Every job I’ve had I’ve ended up becoming a liaison of sorts between the sales teams and the operational teams because I seem to be the Daywalker, who can walk between worlds and communicate with the techy nerds, take their issues to the loud sales assholes and make it all work.
It’s not an enjoyable role but it always earned me high marks because nobody else can stomach it.
Absolutely correct, I watched this happen to our tech team before I was also thrown in the chipper.
And it doesn’t help that a lot of the young people trying to get into coding and tech fields are not what you would call titans of confidence and charisma, these are mostly introverted and thoughtful people who have studied most of their lives under the belief that meritocracy exists, and they can prove themselves in the business world by doing great work and being a good employee.
Meanwhile glance over at the sales side of the building and there are people there making six figures a year who do next to nothing but party and tell lewd jokes, but are absolutely invulnerable to layoffs and downsizing as long as they can talk to clients and joke about sports with the CEO.
The disillusionment around the business world is real and unsustainable.
Truth.
Been job hunting in similar fields for a while and as a middle-aged person, I simply cannot get a callback from any of these companies, then when you actually visit them and see some of their workforce, you rarely see anyone over late-20’s, and it’s all these high-energy, eager-to-please, eager-to-work-for-recognitionbucks, fresh-outta-college kids who can be exploited and turned over rapidly.
I am job hunting because the previous company I managed was bought out, downsized, and all the senior employees making more than entry level wages were cut. This is happening everywhere.
More and more technology, overseas outsourcing options, and general service/gig systems for filling job openings has left companies treating workers as disposable as toilet paper.
This is because almost every business is now part of a huge chain of ownership, and the shareholders at the top, groups of very rich old white dudes, just gather together in their hooded cloaks and look at the bars and graphs every month and decide what investments are to be amputated, and which to be kept. Before going back to their private sex islands.
I have a gaming group that I regularly spend time with, they are about as diverse as you can possibly imagine. We have back-country gun-toting conservatives playing alongside college campus protesting trans girls, hispanic immigrants, US marines, housewives, people from China and Philippines, midwest American Christians and one extremely loving gay couple who do everything together.
While we do have a few ground rules, more like courtesy guidelines, like no arguing about politics, it’s not something I’ve ever had to enforce or moderate, and if you were to overhear the group on an average gaming night, you would think they are just the closest and tightest group of people who lift each other up, help each other out, laughing together and telling lewd jokes until they laugh so hard together that they wheeze.
This group has been the end-product of years of “distillation” in that the people who have issues with other people’s identity or politics or can’t set aside ego to have fun with people and make new friends, they just have naturally fallen by the wayside, so what’s left is a group of people who are bound together by something much stronger than politics or ideology, and that’s intelligence.
The one common thread that everyone left here has is that they are sharp, they like to talk through issues, they talk about ideas and science and sociology and relationships and enjoy the very simple act of trying to understand other people.
Curiosity about others will carry you through life far, far further than one might think.
They’re already being grifted, they have already passed the first filter.
People sometimes wonder why scam emails and phone calls are so obvious, with mis-spellings, bad grammar and poor English. The thing is that they do this on purpose. Running a scam takes time and energy, you want to work marks that you know can be manipulated easily, and if someone can’t determine that an email from “micosaft.pAypal-Customre-Sercicve.com” isn’t legit, they’re VERY likely to buy the story that they have to send money via Western Union to some random address in Kazakhstan to get their share of the king’s inheritance.
Being in maga is basically that. If you’re wearing a red hat and waving flags and spouting off FOX news lines to anyone who will listen, you’re a mark.
The average progressive or even liberal in the US hates hearing this, but the vast, vast majority of Trumpers are actually “okay” people, and you would all get along splendidly in just about any other context.
The problem is though, they are dumb. Don’t get me wrong or think I’m sticking up for them. I just have some amount of sympathy and pity because I grew up out in the boonies in Southwestern USA, I was raised conservative and only flipped in my 20’s after seeing too much horror and war hurt people I cared about, and by extension, I learned to care for more than just the people I know.
A lot of people haven’t learned that. We take for granted that empathy is a learned skill, and we expect others to have it on demand and we tend to resent those who don’t exercise it. My take is that we’re expecting people to exercise muscles they’ve never even stretched. These are people locked in communities that they will likely spend their whole lives in, often times decaying outskirts of America, rampant with drugs and alcohol abuse, stuck in low-wage jobs or jobs that demand them to spend every waking moment working. They have no time nor opportunity to learn how to incorporate “care” into their daily misery, much less political knowledge. Then someone like Trump comes along, someone they only hear clips of and hear their “news station” praise while simultaneously explaining that all their problems are because of people who “hate america” and are trying to destroy families with scaaary things like abortion and gender-fluidity. It makes sense if your brain is desperately looking for a story to explain why you’re so unhappy. Which is how all our brains work.
We all have to remember that the worst people in the world are identical to us. We could have been born in their lives with their ignorance and tunnel vision, and all their feelings of fighting against a stacked-deck and hopelessness against change that will (supposedly) take away their only comforts in life.
I am getting really uncomfortable with the hate the left is directing at people who are simply dumb as fuck. Yes, they are dangerous, yes they are capable of doing better, and on top of that the only examples we SEE of this segment of America is the most horrific and malicious, the people storming the capitol or screaming at rallys or beating up protestors. They are the worst, but not necessarily the rule.
I had family members who were going to vote Trump and JUST needed to see the clips of him speaking that don’t make it to Facebook news feeds to change their mind. Approach this from a place of education and compassion and you will all have better results.
Let’s save our hate for the real evil, the grifters and pundits who are pied pipers for the ignorant. They are smart and know what they are doing and it’s pure evil.
I mean, everyone has been crying and whinging for years, decades even, that the USA needs to ramp up semiconductor fabrication in case shit goes south in Taiwan. We are finally getting some domestic production power and we’re getting outraged by the traffic delays? America will sink itself because of our people’s own addiction to comfort and complaining about any slight to that comfort.
Alternatively, and more realistically: drugs.
because the damn liberals canceled glue on pizza!
The right in general follows the Wrestlemania principle, wherein they exist in a strange quantum state of both believing the narratives and storylines with all their heart, while at the same time understanding enough about the world around them that they can function and understand complex concepts. IE: the vaxxine-skeptical nurses and climate-change denying scientists.
If you’re old enough to remember having to argue with your friends that wrestling is scripted, and your friend doubles down that there really are necromancers and supernatural powers in professional wrestling events, but you also know that point where trying to convince them becomes less enjoyable because you see for a moment that their connection to this fantasy storyline is all they have and you just let them believe that the fantasy and spectacle is real.
Because for wrestling fans and Trump fans, it’s not about logic and reason, it’s about emotion and validation for those emotions, and that validation doesn’t necessarily need to make sense to provide comfort for fear and anxiety and sadness.
Those people never grew up and grew out of their magical thinking. We all have magical thinking about something, but this segment of the population stands out more because their belief is being steered by powerful criminal minds and shaping international policy.
Before that it was fliers and classifieds in the paper for groups to meet up and discuss or have mailing chains.
Although, I would have to admit that back when people who wanted to gather around a single idea had to make an effort and have leadership and infrastructure, you saw a LOT less bullshit nonsense in the world, people just kept their shit to themselves most of the time and it was a little better.
No no, some of us enjoy struggling through page after page of attempts to push premium products and services, and never mind that these “free file” options generally don’t cover both state and federal. But hey, yay for H&R, they really need the business, right?
Read the way you talked about this shit at the start:
We are literally the first humans in human experience to have a human-level conversation with something that isn’t human
And if my harsh, scary, grown-up language with bad words got you to now call it this:
It’s just a tool man
Then I consider this entire interaction a success. Thank you. I’m done.
You’re not wrong that we don’t have great definitions of intelligence, but that doesn’t detract at all from criticism against these LLM’s being pushed on us and the massive amount of praise and hype being directed at what’s essentially advertising platforms.
Never understood this argument.
All you need to understand is that AI models are making the internet a lot worse, and it’s going to get worse and worse and people are not happy about it. The exact details and semantics about the wording is almost irrelevant in the face of our need to collectively demand better from our tech companies and not act like these LLM’s are real entities that deserve respect.
I have never said that Chatgpt is smarter than humans, I said that when it comes to linguistics, it is more advanced than the average human.
You’re not SAYING anything here. Are… are YOU a chat bot?
In terms of language, Chatgpt is more advanced than most humans.
The internet is getting flooded with content that reads like a 10th grade book report written the hour before the test. When you can give me an internet that isn’t overflowing with mindless slop that says nothing new and pictures of uncanny people smiling with too many teeth, then I might start to believe it’s better than people in some way.
In the meantime, I would encourage everyone else to maintain and encourage human connections, hand-written material and actual human interaction. Write and draw. Don’t be lazy and let your lazy brain convince yourself that any of this is making you better at anything.
Maybe you should start actually figuring out how to use the tool instead of complaining about it in this echo chamber.
As someone who actually has used most of these applications and has to learn how to keep up with it for my own professional reasons, I am speaking from a place of education that this isn’t going to help as many of us as it supposedly is helping you. Nothing you write can make me feel positive about the immediate future.
I know the tech will transform our society, I know it will change everything. I’m not disputing that.
I’m disputing the absolute fucking adoration and hype that you and others are gushing all over this tech like it’s daddy’s big fat knob that has to be lubricated constantly. It’s disgusting because right now it’s all hype and bullshit and exaggeration. It’s making everything worse. We’re a LONG fucking way from transforming humanity for the better with this, that goal is far further away and on the other side of a lot worse hardships that people are cowardly dodging, and none of this is going into helping the people who need the help the most in our world.
It’s so very yay and happy that it makes you feel important at work using shortcuts. I’m sure that you feel special being able to be lazier at work. Yippee. Now please fix the internet while we wait for things to get as good as you’re promising. Please, fix it. It’s getting worse every second with slop we didn’t ask for. I’m sure with all your shortcuts you can do the work of a team to solve this mess.
And you’re going to be waiting a suspiciously long time before your life is tangibly, positively impacted by any of this. Nothing is changing for the better any time soon, and many things are going to get worse. The carrot will always be a few years away.
The worst part is I want it to succeed and live up to it’s promises, but I am old enough to be smart enough to know that as a species, and I fucking cannot stress this enough, not that fucking special. We do the same sad shit over and over, this is tech promises that will change the world, but not soon enough to actually help because they want to make money from it. That’s the hard truth, the real pill you and all the kids watching this shit are going to have to slowly… ever so slowly… swallow.
It’s pretty insane how negative people are.
It’s not negativity, it’s reigning in unwarranted faith and adoration, this is a technology, a product that is largely being made by and for corporate mega-giants who are not going to steer this towards betterment of anyone or anything, just like every other technology, it will take decades or more for any of us to see this take the form of the life changing wonder that too many people are already seeing in it. If you can stop being impressed by how easy it is to mirror human traits back at us, you will let these companies know that you do NOT want advertising AI’s in your fucking toaster.
You want the real thing? Then put some pressure where it belongs and don’t be a hype-person for advertising platforms and plagiarism simulators.
Since the shareholders only care about 6-month projections, they will always choose a shitty, short-term successes with rushed products with patches later or promises of continued bugfixing, than spending more money and time to make something that users approve of and passes all requirements.
The shit is already running pretty deep.