• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Surely this could backfire in so many hilarious ways?

    • Teach the parts that conservatives don’t do, and teach your class to call out injustice everywhere.
    • Teach the bible in Aramaic or Ancient Hebrew, and give the kids 30 mins of study time to learn whatever they want from it.
    • Use it as an exercise to teach that many parts were written thousands of years ago, and doesn’t have current medical or societal advancements, so that many parts might be up to interpretation.
    • Compare it to Islam, Judaism, and other sects of Christianity - and teach that they’re basically the same thing and that everyone should get along.
    • Reference that the pope said years ago that even nonbelievers that led a good life would be offered a seat in heaven, so be nice and it’ll all be fine.






  • I think the “underpaid teacher” thing isn’t necessarily rooted in reality,. especially outside of the US. My wife is a teacher in the UK, and she’s a head of her subject. For many years her pay was similar to mine as a software engineer, but everyone often treated her as if she was poor and that I was rich.




  • All of big tech is really worried about this.

    • Apple is worried about its own science output, with many of their office heavily employing data scientists. A lot of people slate Siri, but Apple’s scientists put out a lot of solid research.
    • Amazon is plugging GenAI into practically everything to appease their execs, because it’s the only way to get funding. Moonshot ideas are dead, and all that remains is layoffs, PIP, and pumping AI into shit where it doesn’t belong to make shareholders happy. The innovation died, and AI replaced it.
    • Google has let AI divisions take over both search and big parts of ads. Both are reporting worse experiences for users, but don’t worry, any engineer worth anything was laid off and there are no opportunities in other divisions for you either. If there are, they probably got offshored…
    • Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go, but they’re still plugging AI shite in places no one asked for it, with many divisions now severely down in headcount.

    If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there’s a real concern that they’ll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn’t sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.


  • From a company perspective, it’s a common sentiment. Google and Amazon have mantras around trying to stay agile and relevant despite being behemoths, and both have arguably kept into boomer tech territory the second they made a poor CEO hire. Microsoft had their Ballmer era, and while Nadella did a lot of good at Microsoft they’ve had a lot of failures in established divisions to be soaked up by AI and sales.

    I think that all of big tech has struggled over the last 3 years. Sacrificing employee skill for shareholder value has ultimately moved them all into IBM territory, whereas the cool tech is happening at startups again. If AI is a bust, and another company comes along and eats their lunch in their established markets like consumer devices, web tooling, or cloud computing, they’re in real danger of another huge set of layoffs and resetting their businesses to only core profit-making ventures. What I think we’ve seen companies shift towards death, Day 2, rotting from the inside, or whatever your business calls stagnation.


  • I work in AI as a software engineer. Many of my peers have PhD’s, and have sunk a lot of research into their field. I know probably more than the average techie, but in the grand scheme of things I know fuck all. Hell, if you were to ask the scientists I work with if they “know AI” they’ll probably just say “yeah, a little”.

    Working in AI has exposed me to so much bullshit, whether it’s job offers for obvious scams that’ll never work, or for “visionaries” that work for consultancies that know as little about AI as the next person, but market themselves as AI experts. One guy had the fucking cheek to send me a message on LinkedIn to say “I see you work in AI, I’m hosting a webinar, maybe you’ll learn something”.

    Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and some companies are doing some legitimately cool stuff, but the actual use-cases for these tools where they won’t just be productivity enhancers/tools is low at best. I fully support this guy’s efforts to piledrive people, and will gladly lend him my sword.





  • The corporate jobs aren’t much better. The pay is great for tech workers, but no amount of money makes the 10% yearly cull, the added layoffs, and micromanagement easier.

    To your last point, though, you’d be surprised at how hard it can be as a very experienced candidate from outside the US to land a role in the US. I have had multiple HM’s that have wanted to hire me for my experience in their market, but they have been forced to take domestic candidates or to run weeks of interviews with external candidates to rule out that a foreigner should get a tech role.


  • I’m in the UK, and First basically hold the monopoly in my city. There are so few buses that they often skip stops at rush hour because they’re already full, or because they’ve decided in the moment that your stop doesn’t matter.

    Nothing wakes you up during your commute like listening to a woman get fired over the phone because she’s going to be late for work, despite still being 60 mins early for what should be a 20 min journey.