SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
No bio...
User ID: 84
However, I still think it's clear that genuine eccentricity is better tolerated in programming circles. Fursuits, blahajs and programming socks are more prevalent in programming circles.
I don't think any of those would be tolerated in any of the workplaces I've ever been involved with. Sure, worn jeans and an old metal band t-shirt don't even get a second look - that was practically a uniform some 10-15 years ago. Same with combat boots and camo pants. Business as usual.
But straight up "WTF is this shit, that guy is weirding everyone out, what is his issue?"-eccentricity? No. The boss would have a Talk with them.
The SBF types are gaming a second-order effect (convincing investors and managers that they're geniuses), but the underlying infrastructure still requires first-order competence (actually building the thing).
SBF types are basically reverse signaling the same thing the same way that overpaid hype consultanst in fancy suits are signaling to the upper management. Both are trying to use looks and behavior to convince someone who isn't technically competent that "Trust us bro, we're so good that we'll totally deliver you massive benefits".
aristocratic standards are more gameable by the wealthy precisely because they're so trainable. If you have money, you can buy the suit, hire the etiquette coach, send your kid to the right boarding school.
I've gotten the impression from some older comments here that such gameability was almost the point. That by having the money and acting like you were old money, in a generation or two you'd be considered if not actual aristocracy, at least upper class.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
Today, it reflects precisely the opposite, tech-bros compete over who can performatively display their slobbery and betrayal of social norms as evidence of their talent.
In what alternate reality besides truly tiny niche examples?
I've been in the programming workforce for close to 30 years and I have never seen actual slobbery nor any betrayal of social norms there. Peoples clothes (including my own) have ranged from shorts and band t-shirt to straight pants and a fancy collared shirts and I've even seen one or two guys wearing a suit (due to intentional personal style). That is to say, people have dressed exactly as other men of similar age in non-public facing (*) office jobs that don't have status games attached to looks.
The only actual flaunting would be to dress in a business suit with a tie (unless you work in the financial sector) because you'd then be essentially signaling that you're trying to hide your lack of technical substance by over dressing .
*: The one time I ended up presenting a product at an industry trade fair my attire was black jeans, black dress shirt and black leather jacket which was chosen because it was my normal style at the time and also happened to blend in perfectly with the other industry people.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
With advanced math even the latest models will still hallucinate on me when they're just asked to immediately spew output tokens
The other day I needed the equation for the voltages of two capacitors over time when charged initially to different voltages and connected via a resistor. That's simplest possible system of two differential equations, first term of the first year university level math. IOW it's the very opposite of "advanced math".
I wrote down the equations and asked ChatGPT to solve for V1(t) and V2(t). It spent a long time thinking and gave a confident answer with a bunch of "I can also give ..." extras. Too bad it was wrong. I changed the variable names to make it look closer to a basic textbook problem and after a bunch more thinking it gave a different wrong answer. Finally I simplified the problem so much that it became useless (fixed initial values to 1 and 0 respectively) to make it even more textbooky and I finally got a correct answer. Too bad it was useless. Finally I just ended up googling how to present such systems to Matlab symbolic math toolbox and got the answer I actually needed in the first place.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
Yes, with our hands! Come, join the revolution!
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
Don't forget physics. We're probably nowhere near the limit of how many computational operations it takes to get a given "intelligence" level of output, but whatever that limit is will combine with various physical limits on computation to turn even our exponential improvements into more logistic-function-like curves that will plateau (albeit at almost-incomprehensible levels) eventually.
What people seem to fairly consistently forget is that the exponential improvements in computation have come at an exponential development and build resource cost. It doesn't matter if a hypothetical AI can keep improving the core design part when everything else required to actually use that new core design keeps increasing exponentially in cost.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
Surströmming is less food and more chemical warfare.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
I understand people who like the multiplayer aspect wouldn't want to play like that and I have no problem with it. Any implementation could essentially be just another variant of easy level difficulty purely for the single player campaign.
That wasn't what the comments said, though (in that and some other similar conversations elsewhere). They were all about me supposedly playing an entirely wrong game genre (as if single player RTSes are somehow inherently about braindead unit AI and twitchy mouse clicks) and I essentially got told that I should just play turn based strategy games (a completely different genre that I have zero interest in). Essentially that only people who people who have play with "proper" meta should be allowed to play games like that and everyone else should stick to simple casual games.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
The prevalence of metagaming and net decking is a great example.
I don't play much but I've noticed people have very strong opinions on The One True Allowed Way To Play a game and what sorts of game types others should even be allowed to play at all based on their preferred play style. This is exemplified by the assumption that anyone who isn't a hardcore competitive gamer who's willing to invest in a $5000 gaming computer should only ever play ultra lightweight casual games. I think it was even on /r/themotte some years ago where I pretty much got jumped on for saying I'd like a version of Starcraft 2 that nearly completely eliminated "actions per minute" as a relevant metric in single player game (which is to say, a version of SC2 with the artificial stupidity of unit AI removed and some basic action automation features added).
Yeah, that's very different from just a "programming company". California woke tech-adjacent culture is its whole own microcosm which cannot be generalized to the entire programming profession, particularly in international conversations (what with self_made_human being an Indian in Scotland). To put it slightly less charitably, the vast majority of programming profession isn't filled with cliche autist weirdos to even remotely the same extent as that particular subculture of it is.
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