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MaddieM4 @MaddieM4@raphus.social
1mo
I need a tech industry that doesn't make regular old software engineering that I've been doing for 20-ish years feel like the freakin' "I studied the blade" meme. Which, I forgot had the blockchain reference in it, that's so much funnier than I even remembered.
A white boy somewhere in his early 20s with his head bowed, partially unsheathing his katana. The overlay text reads: When You were partying I studied The Blade When you were having premarital sex I mastered The Blockchain While you wasted your days at the gym in pursuit of vanity I cultivated Inner Strength And now that the world is on fire and the barbarians are at the gate you have the audacity to come to me for help?
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MaddieM4 @MaddieM4@raphus.social
1mo
Literally all I'm doing is not falling for the most obvious attack on skilled labor I've seen in my lifetime and continuing to do business as usual without softening my head like butter in a microwave. That shouldn't be noteworthy or laudable! It feels boring (in a good way) to me! I'm not trying to be special by still having skills at the far end of the skillpocalypse, I am literally just not doing the dumbest option available to me.

The fact that any of this is treated as controversial, regressive, Luddite, any of that stuff, has been a shocking correction to how I see the rest of the industry, who I wouldn't have naturally guessed would be this gullible.
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additional meis meiing meifully meihapsulating meibe @mei@amazonawaws.com
1mo
@MaddieM4 Yeah.. The sheer social pressure is insane, I keep on doubting myself. Because how often is everyone else wrong about something, actually..

I continue to hold faith in society, but it's much harder to dismiss this because of it being a statistical approach. It's a very man made horror, that we train these models to present a chat-like interface. By default, a base ("foundation") model is just an obvious junk machine.

I think that is why this is hard. It's like a drug.
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MaddieM4 @MaddieM4@raphus.social
1mo
@mei I've struggled with the same problem multiple times in my life. That's actually something giving me strength today.

Not a new lore drop for people who follow me, but I was raised in a cult. I think I've even mentioned before that my parents apparently limited how often certain secular relatives could visit, because they didn't want that unchristian influence in my life. Now, I love my parents and see this in retrospect as misguided positive intentions, but you have to understand what a totalizing experience this was. For the first, I dunno, 14 years of my life, with no other frames of reference, EVERYONE I knew was committed to the same set of dogma. If I had doubts, I couldn't trust anyone. If I thought maybe Jesus wasn't going to show back up with a very specific sequence of resurrections of the dead or that eating meat was okay, I WAS THE CRAZY ONE AND EVERYONE ELSE AGREED THAT I WAS.

And every single person upholding that bubble was wrong. But it's a big leap to trust yourself like that.
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MaddieM4 @MaddieM4@raphus.social
1mo
@mei Now obviously I'm not saying that heterodox contrarians are always automatically right. Most of the time, the guy who thinks Einstein was a moron, is actually himself the moron. We rely on this heuristic to guardrail ourselves against insanity, and it is a societal failure mode when this heuristic becomes unreliable, and an insanity of the masses secures that role of collective guiding light.

What's important to internalize is that this failure mode still absolutely happens on a regular basis. In 2007 there was no way that the housing market could collapse, and it was the logical safe place for long-term investment money. Prior to Galileo, the Earth was the center of the solar system. People elected Trump, not once, but twice. This heuristic can keep you aligned with the masses in a way that prevents you from being perceived as crazy, but you might have to sacrifice your sanity to do it. And popular approval is never worth the sacrifice of your attachment to reality.
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MaddieM4 @MaddieM4@raphus.social
1mo
@mei anyways. I guess that's my strategy now. Not to level the playing field by trusting myself blindly, but to trust myself some (and ever more over time as I earn my own trust through experience), and adopt a deep skepticism of the wisdom of crowds as a thing we factually know fails on a not-infrequent basis.
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additional meis meiing meifully meihapsulating meibe @mei@amazonawaws.com
1mo
@MaddieM4 Indeed, we build this self-trust gradually. It can be sluggish compared to the hype cycle. But it seems to me that choosing to undergo this reconciliation originates from seeking to remain coherent in the mainstream zeitgeist, rather than narrowing to anti-AI circles, for example.
I think it is from a place of love

Thank you for your thoughts.
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additional meis meiing meifully meihapsulating meibe @mei@amazonawaws.com
1mo
@MaddieM4 And all the love about this, that sounds awful. It's good you keep up viewing your parents with good faith
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MaddieM4 @MaddieM4@raphus.social
1mo
@mei I've had to correct people who thought my parents were monsters, and people who thought my parents were saints. Real people are complicated, and my folks are no exception! I'm actually on quite good terms with them. I don't think they know I call their religion a cult pretty consistently online though, I bet they'd really dislike that.
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Krzysztof Sakrejda @wronglang@bayes.club
1mo
@mei @MaddieM4 2008 and 2020 come to mind
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