Notices by datarama (datarama@hachyderm.io)

@inthehands As a department manager I know put it, after someone pointed out that LLMs could be used to get rid of pseudo-work:

If it's pseudo-work, we've definitionally just agreed that it has no value.

But if it has no value, why would we automate it? It is better to not do it at all.

@aral In fairness, I picked that phrase because it's a direct quote from Marc Andreessen - a uniquely reliable source of psychopathic language.

@aral I had a conversation today about how horrible it must be to be a person with a conscience across pretty much every industry. You work in advertising? You're manipulating people for profit. You work in garments? You're creating mountains of pollution heaped onto the Global South. You work in journalism? You're writing manipulative clickbait.

And you're probably a good person, anyway. Your work got turned evil by economic forces outside your control.

@aral Perhaps it's just because software is my own trade, but I think the software industry has been uniquely disgusting in this process. *Why* does that poor journalist have to produce shitty clickbait? *Why* is advertising now synonymous with surveillance? Because of the software industry.

Software did eat the world - and in the process, it unsurprisingly made the world into shit, half-digested by software.

@aral This is 2024 - they're thinking "I'll just put it in the training set for my ML system, and then the license goes away".

@aral I have never ever been so tired of tech in my entire life. It is all so, so depressing.