Mike D.

Mike Johnson would hate for you to know that nearly 40% of his district is on Medicaid. Or that 1.6 million Louisianans — about 35% of the state — rely on it. It would be terrible if this information went viral.

What happens when you bring context and expertise?

Bullshit Jobs book review The basic summary of the book is: Roughly half of the jobs in the world are bullshit, so we could get rid of them and divide the remainder up to have a 20 hour work week and less impact on the planet. This book grew out of a smaller essay: web.archive.org/web/2018080702… 37% of the survey participants thought their jobs were meaningless, and it takes a number of people doing the “real work” of building and operating offices to support the meaningless jobs, so he calls it about half of the workforce not contributing meaningfully to the world. That may be an overstatement, but I don’t think it is off by a factor of two in the western world. He claims to have been accosted by many free market types that say this isn’t possible due to market efficiencies, but I accept the proposition that there may be a billion or more people doing work of negligible value. I have a somewhat different take on the phenomenon, which makes me even more pessimistic than he is about reducing the amount of bullshit jobs: Bullshit jobs are a luxury good, and we are only going to see more of them as society continues to become wealthier. This is his case for the class he calls “flunkies”, but I think it accounts for most of them. Burdensome regulations are put in place because the regulators feel rich enough to impose the costs of the “box tickers” necessary to comply with them. We have hosts of food regulations because there is no danger of starvation. For a lot of people, the number of “heads” below them in an org chart is a measure of their self worth. This isn’t the same as flunkies that directly stroke egos; they don’t have to even see the people or know what they do, just that they are a resource at their disposal. Rich and successful companies reward their managers with more people. On the other hand, his class of “duct tapers” fundamentally misunderstands the nature of most value creation. He talks about how software developers bemoan duct taping systems together, and would rather work on core technologies. He thinks it is some tragic failure, that if only wise system design was employed, you wouldn’t be doing all the duct taping. Wrong. Every expansion in capabilities opens up the opportunity to duct tape it to new areas, and this is where a lot of value creation happens. Eventually, when a sufficient amount of duct tape is found in an area, it is an opportunity for systemic redesigns, but you don’t wait for that before grabbing newly visible low hanging fruit! Most of the book is just bitching about work in the modern world. He talks about how he doesn’t like putting policy suggestions in his books, because he wants his books to be about the problems, but this just comes off as a slyly cynical “Everything sucks, amiright?” The anecdotes that he weaves through the book are from 250 self-selected people that reached out to him on Twitter to talk about their bullshit jobs, which is far from an unbiased sample, and I am not very sympathetic to most of them. One of his correspondents talked about how they couldn’t quit, because they kept getting offered more money to stay.  That’s not what “couldn’t” means. He talks about “the spiritual violence of modern work” and how we have been tricked into not having a good life. However, he characterized the good life as “arguing politics and gossiping in cafes”, which is not as universal as he might think. He styles himself an anarchist, but it is pretty clearly the anarchism that is supposed to happen after communism does its work, and I haven’t seen him say anything actually helpful in his books. I’m curious if any of the people that suggested this book accepted the challenge to read  @johanknorberg ‘s The Capitalist Manifesto as a counterpoint.

13-year-old: I need cool clothes. Me: I think your clothes now are pretty cool. 13: That's the problem

@LINE_Global please direct to Product Manager: please change iOS app so when you mute a conversation it does not push notifications on that chat activity.

AI powered news network, in every language, on demand. How could this possibly go wrong? channel1.ai

Apple Develops Breakthrough Method for Running LLMs on iPhones macrumors.com/2023/12/21/app…

@tmdthai2 please see above post. 🙏

@tmdthai I notice that the data reported includes a “severe rain warning” every day, even when there is no rain. Is there a reason for this? 🙏

Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different. That’s your source of power.

The organization Theoradical on Hugging Face is involved in a project aimed at evaluating the #security aspects of Large Language Models (#LLMs) concerning the leakage of Personally Identifiable Information (#PII). huggingface.co/Theoradical

LLM injection attacks #AI #security

And then there is this …

We are going to build something new & it will be incredible. Initial leadership (more soon): @merettm @sidorszymon @aleks_madry @sama @gdb The mission continues.

We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI's new leadership team and working with them. And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.

Cleaning out the closet and found this gem from @SecurityBSides. I think this is from the first #BSidesSF event in 2010. As of July 2023, there have been over 850 BSides events around the world, hosted in 220 cities spanning 62 countries.

You know that person who reel bombs you in a relationship? “It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem it’s me.” youtu.be/b1kbLwvqugk

Excited to see what @BestOfLuk and @withPlenty do to democratize investing for the 99%.

Congratulations Thailand! Big Step forward. bbc.com/news/world-asi…

How Russia is trying to block TOR and got thwarted. youtu.be/YlZZQYLIXe8