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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5107 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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It is surprising how much can you achieved with good prompt and harnesses nowadays with how little tokens. The problem is that the majority of people using AI are too stupid to be lazy in the proper ways. I think that a tornado is coming. Probably later than anticipated, but the white collars brains are afraid (insert starship troopers movie meme here) - especially the ones who deep down always knew that their intellectual labor is neither extremely intellectual nor much useful. I am already seeing proposals for excise tax on tokens. And I think that the big hyperscalers grossly underestimate how much optimizations are left in the pipeline.

The compute cost on tools is low, agents are becoming quite adept at tool calling - so agents creating their own tools and tool calls is totally expected ... in a way this is what programmers have always done.

There is lots of performance left to be squeezed out of each token. And relatively small hyper focused models also doesn't seem to be getting the attention it deserves.

And I think that the big hyperscalers grossly underestimate how much optimizations are left in the pipeline.

Strongly agree on this. Deepseek V4 already brought down the output cost per million tokens below $1 (they say it's a promotion, but they keep extending it) for a model that's perfectly good enough for all "normal person" uses. I expect further optimisations will bring this cost down to $0.01 or so per million output tokens (with two more zeros in front for the input cost) within 5 years or so for models that are as capable as the stuff out there today (see how Qwen 3.6 27B today which you can run locally if you have a decent GPU outperforms Opus 4.0 from less than 12 months ago and which used to cost $75 per million output tokens).

For the vast majority of tasks you don't need the smartest model out there, you just need one which is good enough, and once the baseline for "good enough" is established Chinese competition will drive down the marginal price for "good enough" tokens to the point that some companies are going to be left nursing huge losses.

The problem is that the majority of people using AI are too stupid to be lazy in the proper ways.

especially the ones who deep down always knew that their intellectual labor is neither extremely intellectual nor much useful

I'm always amazed at how often this refrain comes up, with different explanations every time. For some reason, he idea of bullshit jobs is one has immense staying power.

Whenever it does come up, I often wonder how one would separate the useless, lazy, stupid jobs from the essential ones. When I was younger I held a similar view, but over time I realized that the single strongest predictor for whether I thought a job was bullshit or not was how little I knew about its actual day to day work.

As a simple example, take project managers. A bad one is terrible, and is probably one of those things that a lot of people woud say is neither "intellectual" nor "useful". I had that opinion once upon a time. Eventually, I worked on a project with a good project manager and realized that they actually do an insane amount of work and provide a significant force multiplier for the rest of the people involved. It felt fantastic to just... work on the problem.

That's one of my biggest concerns about the current LLM frenzy. It's largely being driven by a small, cloistered group of people who really buy into the "bullshit jobs" premise, and spend more time saying "well couldn't you Just X" instead of figuring out why things are the way they are. Systems evolve into specific shapes for a reason. Tribal knowledge is real.

I feel like we're going to be forcefully reminded of those facts if we keep it up.

It has lots of staying power ‘cause it’s an efficient motte and bailey.

Motte: the stereotypical email-shuffler. Office Space. Sinecures for the trust-fund kid. Wal-mart greeters.

Bailey: anything I don’t like or respect. Fundraising? Bullshit. Compliance? Nobody cares about that stuff. Management? Fuck those guys in particular.

Apply the usual incentives of group psychology, and bam, everyone’s getting Gell-Mann Amnesia.

Eventually, I worked on a project with a good project manager and realized that they actually do an insane amount of work and provide a significant force multiplier for the rest of the people involved. It felt fantastic to just... work on the problem.

I mean this is kinda the point. A lot of these roles if you get the right person into the right situation they can definitely actually manifest a lot of value, but there's also a lot of jerking off and people dissapearing into huge bureaucratic machines. I also believe that 'bullshit jobs' and 'the current state of the economy evolved for a reason' aren't really mutually exclusive. My expectation is that in 20 years time there'll be a broad reshuffle of the deck but whatever percentage is largely superfluous today will also still be there in slightly different job titles.

"Bullshit jobs" is, as far as I can see, one half large organizations being too slow to adjust course when jobs need to change, and one half wishful thinking by utopians who desperately want wage labor to be bullshit so they can make the case for some form of luxury communism.

It’s a useful way of describing work that has been regulated into existence. For example, the EU passes legislation that requires some hugely complex and time consuming climate reporting for every company with an annual revenue of more than €10m. 100,000 companies now have to hire someone to be their ‘climate reporting officer’. The US healthcare system’s extensive regulation and lifetimes of case law about who pays and when and what insurance covers and what the hospitals have to provide etc etc create tens of thousands of jobs on both sides of the billing equation (the healthcare providers and the insurers) that don’t exist, or certainly don’t exist in the same sense, in single payer systems. Walmart wants to open in a town in Kentucky. The town offers large tax breaks in exchange for hiring 200 local people. A big Walmart in 2026 only needs 120 people to operate, though, but the tax breaks are worth more than that payroll. Numerous jobs as greeters and shelf stickers and security guards are created unnecessarily. A government contractor is tasked by a new government with proving that what it does at $500m a year in state billing is justified. It hires McKinsey for $20m to write a report, because nobody ever got fired for hiring McKinsey (including the minister who gets the report).

Individually these are examples of bloat, bureaucracy, overregulation, unintended consequences, inefficiency, corruption, graft, credentialism, whatever. But collectively, all of these are examples of bullshit jobs.

If the bureaucracy is being imposed from within the corporation, it's one thing, but it's totally different if it's a necessary response to legislation. At that point it's less about the job itself being bullshit and more about disagreement with the underlying policy. If the job performs the function of complying with the law, it's a fairly large value add compared with the penalties that would be imposed if the work weren't done. To give an example of a regulation that can come across as bullshit to some people, the EPA requires erosion and sedimentation (E&S) permits for construction projects that involve disturbing a certain amount of earth. Depending on the size and location of the project, you may need to apply for a permit, not need anything, or need to have an E&S plan on site but not need prior approval. This third category can come across as bullshit to some people, because it involves paying an engineer thousands of dollars to publish a report that no one is going to read, especially if the conclusion is that no special precautions involving erosion need to be taken.

You could just as soon not get a plan and no one would be the wiser. Except if runoff from the jobsite ends up washing onto your neighbor's property and he asks to see the plan and you don't have one. If you end up getting sued over excessive runoff causing damage, not having a plan to deal with erosion is a pretty big matzo ball to have hanging over the litigation. Sure, the government could eliminate E&S requirements entirely, but that only means that when a problem happens you get to spend several years litigating it. The tradeoff is that you minimize erosion problems on all projects from the beginning, and if you do get sued it's nice to be able to say that you had an E&S plan.

The problem I have with the bullshit jobs theory in general is that somebody who isn't familiar with a business presumes that they know how to run it better and knows what work contributes value and what doesn't. This is the fundamental issue I have with AI gurus saying that LLMs are going to take your job. Really? Because chances are they have no idea what you actually do, let alone what value it provides the company. They think of everything in terms of outputs and assume that being able to generate the output is the beginning and end of the value the employee provides to the company. It's a prime example of Rory Sutherland's Doorman Fallacy: A consultant to a hotel company sees the doorman's job as opening the door, and he tells the hotel that they can save a ton of money by replacing the doorman with an automatic system. But the doorman does more than open the door. He calls cabs, he deals with package deliveries, he provides a certain amount of security, he gives the hotel a degree of prestige, etc. Since it's impossible to quantify how much business you're getting as a result of these little services, it's easy to fall into the trap where you believe that automating away the doorman is an automatic windfall, especially when nobody is ever going to say in a customer survey that the existence of a doorman played any role in selecting the hotel.

this is exactly it and the part of bullshit jobs people miss. Bullshit jobs exist almost entirely because of regulation - the job may seem useful, but it is only useful because regulation requires it/makes it worth paying for.

Is being a police officer a bullshit job? Professional law enforcement is an occupation that only exists because of legislation creating it.

Graeber would say yes, though that's because he thinks any kind of security work is BS; he also thinks actuaries and corporate attorneys and executive assistants are all bullshit jobs. Conversely, he'd probably think food safety inspector was a real job. This is because "bullshit job" is an incoherent concept that people slap on jobs they think shouldn't exist. They have a variety of reasons why they might think a job shouldn't exist, but they're almost always normative claims about what things are worth doing.

Note that sometimes the "regulation" isn't from the government, but a parent organization.

For example, sometimes managers assign employees useless tasks to take credit for managing a higher number of employees, since that's the metric they get promoted on. Or to spend their yearly budget so next year's isn't reduced. Or because one of their employees is their boss's incompetent grandson.

When companies become large enough, they become pseudo-governments. The real enemy is big bureaucracy.

For some reason, he idea of bullshit jobs is one has immense staying power.

Maybe we’ve just had different life trajectories, but I think this is because most people have had one of those jobs.

The original thesis labelled a bullshit job as one where the person self-reports that “the world would be the same or better if I didn’t come in to work” and I think huge numbers of people can relate to sitting down at their desk and doing something that really just doesn’t need to be done but that they are being told to do anyway.

Yeah. I'm fortunate enough to have FIREd due to hitting a SAAS startup home run but even the company I was part of has now roughly 10x'd headcount from when we hit our explosive growth phase. Maybe a quarter of that is strictly necessary for allowing people to have bums in seats/realistic worklife balance. The rest is just a slow grind towards bureaucratic inertia and shipping pace has fallen off several cliffs.

The rest is just a slow grind towards bureaucratic inertia and shipping pace has fallen off several cliffs.

It has been my observation that engineering productivity often scales sub-linearly with team size. Coordination between developers isn't zero-overhead, but it can still be "faster" (to market) overall than a small, dedicated team.

Yeah this is essentially it. When we hit our initial explosive growth we had a combination of being absurdly lucky in terms of right place/time and had some smart, skilled guys working 100-hour weeks. Now most of the original drivers have enough cash to have a strong buffer and minions, nobody's pushing it anywhere near as hard.

You jammy bugger! Congrats. That's the dream right there.

I saw the same dynamic in projects that I was part of - you can absorb a surprising number of people without really meaningfully improving performance.

I mean I'm talking essentially going from a staff of 10 of us where we were all pulling 100-hour days to now 100ish people but like the explosive growth tailed off about 70 hires ago and I'm not sure what everybody else is notionally doing when fuck all is being shipped.

I'd like the secret to pull 100-hour days seems quite useful.

In my teens, and early twenties I split time between agricultural labor, food service, and construction. After that, I ended up in logistics before moving into software. I don't think I'd say any of those would meet those criteria.

Whenever it does come up, I often wonder how one would separate the useless, lazy, stupid jobs from the essential ones. When I was younger I held a similar view, but over time I realized that the single strongest predictor for whether I thought a job was bullshit or not was how little I knew about its actual day to day work.

By and large and also unfortunately: The bullshit is distributed throughout the system at different levels of concentration.

When I did Labor, my job (based on what I was compensated for) was about 20-30% bullshit; given that that was how much my paycheck reflected massaging the owners ego vs. actually doing stuff; but I did actually do stuff all day.

I've also had an office job that was more like 90% bullshit; I mainly read ebooks while pretending to do email bullshit, but there was an occasional critical task that needed me specifically. I could Have been in the office for 1 hour a day with room on both sides; but the owner needed me there for 8 hours in order for his dick to feel big.

There are probably jobs out there that are 99% bullshit, and 1% irreplicable and critical process knowledge that shuts the plant down for a week if the one guy who sits on a stool spitting sunflower seed hulls everywhere like a god damn savage leaves because he is the only one who knows what that sound means.

Whenever it does come up, I often wonder how one would separate the useless, lazy, stupid jobs from the essential ones. When I was younger I held a similar view, but over time I realized that the single strongest predictor for whether I thought a job was bullshit or not was how little I knew about its actual day to day work.

There's a simple question that needs answering and yet never gets one regarding this. If the jobs were so clearly bullshit, why are employers paying for it? There must be value somewhere in some way expected from it. That value might not be immediately noticeable, maybe it's some PR thing like how companies do donation matching. Or maybe it's as you say, more complex than people think it is. Hell maybe you just exist as a redundancy in case shit goes wrong and in the rare case you're needed, you're there for the emergency. But there's gonna be something worth it.

This doesn't mean perfect. Companies will overhire on tasks from time to time and employers will make mistakes or have stupid ideas because they're people too. Or sometimes a project seems good at first but just ends up failing due to competition doing better or society/market conditions shifting.

But the corrections do come and jobs that are determined to not be working out get fired. The owners want profit, they are not running a charity.

Especially funny that this populist sentiment tends to coexist with another common one about greed. You can have "bullshit jobs where people get paid despite not being of value" or you can have "greedy owners who don't care about employees and will fire you without care" but not both.

You can have "bullshit jobs where people get paid despite not being of value" or you can have "greedy owners who don't care about employees and will fire you without care" but not both.

Those aren't mutually exclusive if the owners are terrible judges about what actually produces value.

And if they're particularly bad and they don't make up for it somehow else then the company takes a backseat to competitors and the CEO gets replaced/owner fails. Lots of businesses fail, the culling process is an important part of optimizing.

Massive stack of competing incentives where selling needing more minions to boost your headcount to your superiors is imperative for getting more clout in the business, plus weird complexity situations where owners are sufficiently alienated from day-to-day coalface operations to not know where things are actually getting done.

Without getting into obvious absurdities like hiring to meet affirmative action quotas or personality hires or random goonsquads of friends/family. There's also a lot of weird situations in business where owners aren't necessarily running enterprises for purely financially optimal reasons. I once worked in a computer store that was lucky to break even, but the guy running it had been a very early mover on retailing PCs and essentially banked Financial Independence money 20 years ago. Now his entire social being was tied up in being a small business owner, he is a complete workaholic and he additionally had a bunch of 20-year employees that he felt were unlikely to be able to find employment elsewhere. I was there for 6 months and it was essentially a sitcom where this 70 year old owner would wake up in the morning, come up with some hare-brained scheme for a new product line to introduce to 'bring the business back to the old days' and everybody essentially went through the motions.

The only reason I understand that it was essentially a lifestyle business for the owner was a chance encounter with his wife where she told me, and things like this aren't even that rare in the economy. Though notably he did eventually sell to a random Indian guy who proceeded to replace all the old-timers with the Australian H1B equivalent, so I guess the economy finds a way.

Small businesses can get away with being pure passion projects. Small businesses are also small. The value provided isn't always financial, often especially for many small business entrepreneurs, it's social and emotional value. They crave control, or recognition, or freedom, or the feeling, or ego, or whatever and they're willing to substitute some financial value in exchange for their social or emotional value. Heck even large companies and owners do that sometimes too, just not to the same relative degree. They're still human at the end of the day, not emotionless robots with pure logical finance guided thinking.

plus weird complexity situations where owners are sufficiently alienated from day-to-day coalface operations to not know where things are actually getting done.

Like I said, it's not perfect. Often companies do prefer to be a little too much than to risk not being enough. But generally there is an expected value to come from you, and if you don't fulfill it then you'll be dropped eventually.

Managers have competing interests with their org and with the broader enterprise. Career growth for management is managing more people - nothing else really exists. Sufficiently large companies have strong conflicts of interest between departments. Microsoft VPs have historically preferred outright killing winning projects if they can’t get a slice of the action in their org. On another note, firing people is truly awful for most (0/10, do not recommend), and is disruptive to the rest of the team… and the career consequences of a bad fire differ from just hiring too many people.

Managers have competing interests with their org and with the broader enterprise. Career growth for management is managing more people - nothing else really exists. Sufficiently large companies have strong conflicts of interest between departments

Now that's true, but to be clear here hiring people so the manager in charge can feel more important is a value provided too! A stupid one to many of us, but people spend tons of money validating their egos. It's not too much different than someone who spends millions of dollars on some art piece so they can say they own a piece from Famous Artist instead of just a cheap replica.

The value can manifest in weird ways that aren't directly profitable.

Most bullshit jobs exist because other bullshit jobs exist. You can see this in healthcare; you've got armies of healthcare admins whose job it is basically to make sure they get paid, and other armies of insurance people whose job it is to try not to pay. Or "compliance", where you've got people whose job it is to make sure all the paperwork is done right, and other people's job it is to punish the first set if they don't do it correctly.

A good project manager may be useful, but most of them IME were basically making sure the paperwork got done and the charts filled out, and were a net negative for actually getting the stuff done. The usual argument is they're needed for management to do their job, but I'm doubtful.

especially the ones who deep down always knew that their intellectual labor is neither extremely intellectual nor much useful

I mean this is the thing that confuses me a bit about the surge. A lot of white collar labor at present is barely productive, and whilst AI can probably ape a lot of it effectively (Especially since the end result doesn't actually matter that much) we're already in an era of essentially UBI fake work in a lot of fields. Meanwhile the actual ability to manufacture things that aren't software and compliance legalese have largely been outsourced to other countries and I think meaningful advancement in manufacturing robotics isn't that close so like... okay you can set the highest score ever in Facebook button optimizing but who cares.

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