psi75

Also, it's much harder to build a platform organically than it used to be. I was semifamous in the 2010s and was literally almost killed for it. (Some people who were high in Y Combinator were on the wrong side of history there, but I digress.) So, I know how these systems actually work and how to exploit them (if one wants to go black hat). The game of getting attention is more competitive these days because there are so many more spammers, bad actors, and general-issue crapflooders. You can buy 10,000 fake Twitter followers for less than a hundred bucks and you probably won't get caught or face any negative consequences; on the other hand, getting from zero to 1000 legitimate followers is really difficult (much harder than it was in 2010).

The "cultural role" is drummed up in order to get people to work on below-subsistence salaries.

It's probably more about ego than money for the high-level people. Since people are cheap (because "passion") they can have large teams under them without their organizations having to pay the typical costs of large teams.

The truth about it, though, is that the culture is too balkanized for any of this stuff to make sense. Very few people go out of their way to read or find the best books; for good or for bad, they've all self-segregated into warring genres and subgenres--and the so-called "literary" crowd who insist their genre is not a genre are often the worst in this regard. The balkanization is probably why no one knows how to market books anymore; people really understand a small slice of the total readership and, in any case, the lines are always changing.

Right, and this is basically an admission of their own uselessness. They'll only help you if you can prove you don't need the help. They're rent-seekers at this point.

To be fair, it is a hard problem. In the visual arts, you can tell if someone is talented immediately. With authors, especially in fiction, there's about a 12-hour commitment before one even knows if they know how to begin, carry, and finish a story. Literary agents, who are supposed to be the gatekeepers, are beyond useless at it (although it is worthwhile to get one, if you can, because you need one to be a serious player in traditional publishing).

If you want your book to get a decent editor and maybe get a print run in the three or four digits, you don't have to deal with all the faddish bukkake (social media presence, trendy subject matter, performative wokery designed to signal virtue without actually changing anything or challenging capitalism, dodging cancel mobs). You can just write, and you may be able to find an audience organically if you put time and money into it. You probably won't, however, make enough money to write full time.

If your focus is on getting set up to make enough money to write full time, then you do have to worry about all that garbage, because there just aren't many good book deals to go around.

In theory, publishers provide a real service, because self-publishing well is expensive (four, five digits easily). In theory, they should be offering access to people who couldn't afford what it costs to self-publish to the expected standard. In practice? The only people who can get in are people who have the connections and financial resources not to need the help. Whoops.

What we're learning about publishing (which we already knew, those of us who've been studying it) is that no one is good at selling books. Most self-publishers aren't, most traditional publishers aren't, and most PR firms are only good at taking and spending your money. We just don't have a good understanding of why individuals buy books (it changes) and there's a lot of evidence, sadly, that book sales are only loosely correlated to the quality of the writing (in the long term, quality matters more, but a book that dies in the short term won't have a long term).

I am of the mindset that the decent functioning of human society is an entitlement and that people who deliberately cause dysfunction (such as Davos assholes, who are deliberately destroying the U.S. middle class to set some weird kind of example) should be treated as reneging criminals and removed from power using whatever means are necessary. Some people coat doorknobs in feces (or, say, found companies with terrible cultures, support capitalism past its deserving end-of-life) simply because they enjoy the thrill of being the cause; others among us, people of culture, are entitled to a society that protects us from the fecal spreaders. That's literally why we permit the state to exist; so it will protect us. However, it does a terrible job these days.

But yes, it is true that, absent the existence of human society, I am owed nothing (since the lions and gazelles and wolves clearly owe me nothing).

Life under 21st-century American capitalism is bad, but it's even worse outside of the imperial core. Two things can both be true.

"Sprints" are supposed to be humiliating. The very message is that you're not trusted with even two fucking weeks of your own (!!) working time. It could not be clearer. If you work in sprints, it's because the higher-ups think you're a child and a loser, and you'll never be able to overcome that negative inference, because if you perform poorly you will confirm it and if you perform well, you will confirm that their micromanagement actually works--there is no winning.

Also, "Waterfall" never really existed. It was a straw man invented to sell this Agile bukkake.

In any case, a number of the dysfunctions are, in effect, intentional. Standups that go on for 45+ minutes? Long meetings are a classic way for managers to punish perceived underperformers (or, in Agile terms, "impediments") when they're not entirely sure who problem player is. The theory is that the rest of "the team" (I put this term in quotes because coworkers in corporate aren't an actual team--that's just management speak--but are often pitted against each other) will get sick of the incessant meetings and rat out the underperformer who is causing this wastage of time. The humiliations of Jira and "user stories" aren't bureaucratic accidents that occurred in good faith; they hurt because they're supposed to hurt.

Henry Ford wasn't a good person. He was a rabid antisemite. But even he knew that he wouldn't be able to sell cars indefinitely if people couldn't afford to buy them, so he raised wages. The bosses, as a class, no longer have to do this. They can make enough fake money out of debt to keep their businesses alive. So that's what they're doing.

All this means we get artificial mediocre prosperity that is contingent on their piles of money getting bigger (i.e., all economic growth, meager as it has been, goes to them). And we know that they are willing to crash everything (or, to give an example that has actually happened, make lots of people sick with Covid-19) to keep themselves in charge and their piles of money growing bigger.

If the consumer debt game ended for some reason, the whole system would collapse immediately.

Without a complete overthrow of corporate capitalism, we're going to regress to the state of medieval Europe and many of the poorest, most corrupt countries today, in which there are people who have money and there are people who work but it is impossible to get meaningful money by working.

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[1] Please note that there's a distinction between personal property and private property. You're not an asshole for wanting people not to take stuff you need for personal use, such as your car and your books and your toiletries. That's personal property, which is a different thing. If we take this reasonable idea, though, and run it up without attention to how it might behave at scale, though, we run the risk of enabling the kind of nightmarish private property that afflicts countries like the US, inevitably leading to extreme inequality, intractable political corruption, and metastatic governmental dysfunction.

For most of us poors, money is a tool we need to survive. For the people who have the bulk of it, it's a weapon. And we're the targets. They love blowing us up; it's what they do. They care more about making others suffer than the material comforts (to which hedonic adaptation accrues quick) money affords. Putting the few "good jobs", the few jobs that offer us even a sliver of a chance (like 1%, but we're expected to work as if it were 95%) of being something more than an exploited worker, in congested and dysfunctional expensive cities is something they do because it's hilarious to them.

Barring a complete and final overthrow of corporate capitalism, you can't escape this crapsack world. The important land is already owned by reptilian shitasses. Billions of people are going without drinking water while a bunch of psychopaths fly around in private jets, destroying the planet because they find it comical.

Technology is a good thing. Industry is a good thing. We can keep them.

What we don't need is the ruling class. They take the lion's share of the resources, and they don't do anything useful to justify what we pay to subsidize their pampered existences. We can rip them out and things will still work.

Companies are fantastic at making it look like accountability exists, because people at the bottom get punished for even the smallest mistakes, but avoiding any consequences that would affect high-ranking members or force the organization to change how it does business.

It's debatable--it goes back to Barthes's "death of the author", whether art's value and meaning resides solely in viewer perception or also in author intention--whether AI art will be "true" art, but it will very soon be good enough to replace artists who work in subordinate contexts (which is, unfortunately, generally a necessity if one wants to survive within the reigning corporate-capitalist totalitarianism).

AI is not going to force us to "become artists and poets", because it will make it even harder to earn money (i.e., the stuff most people have to earn through humiliating subordination) at these things. It will force us to become dependent, in the way artists (in practice) already are. This isn't as horrible as it sounds. The rich are already dependent on the state, which enforces their so-called "property rights"--this fact being something so-called "libertarians" are too stupid to realize. The middle classes are already dependent on employers, which turns out to suck a lot more than being a rich person dependent on the state. We already depend on complicated supply chains and national defense practices; it is simply the case that we'll soon (a) be dependent on AI, as it increasingly excels at the menial subordinate work we once relied on other people to do, and (b) be dependent on intelligent management (first coming from nation-states and UBI; later, one hopes, coming from a global entity that can eradicate poverty worldwide) of this weird quantity called "money", because we will no longer be able to reliably earn it through work, machines having taken that over (and thank God).

Ignore the whining of frontline managers about how "no one wants to work" (i.e., their own bosses are squeezing them by refusing to let them hire, forcing them to do more grunt work). The long-term trend of wages is downward. Labor markets do not find equilibrium. They diverge. The lizardfolk who own all the capital can wait. But laborers cannot; they need to eat. The whole goddamn system is rigged and 99+ percent of us are losers.

This isn't just about AI Art, or the mediocre but serviceable code generated by GPT-3 and the like. We are very likely headed for a broad-based, general wage collapse everywhere in the world, and this sort of situation is likely to result in a global violent conflict between people and capital, in which either an entire socioeconomic system is overthrown (a chaotic situation, but the good outcome) or humanity is thrown into slavery from which it is unlikely ever to recover.

This is completely normal. There is a conflict between what you know on a deep level and the false consciousness you are required to uphold, and that you do uphold by completing the work.

The ground truth is that, even though your boss probably isn't a bad or mean person, he too has a boss, who has a boss, and following the chain one almost always finds a vested interest in a corrupt status quo whereby a small set of hereditarily connected rent-seekers who stifle progress and don't care about anything but expanding their own wealth and power.

You can make money by collecting small donations from normal, decent people, but there aren't that many to go around, because the fact is that normal humans have almost no economic freedom. Modulo a rounding error, all money is blood money: it comes either from wealthy people and corporations who have evil intentions, or from governments that might have decent intentions but have been corrupted by evil psychopaths from the private-sector elite.

The fact that rich people are paying us to do something is as strong a signal as there could be that what we're doing is poisoning the world, possibly in a way we don't fully understand. Plus, any time we do something as a subordinate, we know that if we perform too well, we are sending a signal to people who are humiliating us (even if in a superficially professional and kind way) that treating us as subordinates works, and encouraging them to humiliate us even more.

The only reason the system doesn't collapse in an afternoon is that we're indoctrinated into bourgeois false consciousness. But something tells me you knew that already.

The large-scale failure of democracy that's happening all over the world is something different, though. Regulation is struggling to keep up with technology, and it doesn't help that nation-states have already been doing a piss-poor job of protecting people from their employers. If the US falls in the next 20 years, it won't be due to Covid or Trump or nation-level adversaries; it'll be due to the obscene power given to employers, who can literally ruin an employee's life--not just fire him, but anally ravage him in perpetuity with bad references--for any reason or none. Eventually, unless national governments start dropping serious lead pipe on employers' heads, people are going to tire of paying 30+ percent of their incomes to a government that lets bosses get away with this shit.

Government may be an option, although it doesn't pay as well as industry and you can end up in a comfortable but stifling role.

In corporate, though? Yeah, you pretty much need to have the appearance of star power, which means degree prestige matters. Whether you're actually any good (and, trust me, there are plenty of mediocre people from top schools) doesn't really matter, because the decision-makers are too stupid to know the difference.

There are ways to play this, though, if you're aiming at industry. Harvard isn't a top-10 CS department, but the people in corporate aren't going to know that, and so "Harvard PhD" is going to make them fellate you just because it's Harvard. That may be an avenue. Or, better yet, get a PhD in something that sounds technical but is easier and less selective.

That said, if your goal is to play the corporate game and make a lot of money, you should probably forget about ML and focus on becoming a manager as quick as possible. If your goal is to do intellectually stimulating work, you should probably not consider corporate, because your work is going to be evaluated by people who are literally 50 IQ points too dumb to do so, and while this noise factor is manipulable rather than truly random, the people who have the skills to do perform said manipulation tend to go into management, not technology.

If you want to do real ML work, you pretty much need the PhD. This is a hard thing for people who have 140+ IQs but do poorly for whatever reason with formal education to accept, but it's true. Even if you get one real ML job without a doctoral degree, you won't get a second one.

Sure, other 140+ IQs can recognize very smart people with only (or not even) a bachelor's degree, but (a) your career in industry will be influenced by the opinions of not-smart but politically empowered people who rely on heuristics like educational prestige because they can't judge the genuine article, and (b) some of those 140+ are nevertheless scumbags and will use (a) against you.

If you want to be a serious player in an academic field like ML, you need to not only get the degree but start publishing and never stop. It doesn't matter all that much if your papers are any good; no one in industry will ever read them. But you need the image of a successful academic who's just slumming it and can go back any time.

From the boss's perspective, the grungy IT support stuff is closer to real work (although the only thing that's actually respected in management, because it's what they do) than the shiny ML stuff that one star hire is allowed to do because it makes the company look cooler than it actually is.

Most of the people doing real ML in industry are prestige hires--they're hired because their names draw people in, but basically get to work on whatever they want--and you need a top-10 PhD at an absolute minimum to be eligible for those.

The ugly truth about industry is that 99.9997% of it is flow capture based on power relationships, found artifacts (i.e., corruption opportunities) within the state, and the implementation of very simple processes but in a way such that the threat to executive reputations as a first priority, and profit as an important second one, are minimized. This doesn't exactly make a market for ML innovation, unless your boss for some weird reason still cares about being a co-author on your papers (which his bosses will pressure him not to let you publish, because after all, this publishing is a distraction from your paid work).

On the other hand, if you want to be able to afford a house in the Bay Area, and to be tapped for (indeed, most likely forced into, both due to losing interest in and being unhireable for IC work) management in your mid-30s... then go for industry. The poison carrot will make you sick but it will kill you more slowly than poverty, so that ain't so bad, now is it?

This is true, but it's also dangerous. The lizardfolk [1] have learned that WFH works, that's the good news. The bad news is that nothing prevents said lizardfolk from taking the jobs right out of our pockets and shipping them to places where workers have even fewer rights than in the US.

COVID-19 isn't over, and it is still capitalism's Chernobyl. It might, however, first hurt American workers because it is also possibly nationalism's Chernobyl. People accept national governments when those governments protect them, either from foreign invaders, or from the private-sector smeg-thugs called "employers". The success of WFH has proven that most work can be done anywhere. This isn't just bad for local real estate barons; it's bad for nations. Western governments have done a piss-poor job, over the past 40 years, of protecting their own people from their bosses... but what happens if they can't even do that? The world becomes ungovernable.

WFH eviscerates false consciousness, which is a good thing (acceleration) but dangerous. We no longer pretend work is the most important thing in our lives, a "passion" because we somehow lack the imagination to conceive of better uses for our time than subordinate labor. (We still do it, and competently, but not for 50+ hours per week.) The bosses no longer pretend to be invested in our careers or to see us as future colleagues rather than disposable subordinates. Work becomes a commodity, a trade of (too much) of one's finite time for (too little of) an artificially scarce commodity called money. And that's really fucking depressing. "Antiwork" on Reddit (which is mostly just meme posts at this point) is just the beginning.

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[1] No, I don't believe the corporate upper class are literal reptilians. It's important to use imagery like this to dehumanize the private jet set, in order to prepare the public in case peaceful means to remove these people from power are exhausted and we have to go into the second half of the alphabet, so to speak.

Offices suck. The only reason the cattle are being called back into them is because a bunch of propertarian squidcunts convinced some corrupt mayors to say "it's time" even though COVID is still quite active (I'm recovering from it as I type this, and it sucks).

The bosses don't care, of course. They have their own offices, and people who work in open-plan spaces are replaceable, so who cares if they get sick? Not the reptilian demonfucks who sign the checks, that much is clear.

I do agree that "woke" virtue signaling, when performed by bourgeois upper-middle-class people who fail to see (or who have vested interests in not seeing, or at least pretending not to see) that capitalism is the underlying enemy, is insufferable. We should avoid falling for capitalism's myriad divide-and-conquer tactics. "Woke capitalism" is a product. So is Trumpism. So is the religious garbage of right-leaning or right-wing megachurches. So are the myriad intellectual hoops Ivy League professors have to twist themselves into to justify neoliberalism.

We do have problems of racism, sexism, and antisemitism in our society. We also have (as the right points out) a problem of cultural and moral rot. All these issues are serious and we need to attack the underlying cause. We need to stop fighting small battles and letting ourselves be divided, because the real enemy is corporate capitalism and the minute we stop letting those boardroom shitfucks divide us, we start winning.

For example, it has become fashionable in liberal circles to argue for abolishing the SAT because, while it is not intrinsically racist, its results reflect our racist society: people with less access to education and tutoring perform poorly, and this results in measurable racial disparities. Problem is, the world becomes even worse without it. Under our current regime, very few people from underprivileged backgrounds can get into college and advance, but without the SAT, almost no one would be doing so.