The bullshittery is the thing that will not survive enshittification. I keep telling people that all the tokens we're blowing are going to explode in cost as soon as these companies run out of other people's money. To me, this means being laser-focused on your core competencies and only "farming out" stuff to AI that you would offload to a vendor. We're all familiar with the level of risk there, and the kind of encapsulation you need to swap something out if a vendor fails you.
The Rise of the Bullshittery
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Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery
#12 >The person next to you, who is willing to fake the demo and declare victory on LinkedIn even before the launch, is going to look more successful than you.
Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery
#13>an awful lot of modern professional life consists of producing artifacts whose primary audience is other people producing artifacts. Slide decks for slide decks, strategy documents about strategy documents
This is because thinking, communication, and collaboration are extremely valuable.
Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery
#14I have a feeling this goes waaaay back, but was covered by claims of authority, in a time where merit and authority were intertwined.
My pet peeve is that management is a transferable skill that supersedes industry expertise. It is such a convenient lie that offers MBAs, management consultants, burned out business executives and “retired” generals alike a new career without actually knowing anything about what they are doing.
Bullshittery of the finest quality.
Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery
#15> bullshitter is not the same as the liar, because the liar at least respects the truth enough to try to hide it, but the bullshitter does not care whether what they are saying is true or false thus, by definition, all LLMs are bullshitters
I don't know about that. When you're prompting some LLM, the response you get is a statistically likely valid response to the prompt. Whether it contains any truth or facts or information at all is besides the point; the LLM has done its job of predicting something that is statistically likely to be the answer.
The fact that people assign any weight to that information is the mistake.
Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery
#16loving the overlay you get when you open it in a tab and then tab away
That was brilliant.
Some of the ones I spotted:
- FTX Cryptocurrency
- Infowars
- YouTube: Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom (lmao, what is this supposed to be?)
- YouTube: MrBeast en Espanol
- Netflix: Fifty Shades of Grey
- ChatGPT: Online Debate Argument Suggestions (haha - I've never done that...)
- Hacker News: The Internet Used to be Fun
- Google: Zuckerberg Nudes
- Official Church of Scientology
Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery
#17> bullshitter is not the same as the liar, because the liar at least respects the truth enough to try to hide it, but the bullshitter does not care whether what they are saying is true or false thus, by definition, all LLMs are bullshitters
Relevant research paper: Hicks, M.T., Humphries, J. & Slater, J. ChatGPT is bullshit. Ethics Inf Technol 26, 38 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery
#18I think at least one approach that can work is de-globalization of social media into smaller, reputation/trust-ranked social networks. Discord is pretty good in this regard.
If you have suggestions for good Discord servers, please share. The bullshittery is coming out of my ears. I don't quite know where to turn to anymore. There's HN. Reddit is getting a bit crazy, all other social media is a pass for me.
Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery
#19Using a throwaway for this comment, but my first experience with this kind of thing was in 2013 when I joined a major international company with over 100k employees worldwide and realized that there were entire departments and organizations dedicated to delivering no value at all. Departments with 100s of people, with middle managers making several times the average salary in my country, where after years of work nothing of value was delivered and nobody was held responsible. I always wondered how companies like this can even exist and why shareholders invest in them.
Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery
#20Been noticing this new phenotype of tech bro who writes with an air of superiority, subtly belittling all those beneath him. Also ardently believes in
- bullshit jobs
- enshittification
- kubernetes being a psyop
- tech landscape was best exactly during his career peak and has gone down since