domain:acoup.blog
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
Nothing you've said is wrong, it just reflects a different value prioritization and worldview.
When people use the phrase "work to make someone else richer", I very much enjoy YesChad.jpeg'ing that hard. I believe in a life of service. I want to do things in life that make other people better off. In a more economic yet abstract sense, I want to create more value and wealth than I consume.
I can hear @Sloot laughing as he pictures me as a doe-eyed whippersnapper who actually feels good about making the Boss more money. Well, maybe? What if the boss is smarter than me and can better allocate the resources of the company? What if I know the boss pretty well and also think he or she has a good set of moral principles as well?
One of the pitfalls of modern individualism is the idea that if you're "serving" or "working for" anyone else in a hierarchical arrangement, you're automatically being exploited. I can tell you for a fact that there are still thousands of Marines who loved the hell out of serving under General Mattis. Elon Musk's reality distortion field is so strong that he has ex employees on record stating he was pretty much abusive - and they were proud to take it! These are probably bad examples to bring up to defend my case, but my point remains.
Chad H1B Billable Hour-Generation, with his excellent ability to game the system will enjoy skating ahead while everyone else around him - fuck 'em - is being a naieve little wagecuck. But Chad H1B is also importing the, ahem, cultural peculiarities that don't look so good for the West when extrapolated across all of society (the UK and Canada would like to have a word in the alley -- which is where they spend most of their nights now).
Free riding is a problem and the answer isn't to applaud it.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
John Grisham – The Testament. The thing about Grisham is that everything he writes is inevetably good, but he hasn't written one great book in his life, even by the standards of popular fiction. Like, Stephen King, he has a problem with endings, but where King's endings actively piss you off, Grisham's just sort of exist, and you move on with your life. I gave up on King around 2001 when I tried reading The Tommyknockers, which was just one long King ending. Grisham was the first "adult" author I read, starting in middle school, when my idea of adult books was the kind of thick mass-market paperbacks my parents always carried around with them. Grisham was the hottest author at the time, and my parents happened to have a copy of The Runaway Jury, and I was captivated. I read most of what he put out until some time around when I graduated from high school, when I quit for some reason and didn't pick it back up until the pandemic, when I was looking for a book I could get into without trying. I have no idea why I slept on Grisham for all those years while I kept reading plenty of other authors of questionable literary value.
Gaashk
5d ago
Yes, but anything hyper local is too much even for my laughably nonexistent opsec.
birb_cromble
5d ago
If your charitable interpretation is correct, what kind of timescale would you predict before you hit break-even?
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
5d ago
1st prize: Cadillac 2nd prize: steak knives 3rd prize: you're fired.
Totalitarianit
5d ago
I listened to Blood Meridian, and it was very difficult for me to follow. The long detailed descriptions of scenery, old tools, weaponry, dress, etc. would get monotonous and my attention would slip. There was also no real shift or change in tone between the description of a baby being slammed to death by someone in the gang versus a description of a sunrise. The amount of times the color blue was used to describe multiple different objects or pieces of scenery felt repetitive. I didn't really pick up on some of the themes or details in real time as I was listening to it either. I only registered some of the implied depravity of the Judge after reviewing the chapters online. I knew of the character's reputation before I listened to the book and had a loose idea of what he was, so I wasn't completely in the dark. I listened to it on a road trip and then finished the rest as I lay in bed for the evening, which took about 3 or 4 days. The online review filled the gaps pretty well, but I was pretty disappointed when I realized how much detail had slipped by me when I was listening. I get the hype surrounding it, but it was hard to absorb in real time.
Sloot
5d ago
> make whatever mouth sounds get you to leave them alone
> zero pride in work
> zero interest in getting something done in a final in production sense
If your and @WhiningCoil's characterizations of H1Bs are accurate, that makes me think H1Bs are low-key based in being Punch Clock Villains (or should it be Heroes?)—in contrast to Westerners (especially Americans), who will "go beyond the extra mile" or whatever in grinding hard for some self-actualization and to make someone else rich. Although granted, they'd not sound like great coworkers.
It's like the only goal is just to generate more work - good, bad, repetitive, doesn't matter - so that the billable hours stay strong.
Generating billable hours would be a refreshing contrast to many a young Westerner in law/consulting/accounting/etc., who might work 60 hours in a given week but then shave it down to 40 (lest a partner or project/relationship manager tut-tut that he or she had to perform the Emotional Labor of shaving hours off the bill [or present the bill as is]). However, then said young Westerners in law/consulting/accounting/etc. will then fret as they might not have enough "utilization" for a given year due to their lack of billable hours during downtime between projects.
Chad H1B Billable Hour-Generator vs. Virgin Western Billable Hour-Shaver.
I think the Freedom Alliance Elites are a closer parallel. From To the Stars by Hieronym, Chapter 34:
Defeats on the battlefield failed to put the remains of the Freedom Alliance in the mood for surrender, however. The hyperclass oligarchs, by now thoroughly indoctrinated by their own poisonous ideology, placed the blame for failure squarely on the shoulders of their soldiers, declaring that if their soldiers could or would not perform, then they would be modified until they would. In underground laboratories around the world, scientists tinkered with the genomes of vast arrays of clones, designing thicker cranial plating, muscular augments, toxin glands, and whatever else might be expected to improve combat performance, regardless of personal welfare or the source of the genetic modifications.
Perhaps the most disturbing modifications were those made to the brain, the seat of consciousness itself. Some brain regions were enlarged; others were shrunk or deleted entirely, written off as unnecessary in an instrument of war. Empathy, love, fear—all these were unnecessarily evolutionary adaptations that could now be placed squarely in the dustbin of history. The tools of war, these "perfect" soldiers would not need to ever question their orders, or indeed do anything but show their prowess in combat.
This horrific disregard for basic human dignity showed itself amply in the names of the abominations that would serve as the FA's elite soldiers in last stages of the war. Grunts, Tankers—these were not nicknames given by their enemy, but their actual designation, followed of course by a serial number. These soldiers came in different varieties, each shaped by their battlefield role—giant hulks for assault troopers, lithe, giant‐eyed nymphs for snipers. The Tankers were some of the worst, barely more than an out‐sized head on a shrunken body, perfect for connecting directly to the life‐support system of a medium armored vehicle.
While some of these creations were sentient, after a fashion, the nature of such a sentience was loathsome—tied to one task until death, devoid of human or even animal emotions, and each bound irreversibly by its cortical control module to its masters. It is telling that, at the end of the war, there was essentially no resistance to the Emergency Defense Council's Decree 224, ordering the summary execution of any FA "Elites" found anywhere.
In the end, the FA spared not even its civilian functions from such "enhancement"…
— Excerpt, Unification Wars, textbook for Primary School History
srf0638
5d ago
The inability (in work capacity or mental fortitude) to lift all day is the same as not being "all that strong at all" - no matter what the little numbers on the plates say when they get moved around for a grand total of 10 minutes every other day.
It seems more or less pointlessly obfuscatory to use the word "strong" like this when you yourself invoked the more accurate "work capacity or mental fortitude" (and we might also or instead say endurance, heat tolerance, hand skin toughness, ....). People surely do love to define "true strength" as what they, themselves, are good at, even when it has very little to do with maximal force production.
srf0638
5d ago
hopper
I would push back against this a bit. If a "hopper" scenario is what motivates you to go put in the work, fine, cool, whatever. But it sure seems to me that this scenario is just as contrived and fake as actual real competitive sports with standards established through a history of wide participation, particularly when you look at the multisport competitions that actually exist. To my ear, it vaguely rhymes with a Rawlsian veil of ignorance--"how would I train if I didn't know what I had to do?" Of course, there may be an answer to this question, but in a world where I do pretty much know what I have to do that answer shouldn't have much action-guiding force. Meanwhile, the cost of invoking a "hopper" scenario is that it invites mediocrities to be smug, cf my point above about established standards--"Mark Allen? what's his Fran time?"
when one is talking about muscles we're mostly talking about aesthetics.
Indeed. I class talk of "gym muscle" much the same as "I don't want to look like one of those gross bodybuilders", "lean, toned muscle", " Tyler Durden in Fight Club", "swimmer physique", etc. etc.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
LLMs truely can boost productivity in most tasks except for pure manual labour we would see GDP roaring.
Ironically, I personally suspect that the current AI revolution may find its best use cases in manual labor fields. Replacing software developers is sexy, but hard. Training a model to operate robotics for conventionally "hard" problems (picking fruit, sewing garments, sorting trash) that require a bit of intelligence due to inconsistent inputs (fruits differ, fabric bunches in non-deterministic ways, trash isn't worth sorting) seems much more viable than groking a full software stack.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
5d ago
In the US it's a current event: T-Mobile claimed selling location data without consent is legal—judges disagree. One might be able to opt out.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Your phone probably feeds geolocation data to ad networks. The rest is obvious.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
As far as I know, Coinbase still allows you to withdraw your coins to your own wallet whenever you want.
Yes, of course. But: this is only while everything is well. At any moment if something goes wrong Coinbase could stop withdrawals, and you can do absolutely nothing about it - short of suing them of course. Just as with the bank: normally, you just transfer money with a couple of clicks, but if the bank has problems, you have problems. Except there's no FDIC for bitcoin, so you're not protected by anything.
Unless your suggestion is that he find some dude to sell him BTC for cash, I dunno how else he would come to acquire the coins in his wallet.
No, acquiring coins through Coinbase is just fine. But then get a self-custodial wallet (I prefer offline hardware ones, but you don't have to go as far if you don't want to, any computing platform can hold a wallet - though do back up it and/or the keys if you use software) and move the funds there. That's what I do when I DCA - it's very convenient to set it up on the exchange, but once it gets to something sizeable that I'd hate to lose, I move it to my custody.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
5d ago
I had a very similar experience when I read Neuromancer a year or two ago. I always knew it was influential, but I didn't get just how influential until I read it. It is honestly an understatement to call it "influential", every cyberpunk setting is basically copied wholesale from Neuromancer. It was pretty wild to see how strong the influence is.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
5d ago
Way of Kings is one of the slowest books Sanderson has written, I'd say. I almost gave up on it because I was waiting for the plot to actually start happening, so I sympathize. If you read his other books (say, Mistborn) they are much better paced. Way of Kings does pick up towards the end, but it takes forever to get there.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
5d ago
I mean, SIV is the simian equivalent/originator of HIV, but I don't think Scotland is quite so far gone.
Throwaway05
5d ago
it's food for thought nonetheless
Lol I mean I maintain shit ain't ready yet like I always have - it's very common for diseases to present atypically and even more common for patients to poorly explicate things. Neither of these is well captured in the literature and therefore the data set.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Especially in China, world leaders in personal surveillance?
Maybe my understanding is out of date, but I thought that China was also a world leader in bribing the people who interpret the surveillance footage as well
birb_cromble
5d ago
Where are the parentheses in that statement?? Which part is Scottish????
birb_cromble
5d ago
I’m in a building full of programmers
I'm also in software, and we've seen value in the following areas:
- Keeping juniors from completely stalling when unsupervised for a day or so (at the expense of going down a rabbit hole), like a beefed up search engine.
- Toy scripts to show management that we're "AI ready"
- Spinning up a lot of boilerplate on a Greenfield project that's similar to other pre-existing problems.
They seem to all be absolutely terrible for large legacy codebases. I've lost count of the number of times it spit out code in the wrong language entirely.
At this point, I don't think AI is a dead end, but I'm starting to think LLMs might be a blind alley for this particular application.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I’m expecting that most of the internet will be abandoned by humans by 2050 as bots, fake images and videos and so on continue to spread. Eventually “I read it online” will have the same effect on future generations as it did in 1995 — a sign of something that’s unverified and therefore suspect. The number of outright hoaxes is high enough now that I think most people have had tge experience of being fooled by a fake-news story, picture, or video, or reading or listening to someone who has. It’s crazy enough now, but give it 25 years and I think it will be so difficult to spot a fake that people will be forced by necessity to return to the equivalent of old school news sources, people they actually know or have good reason to trust.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
5d ago
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12334947/
This the one? It's mildly ironic I found it using GPT-5T, but it's food for thought nonetheless.
NunoSempere
5d ago
This is a good point. I consider the above an early draft, with fewer signposts, mostly pointers to the primary sources I'm using, because The Motte can take it. Maybe you might derive other interpretations from the primary sources than what I am getting out of them. The final polished version, read by about 3K people, is here.
A Chinese navy ship collided with a Chinese coast guard vessel while pursuing a Philippines coast guard boat. Subsequently, China claimed to have expelled US warships from “Chinese territorial waters” in the South China Sea.
The link under "claimed" links to a more neutral source, because in this case it remarks:
Beijing has also pushed back what it calls infringement of its airspace and maritime waters by the US and its allies, while the latter claims it flies and sails its military assets in international airspace and waters.
I don't know if you have experience actually working in tech but the "rapid revenue acceleration" is ringing some alarm bells and even you article doesn't really support the pessimism in these comments, mostly it's saying if you just give chat bots to your front line workers it isn't driving huge growth, which I mean sure.
Yeah, especially if you want this thing to be "rapid" that'll be the case. My team is building some AI tooling into workflows and it is a time intensive process. And I can't stress enough that we're not expecting them to hugely scale revenue, we're expecting them to reduce costs through labor savings which your article just isn't about. It's a totally wrong measure.
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