aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
4hr ago
You get a variety of engineers with very variable commitment to the job and less than perfect insight into who actually are the laggards and who are the 10x performers. I work with mostly ~40-50 year olds with families and stuff to do. Some of them are much more likely to pick up new tools and methods than others who do good work but see their obligation to the company as discharged so long as they provide the same service they have for years or decades. I wear the scrum master hat, although that's rarely more than 10% of my duties as I'm full time coding, and it's often my job to mediate between management that has a distant view into the process and the engineers themselves.
Another element that needs to be understood is that with salary work when a labor saving tool comes along and actually saves you a lot of labor what that means in effect is often that you are given more work to do. If you care about advancement then this is an opportunity to impress, but if you're fifty something and not really expecting to be promoted before you retire the main upside to 10xing your work is that you get to write more jira tickets and do more work overhead instead of coding. To the younger people on the team like me we were indeed already using the tooling before the firm brought in an internally approved version, and I've been promoted in part because of this attitude. But then this process of promoting people more excited about leveraging new tools means that you would expect to find management to be constitutionally more excited about new tools and lower level workers constitutionally more conservative.
Sure, but neither does that mean that one is missing out just because one has FOMO. You need to temper that instinct with some thought, and I see no sign at all that managers are doing that.
What would it take for you to believe that the managers have actually done some reasoning here? From their perspective they see a potential phase shift in how their organization operates and they want to make sure that if it's real they capture it and if it's not real then maybe they've wasted a little bit of budget on tokens. That's really not a hard risk reward tradeoff to take.
aqouta
18hr ago
Inference is pretty cheap. Once you have the weights running inference on them is unquestionably profitable in a opex sense. The labs are definitely not offering inference at a loss to corporate clients. And you could quadruple the cost of inference and it'd be pretty easily worth the cost.
aqouta
18hr ago
If LLMs really are that good of a tool, you don't need to mandate them. If someone can get a 10x speedup on his work, he's going to use the tool without management breathing down his neck to do it (indeed he'll probably use it even if management forbids it).
this is just not really how corporate salary workers function. We had a guy we kept around for probably longer than we should have who refused to learn anything but sql. It's notoriously difficult to track actual productivity in software and because of that a lot of coasting, because when I say "yeah I spent all day yesterday working on the inspection schedule import process" There is probably only one guy on the team who could reasonably say if that was a task that should really take a whole day, and he's not my manager.
It's nothing but FOMO really, and it's so aggravating to have to deal with.
The whole concept of FOMO exists because there really are situations where you could be missing out. If you just assume that all the hype is right and there is a tremendous amount of uplift available if your team is using these new tools then wouldn't you want to push them into using them asap? There's always an available excuse in software not to learn new tools, deadlines are weekly and you have real work to do outside of messing with some new instruction set.
aqouta
18hr ago
And an LLM will never figure that out.
An LLM could absolutely figure this out. The technique is to have the llm create a file on each judge to update with perceived biases. It would not only figure this out but it might figure it out more completely and more thoroughly than any human could. This is in fact some of the stuff they're actually super human at. They can detect Russian ESL speakers in 6 words of a prompt, you think they can't scan through a history of judgements and find exploitable biases? Their most useful quality is that they are inhumanly patient and willing to do ungodly amounts of legwork.
aqouta
22hr ago
I'm definitely feeling a lot of pressure from the higher ups to get on top of using LLMs. I support some extent of the push, the tools really are impressive and we're seeing real test cases of it providing a lot of benefit. But there is also a dynamic where the different manager fiefdoms are jockeying to show who's team is best utilizing it. I'm usually the shield that stand between our team and upper management bullshit and I recently had to walk my manager off a cliff of requiring each engineer to answer a short questionnaire every day about if they've used AI and for what the previous day after our standup.
Both can be true that there is a lot of value to be gained and that there is a bit of a mania going on where upper managers smell blood in the water. There's a lot of talk about merging teams and helping engineers transfer skills across teams, this is the kind of environment that makes careers as the manager who's team is able to demonstrate a superior implementation stands to gobble up other teams.
The bosses get rich, as do the tech scammers and their affiliates, but the economy inches closer to its doom once the bubble goes pop.
The actual labs could pop, but the people using the tech won't. The dotcom bubble didn't get get rid of email when it popped. This stuff is useful and there its use will linger.
aqouta
3d ago
Even on the journo side, actually--that's what all the "gamers are dead" articles
These were when I first became aware of any of the controversy and I think did more to create the feeling of an us vs them mentality out of the whole thing. I couldn't have been made to care about any of the precipitating events like the depression quest review or whatever, gaming journalism was always terrible slop that no one read. Both the gamers knew it and the people who wrote for the outlets knew it. I think a lot of the anger on that side of the fence came from them not really wanting to do the job, they would much much rather be doing, what we would now call woke, activism but they didn't have the chops to get a spot in any of the outlets that specialized in it. Declaring one of your identity markers is "dead" however is a very provocative move and it did provoke. A wiser and less teenaged aqouta would have recognized this as the false choice that it was but I was prepared to side with basically anyone against the kind of smug jerks who were writing those gamers are dead articles.
aqouta
5d ago
Trampling on the rights of the individuals because a State cannot get people to volunteer is a state that shouldn't exist.
Your rights are not being trampled because you're asked to pay for taxes to support things that will pay dividends to you in your old age dude, be serious.
Why should I sacrifice for my society? What has my society sacrificed for me? It is a give and take reciprocal relationship. The state seems to have forgotten that and it has failed to instill a sense of civic responsibility in its citizens. Probably the REAL problem, is when the state exist merely for the interests of the mercenary elites. All this other stuff seems downstream of that.
Every society we know about is struggling with fertility. Even the bright spots are just declining more slowly. There is wide diversity in the makeup of each of these societies so it can't actually be that mercenary elite capture is the monocause. It's almost certainly something economic(in the very broad sense, concerning modern industrial incentives) in nature. In fact the darkest spots of fertility are some of the most abject patriarchal eastern societies so your general axe to grind about how awful western women are is particularly ill suited to explain the problem.
aqouta
5d ago
The problem with any redistributive scheme around this topic is that you are in essence punishing people for things that are generally outside their control. I'm a man. I cannot have kids. No about of forced taxes to pay for the privileged people who can is going to change biology. In order for me to have kids I'd need to find a woman who wants them. Single rates are up and unless the State is going to do something dysgenic like make it legal for me to go around raping woman or forcing them to marry me to get my TFR quota in, I'm not sure what there is much I can do about it.
You can probably not do much personally about whether other nations seek to make war with your country either. And if you're unfit for military service you can't serve a direct role in the conflict. But you can contribute through taxation. As I said in the outset, this isn't meant to be punitive or coercive. It's meant to get everyone to contribute their fair share, those having children are sacrificing their own consumption in a real way. If you were crippled and thus unable to participate on the front lines you might reasonable be jealous of able bodied men who returned with heroic stories, like people who always wanted to be parents and had great kids that brought them glory they were very fortunate in a way. But there are also soldiers that die in ditches as their lungs slowly fill with fluids, and there are parent's who's kids come out with severe disabilities. Life is not fair in that way and never will be.
And whether it's military defense of the nation or the production of the next generation we as a society simply cannot survive without it. If tax policy can be used a tool to prevent either the birth rate or the military from collapsing it ought to irrespective of how it might make some individuals feel.
A state that can't get its citizens to volunteer to make sacrifices for it has no right to exist. Apparently people have forgotten that quintessential rule. If that means most of the first world then let them die. Maybe the next batch of cultures will learn from our mistakes.
You're bemoaning that you might be made to make the sacrifice of marginally higher tax rates.
aqouta
5d ago
What compensation is owed the soldier for defending the homeland? What if one particular soldier fucks up and crashes a plane, in effect lessening the war effort?
We can't really think of these kinds of things on the individual level. Or rather doing so would be an intractable computation problem. You could probably come up with some clever scheme where parents are granted some kind of tax asset that entitles them to a share of lifetime tax revenue from their child. But most people can barely handle mortgages so simplicity and treating parents as a class rather than individuals seems pretty compelling. Either way it simplifies to the same thing.
aqouta
5d ago
My original proposal was not direct taxation of the childless, it was raising taxes across the board with a major deduction for parents. There is a delta in public sentiment for parents and childless adults that I'd say is the important wedge.
aqouta
5d ago
This is essentially the same policy except impossible because we will under no circumstances ever "more or less eliminate social security".
aqouta
5d ago
The market wage compensates the child. It doesn't compensate the parent for the investment. It's like a communist who sees a laborer use an expensive machine to turn $1 worth of materials into $2 worth of finished goods and demands $1 is the fair compensation. Or bemoaning that when shipping a package you must pay both for the road out of your taxes and pay the delivery company to move the package over the road. They're different payments for different services rendered, both of which are necessary for the end result.
aqouta
5d ago
Everyone claims their punitive, coercive, redistributive tax is somehow more fitting than the ones they don't like.
Is military spending punitive and coercive?
You're not proposing to tax the childless to pay for their own retirements [...] you're straight up proposing to tax them to pay for the other people's children.
These are the same thing. The parent's children are who will perform labor necessary for childless retirement. I'm not saying people should subsidize the life choices of people who selfishly want to be parents, I'm saying in your own self interest you need them to be parents, it's a bargain for your future self to not have to live in a demographically collapsed society just like funding the military is a bargain for your future self to not have to live in a conquered society.
Of course the effect this can have is limited; as with any sin tax, if it actually reduces the sin it also reduces the tax base.
I'm not framing this as a Pigouvian tax, but if you insist it is one then to the degree it shrinks the subsidy it is a pareto improvement, not a self defeat.
aqouta
5d ago
Sure, that'd reduce the redistributive tax burden and proportional reduce the difference expect from those producing the next generation and they who must contribute in other ways. Still there are many other ways you implicitly free ride on the parents. Even in ancapistan where you've hoarded capital, durable goods and gold for your retirement when it comes to you needing to exchange those things for youthful labor you are depending on someone to have brought that youthful labor into existence. One could probably come up with a fancy financial product to have parents paid now as some kind of royalty for future labor of their offspring by anyone who expects to benefit from it, but that simplifies to a general transfer.
aqouta
5d ago
If it's punitive or coercive it's only so in the way all taxes are, and less so because it more fittingly distributes fruits amongst those who planted fruit trees. Society needs a next generation to survive no less than it needs a military to survive. And at war if you're spared the draft you'll still need to pay for the tools our brave soldiers use to maintain your society.
aqouta
5d ago
the inherent politics of his act is pro-Puerto Rican independence
doesn't' this kind of undercut the whole, he's just as American as everyone else bit from earlier in your post? I think we had a portion of our country declare independence before and I don't quite remember what happened after but I get the impression it wasn't popular amongst the rest of the country.
aqouta
5d ago
You'd have to pay for the cosmetic surgeries before the dollars had anything to do with children.
Not necessarily. If our only option was to cut people a fully fungible check then sure that wouldn't work. But we could either have accounts that you have to spend on child associated costs, like a healthcare spending account, or more straightforwardly and better give them money if and only if they have a kid. That'd be equivalent to making the car cost $0.
aqouta
5d ago
Less kids means higher taxes on working aged people to pay for retirements. All one needs to do to properly apportion the costs to those that cause them is to raise taxes and give a tax break to those with kids. If you're footing the bill to bring in someone to pay for your retirement on average then you gotta contribute enough to pay for your own. pretty simple. Someone with a TFR of 0 should be paying roughly twice the redistribution portion of the tax bill(excluding more fixed costs like military spending that don't really figure into the per capita societal upkeep). I wouldn't consider this punitive or coercive, just making people internalize their externalities.
aqouta
6d ago
I just don't think there is any way this lasts. It's like the guys who learned that playing them + the computer edged on computer alone in chess for a period. Eventually the meat just isn't going to be adding anything and I doubt it's even that long after.
aqouta
7d ago
Unfalsifiable beliefs are pretty weak sauce. There are very few things more antithetical to the purpose of this place than do this kind of bulverism in the pursuit of defending taboos.
aqouta
7d ago
If he's here to shit-stir (especially if he's doing it to get juicy quotes to make rationalists look bad
Is this even still a thing? Where do they post their content? I checked sneer club but they seem to be basically exclusive anti-yud posters at this point.
aqouta
7d ago
This is saying something different I think, one of those as you approach absolute zero things get wonky kind of theoretical effects. A perfectly efficient rational stock market won't come to exist because it would imply knowledge is worthless, but this wouldn't really be a problem for markets for goods or equity which would still clear. I agree that if everyone who participated in prediction markets were omnipotent then the prediction markets wouldn't make any sense, but then we'd be able to get the information we want out of them by just asking the omnipotent people what the probability is. And in any case even very good super predictors are not actually omniscient.
I agree that subsidizing the market will buy you more information, and dumb money can act as a subsidy, but other things can act as a subsidy as well. If I really want to know the answer to some question a prediction market in effect gives me the option to pay for an answer by offering a bunch of 50/50 liquidity. There is also a lot of subsidy available in people rationally buying shares to hedge outside of market positions. If I do a lot of international trading maybe I can buy shares betting Trump will impose tariffs to hedge against that risk.
aqouta
7d ago
Not necessarily. Zero sum markets can still be mutually beneficial, especially as a hedge mechanism. Hedge funds aren't primarily founded on extracting money from retail traders even if they also do that.
aqouta
7d ago
I still think prediction markets are good but how about this, you can only gamble with money from special government accounts that you allocate like an IRA. You can spend the money in the accounts anywhere including on gambling sites but you can't spend any money not in one of these accounts on gambling/prediction markets. Cap the Amount you can put into one of these accounts at some percentage of taxable income, say 5-10%. This limits the damage they can do while actually probably accelerating the rate at which the dumb money loses the ability to influence signal possibly improving the usefulness of the results.
Things are moving fast. A year ago I was pulling up chatbots on my private hardware to do queries to streamline writing sql and parse documentation. Today the firm has a wrapper with sota models and even some scaffolding to give it access to resources about internal documentation. I'm on the list of people that will get to pilot claude code on work computers soon. In my ~10 years here I've never seen heaven and earth moved so rapidly. But your complaint seems different to @SubstantialFrivolity 's you seem to think your previous place's management wasn't pushing the tools enough, at least to the people provisioning them.
The irony of you refusing to do reasoning on your belief on whether they are refusing to do reasoning is a little rich.
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