Lemmy. The man, the myth, the legend. Like with Ozzy, there was no stage persona. I’ve met him on a street the day after the gig looking exactly as he did on stage the day before. If you listen to stories about him, you’ll find the obligatory drinking and excess. Sure. But immediately after you’ll find a lonely man who deeply cared about his team, who was probably too smart for the business and who added warmth to even simple human interaction. Ozzy was the same and it’s no coincidence his most vulnerable songs were written by Lemmy. Having met both, I miss them in this world.
Thinking and writing are complementary processes. If you write things where you don’t have to think, let the AI do the typing. No harm done. But any writing, where you actively think while you type not about what the next word should be but about the entire topic, so it yourself. Otherwise you’re not thinking and that’s pretty much the only value-add that’s left.
I have removed a person from a project. Doing their share of work, paying them exactly as agreed. Because they decided to have Claude write 10 pages of feedback on about 5 pages of content I created even after I asked them for clarification. If anyone uses AI in communication, fine. If people think an LLM can express their thoughts better, than they can, ok. No problem. But if I wanted to talk to computers all day long I can already do that. I’ve been doing it close to 40 years now. The reason I work in a team is so I get to connect to actual human beings. Live people, warts and all. If I can’t get that, why would I bother? Again: I have plenty to do talking to computers.
The author does not emphasize a significant reason why this is. In Russian Orthodox belief, there is no purgatory. This is one of the key reasons they consider the catholic heretical. In their belief system, the suffering, that’s supposed to clean us of our sin, happens while we live and not afterwards. Suffering in itself is good for the soul. This is why there’s a saying in Russian about violent husbands: “beats, that means he loves”. Not beating my wife was considered amazingly progressive by my Russian relatives 20 years ago. And this is also why they don’t care about their fallen soldiers or treat GULAG sites like the sites of former concentration camps. Suffering is good for you.
This assumes the current demand will continue. Which is unlikely given the order of magnitude difference between capex by the Big Folks and the revenue generated by that capex. Given they now need to fund this spend from money markets, they are likely to be told off pretty soon. Feds go “ooh” and Google goes “aah”.
What’s the rationale of all this? I mean countries have gotten (mostly) rid of black books without such systems. Maintaining such a solution must be horribly expensive and what if it goes down?
What makes large things slow is not the individual pieces of code but the way the architecture dynamically reacts to changes in the load. Sync vs async calls, buffers, parallel vs sequential processing. This includes optimizations made: do we want to wait until the call returns or do we proceed anyway and deal with the negative response later? Most developers can’t coherently (ie, with math, graphs and figures) explain, how a connection pool prevents undesirable consequences of brief spikes in incoming requests. And I’m pretty sure AI can’t either.
Harassment is not permissible. But if he had been a black researcher in, say, microbiology, it wouldn’t have materialized to that extent. His research tried to shame a very large chunk of the society for being racist. And it turns out people react in unpredictable and unpleasant ways to accusations towards their core identity that are based on lies.
There’s a difference between normalizing harassment and understanding where it comes from. I’d also like to be more forgiving about people talking bs about me. But I’m not.
Also, imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story. The vitriol _they_ will receive, the scrutiny of _their_ work.
> imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story
Honestly, I hope nothing like that happens. It would be outrageously racist to say "There was that one fabulist black person in academia, here's a different black person applying for a job in academica, therefore they must also be a fabulist". How on earth could you justify that thought?
I think any applicant's work should speak for itself, it should be based on their papers published, their impact and reach, and if they're teaching staff, the aggregate reviews left by their students.
I'm not sure I'd be a fair judge in a sociology department, because I'm on Sokal's side in the Sokal hoax and think appointments in humanities departments run on bullshit and social networking, not hard data.
I think there are a lot more white bullshitters in UK sociology departments right now, and they think the equitable thing to do is to try to skew that social networking to admit more black people. I think the right thing to do is to put a hard ban on the social networking aspect of academic recruitment and promotion, and run the all the bullshitters out of town.
If the bar was provably lowered for him due to an attribute [0], then doesn't that invite scrutiny on others with the same attribute? To your critique, the attribute could be political affiliation, familial relationships, academic lineage, social circles, nationality, <your choice>.
Also, imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story.
Indeed. It's a disaster for any minority or outsider trying to build a pathway for themselves, as well as people working in the 'soft' sciences; no matter how rigorous the qualitative methods a researcher uses, the additional effort involved in explaining/understanding them vs quantitative methods leads to reflexive dismissal from many.
Everyone deserves compassion. I feel sorry for him. But the fact remains, that he deliberately used lies and deception to gain a high social position in a very politically derisive context. It couldn’t have come as a surprise, that every single racist out there would jump at the opportunity to pull him down should there ever be doubt about his academic work. Plus the people, who really care about academic integrity. Plus a whole lot of folks who simply do not like people blatantly lying for massive personal gains. The vitriol was entirely predictable. The internet is not known for being forgiving. He very deliberately and knowingly took a huge and, given the absurdity of some of his claims, unfounded risk the materialization of which he could not handle. I do feel sorry for him to have started on this path. What state of mind would push a person to take such risk? He must have been a tortured man long before it all exploded into the open.
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