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The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

kennethreitz.org

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

#61

Post by freehorse »

mathiaspoint wrote: post #54
jasonlotito wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Yeah I noticed the same, in the beginning they seemed to have different "personalities" as in ways of interacting with users. Maybe it is just a design related thing, same as all commercial websites ending up being the same, as the users know what to expect and how to interact.

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

#62

Post by morleytj »

jasonlotito wrote: post #41
morleytj wrote: post #30

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.

Very snarky, but okay, haha. Do you not get that sort of sense at all from the above structure? I'm curious if it's just in my head and what the perspectives of others are.

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

#63

Post by dpoloncsak »

nemomarx wrote: post #44
bradstewart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specifically is the LLM verbiage you're seeing here? That reads like a normal sentence to me.

em dash in the middle of a "it's not just x, it's y" phrasing. I see it in several other spots in the essay and it's kind of a "code smell" Of course it's also a normal, polished sentence with good grammar, but it seems a little unrealistic. It's too polished basically.

pops up multiple times, too. One or two, sure maybe it's just a reflection of using LLMs often, but this many suggests that the article was (atleast) re-written by an LLM

I use Copilot to re-write emails all the time. I'm not going to act like I'm above it. I will say, it makes your emotional plea ring a little more hollow than it should, but so does posting it online, in text form anyway.

> This isn't job-hopping by choice—it's a survival pattern forced by systematic exclusion. > This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience. > The discrimination I'm documenting isn't just about hurt feelings or career setbacks—it has life-and-death consequences for people with schizoaffective disorder: > These aren't abstract statistics—they represent the human cost of the systematic exclusion I've experienced. (little looser here, but still fits the bill) > The pattern of discrimination I've experienced isn't unique—it's systematic. > The discrimination I've faced isn't my fault—it's a reflection of society's failure to move beyond tokenistic awareness toward genuine inclusion.

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

#64

Post by JohnBooty »

Non-negotiable tenet(s): all human lives are valuable, all humans deserve dignity, and when we as a society can't find a place for a valuable and talented individuals like the author then we have failed in some sense.

That said, within the current system...

Morally and legally, what are the limits of accommodation?

Accommodation, in my uninformed layman understanding, is about accommodating people who can do the job, but need to do it differently than others. For example, wheelchair accessibility for white-collar office workers.

Does it include the inclusion of people who can't perform all aspects of the job?

Communication and collaboration are absolute pillars of nearly any engineer's job, but by the writer's own statements it seems like his condition often prevents this.

How do we resolve this?

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

#65

Post by Alex3917 »

morleytj wrote: post #60
Alex3917 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I'm more talking about the particular contrastive structure.

But that's one of the main uses of emdashes, for signaling that the second half of the sentence is more important than the first half. If you Ctrl-F for emdashes on my blog, you can see I do it everywhere, even though all of my posts were written before LLMs existed:

https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/

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

#66

Post by runjake »

carlosjobim wrote: post #8
rini17 wrote: post #2

Sigh. I too would like to know an employer that can accomodate unpredictable performance or a partner willing to do emotional labor.

As for unpredictable performance, employers never want to have that. But it is possible if you have your own business or consultancy. Or if you work with art and creativity, where it is the norm to have ups and downs.

Perhaps one option: work at a non-profit whose mission deals with your disorder.

They probably understand it more than most disorders and likely have some level of skills to cope with it and it makes them look good employing them.

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

#67

Post by nemomarx »

Alex3917 wrote: post #53
morleytj wrote: post #30

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.

Out of curiosity, why em dashes and not en dashes? Is one easier to type in a particular keyboard layout or the default in some editor?

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

#68

Post by freehorse »

nemomarx wrote: post #50
jasonlotito wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I think an llm would have put a comma in the middle of that? I wonder why no one's tuned their model to make minor errors that way or leave a few things uncapitalized to fake a human touch

You can do it after, remove all commas and newlines. Make it all a huge continuous blob of text that is hard to read. Definitely not LLM written.

A lot of this here imo is just llm paranoia. I do not think the style of the author is different than their pre-llm posts. One em dash is not proof of anything imo as long as the text in general does not smell as much like llm-generated. I could be wrong because I do not interact much with llms lately, but it does not seem that to me.

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

#69

Post by jerlendds »

zdragnar wrote: post #21
zemvpferreira wrote: post #4

"Schizoaffective disorder is a mental health condition that is marked by a mix of schizophrenia symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, and mood disorder symptoms, such as depression, mania and a milder form of mania called hypomania. Hallucinations involve seeing things or hearing voices that others don't observe. Delusions involve believing things that are not real or not true." I'm not sure this is an empl…

It is a condition that is employable in the abstract, as symptoms are as varied as individuals are. The difficulty begins with the treatment- the medications can be extremely unpleasant, and it is not uncommon for patients to cease taking them. Unfortunately, people with the condition can be unreliable narrators, so to speak, and so any deviation from perfectly normal becomes suspicion of medication refusal, as the a…

[redacted]

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

#70

Post by JohnBooty »

morleytj wrote: post #30

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 thought the same exact thing. The "proper" em dash (or is that an en dash) as opposed to two dashes "--" is a typical giveaway, it seems to me.

However, the article in general certainly reads like it is coming from the author's own voice. Painfully so, even, because this guy is clearly suffering.

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