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TIL I'm Julius lol.
Maybe that should be the discussion. Is Julius a psychopath, and that is what bubbles to the top of corporate hierarchies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read the whole thing and never saw any twist. What did I miss?
I missed the twist also. When he said he was surrounded by Juliuses I thought he meant his other colleagues had gotten to their positions by cheating with LLMs to look like Julius.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I missed the twist also. When he said he was surrounded by Juliuses I thought he meant his other colleagues had gotten to their positions by cheating with LLMs to look like Julius.
Re-read the last 7 paragraphs, quoting paragraph[-7]: > On my side, I tried to forget Julius. But, recently, my boss came to me with a huge smile. He had met the salesperson from a company that had amazed him with its products. Artificial intelligence software that would, I quote, boost our productivity! [emphasis added]
> I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code. Another that helps me search for information. A third one that summarises and writes my emails. I am not allowed to disable them.
> At every moment, every second, I feel surrounded by Julius. By dozens of Juliuses.
The first paragraph is my situation and I like it, so the second paragraph didn't follow for me. My inner voice had a short mental hitch where I thought "was something missing between those? Should I slow down and stop skimming?" Then my eye jumps to "My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was dangerously declining" and I decide "the paragraph before must have been referring to the team members using the AI tools", and I've missed the point of the story.
This is not a comment about the main story in the article, but about a paragraph at the end: "My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was dangerously declining. That we should use artificial intelligence more effectively. That we risked being overtaken by competitors who, without a doubt, were using the very latest artificial intelligence." This is the oldest scam in the book. A boss will neve…
This is just a fictional story meant to be an allegory about AI. I don't understand why people takes it so literally in the comments.
I've met a breed of career min-maxers adjacent to Julius that I have a hard time describing. Picture this: you join a new team with a senior engineer, call him Pete. Pete wrote the initial version of a new product, and you joined the team to take over and continue it's development. Pete is bona fide genius who can work miracles and he is always in the critical path of each new initiative, you are told. Once you open…
Oh, i know him... it's me! I do "computer stuff" as my profession for about 20 years and always for rather small companies. I do everything from wiring a network, any level of supported, programming and administrative stuff... oh yeah, and in my current job I sometimes drive a forklift in the warehouse. I work now for about 10 years for the same company and have built significant parts of their software ecosystem, an…
They milk the credit and move on, leaving the next engineer explain to management that what they have is not what they believe they have.
Fantastic, hilarious, and too relatable. Perhaps I am becoming overly cynical as I approach middle age, but it seems to me that this phenomenon exists because the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people. Businesses exist to serve the egos and goals of the people who run them - from their perspective things like technical competence and honesty are often secondary to achie…
we hired a Julius. Result after a year: Prolific people were laid off, yappers stayed, sales didn't grow, more money was spent than made. Company has 6 month left of runway. Oh Julius why you be like that? Amazing presentations tho. Like watching a movie.
Really worth actually reading, very nicely done. I think the point is being made that real Julii exist, and also, that the mechanisms being used to get AI into workplaces and such are the same methods used by the Julii of the world to get ahead as well.
As for AI being the new version of this, I don't think so. The effect of this tech is more likely to remove one layer in the hierarchy. But maybe it's your boss, not you, that will get replaced.
Really worth actually reading, very nicely done. I think the point is being made that real Julii exist, and also, that the mechanisms being used to get AI into workplaces and such are the same methods used by the Julii of the world to get ahead as well.
Ah yes, a masculine proper noun of the second declension in the nominative plural. Just one macron away from nailing it ;)