I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the blessings of Sega Saturn, the gaming system of destruction, I am the Scout of Silence… Sailor Saturn.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • The Generative AI hype at my job has reached a fever pitch in recent months and this is as good a place to rant about it as any.

    Practically every conversation and project is about AI in some way. AI “tools” are being pushed relentlessly. Some of my coworkers are terrified of AI taking their jobs (despite the fact that the code writing tooling is annoying at best). Generative AI is integrated with everything it can be integrated with, and then some. One person I talked to admitted to using a chatbot to write performance reviews for their peers. Almost everyone at my job who I’m not close friends with is approximately 300% more annoying to talk to than a year ago.

    Normally if there’s some new industry direction we’re chasing people are almost bored about it. Like “oh dang I guess we have to mobile better”. Or “oh gee isn’t implementing cloud stuff fun whoop-dee-doo”. But with AI it’s more like everyone is freaking out. I think techies are susceptible to this somehow – like despite not really working that way at all it feels close to sci-fi AI. So a certain class of nerd can trick themselves into thinking the statistically likely text generator is actually thinking. This can’t last forever. People will burn themselves out eventually. But I have no idea when things will change.

    Basically I should have gone into an industry with more arts majors and less CS majors sigh.







  • I agree. I spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to understand Yudkowsky’s posts about newcomb boxes back in the day so my two cents:

    The digital clones bit also means it’s not an argument based on altruism, but one based on fear. After all if a future evil AI uses sci-fi powers to run the universe backwards to the point where I’m writing this comment and copy pastes me into a bazillion torture dimensions then, subjectively, it’s like I roll a dice and:

    1. live a long and happy life with probability very close to zero (yay I am the original)
    2. Instantly get teleported to the torture planet with probability very close to one (oh no I got copy pasted)

    Like a twisted version of the Sleeping Beauty Problem.

    Edit: despite submitting the comment I was not teleported to the torture dimension. Updating my priors.









  • I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.

    My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.

    Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy’s public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I’ve been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).

    Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!