throwaway_7274

I so appreciate the compassion in this comment. It’s rare on the internet.

Yeah, in that world. You realize this, and the next thing you realize is that you’re at the tail end of it and have about a year to escape the permanent yadda yadda yadda…

Oh hey that’s me! Not literally me. Probably I was a little better off. But I was recently in a similar position, and feel like my PhD was a lost decade in some ways.

The answer, as I’m sure many already know, is idealism and a certain kind of naïvité. It’s not an absolute naïvité, but it is some kind of belief in the value of doing something that isn’t “mere” careerism. You think it’s noble to contribute to science. And you do contribute, a teeny eensy weensy bit. You also find out that it’s not everything you imagined it would be. And then you’re 30 and one day you unblind yourself. You look at the job market, and how much money various jobs actually pay. More importantly, you realize quite suddenly that money can actually make your life better, and that, whatever damage it might have wrought on your soul to pursue it, it would at least have enabled you to own a home one day. Maybe have kids. Shit. And the fresh grads who went straight into tech and finance making $300k (hold on, you can make $300k? Wait a second, that’s not a senior executive salary? That’s a normal-ish bourgeois white-collar HCoL salary that people make fresh out of school? Hold on, that’s basically a starting salary in that world? WHAT?)… just naturally understood.

Then you try to explain this on a message board or something. You don’t want pity (after all, your life is very good in the scheme of things), you just want some connection, or maybe even a, “that’s ok, that’s how we learn, life is a twisty path.” But half the people call you a class traitor. The other half call you a mediocre sucker.

Like something straight out of the old internet. Beautiful work.

This is basically what I believe, too. Its outputs are generally syntactically correct human-language sentences, but semantically, and especially at higher levels of abstraction, it is no longer correct to think of them as human language.

My impression from working with claude code far more than is good for my sanity is that Claude's human comprehensibility is fractally messed-up. On more superficial levels, this looks more like a "language" thing: it has all these obnoxious lexical tics and so on. But the more time you spend with it, the more you notice it's similarly messed up on deeper and deeper levels. I think that's what you're seeing.

Indeed. It’s a real tragedy.

Someone close to me is a folk musician who’s done surprisingly well, at least getting by as a full-time performer. Much of what people are paying for when they get tickets to see her is the feeling of proximity to non-artificial, unalienated human culture. It’s traditional (lots of the tunes are hundreds of years old, passed down mostly orally), but it’s a living tradition. Extraordinary. Take my money.

The coming slopnami may well be the end for many artists, but for her and others already trading in an unfakeable way on the idea of authenticity, it might be a blessing in disguise.

It’s unfortunate no matter who!

People overcorrect, even when making directionally necessary corrections.

Rhetorically wondering :)

Just want to say, this comment section on this website would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It’s wild: all the engineers have developed class consciousness. I wonder how that happened?

Anyway, it’s fun to watch, but remember to stay sane guys, be aware of the pendulum dynamics.

Even more so than borderline incoherent academic writing like Foucault or Lacan or whatnot, for that matter. It’s less “I don’t understand this and I suspect the author doesn’t either” and more “reading this feels like having a stroke.”

Better start chinamaxxing

I think it’s no longer speaking human language. It used to, when it was mostly or entirely trained with imitation learning of human-generated text. Now it’s increasingly trained with RLVR, and there’s far less optimization pressure on actually speaking English (or Punjabi or Mandarin). It still uses English words and syntax in its output, but the semantics are drifting more and more. It’s basically speaking in a code that superficially resembles English.

As a native speaker, it feels like reading an impression of a literature book by a high school English class’s most overconfident student who’s only ever read LinkedIn-speak.

Anyway, you might have more luck just writing to it in your native language. It’ll be equally crummy, but maybe you’ll find it easier to decode.

Isn’t this the point? To destabilize you, put you on your back foot, make you feel preemptively guilty and a little angry, to feel the presence of an Authority?

> teasing, cute, chubby, etc.

gordito

Maybe happiness is a different kind of thing from the pleasure/pain axis. Maybe it’s a different thing that’s tragically easy to mistake for the same thing.

I notice a lot of resistance and discomfort whenever someone says anything like this (“are you suggesting my pain doesn’t matter? How about the starving kids in xyz?”), and I get that. But it feels like there might be something to it.

Privateering is back!

Yeah, it's contextual. Of course. There's context in everything.

Couldn't agree more!

ok

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

All well said.

I would add that, while “giving every under-privileged kid opportunity” wouldn’t make them all successful, for just the reasons you said, I’m not sure that’s even the bottleneck! It’s like… how do you “give someone opportunity?” It’s a very subtle problem. It’s not easy. I doubt there’s any straightforward intervention where you can give everyone 10 units of opportunity, use them wisely please. School funding and clean streets and EBT and whatnot are sort of proxies for this, but it’s just really not that simple.

(This isn’t a disagreement with anything, by the way.)

Whatever strawman you’re fighting here, it ain’t me.

I’m correctly estimating my own effort in my success. I know just how hard I worked. Making the right childhood best friend causally set me on the path to do it.

I attribute 90% of my success in life to the fact that I happened to make the right childhood best friend. One thing led to another and I got a PhD and earn [unreasonable salary]/year now. Life is insanely unfair. On some level it is luck. I don’t know what the “skill issue” twitterites don’t get about it.

(Hard work doesn’t hurt, either, but that goes without saying.)

I mean… I guess, sure. But on a scale of “heavier-than-air powered flight is impossible” to “superluminal signaling is impossible,” it’s like… realistically, about halfway in-between? Enough that I’d sooner start lifting weights and practicing my scary face than count on a third-act gizmotron.

Yeah, this is all true! All of these things are also insanely hard, like, orders of magnitude harder than what we usually mean by “insanely hard,” and might be near-impossible in a similar way that unburning all the carbon is near-impossible, only… somewhat less so. I only talk about unburning all the carbon to emphasize the sheer scale of the problem. There are things you can “fix” or “clean up” or “undo” like, surprisingly, the ozone hole. This is not something we can undo. We can at best halt it, and even slowing it would be (will be) historically traumatic.

Not a dumb question at all.