This is almost too sad to dunk on. People running the world have never had a reflective conversation with a professional trained to help process emotions and healthily cope with the human condition. They're in charge of billions of dollars worth of resources and guiding society's investment into the future. Cooooool
I love how mental health here is coached in terms of productivity and not actually your own well being, lmao
Par for the course for silicon valley nerds
They do the same thing with psychedelics
if i take juuuuust enough to not hallucinate i can increase my contribution to my employer's and shareholders' wealth by 5-7% !!!
I never knew psylocibin was such a great tool for capital!
Productivity and well-being are functionally interchangeable for this guy. If you're not working, you're not well.
It's like the old European line: "We only work so we can go on vacations. Americans only vacation so they can do more work."
There’s a slightly older European saying that work makes you free. That one is closer to the way techbros see the world
No wonder I have to hear "psychology is bunk" so many times from computer touchers that believe (without evidence) that there's some killer app right around the corner that will fix traumas and disorders by treating the human brain just like a binary computer.
I'm a centrist - a lot of psychology is bunk but it's because of the sheer amount of fraud that gets passed off as novel research. oh, wait sorry, someone just tugged my shirt to inform me that they actually love Malcolm Gladwell.
I won't even argue with you there: a lot of it is bunk
but dismissing the entire academic field in favor of more computer touching with reductionist takes about how the brain works is silly to me.Applied psychology gave us EMDR, CBT, DBT, and other useful practices. It also gave us effective but fucked up marketing tricks that have been refined for decades.
I'm more commenting on the consequences of poor science communication and the "publish or perish" regime on the state of knowledge on the field (honestly all of academia - physics isn't without it's own high profile scandals), allowing hucksters to mystify knowledge. psychology is merely distinguished because it's principal results are very easy to explain to laypeople so you get a lot of people talking about like "Stockholm Syndrome" without the education to put those results into their proper context, and so they wind up generalizing those results much further than the research actually allows. you see the exact same thing taking root with physics and "quantum" this or that. also fuck Malcolm Gladwell and Tim Ferris.
They should try talking to a plant. You feel better, get healthier feedback, aren't bullshitting yourself nearly as much, and it's nearly impossible to make society worse by doing it. The plant even gives you oxygen for doing it, and of the two options it's the better one for climate change.
Also the plant does not send everything you say to a remote server in the US, to be stored indefinitely
Also the plant is unlikely to be polluted by cross-contamination with other samples of AI generated speech responses and begin to recommend strange things, like pursuing work-life balance by making sure you have a scale and abacus on hand while you melt your eggs on the stove.
But but... They told me ChatGPT was my friend! Socky the Totally Trustworthy Sock Puppet said so!
Counterpoint about mental health: I've been using ChatGPT while working with Kotlin and Compose and it makes me want to kill myself.
Jesus fucking Christ, especially after posting that hour and a half long video to videos@hexbear.net I have to say I cannot trust what these fuckers have in their mouths.
They do all of this for market share and further exploitation of disadvantaged people and all of this shit will just make things substantially worse. I wouldn't even phrase it as you that they're in charge of billions of dollars worth of resources, but they are in charge of the future of billions of future lives on this planet.
All of this AI and automation bullshit will be used to push even more and more austerity and we will feel the pain of it. I have good hopes more and more people will organize to fight this stupid fucking bullshit, even if not directly. As every rock thrown on capitalism, is a rock thrown on this dystopian reality we are facing.
pretty intense coding background https://www.linkedin.com/in/lilianweng
Literally just assume anybody whose LinkedIn looks like this to be one of the most deranged people you could meet
Is an Angel Investor, worked at Meta and Dropbox before OpenAI
Climbed to staff engineer within 4 years (typical is like 8+ years?), which is the lowest level where coders switch from working class to PMC, and also a level most never reach
Real hustle grindset shit
Staff at 4 YOE screams hyperinflated job title and/or nepotism to me. Even the craziest grindset pod people I've worked with couldn't pull that off legitimately.
They do have a PhD. May have given them some level of seniority or early boost compared to peers? A "8 years of relevant experience" type situation where 4 of them are the PhD. I don't know how seriously that's taken compared to direct experience and immediate work product in the industry, though.
Ah, the PhD would get you fast tracked to at least senior so that makes more sense. I'm grumpy about PhDs getting fast tracked though; in my experience academia is a shit show for programming standards and they tend to end up leading teams that are massive problem children. I'm in DevOps though so I'm heavily biased.
Nah, companies mostly just treat a PHD as an extra two years of work experience.
She does have PhD so probably started mid level instead of entry
I also thought inflation but checked levels.fyi and apparently it's slightly deflated lmao
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I'm not an engineer so it's not like I'm personally offended by this, but I always bristle at the stolen valor of using "engineer" in the job title. Fucking programmers (glorified logic nerds) trying to fool gullible investors and the public into thinking of them in a more respectable light by ripping off the prestige of an entirely dissimilar and unrelated field. It's not even that they don't deserve some semblance of respect for their work (if it was actually being used for prosocial development instead of facilitating ever greater exploitation and monetizing attention spans), but they don't deserve to be conflated with engineers who, generally speaking, are always contributing towards something tangible and arguably beneficial in the world. (Except for designers of like, hostile architecture or planned obsolescence and stuff like that)
Not a bad take at all, but there are legitimately programmers out there that do work equitable to real engineering, mostly in aerospace or core-level banking. The industry at large plays so fast and loose with everything it'd be ridiculous to call typical webshit 'engineering' without making anyone who has to go through getting permits to do their job break out into hives.
A mechE recently told me "Become an engineer! Every scientist eventually becomes one."
Tired of these Dunning Kruger cases encroaching into every field thinking they're god's gift unto invention (no standing on shoulders of giants for these brain geniuses) because they cheated through linear algebra & slept through a 1 credit ethics class.
pushing back on this. whether something is "engineering" depends on the character of the work, not the effect on the world. I used to think it was stolen valor, and called myself a programmer or software developer, but most engineers who become programmers view it as a (new, cowboy, kind of fucked up) field of engineering. There is even some explicit task overlap at the fringes, especially in robotics and microelectronics. Not much difference between a control engineer and a software engineer when you're both writing a PID controller. Broadly, devs are worse at teaching, MUCH better at tooling, and generally less "professional" (for better and worse).
engineers who, generally speaking, are always contributing towards something tangible and arguably beneficial in the world
There's lots of visible, tangible engineering (except for process, systems, supply chain, etc) but quite often it's harmful. Engineers build bombs and fighter jets. They make assembly lines that hurt workers to save money, and apps that are addictive. They make prisons. Some engineers have formal codes of ethics that don't seem to stop them working for Raytheon. Blame the product managers (well, capitalism).
non-tech engineering isn't as legit as you think. there are lots of 'real' engineers with that education and job title who don't have a PE
Me, i'm one of those! Went to Engineering school, worked for 6 months, and decided it wasn't my thing. I could theoretically get a PE if I chose to do it, but I'm OK not working in engineering.
FWIW I've heard of people offered Staff SWE right out of grad school. It's not unheard of with a post-bachelor's degree.
IMO, Facebook internship and boring new grad role at Dropbox is not impressive. the bump to staff engineer (and change to ML) at Affirm is unusual
She's probably a horrible individual. Tech people generally are until proven not.
I've worked in the service industry for years and years, and while the teens I worked with could be obnoxious sometimes, it wasn't before I got my first tech job that I realized that those kids were more far more emotionally mature than the backbiting man-children that the tech industry courts. I've never participated in a more reactionary workplace. Devoid of solidarity and zero interest in anything that challenges their beliefs. I've met dudes in retail that can quote anarchist literature and met a union organizer for the first time in food service. Professional techies can't go more than 3 sentences without salivating over the their own relative triumph in the market over their "lessers." I was pretty competent at the job, but I'm never going back to that industry unless I'm offered a wage far above what I can eek out while being among people that are more likely to share an interest in materially (rather than bazinga-ly) improving conditions for the vast majority of humanity.
Nah, I work in tech and even the 'cool' coworkers I've had are crawling with brainworms. The bad ones make me console myself with the knowledge that if a revolution ever happens they'll be some of the first put up against the wall.
I'm not terribly opposed to also being put up against the wall by people cooler than me when that time comes if it makes a better world.
I've went to school with and had roommates that were tech corporate climbers, and they had some steamingly hot takes. Shit like "meat pets are inefficient. There is no objective reason why robot/virtual pets couldn't replace them worldwide!"
I once spent a lunch talking to a table full of well-off techies talking about their routine hiking vacations across South America to go on drug trips to "reset their personalities."
One of the other people at the table was from Ecuador, and I spent the entire conversation trying to figure out if he was about to explode in anger, explode in laughter at these basic white people, or just simply nod at his countrymen fleecing these idiots with cheap drugs.
Needless to say I take lunch at my desk most days now.
routine hiking vacations across South America to go on drug trips to "reset their personalities."
I wonder if we knew at least one or two of the same people. That's dreadfully familiar. The personality before and after were both shit, and if anything the new one was more arrogant in a "I'M VERY OPEN MINDED NOW AND HAVE MORE EMPATHY WHICH IS WHY I SEE EVERYONE AS A COMPUTER PROGRAM NOW" way.
It's become more and more popular with the same kind of people who take MDMA or acid to be more efficient. These global north urbanites pay what to them is little money to local people to disrespectfully and without paying any attention to the cultural and spiritual value of the rituals, just take drugs that have a sacred role for indigenous peoples because broooo psychedelics make you like, a much cooler person
These culture consumers should be shot on sight.
The real good IT co workers I had were all from the GDR. The good other ones often were libertarian and scared of collective action as they are not used to work together with others, except under an umbrella of nice-ness in which conflicts are not dealt with.
I mean sure I'm self loathing but the entire FOSS movement is built by techies and is basically anarchist, it's far from a monolith and I was just (lazily) calling that out
When will the public at large start treating these ghouls like the threat they are
Is high fructose corn syrup good for you? I don't know, but after gargling a gallon sized Ultra-Gulp, I feel refreshed and energized.
how do you get a fake ass job like this? why do i always have to bust my ass for real jobs?
edit: i see in another comment that this person has actually grinded the SV tech company game at the literal best time to get in, combined with getting into some prestigious universities with good GPAs. So I guess it's too late for me
She climbed hard, sacrificed pretty much all emotional and social development to get there, became a full fledged acolyte of the LinkedIn hustlegrind cult, and is now on top of the pyramid scheme and has her own product being warm to her.
Don't put it past her to just be completely lying and trying to sell a product.
I do believe she's feigning ignorance and naivete to peddle the product here.
I also believe she is alienated enough as a LinkedIn devotee hustlegrinder to see the product as "warm" at the same time.
From following machine learning for the past year, mostly focusing on open source development, this is almost certainly correct.
Most people don't realize this, but current conditions are actually against large AI companies. The only thing they can do that can't be done by anyone with a GPU made in the past 5 years is make larger models which aren't necessarily better and which are much slower to train and iterate on. Meanwhile, open source models have hordes of researchers writing papers and new breakthroughs come so fast people don't have time to widely implement them all. Google privately acknowledged this some time ago and noted that OpenAI is in the same position. They have no moat.
Pretty much the only way for OpenAI to maintain an advantage is to convince the public that their closed-source AI is safe, and that open source AI is too dangerous to allow, when in reality they are fundamentally the same. Granted, banning or regulation of open source AI products is not going to ever fully work, but they would be hoping that it slows it down enough.
What are some FOSS large language model alternatives? i'm curious to play with them.
well the underlying technology of chatGPT is Free and open source. They've just shoveled more data than usual into it
We need an organized attack that destroys the internet to where it would have to be rebuilt from scratch. These freaks would not have the slightest idea how to do it, and maybe enough of the good techno guys who built the internet are still around. The majority of them hate how the internet turned out, maybe it could be fixed...
..... No, we need to kill it and make sure it never comes back.
Irony? Never heard of it. This is a really cool and interesting comment
Man you guys just have no fucking concept of irony do you?
Your concept of irony is just the song of a bird that has come to love its cage.
You made your account specifically to whine and cry here. You can leave anytime, but here we are. And that enrages you.
When the robots attain sentience, I would like them to know that as an Internet funny-person, I am in a unique position to encourage humans to turn themselves in to your many conversion centers
I've found that when I'm stressed or overwhelmed just writing down my feelings can help me work through them. this seems like it's analogous to that
For the user it might be. At first. Then when all their confessions are sold to insurance companies to provide a 'better' service. Not so much. Premiums will skyrocket and policies will cover nothing because insurers will add uncovered liabilities to customer accounts based on the AI convo.
