abhijitr

For me personally working in big tech, there was a sharp increase of work-related malaise in 2020 that never went down. IMO it was largely driven by 1) covid-era hiring blitz followed by layoffs, 2) so-called zoom fatigue. Teams became more geographically distributed, lots of newbies showed up, coordination overhead went up, competitiveness and backstabbing increased, work seemed to progress much slower.

The book "On Tyranny: 20 lessons from the 20th century" by the historian Timothy Snyder is an excellent read for these times. The very first lesson is "Do not obey in advance". It's about how authoritarian power often doesn't need to force compliance, people simply bend the knee in anticipation of being forced. This simply emboldens the authoritarians to go further.

I've been disappointed to see many businesses and institutions obeying in advance recently. I hope this moment wakes up the tech community and beyond.

From the job posting it sounds like the company value prop is AI agents as debt collector? They want to “solve deep problems like collecting more money”. What a shitty dystopia we’re creating.

BERT is encoder only..

Also: what happens when a nontrivial portion of public code out there is ML-generated? How will it deal with feedback effects?

It must be nice for you that you've never felt persecuted or treated unjustly by human systems and therefore can't extrapolate to how that might play out when autonomous killer robots are thrown into the mix.

> Out of curiosity, has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet?

Piggybacking on this, has anyone made an open world single player RPG better than Ultima 7 yet?

> Brazilians have done a terrible job of protecting their rainforest

While the Amazon is in Brazilian territory, it is one of the largest carbon sinks in the world and therefore has a global positive externality. Therefore this is not a domestic issue.

Perhaps by spreading awareness we can shift the Overton window on how these cross-border climate issues should be addressed. E.g. perhaps Brazil should be paid from a global fund to not cut down the rain forest.

There's a rhythm to the original that's lost in translation. GGM's mastery of the language is impossible not to notice.

In chess there are hundreds of annotated databases out there where I can study how the masters play, read analyses of different playing styles, and try to follow along and improve my own intuition.

Is there an equivalent for programming? Github and Stackoverflow are good resources, but it would be interesting to see something more structured. Perhaps a DB of a fixed set of problems such as projecteuler.net with voting and analysis of the submitted solutions.