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The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

kennethreitz.org

51–60 of 130 posts

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#51

This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent. On another note though: "This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience." I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those p…

> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it.

If you write concise but with some panache, people will think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023.

It really sucks. In a similar vein, before LLMs my friends always used to call me "the walking Wikipedia" because I tend to always have a fact or trick or trivia in my back pocket. These days more often than not, I get told "okay and now for a non-AI ass answer".

I completely understand why people have that reflexive response to it, but it also feels really vile.

For what it's worth, I do also notice it. Especially on Reddit, you'll start reading a comment and halfway through your gut feel tells you it's likely written by an LLM.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#52

[flagged]

> Im certain this guy is terrifying when he’s having an episode

Why are you "certain" of this?

Whatever else can be said about all of this, this seems little more than stereotypical fear-mongering, and is exactly the sort of discrimination the post talks about.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#53

This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent. On another note though: "This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience." I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those p…

> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look.

emdashes have been pretty popular among net native folks for the last 20+ years, e.g. if you were to look back at the most popular Kuro5hin stories from ~2001 - 2005, you'd see them everywhere. People just aren't used to the average person being able to write well, so it looks weird to them.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#54

This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent. On another note though: "This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience." I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those p…

"This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent." I can't stop seeing this LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those patterns from reading AI-generated language now too.

Personally I was expecting it to get more diverse since there are a number of companies producing the models but it seems to have converged? Are they all cheating off OpenAI Is there some fundamental linguistic reason for that?

It seems super strange to me. At the very least I thought they'd try to RL other personalities to make it harder to catch. The older base models definitely could handle that.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#55
post #40

[flagged]

Masking sucks but everyone has to hide parts of themselves in normal corporate workplaces, so it's part of life really. If you're struggling at home or going through a messy divorce, if you're stressed and anxious, if you're dealing with illness, you're supposed to keep some of that held back so it doesn't affect the 'squares' yeah

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#56

> Silence means constantly monitoring my behavior for signs that might reveal my condition, avoiding discussions of mental health that might trigger suspicion and living with the constant anxiety that discovery will lead to rejection. This framing is at the very least maladaptive and possibly indicative of the mental illness they are writing about. Mentally healthy humans regulate their behavior around other humans d…

> There is no reason for an employer or professional colleagues to be aware of an employees medical issues. Totally agree, but it can get a bit weird. I struggle with depression, and at times I have felt like I owed my co-workers/manager/boss an excuse as to why I "suck" sometimes. IE; I didn't show up late for the meeting because I am irresponsible, rather because I'm just in a bad spell this week and have brain fog…

The rationalization matters far more to you than it does to your coworkers or boss. I have no opinion on how you should frame it to yourself.

However, I think it's genuinely good advice to say that professionally, people are just trying to build a mental model of how reliable you are. The reasoning doesn't really matter to them, and a psychological diagnosis is a predictive theory about how you will behave. Unfortunately, people will assume close to worst case for any condition you tell them about. The mental model you put in someone's head with a psychological diagnosis is always worse than how they currently perceive you.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#57
post #13

I had never heard of Kenneth Reitz and I was curious about his Python contribution so I googled him and this was one of the first results https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...

That post is all about money. The author came into someone else’s project, acts miffed that he isn’t treated as a founder right off the bat, and then complains endlessly about where the donations went. Even belaboring the “dishonesty” of rounding 28k to 30k. I won’t read to the end because clearly this person has major faults of their own and just wrote an attack without making any reflections on himself

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#58
The post echoed some similar points from Freddie DeBoer on real mental illness not always being pretty. There's limits to inclusivity that you quickly run into with schizoaffective disorder or bipolar. Companies are proudly supportive on paper, but that rarely extends to mania or psychosis.

It's a reality that most people are absolutely not equipped to deal with a coworker (or any contributor) that has manic or psychotic episodes. Mental illnesses is not anyone's fault, but there are still behaviors that will make it difficult to work with others, even for someone like Kenneth who is very good on the technical side.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#59
post #51

This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent. On another note though: "This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience." I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those p…

> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. If you write concise but with some panache, people will think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023. It really sucks. In a similar vein, before LLMs my friends always used to call me "the walking…

I do also get that pretty often. Also because I've always liked using hyphens and emdashes, so I get that as well. I don't know if I'd call it "vile" to notice a common pattern like the above though.

But it does have a certain code smell sometimes, I often get it on Reddit posts as well.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#60

This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent. On another note though: "This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience." I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those p…

> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. emdashes have been pretty popular among net native folks for the last 20+ years, e.g. if you were to look back at the most popular Kuro5hin stories from ~2001 - 2005, you'd see them everywhere. People just aren't used to the average person being able to write well, so it looks weird to them.

I also use emdashes a lot. I'm more talking about the particular contrastive structure.
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