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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

#81

Post by inanutshellus »

34nabxgyF wrote: post #9

Regarding the Python Documentary, that is just the old boys boosting their personal brands and valuations again. If you aren't part of that club, you are nothing in the Python world. It does not matter what you have done, whether you just maintained an email module throughout Python-3 or had your broken code fixed and completely rewritten by people who came later: The only thing that matters is that you have been the…

Ok so I was writing python professionally in this time period and ... if I were making a python documentary I'd expect it to honor folks that were active back this far much to the exclusion of late comers. I presume you were one of those?

Back then the language felt like a quiet little also-ran behind Perl and we looked with jealous eyes as Ruby On Rails took over the mindshare. If you were a python advocate then, you were really singing into the void.

My personal low-effort view has been that Python is only on the map today because MIT switched to teaching it as the language of choice in their CS classes. A quick internet search says that happened in 2009 though so ... maybe that's not fair. I thought it happened around 2005 causing the popularity to surge around 2010 but... them starting in 2009 seems like it wouldn't've been that quick to spur change. Sounds like I should go watch the documentary. ;)

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

#82

Post by zdragnar »

jerlendds wrote: post #69
zdragnar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Thank you for sharing. I am sympathetic to the struggle, being an occasionally unreliable narrator myself.

It can be incredibly surprising and disappointing how people can react to mental health issues, even just hearing that you have them despite not presenting symptoms at the time.

A prior acquaintance of mine was a social worker who helped people with such conditions live (semi)independently. One in particular hated his medication, but when he wasn't on it, he'd become increasingly paranoid that vampires were out to get him. To the best of my knowledge he was never violent, but you're right- when imagining defensive paranoia, popular media always brings to mind a loose cannon who might be a danger to themselves and others.

In time, this may change, but I can't say that I'm too hopeful. We no longer associate menstruation with hysteria, but it's easy to change when we're talking about half the population. So long as fictional media outnumbers real lives, it'll be harder to change.

With that said, change comes from learning, and I hope your sharing will help others understand.

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

#83

Post by nemomarx »

JohnBooty wrote: post #73
jorvi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 Nobody's ever accused me, but I am definitely conscious (paranoid) about the possibility. I have found myself editing my words to look "less LLM-like" What a world!

Less serious, but this reminds me of how before stable diffusion was consistently useful, there were artists who made a sizeable Patreon income on anime characters in 'realistic' style. Unfortunately that seems to have been one of the styles that got trained into models the best and now their good work is associated with cheap looking art, and not through any fault of their own.

All the way down this kind of genai has weird impacts I guess.

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

#84

Post by nemomarx »

JohnBooty wrote: post #78
nemomarx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I also kind of wish he published the blog in his own words instead of using what seems to be LLM polishing. It seems ironically like the same defensiveness and lack of transparency he wants to avoid?

I don't mind AI polishing any more than I mind somebody using a spellchecker. The article overwhelmingly reads like a (painfully) honest and personal account of what he's going through, it's not AI slop.

It's definitely not slop, but there's something kind of sad about a very personal and emotional account needing to be fed through the corpo speak grammar checker? At least in my opinion. It feels like if a friend wanted to vent to me on discord but didn't trust me enough to do it without editing their post for hours, or something.

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

#85

Post by runjake »

nemomarx wrote: post #23
sfn42 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This blog I found seems to support your view https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...

> I think a lot of people don't realize how little Reitz actually has to do with Requests development. For many years now, actual maintenance has been done almost exclusively by other volunteers. If you look at the maintainers list on PyPI, you'll see he doesn't have PyPI rights to his own project, because he kept breaking stuff, so the real maintainers insisted on revoking his access. If you clone the Requests git r…

I think the important thing here is that Kenneth came up with Requests and did the initial implementation beginning in 2011.

The author is referring to Kenneth's involvement in Requests at that time (2019), long after its creation. Substantial work has been done on Requests since he stepped away from the project, but it was born from him.

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

#86

Post by hamburglar »

runjake wrote: post #10

The Python community didn’t exclude Kenneth because of his condition, at least directly. They excluded him because of his actions and history of shady, manipulative behaviors. And while workplaces should be accommodating, there’s a point where it gets to be too much. I worked at a place with a person with similar behaviors and it destroyed that company because they refused to acknowledge reality: this was a business,…

One thing i noticed while reading the post is he doesn’t go into what events led people to be fearful of him. I’ve known someone with schizoaffective disorder and the episodes can be downright scary. You can have sympathy for someone while also knowing it’s a bad idea to let your guard down while they’re holding a fork.

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

#87

Post by morleytj »

nemomarx wrote: post #83
JohnBooty wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Nobody's ever accused me, but I am definitely conscious (paranoid) about the possibility. I have found myself editing my words to look "less LLM-like" What a world!

Less serious, but this reminds me of how before stable diffusion was consistently useful, there were artists who made a sizeable Patreon income on anime characters in 'realistic' style. Unfortunately that seems to have been one of the styles that got trained into models the best and now their good work is associated with cheap looking art, and not through any fault of their own. All the way down this kind of genai ha…

That's something I find very interesting, honestly. I think the two way nature of the relationship between the impacts of a tool on humans and the impact of humans on the way the tool develops is a particularly weird little phenomenon that exists these days. It's overall fascinating.

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

#88

Post by nemomarx »

runjake wrote: post #85
nemomarx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a lot of people don't realize how little Reitz actually has to do with Requests development. For many years now, actual maintenance has been done almost exclusively by other volunteers. If you look at the maintainers list on PyPI, you'll see he doesn't have PyPI rights to his own project, because he kept breaking stuff, so the real maintainers insisted on revoking his access. If you clone the Requests git r…

I think the important thing here is that Kenneth came up with Requests and did the initial implementation beginning in 2011. The author is referring to Kenneth's involvement in Requests at that time (2019), long after its creation. Substantial work has been done on Requests since he stepped away from the project, but it was born from him.

Oh yeah I don't mean to diminish that part. Rather, I'm thinking this might actually be one of the things he's talking about in the post? Whatever happened that the maintainers took over the repo, that could be a point of tension and maybe a loss of control for him. Which would definitely make you feel like the community was isolating you, right?

Different sides to the story, and neither post here explains exactly what happened with Requests.

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

#89

Post by ProllyInfamous »

sfn42 wrote: post #16
runjake wrote: post #10

The Python community didn’t exclude Kenneth because of his condition, at least directly. They excluded him because of his actions and history of shady, manipulative behaviors. And while workplaces should be accommodating, there’s a point where it gets to be too much. I worked at a place with a person with similar behaviors and it destroyed that company because they refused to acknowledge reality: this was a business,…

This blog I found seems to support your view https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...

tl;dr (from the linked author):

>In short: He chose a fundraiser structure that avoids standard accountability mechanisms he was familiar with. He never had any plan or capability to deliver what he promised. And when I offered a way for him to do it anyway, he gave me some bafflegab about how expensive it is to write docs. Effectively, his public promises about how he would use the Requests 3 money were lies from start to finish, and he hasn't shown any remorse or even understanding that this is a problem.

A similar (but unrelated) fundraiser mechanism is why I no longer donate to any fundraisers, online (no accountability, no refunds). I'm looking at you µOptics >:-|

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

#90

Post by noident »

JohnBooty wrote: post #70
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.

The em dash existed long before LLMs. The fact that 95% of people don't use dashes properly doesn't mean that every single person who uses an em dash is relying on an LLM.
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