Viewing profile — maiar

I recall about ten years ago there was a poster here who warned about tech authoritarianism, got banned for it, and had his career destroyed for the service.

At first, “scary numbers” seems ridiculous. Then you realize we live in a world where otherwise meaningless numbers (also known as “money”) are, because of their emotional effects …

Right. The fundamental difference is that LLMs are a technical achievement that almost no one expected to come this fast. Neural networks were long considered a dead approach—not a…

We’ve known the answer for at least 15 years. It’s just becoming wider known.

The good news is that these costs are still in exponential decline and will be for at least a few years. The early iterations are costly, but later versions will be cheap. The bad …

It’s worthwhile to “go above and beyond” for individuals who will help you, who may exist in a company… but never for the company itself. A company is no less and no more than a pi…

Usually when you’re in a shitty situation, all the people who know who you are are also in bad situations and probably can’t hire or protect you. That’s how business works—things g…

Two things can be true. Most people don’t climb the corporate ladder because there are a limited number of spots, that’s true, and it is also true for most people that the reason t…

The capitalists have found a way to make 51+% of the justifiably furious people vote for further dismantling of the institutions that work (as well as anti-DEI witch hunts and othe…

This is a fancy word for “being human in a hostile and duplicitous world.” There is a real cognitive cost to knowing everything is invalid but being disallowed to say it is this be…

The problem is that only 0.01% of the people who need to be held accountable are. The number isn’t zero, clearly, but how many of the people who caused the 2008 disaster ended up i…

It doesn’t shield small business owners in practice, though. Bank loans tend to require personal liability, and there are ways to pierce the corporate veil when the company is prov…

No, we’re just learning that disruption is usually terrible. The word is proving to mean what it actually means.

This. The entire point of corporations is to shield individuals from penalties, but they don’t work. Business failure in good faith, where the shielding makes sense, is not really …

They stopped using their real names after what happened to you-know-who.

They should have stayed rare, but they’re a way for universities to get free money from the government as well as a temporary (but sadly permanent) fix for academia’s deep structur…

* discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.* It’s not the research or teaching …

In a lot of fields, postdocs are required if you want a shot at a tenure-track position. For the most part, it’s just another artificial rung the system uses to justify exploiting …

This is an excellent post and I agree. That said, we should vilify people who get rich (small or large scale) in reprehensible ways, e.g. class traitors and people who enforce the …

The issue is game-theoretic. There’s value in having money, absolutely, but most people end up having to chase it and never get any. If one person chases money, emancipation result…

Twitter was a social accomplishment, not a technical one. It created its own new word (to tweet) and it did really feel, misleadingly, like a public utility rather than a private p…

I’ve been in too many arguments about Lisp indentation but that actually comes close to decent with a couple of changes: move the singleton closing parens up, and reduce to, say, 2…

And usage tends to go two ways.