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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • imo the distinction is between the workers of that particular organisation vs the public as a whole. there’s still value in the people actually close to the work making the decisions (a lot of the failures of the soviet system can be attributed to party officials overruling experts) but it should be counterbalanced by the public looking out for each other, so that no single org or collection of orgs stand above the rest of society.


  • actually, i do hate capitalism with all its complexity too. imo the market is a useful tool when kept in check by having to compete with planned, government-subsidised alternatives, but private ownership of capital is what generates 99% of the problems with it. either the workers should own the capital or the public should. the best option is probably somewhere between the two.




  • there isn’t. the only real protection is if you find your own clients and build your own relationships with them. but that’s so difficult these days that you might as well just get a regular job in the same field.

    idk the “official” definitions, but imo the main difference between the gig economy and a freelance job is the gig economy happens through a platform that often exploits you. for example, for the previous user’s field, it would probably happen through fiverr, which takes 20%, actively pushes your competitors, and punishes for any attempt at communicating off-platform. for more “mainstream” gig work, you have platforms like uber and doordash, where everything is integrated so deeply that off-platform work might as well not exist.

    part of the reason i think is that we just don’t have well-known platforms that aren’t exploiting both workers and clients, so both are having difficulties avoiding the exploiter in the middle.




  • from what i’ve seen this is a very american phenomenon. a lot of yanks are concerningly quick to switch off their empathy when someone is “on the other side” and they often use the same kind of tactics they decry as horrific when it is used against them. (ostracism, ableism, what have you.) they often don’t have principles, just allegiances.

    i’d say this is slightly more noticeable on the left than the right for the sole reason that the american right keeps its empathy off nearly all the time, while the left has it on by default but turns it off when someone’s vibes don’t match. but the core issue of critically low and conditional empathy is the same there.

    and sure, idk how literally everyone around the world behaves, but at least the progressives i met (locally, outside the us) usually aren’t like that.



  • i think this is flawed, tbh. it’s true that up until this year, llms did not make people any faster at coding, or more able to tackle challenges outside their skillset. but that has changed, and if you’re in uni now, you’re not trying to be useful today, you’re trying to be useful 4-5 years from now. it’s wildly irresponsible imo to gamble your future on llms failing when the trend has been the exact opposite.

    you also shouldn’t gamble your future on llms being easily available forever. but you don’t have to do either.

    the real thing that matters isn’t line-by-line coding ability, it’s a deep understanding of technology. that’s what you should be focusing on. it cuts juniors deep (and by definition, most coders at uni are juniors) because they tend to be the group that focuses the most on the superficial aspects of coding and not on the underlying reasons and technologies, but that focus was always wrong, it just used to be easier to get away with being wrong.

    focus on being someone who understands systems and builds things, whether or not you have an ai to help you. programming is not an abstract field judged arbitrarily by how well your peers like you, at the end of the day it’s very results-driven. we build real things, and it matters more what you can build than how you do it. and what you can build directly depends on your understanding of technology, regardless of how much ai is being used at building it. it does not matter if your c++ is 10% more idiomatic or 20% less llm-coded than that of your peers, what matters is if you managed to solve the problem.

    even if we assume llms will be more capable in the future, not less, that direction will help you, because most non-coders don’t know what the hell to ask an llm to get something done. they also didn’t know where to start before llms were a thing. it’s your willingness to learn and your understanding of where to go, what to reach for, that sets you apart from an mba with a claude subscription, not your ability to dance around the borrow checker.



  • tbh as far as those lucrative jobs go, a lot of americans and western europeans also have some reckoning to do. especially in the us, a lot of those jobs come from selling a service to the whole world, which siphons a bunch of money from a whole lot of different countries into the us. so why should only americans be allowed to work those jobs? and if the rest of the world gets tired at that, why shouldn’t they just cut those companies off and make domestic competitors?

    it’s crazy that we live in a world where you can do the same job as someone else in the same western coalition – and increasingly, in the same global trading order – and often do it for the same global companies, and yet, get paid wildly differently just based on where you’re from. as long as that is the case, in my opinion it’s already unfair to an immigrant that they had to immigrate to get access to the same opportunities someone else has by default. anti-immigration rhetoric is just deepening that injustice.


  • welcome to orbanistan, recently renamed for our new glorious leader! we’re the perfect hangout spot for commies for that raw soviet vibe, because we sure as hell haven’t progressed since. indulge yourself in a thousand intricate flavours of hate, walk the depressed streets of our only city, or simply enjoy our currency making you feel like a millionaire just for being able to afford to visit.


  • lmao

    y’know, i used to think that we would get android girlfriends because jensen huang is 62 and you know he wants to bang a robot while he still can. i didn’t expect that the way this would lose its relevance is through him losing his position as ceo, but it’s indeed a very jensen way for him to do it

    although now that he’s not saddled with managing nvidia, he can go and focus on it. like he’s still a billionaire


  • as someone who went through the same, it was mostly lack of attention. i had a vague idea that israel and palestine hated each other, and it was easy to understand from a perspective of israel taking palestinian land, but when you don’t think about it too much it’s easy to both sides it or feel like the supposedly western, supposedly democratic one has a point. i think a lot of people in the west had that vague, unrefined view when oct 7 happened, and it’s easy to stand with someone who just suffered a terror attack.

    but it just kept being a focus in media, and the more you look into it, the clearer israel’s crimes against humanity become. and the crazy part is that the vague perspective of israel taking the land for themselves is absolutely correct, but when you see it for the real atrocity it is, rather than an abstract curiosity, it’s impossible to side with the occupiers if you’re not a bigot.