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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • In a way, LLMs have already taken my job as a software engineer. It’s not that they can do my job better than me. But they suck all the joy out of the field, they expose the almost religious culture around efficiency and velocity in the field (no, i don’t want to be 5% faster to make the boss richer and feel miserable doing it) and how little my peers care about craft and quality. Also why do those fucks have to lap up every new technofacist oligarchy thing with such enthusiasm, it pisses me off.

    so it’s not that it does my job, but that it showed me how much i disdain this field now.

    I’m thinking of switching to something (cnc) machining/cad related, both skills i taught myself and love , but i don’t know what kind of position could be suitable given my dev knowledge and lack of formal training. Plus i wouldn’t want to do the operator kind of work where all you do is put stock in the cnc machine and execute someone elses CAM, that seems too close to using LLMs in spirit. I do want and like creative work and tinkering.

    [edit]

    and I’m lucky enough to work for a university, so good work life balance, job security, pension, mostly meaningful work. Ironically enough in the AI field… But that makes considering to switch even harder. I could easily and comfortably coast along and feel discontent for many years to come.



  • From an old XKCD What-If, which put it at 2.15 gigatons ships vs 2 gigatons fish. But that uses quite old numbers.

    Looking at up to date data from the UN there’s 2.4 gigatons of ships. Note that this is dead-weight tonnage, so fully loaded. Empty is probably more like ~0.5 gigatons, so it’d depend on how fully loaded the ships are.

    And a quick search turns up this paper which references several estimates for fish biomass form other papers, which would put fish biomass somewhere between 0.4 and 4.9 gigatons depending on estimate.

    So I put it too strongly saying “more”, it’d be more accurate to say fish biomass and ship mass is within the same order of magnitude. Also note that it’s only fish, not like plankton, shrimp, etc.










  • yes, though to be fair, it’s not like this is just sitting in their bank account doing nothing. It’s mostly invested somewhere doing stuff to make them richer. So if they were taxed at a fair rate, idk, 90% or so, that would mean less investment, which in turn does help companies grow and pay salaries, R&D etc. They don’t send a trillion to a scrooge mcduck bunker on the cayman islands, they create shell companies there that own their stock etc. for them. They could not pay this tax since they just wouldn’t have the cash to pay x% of 3.5T. Which would either force them to sell stock to pay tax, potentially tanking the stocks value, or pay the tax directly in stock, making their holdings more government owned over time.

    As a socialist, I’m fine with either tbh. just saying this is not cash floating around that can just be spent to tackle humanities problems, if only it was just taxed properly.