birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
18hr ago
alleging that my friend was a hack and that the novel was completely AI written for absolutely inane reasons
I kinda get it.
Starting around January 2025, AI writing hit publishing like an atomic bomb. Publishers got deluged with generated submissions, and their entire system collapsed under the strain. Major publishers stopped taking open submissions for months while they were trying to figure it out.
At the same time, the publishers started seeing various court cases around ownership and copywrite of generated works, and now they're scared shitless about what happens if they publish one. (@ToaKraka recently had some links about this)
On the author side, a lot of writers are pissed about it. I mean fucking incandescent. For a long time, it's been a joke that everybody thinks they could be a brilliant author if they just sat down and applied themselves, because they gave such fantastic ideas. The thing is, those ideas are usually half baked, and actually fleshing them out takes a level of bloody-minded effort that few people possess. We call that small group of people "authors". Everybody's gangsta until it's time to do gangsta shit, and everybody's an author until it's time to do author shit. Generative AI let a disturbing number of people play-act at being authors without actually having to put in the time. The thing is, generating passable text with an LLM takes effort too, and it's rare that somebody who won't put in the work to be a human author will put in the work to be a robot herder. They sure will say they're an author though. Good God, they will fucking say it.
At the same time, the publishing industry has swallowed so much of their own bullshit that they're stuck. Publishing has pretty much been captured by what people call "woke" around here. Getting published is wildly easier if you are some form of favored minority. It's reached the point where I have taken to publishing under my partner's name, because it has quintupled my acceptance rate. This is not bullshit. I track it in submission grinder and the numbers are ugly.
The reason this matters is because a lot of the LLM writers are custom tailoring identities and prompt outputs to be "too good to check".
https://www.bona-books.com/news/we-bought-an-ai-story
One chosen story was a steampunk, anti-colonial fantasy, titled “The Machine-Breaker of Aba”. It hit our brief with a perfect intensity that felt difficult to resist. A queer woman, building a machine from scrap metal and rage to destroy her colonial oppressors? Of course we loved it. The author was an emerging Nigerian writer named Bella Chacha.
It's a perfect storm. The industry has backed itself into a corner. The technology is literally designed to barf out content faster than any human can process it. A significant population thinks they can get away with throwing generated content over the wall for money and adulation, and in the short term they're probably right.
The entire community is jumping at shadows and seeing secret robots everywhere. I've gotten it a few times myself because I tend to have a lot of discursive sentences with a shitload of nested clauses. (1)
It sucks for your friend. It sucks for you. It sucks for me. It sucks for the industry. All I can suggest for now is that she develop a thick skin until new norms sort themselves out. I hope it doesn't hurt her too much in the meantime.
- It turns out a few slurs can convince an editor that you're human real quick, if you're willing to take the risk.
birb_cromble
18hr ago
I have two acquaintances who have worked at think tanks.
Using those two data points, I think you should work on being a female minority who has really strong opinions about Queering the Narrative In Education.
Once you've done that, maybe get a master's in public policy or something?
birb_cromble
18hr ago
Does the Vice President of the United States really not have the power to discover and communicate concrete specifics about something like this?
I hate to be gauche, but he probably enjoys having a non-dead wife.
birb_cromble
19hr ago
yet somehow you still need to feed slop to extremely inefficient biological machines to mine minerals for you?
I've always assumed that any species that evolves in the context of a hierarchical social structure is going to go to insane lengths to preserve their status as "not at the bottom of the social hierarchy" when that species goes post scarcity.
It may be inefficient to have bigfoot mine your coal, but at least you can sneer at him for being low humanoid capital while you watch him do it. That has to be worth something.
birb_cromble
20hr ago
Where I am, the sun is no longer a disk. It's pretty wild to see if you're not used to it.
birb_cromble
1d ago
I'm staying the hell inside.
birb_cromble
1d ago
How is the Canadian forest fire smoke affecting you?
I feel like I'm in my own personal version of silent hill right now. The sun is almost fully obscured.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Spending is $2,807.93 less than the same time last year. The home repairs got delayed a week due to weather. I assume that this will get worse in the next week or two.
birb_cromble
4d ago
What is your rationale for keeping 2/3rds of it? Do you see more upside?
birb_cromble
5d ago
What would you recommend for a situation like mine? I'm making a fairly large purchase at some unknown future point. The fuzzy timeline means I can handle some volatility, but not "I can ignore it for a decade until things pick up again" volatility. I've been using ultra short term treasuries and other bonds to beat HYSA yields at the cost of some risk, but not so much as equities. This money is very explicitly in its own sleeve - my emergency fund, retirement, and general investments iny taxable account are all set up differently.
birb_cromble
5d ago
At least in my career, the difference between problem solving and problem setting seems to come down to recognizing that multiple problems are actually one problem, and that the problem in question is usually a political one rather than a technical one.
I mostly recognized that by staying at one place for long enough to catch on. There might be shortcuts.
birb_cromble
5d ago
The NDA has expired, so what the hell.
The startup in question was heavily funded by a consortium of automakers. Unlike some of the other shops, their plan was to heavily geo fence their operating area and build models for individual cities. They also freely admitted during the interviews that this was never going to work well enough to work on its own, and the bulk of it was actually going to operate via regular nudges from a call center in the Philippines. They wanted to hire me to write the software for that part of the stack.
Some people here are probably going to reflexively say "well that's not a big deal - Waymo has a human fallback too*, but that's not what they were planning. The actual plan was to regularly have call center workers provide feedback and instruction during live rides "until the ML team can catch up". They figured that they could fake it until they made it, and everything would just work out in the meantime.
birb_cromble
5d ago
I live out in the middle of nowhere. I assume it'll take a year or two to make it out this far.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Is lionfish any good? Cleaning them seems like such a pain in the ass that I've never tried.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I think it's more likely that an old man who flew a lot developed blood clots, but at this point I can't confidently rule out the alternative.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I very nearly took a job with a self driving car startup a decade ago. After seeing a little about how the sausage was made, I've been happy to live so far out in the sticks that it'll be decades before self driving gets any traction.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I'm in a weird place right now where I intend to relocate and buy a house at some unknown future date. I'm building a... I guess you could call it a "risk ladder" for that money.
Most of it is in an ultra short term Treasury ETF. The next tier is state specific municipal bonds and AAA CLOs. After that it's BINC and JSI.
I'm about ready to move up a risk tier, and I'm plotting out what the next steps are.
I think my immediate next tier between JSI and SCHD is something that involves equities rather than debt. Something like JEPI or SPYI seems to fit the bill fairly well. I'm also looking at PFF, but I don't love the Oracle exposure.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I guess I could buy that in the "everything is political" sense, but what does that leave? Sports betting?
birb_cromble
6d ago
What are some of your predictions for the five years, and why do you think you're going to be right?
Hard mode engaged
- No politics
- No war
- No AI
- No immigration
I'm confident that low waisted jeans are going to make a raging comeback in the next couple of years. Not only is the cyclical nature of fashion heading in that direction, but the prevalence of GLP-1 products and will negate the unspoken reason that high-waisted mom jeans got popular.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I'm in a weird place with AI, professionally. They're pretty much worthless in my job for agentic work, but as a better search engine they probably provide low single digit productivity gains to my work as programmer.
Unfortunately, any gain they provide to me, personally, are fucking obliterated but the damage my coworkers inflict on the codebase with it. They uncritically trust it, and they blindly approve AI PRs. At this point, I'm spending more time unfucking the output of gpt and Gemini then I am actually doing original work.
Management is thrilled at how many new PRs and lines of code these new ai-native programmers are creating.
birb_cromble
7d ago
I'd probably start by using Mitchell v. City of Henderson as a template. Start with a heavily armed, hierarchically structured federal agency with an unambiguous power to kill. Have them take over a home for a surveillance operation. Argue that it's not a 3rd amendment violation because of semantic games about what a soldier is.
Boom. Instant drama. Maybe shoot a dog for added pathos.
birb_cromble
7d ago
What are your opinions on covered call funds, like JEPI, vs traditional income investments like bonds or dividend stocks? If you have a shorter time horizon than would be appropriate for something like a whole market fund, they seem to sit at a nice risk/return point. On the other hand, their returns seem to come in the form of ordinary income, which isn't ideal for taxation.
birb_cromble
7d ago
I waited tables and tended bar for years.
I'm thinking more about the restaurant ownership side of things. Unless you own the property, your landlord is going to jack up your rent every year so you're just barely not broke. I know a handful of people who have left the industry for exactly that reason. I might be able to make the economics work with a food truck, but that's about it.
birb_cromble
7d ago
My partner and I are booked for a family dinner tonight, so I made some fresh sourdough bread and hand churned some butter to take with us.
Sometimes I wish that the economics of food service made sense. I don't think I'd mind the long hours and hard work.
I refuse to believe that LinkedIn posts were ever anything but a weird kind of avant garde performance art, so I'm going to say LinkedIn posts.
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