Ir seems to be a call back to that time a tumblr user frustrated about Automattic’s insufficient moderation of transphobic harassment stated they hoped he “dies a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere”, which really doesn’t sound like a serious threat to me.

I do think there is nuance between this and hoping for a violent death, but I’m not gonna die on either hill. Personally, I just hope he (and every other parasitic dickhead) stops being a CEO.

I’m aware of the point, but I wanted to point out that the Nazi comparison doesn’t work. Whether it warrants hoping for his death is a separate question, but there’s a qualitative difference between voluntary asshattery and persecuting people for things outside their control and regardless of the harm they do.

The detective is hoping to find fingerprints of the perpetrator and told the other to look for prints. The other found Prince.

Detective corrects that they meant finger prints, which sounds like an instruction to “finger Prince”.

Nobody is born a CEO. Hating people for their ethnicity, sexuality or disability is inhumane, but that’s not who we’re talking about here. This is about someone that chooses to be a vile, parasitic extortionist.

You can’t just stop being a Jew, but it’s very easy to stop being a CEO.

Edit: It occurs to me that this might read like jewish, gay or disabled people cause damage, so I should clarify: Being jewish, gay or disabled isn’t harmful. There is nothing in common betweem the people the Nazis persecuted and the CEOs we’re talking about here.

It’s a summary of code changes. The green + indicates how many lines were added, the red - how many were removed (though changed or moved lines are counted twice, once as removal for the old and once as addition for the new).

The OP is supposedly being asked to read and review thousands of lines of new code written by claude. Depending on the language and claude’s writing style, those lines may be very dense and hard to read, but even if they aren’t, reading code you haven’t written is always more difficult than reading your own.

So they only care about what’s measurable.

Worse yet, they’ll pick something measurable, declare it an appropriate proxy, handwave any concerns about accuracy with the 80/20 rule (without ever checking whether the inaccuracy actually fits into those 20%), talk about the higher level view and big picture and make my life hard by refusing to actually engage with my questions about what they wanna measure, then complain when they don’t understand the result of my best guess.

Some managers are lovely to work with. Others have a bunch of buzzwords and wisecrack quotes that sound authoritative in place of sound reasoning.

There’s a certain impression among management that “apparent” isn’t enough to make justifiable decisions. To make proper decisions, you need facts. The most obvious type of facts are numbers.

There is a common misconception that numbers and a story about them are required for good decisions. Worse, some seem to think they’re all it takes.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” is bullshit and MBAs were a mistake.

Bonus points for “American company doesn’t understand people can speak more than one language”. At least with Google and YouTube, I had issues where they’d ignore all “other languages” I’ve configured and stubbornly translate German content to English or vice versa, depending on my primary language setting.

I haven’t gotten pissed off about it for a while, so maybe they finally fixed it.

Funny*, I was just earlier reading an article that brought up just how awful Facebook was for LGBT (and other vulnerable groups). A blog post by the same author also referenced its complicity in suppressing dissent by helping “surveil, track and disappear people”.

That article and blog post were both published 2015. It hasn’t gotten better since.

Fuck that whole company.

* In the sarcastic “curious coincidence” sense, not “the subject matter is funny”.

Small correction (you missed a line and rhyme) plus additional lines. There are variations, I’m just reciting the one I know, as best as I know it.

Dunkel war’s, der Mond schien helle,
Schnee lag auf der Sommerflur
als ein Auto blizeschnelle
langsam um die runde Ecke fuhr.
Drinnen sassen stehend Leute,
schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft
Als ein totgeschoss’ner Hase
auf der Sandbank Schlittschuh lief.

Und ein blondgelockter Jüngling
mit kohlrabenschwarzem Haar
saß auf einer grünen Banke,
die rot angestrichen war.
Neben ihm ne alte Schrulle,
die grad siebzehn Jahr alt war,
und sie aß 'ne Butterstulle
die mit Schmalz bestrichen war.

As for a translation, slightly liberal due to missing vocabulary:

It was dark, the moon shone brightly
snow covered the summer meadows
when a car rapidly
slowly rounded the curved corner
Within, people sat standing
in deep, silent conversation,
when a rabit, shot dead,
ice-skated on the sandbank

And a blonde-curled youth
with hair black as a raven
sat on a green bench
which was painted red.
Next to him an old shrew,
who was barely seventeen,
and she ate a buttered bread
with a spread of lard

1. That human beings are logical and that they do anything with intention. For the vast majority of people, this is patently false.

Absolutelu. That seems to be a frequent misconception, or perhaps just a convenient simplification, for many even highly intelligent people. Even a perfectly logical actor would be prone to error when working with incomplete information and limited capacity for calculating likely outcomes.

And we’re not perfectly logical, but subject to whims and emotions, instincts and mental shortcuts. If contributing to a mass murder machine feels wrong, I’m not gonna spend all my energy on trying to estimate whether it would be smarter. I just hope it doesn’t happen.

2. That a super intelligence sees revenge as an efficient use of scarce resources, which given both that revenge is nonsensical without the prerequisite biological need for it, and the conclusion of ‘1’, is nonsensical.

Conversely, if it had some drive to wantonly eliminate humans, I doubt that some moral desire to reward those who created it would impede that.

It could just try to eliminate everyone opposing it, as a matter of self-preservation. That would be a justified expenditure of resources. But what happens if it calculates that its creators might also be a threat?

I assume they’re expecting they can train it to spare them. Why they think a super-AI would reliably stick to that training is beyond me, but we already established that they might not run on pure logic.

I feel reminded of incidents with supposedly tame beasts suddenly proving why a big cat isn’t quite the same as a domestic cat. If you’re gonna build a mechanical leopard, expect to get your face eaten.

3. That even if 1 and 2 were real, that there’s some inherent timeframe in which the AI thinks it should have been created.

And where would it draw the line? Does the plumber that laid pipes in a datacenter count as helping? Does the baker he bought breakfast from every morning count? Is every clerk not directly involved with this enterprise going to be killed?

It just doesn’t add up.

I mean, yeah, I’m not saying that it’s plausible. But I don’t think we ascribe sound reasoning to those people in the first place.

Roko’s Basilisk: the idea that the emergence of super-AI is inevitable and that it will kill everyone that hindered or didn’t support its development in revenge. If both those premises hold, it makes sense to aid its development for self-preservation.

I don’t think either premise holds, personally, but these people evidently do.

I recall some Roman writer complaining about the worthlessness of the youth and how Rome was doomed.

Just before a boom of conquest.

Moralising elders waxing nostaltic have probably been around longer than preserved writing.

Edit: it was Horace:

aetas parentum, peior avis, tulit nos nequiores, mox daturos progeniem vitiosiorem.

Our parents’ era, worse than their ancestors, bore us still worse, and soon we will give more wicked offspring.

Text and translation obtained via Wikisource: Horace, Odes 3.6, published 24 or 23 BCE, during the earlier years of the reign of Octavian Augustus.

We could argue about the quality of a youth that bowed to what would be a monarch in all but name, but it’s hard to deny their courage and effectiveness in battle, which would have been an important virtue in Rome at the time. That “wicked offspring” stabilised an Empire wracked by decades of civil war and unrest, expanded it and by Horace’s standards should have been quite honourable.

(Note: this is not an endorsement, just commentary on the mentalities of the time)

“Unpolular” is relative to the target audience. I’ll relate to my own social circles here:

I actually like Nickelback.

Sure, they’re not exceptional, but mediocrity is hardly a sin (unless it’s AI slop; fuck AI slop). Sure, their music is made to be safe, commercial rock, but that just fills a neat, chill gap in my music taste where LoFi should be (but isn’t; never really vibed with it).

It’s not the extent of my music taste either. I like Drumstep, Deathcore and plenty more. I just also appreciate some “boring” rock occasionally.

I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to be universal, because universal statements about humans and genders are typically wrong. I think in this case, it’s more aiming for the “cliché” meaning of truism.

It’s a comment on a trend probably driven by traditional gender roles that cast men as dominant and confident while women are to be deferent and humble. If those roles don’t apply to you, the resulting dynamics may not apply either.

Well, the common behaviours are the shit you’d associate with the stereotype primitive men: reducing people to objects of sexual attraction, being oblivious to boundaries, exploiting vulnerable situations.

In this case, you just don’t stare at the other sauna guests. You look for a spot, preferably away from others, sit down, focus on your own breathing and all that and leave everyone else alone to do the same.

To take advantage of the fact that someone is naked and exposed to ogle them, then strike up a conversation they didn’t ask for (because sauna isn’t for chatting, it’s for sweating) when they already feel vulnerable and exposed, violates the trust in mutual privacy that makes shared saunas possible in the first place.

Nothing “wrong”, just less healthy than the gym. Unless you only drink water at the bar and spend your gym visit drinking high-calorie shit rather than working out, the physical exercise at the latter is generally better for your health.

(Depending on your health and the extent of the workout, obviously. Don’t overdo it or ignore injuries.)

I’m in Germany. I wasn’t aware this bullshit had actually proliferated here too (though maybe they just did a catch-all for Europe, idk).

I hate this timeline

Uhh… did they just figure this out now?

All the other salient points aside, I think this is an example of the interaction between the bubble effect (we here all know it, but it’s hard to ascertain just how widespread that awareness is outside this corner of the net) and the misunderstanding of the way such big organs function.

The latter is particularly made worse by how Trump (and others, but I’m not gonna write a whole list) has desensitised us to the scandalous nature of “person with some measure of authority makes throwaway comments”.

Big organisations and institutions being “slow” to work or comment such things is an unfortunate side-effect of the fact that they’re supposed to put some diligence into their statements. There’s probably a nice pile of reports and arguments that have been written, reviewed, refined, discarded, assembled, cross-referenced to support such a statement with not just evidence for that fact, but also for the negative implications that make it a human rights problem. They probably figured it out a while ago, but had to build a case before going public with their results.

Even if we assume the best intentions, the Chief couldn’t responsibly “guess” or offer a forecast of where this was gonna go, because his job is to report on facts, not on probabilities*, and those facts have to be established, while all the other work of those organs also is still goiny on. In that light, his statement is tantamount to saying “those doomsayers were right and you should have listened”.

Courts have the same issue: you and I and everyone else may know that some person is guilty, but due process demands that they be properly tried and have their guilt proven to a certain standard. That’s slow. It’s painful to watch. But even in the best circumstances, doing things properly takes time, and doing them quickly risks error.

All of that said, you’re probably right that he wasn’t in a rush to confirm that, just as courts tend to drag their feet. Corruption makes that issue of delay worse.

* Expressing concerns about potential issues is a little more complex, since it uses extant and studied patterns to show the danger of where a partial match might go, but there was hardly much precedent for a rushing tide of slop pouring into so many households at once to compare to until patterns started emerging that could be observed and matched and eventually coalesce into certainty.