist, releasing a book next year. I also burned down my social media platform in 2016 out of an ill-advised protest. So it will be an outlier success if my book sells 5,000 copies in the first year, which is not all that much. (You certainly can't live on that.) Meanwhile, Kyle Fucking Rittenhouse, who has 400k+ Twitter followers, could get a seven-figure advance for ghost-written garbage. This is why you see kids doing those unsafe, stupid "challenges" on TikTok. They're not any stupider than we were at their age, but they've figured out that this is a world in which, if you don't have at least a national reputation, you might as well be dead.

The reason cappies are bitching about a "labor shortage" right now is that, during this anomalous period, inelasticity seems to be working against them (although, let's be honest, they're not hurting all that much). Is that going to trigger long-term movement in labor's favor? Probably not. Capital has political and social power, not to mention well-oiled PR machinery, and labor doesn't.

We'll still have jobs for human truckers in 2035. We might have only automated 10% of those jobs. It won't matter. A 10% cut in job availability can trigger a 50% drop in wages and working conditions. What are workers going to do, not work? It's the same thing as with gas prices. A small disruption can cause costs to spike.

If you rely on the labor market to survive, the future has literally nothing for you, unless corporate capitalism is overthrown.

Most people are mediocre in their early years and get filtered out, even though a good percentage of them had the underlying talent and skill, and just never got lucky. Most of the ones who succeed once aren't going to succeed again, not because they're actually getting dumber but because non-success is the norm in this world.

Wreckage by success can happen, but it usually requires some odious externality that the person is unable to handle. You see this in the arts and in the literary world, because authors start getting invited to the parties that become necessary to make connections (for reviews, resources, and future publication) and then turn into coke zombies who can't write anymore. You don't see it as much with math professors, because there is no incentive pulling them into that scene--with the latter, it's just regular regression to the mean.

People who succeed don't understand or know why. They might have earned their success (some did, some didn't) but being competent at something is orthogonal to knowing why one succeeded at it, over the hundreds of others who fell on their faces. They know the least about how the system works, because they won the lottery by having the whole edifice stay out of their way.

On the other hand, people who failed tend to know exactly why they failed. This doesn't mean they understand the system either. Individually, almost no one does--successful or otherwise. Thing is, no one wants to listen to them. All they can tell you is what not to do, through a story with a depressing ending. It's very easy to write them off as bitter old washouts who never belonged in the game in the first place.

In general, there's a conflict in our society that, I think, explains a lot of the weird dichotomies that emerge, including political ones, and it's this: holding an external locus of control and a negative view of society makes you correct, but isn't always conducive to ideal mental health. On the other hand, believing in an internal locus of control and holding a pleasant view of society, although it largely makes you incorrect, seems to increase the likelihood that you will enjoy positive mental health and therefore succeed. Classical decision theory holds that having more information leads to better decisions and higher utility; on the other hand, when it comes to locus-of-control and the nature of society, being correct is observably maladaptive. It's tough to say which is "better".

In today's world, I don't think you should have kids unless you have enough wealth to guarantee that they won't have to rely on the labor market to survive. That doesn't mean you need to have enough money for them to live like private jet assholes; but you should be able to leave them enough that they can do what they want with their lives, because the era of "good jobs" seems to be ending.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's any way to prepare children for the life that lies ahead for them. There are too many unknown variables. Within 10-15 years, we're either going to have a complete (and possibly quite violent, thus unpredictable) global overthrow of capitalism--this is necessary, but there's no guarantee of what comes afterward being better--or we will see the opening steps of regression into such a degraded state--techno-capitalist feudalism within a collapsing ecosystem (in Fraser's terminology, a rentism that turns into exterminism upon pressure)--that will leave humanity unlikely, within anyone's lifetime, to recover.

1950s parents prepared their kids for one world; in the 1980s, their kids entered one that was slightly shittier (economically speaking) but still fairly similar. Most of our (1980s and '90s) parents prepared us for a world that no longer exists; we ended up coming of age into an unrecognizable country. (Who would have predicted, in late 1990s, that working conditions and living standards in the US would be third world within a generation? No one; I remember; I was there.) I feel really bad for parents today, because there is no way of knowing what the future is going to look like, but the probability of it being absolutely atrocious is much, much higher than it should be.

I think children should do enough chores to have a sense of self-efficacy. Same with survival skills. Being college-age or older and not knowing how to cook or do basic cleaning is an embarrassment, even if you're rich.

All that said, if you want your kids to succeed in the world, they have to know how to do a task without becoming the one who does the task, if you catch the distinction. In the workplace, you have to be willing to do unpleasant jobs, but be extremely selective in what you're willing to let yourself become the one who does. Outside of the upper class, no one really learns this skill. People from working- or middle-class backgrounds are either too resistant to doing tasks they consider beneath them (which is a bad look) or too willing, which leads to recurring time and image costs that eat up their ability to have a career.

If anything, the problem with the US education system is that it was designed to do that, and does it well.

Low-income public schools have metal detectors and a significant police presence. Show up a minute late to class (the bells were put there at the request of industrialists) and you'll lose points. They're treated like possible future criminals. High-income public schools have open campuses and forgiving attitudes toward late work and adolescent mischief, but still have lots of rules about when people can do what. Prep schools have guidance counselors that tell you exactly what you need to do, and who will start setting you up at 14, to get into whatever undergraduate college you choose--they train you to expect to be handed everything you want by society.

Whether it's by design or emergence, the system funnels people into socioeconomic strata that neatly correspond to the one they were born into. In the middle class, this means they get an education that is by-and-large competently delivered and that offers a little bit of autonomy but does not, in general, reward creativity.

The average middle school, with its stultifying rules, its emphasis on memorization and busywork, and its reward/punishment systems, is great training for the median industrial job. High school, with the culture of status-seeking and social pettiness, is great preparation for the white-collar corporate world. College trains people for the kind of job that would have been available to them fifty years ago; but in today's economy, all the decent opportunities are spoken-for.