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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 18th, 2025

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  • Absolutely. Wealth isn’t competence, and too much of it fundamentally leads to a physical and psychological disconnect with other humans. Generational wealth creates sheltered, twisted perspectives in youth who have enough money and influence to just fail upward their entire lives.

    “New” wealth creates egocentric narcissists who believe they “earned” their position. “If everyone else just does what I did, they’d be wealthy like me. If they don’t do what I did, they must not be as smart or hard-working as me.”

    Really all of meritocracy is just survivorship bias, and countless people are smarter and more hard-working, just significantly less lucky. Once someone has enough capital that it starts generating more wealth on its own - in excess of their living expenses even without a salary - life just becomes a game to them, and they start trying to figure out how to “earn” more points.


  • Viva La Dirt League has some great “Epic NPC Man” skits on this.

    “Please, Adventurer, my family is desperate, won’t you buy a carrot?”

    “Oh, greaaat, thank you, yes, the Golden Skull of Raul, here’s all of my life savings. I guess I only needed one daughter anyway. Now will you please buy an apple?”

    “No? No. Of course not. You’ve ruined me, Adventurer!”

    (Paraphrased from memory)









  • Before shoes? Amish? My goodness. I didn’t realize I was a savage Luddite. I’m on the most pro-AI instance in the fediverse, I literally think it has incredible potential, and I personally use the technology.

    It’s not ready to evaluate humans on any level, it’s dehumanizing to force humans to talk to it for money, and it’s definitely going to filter out skilled professionals who don’t want to do that. As opposed to RNG, which is just as likely to filter out good as bad, and so has a net neutral impact on your hiring pool.

    I’m not saying “stick to the past” I’m saying “hey maybe take it easy over there, we don’t need to rush into a cyberpunk dystopia. We can take our time.”




  • The issue will remain that liability will be completely transferred from individual humans to faceless corporations. I want self-driving cars to be a thing - computers can certainly be better than humans at driving - but I don’t want that technology to be profit-motivated.

    They will inevitably cause some accidents that could have been prevented if not for the “move fast and break things” style of tech development. A negligent driver can go to jail, a negligent corporation gets a slap on the wrist in our society. And traffic collisions will result in having to face powerful litigation teams when they inevitably refuse to pay for damages through automated AI refusal like private health insurance companies.


  • Nuance is dead.

    He actually says these things in real life, so it’s fair game for satire to use the type of things he says.

    If satire pretended that he didn’t say any of the things that sound reasonable at first, it wouldn’t be satire. It would just be mudslinging.

    “He had us in the first half” is like a goddamn mission statement with these people - pointing out real issues with the economy and then proposing the most batshit reasoning and “solutions.”


  • … I’m sorry if you’ve spent your entire life on this, but this is bizarrely hostile. Countless people have spent countless hours hiring candidates without AI. This isn’t some genius-level solution to an unsolved problem, this is just an attempt to downsize HR departments.

    The company doesn’t suffer some material loss if they miss out on hiring a marginally better candidate, and it’s not like these AI solutions have been around long enough to prove that they can even find the “best” candidates. Especially when they’re certainly filtering out qualified professionals who don’t want to justify themselves to a glorified chatbot.




  • I genuinely don’t understand the point of candidate filters like this. Is it that corporate has drank the kool-aid, and think the job they are hiring for genuinely requires some 1-in-1000 skillset?

    Every time, somebody says “yeah but they get thousands of applications a day, how could they possibly handle all that?!”

    … Don’t. Just, filter them through some basic metrics, and then rank the ones that are left through a random number generator. Interview those candidates in order until you find a good fit.

    The average job doesn’t benefit at all from hiring people who can specifically pass some bizarre reverse Turing test, and the average video interview should only cost you 15-30 minutes of (also underpaid) HR salary, which is certainly less than a contract with these AI vendors + the increased risk of discrimination lawsuits.



  • Can confirm. The more you deal with people who have climbed to the tops of corporate ladders, the more it becomes clear that it’s all vibes. It’s all people telling stories to other people who tell stories about those stories.

    The peter principle is wrong - in an oversized corporate structure, there is no upper bound for incompetence. You can keep rising for no reason, because after a certain point other people just trust that you know what you’re talking about, and the people that know better work around you instead.

    The people beneath you can’t trust the people above you enough to explain the situation, the people above you don’t really listen to the people beneath you anyway, and so plenty of middle managers just muddle through and constantly make shit up to justify their own existence, while everyone above and below is left in the dark about what’s really going on.

    Decisions are constantly made by people without any real connection to the consequences, and it shows. With the everything.