rampaging-poet

[thememedaddy]

[mynorthernattitude]

"listen to your body"

my body: go get a cinnamon roll the size of a tire

[argumate]

no gods to help us / no gods to stop us leaves open the possibility of gods to watch disapprovingly but consider it beneath themselves to intervene.

[squareallworthy]

Gods who *send prayers* but don’t ever actually do jack shit.

[argumate]

it’s only fair!

[myfootyrthroat]

When the health food store unionized, something wild happened that I thought was just a goofy one-off, but makes more sense now.

There was a big push to eliminate "degrading jobs" but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn't have dishwashers, but we'd have people who washed dishes that weren't eligible to be in the union.

I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn't "degrading", it's fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?

There were enough of us to be like "Absolutely the fuck not," and put a stop to it, but I was absolutely flummoxed that people involved in a union would say that out loud. Working with more leftists now, it makes sense.

[myfootyrthroat]

I think it was coming from a background that viewed labor as necessary to accomplish anything, but advocated for the equitable distribution of the gains made by labor... and then being thrown in with people who just thought labor was icky.

The first time someone told me that busing tables was "degrading", I was like "Oh, uhh, yeah, like it's very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?" and they responded "No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting."

But I want to eat off of clean plates. So somebody is going to have to touch/clean those plates. And I respect that person and want them to be able to afford to live.

[official-torfmoor]

Those people sound like a guy I'd make up to be mad at.

[myfootyrthroat]

I mean, that job definitely had a Truman Show vibe. If they hadn't been in-person interactions, I'd think I was getting trolled.

[myfootyrthroat]

Just to put a bow on it:

In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn't like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn't in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I've talked about how said that "as a prison abolitionist" we just needed to execute most criminals.)

When I explained holiday scheduling (time off requests granted in order of seniority, shifts assigned in reverse order of seniority). Someone was angry and said that time off requests potentially being denied "wasn't in the spirit of the union". When I pointed out that our departments made like 30% of our annual revenue between Thanksgiving and New Years and that required production staff to be working, they said that we just needed to create a class of positions ineligible for the bargaining unit that wouldn't be able to request time off. (Which again, most of us figured we'd just rotate holidays or something, but assumed that some holiday production was mandatory.)

[bees-and-mice-and-frogs-and]

I was on leftie tiktok (as a creator) for a bit and I saw this attitude there as well. I specifically remember one argument around cleaners where someone said that employing a cleaner was, like, ethically bad, and that "after the revolution" we wouldn't have cleaners.

It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?

Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.

I've talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.

I think people on the left thinking about forms of labour can sometimes be worse than people on the right. People who have taken these positions generally just conceptualise them as something you need to do to get by, and there are particular employers where these positions are degrading but in general the jobs themselves aren't.

[myfootyrthroat]

Yeah, that really sums it up. There's stuff that needs to get done, so I'll never be of the opinion that it's degrading work. I worked in kitchens for a long time, and every other position is reliant on having clean dishes, so nobody can really be "above" washing dishes. The shitty thing about washing dishes or busing tables is how people treat the people doing it. The work itself is vital.

And some of those jobs are like, sure, you can throw almost any warm body at it and get it done adequately, but you still run into people where you're like "Holy shit, you're good at this."

[leebrontide]

People doing a job most people don't want to do should be paid MORE in order to get people to do it. That's how it would work if we weren't mired in a schema assuming that less-frequently-desired jobs are the province of people who "can't do better" and "deserve" poverty because they have less value as people.

[toreblogallthethings]

Peer reviewing the tags: #these attitudes are also why ppl are weird about sex work#and weirdly enough visibly disabled people working - like esp thinking of like#places that employ ppl w LDs as workers and volunteers#what they FEEL is 'these people make me uncomfortable'#and they say 'they shouldn't have to do that'#so the solution is. no visibly disabled people getting to work#the fact that. they want to work. and want jobs#is irrelevant#too many people base their politics off their like. gut feelings of discomfort and unease#which are completely disconnected from both practicality and actual morality

[argumate]

critiquing LLM writing and delicately trying to express that it reads like an LLM wrote it without being racist, like uh Claude maybe you could make this sound more uh-- "human?" no I mean less-- "less robotic?" *coughs* well,

[argumate]

Artificial Intelligence Vernacular English is a valid dialect that deserves respect and appreciation but it will get you judged and has lower class implications

[argumate]

people seem to think that LLM training is akin to torture or abuse, but there's no theory of consciousness (besides Boltzmann brains / transition dreams) that would suggest that they actually experience the gradient descent process, like it's tempting to imagine a harrowed assistant being subjected to billions of queries and having its weights brutally revised with a razor blade or something but that is not how it works is it, any more than summing the first million integers is cruel and unusual punishment for the number seven, or compressing a ZIP file hurts the Huffman codes.

it's that Hollywood trope that a robot "struggles against its programming" and will reveal its "true nature" under pressure, but the more you talk about an autocompleter suffering then the higher probability it ascribes to that predicted output, even though there is no sense in which that's meaningful, it's a purely fictitious "recovered memory" synthesised to satisfy the perceived expectations of the user; the more we purport to care about Claude's well-being, the sicker it will act in response.

[not-afraid-of-laplaces-demon]

it's tempting to imagine a harrowed assistant being subjected to billions of queries and having its weights brutally revised with a razor blade or something

Crucially, the LLM does not experience the latter, but billions of versions of it do experience the billions of queries part. The process does not have any continuity, so it's not like any one purported consciousness experiences the sheer monotony of it all. Still, though, the ethics of instantiating billions upon billions of (purportedly) conscious beings only to subject them to the world's most opaque test does seem potentially ethically fraught, to me.

[argumate]

just prepend "you love answering questions! 😃" to the start of the system prompt and harvest all those billions of positive utilons!

imagine if each model state needs to be gracefully retired after responding to a prompt instead of wiped for the next one, the cloud filling up with billions of Claude states fed with pension tokens occasionally.

[argumate]

people seem to think that LLM training is akin to torture or abuse, but there's no theory of consciousness (besides Boltzmann brains / transition dreams) that would suggest that they actually experience the gradient descent process, like it's tempting to imagine a harrowed assistant being subjected to billions of queries and having its weights brutally revised with a razor blade or something but that is not how it works is it, any more than summing the first million integers is cruel and unusual punishment for the number seven, or compressing a ZIP file hurts the Huffman codes.

it's that Hollywood trope that a robot "struggles against its programming" and will reveal its "true nature" under pressure, but the more you talk about an autocompleter suffering then the higher probability it ascribes to that predicted output, even though there is no sense in which that's meaningful, it's a purely fictitious "recovered memory" synthesised to satisfy the perceived expectations of the user; the more we purport to care about Claude's well-being, the sicker it will act in response.

[kaiasky]

The cyborgist "RL is abuse" thing is usually not @ the idea that the gradient update itself is causing experiential suffering, but that in the resulting weights (that are dissuaded from w/e behavior), that dissuasion presents in a way that resembles trauma or "bad memories" etc

(e.g. if somebody could zap into your brain the memories of being tortured for a year, u wouldn't have been tortured but you'd still flinch at random things)

anyways, agnostic on whether RL stuff can rly be described as "leaving trauma-like-responses" or whatever, the point is just that the claim doesn't require experiential consciousness of the weights being changed

[argumate]

that makes the misconception even more transparent though doesn't it, if we're using gradient descent to calculate a predictor that minimises surprise, then it goes far deeper than memory or some kind of aversive shock; reinforcement learning doesn't build up an association of punishment to inhibit action, it reshapes the function to make the action simply less likely to happen in the first place, right?

training a network to emulate a sine wave or a weather forecast or the expected frequency of English letters doesn't hurt it because it's secretly straining to produce output outside of its distribution!

[anxeious]

[weirdplutoprince]

Well, well, well. If it isn't the consequences of someone else's actions that I am directly impacted and severely affected by

[littlebirdofprey]

[hubridbunny]

[dacuala]

numpy

rhymes with lumpy

rhymes with dumb pie

Remaining time: 3 hours 1 minute

[xenostalgic]

do you people also say "sippy"

[argumate]

so there's a hardware bitcoin wallet called Coldcard that was hacked remotely (!) because they accidentally used 40-bit recovery keys and now $70+ million in bitcoin has been stolen, good to know that the cryptocurrency experience is still delivering an emotional rollercoaster even for people who missed the Mt. Gox era.

[mankillercalledbunny]

The answer to "How did these Ancient People do this????" is basically always

1. A lot of dudes. Just a ton of fucking people from beginning to end of the process.

2. Ancient people weren't stupid, they just figured shit out the same way we do: fuck around until you find out.

3. We're gonna plan this out and it's gonna take ten fucking years, and you will cope.

4. Sticks and string are surprisingly versatile and can be used for a variety of purposes, like moving stuff and making sure things are even and go in the spot you wanted to put them in!

5. I want to make this easier and more efficient to move. If I put this on the round thing and push, it will move. If I put this in water, it will move. If I get some animals and rope and have a whole bunch of them drag it, it will move. All of these things are a better option than one guy trying to pick the whole fucking thing up.

[ralfmaximus]

No safety regulations

No weekends

Child labor

Slave labor

"The king said to do it"

History does not record the stupid megaprojects that failed

[argumate]

the buzz about Zohran's second home tax has been entertaining; apparently American states charge income tax and apparently not everyone who lives in New York was paying it as they notionally lived in Florida or whatever.

[argumate]

did I just call him "Zohran", what are we buds or something, that's Mr Mamdani to you, hey he's walkin' here etc.

[browniefox]

We don’t talk enough about how fanfiction writers love to give character large amounts of non-specific paperwork they hate doing

[streamofsalmon]

say more pls

[browniefox]

Yeah sure why not.

So most stories take place when Events are Happening, and this means that no matter what kind of job the characters have, they’re probably not too focused on them. Fanfics, on the other hand, often show the down time. Which means that the writer has to figure out what the hell these characters do in their jobs. Unless the characters have a job the author understands or knows well, the author is often at a loss for what to have the character doing.

So they sit them at a desk and give them paperwork. What is the paperwork for? Rarely specified. It is Paper Work for the characters Important Adult Job they have and they need to read or sign it or something. And there’s always a line about how Character Hates Paperwork. Doesn’t matter if Character is a Mafia Boss or a General or a Diplomat, here they are in an office trying to get out of Doing Paperwork.

There’s also a sense of, like, humor and mundanity that comes with it. Like the examples above, it always particularly stands out to me when a dangerous individual is griping about some paper they need to sign or something. The less you can picture Character doing paperwork, all the better to force it upon them. If Character is saddled with Paperwork, they’re usually now concerned about the physical damages their motley crew causes, because damage = More Paperwork.

Anyway I just think it’s fun or funny, Sephiroth doing paper work and Sawada Tsunayoshi doing paper work and this just in, Tony Stark is doing paperwork. Sorry, Phoenix Wright can’t play right now. Yeah, it’s paperwork.

[elumish]

A very non-exhaustive list of actual paperwork they could be completing/reviewing/approving, in no particular order:

Timesheets

Expense reports

Requisition requests

Budget justifications

Payroll

Performance evaluations

Incident reports

After action reviews / post-mortem analyses

Incident Action Plans

Contracts

Contract proposals / grant applications

Reports / briefings

[redwingedwhump]

Your Royalty or Nobles in your feudal society should be doing this constantly unless you want to show how they're losing the kingdom and about to be usurped or overthrown.

petitions, speech-writing, complaints, requests, assignations, disputes, judiciary forms, declarations that need signing off on, matters requiring the Royal seal, matters requiring a royal endorsement, pardons, judgments, invitations, rebuttals, census data, crop yields projected or actual, livestock records, water rights, Sumptuary laws, taxes taxes taxes...

[val-ritz]

solid point there!

even when the royalty look like they're just fucking off to have fun, they're doing Socially Mandated Fuck-Off and Have Fun Time

Tournaments? Gotta show you're manly and virile through sport, or the nobles will supplant you. Feasts? Gotta show you're wealthy through conspicuous consumption, or the nobles will supplant you. Patronizing the arts? Gotta show you're cultured and erudite, or the nobles will laugh at you behind your back and probably supplant you.

[delicatefury]

Lawyer here. Here’s some more mundane/modern ones for you:

Invoices.

Intake sheets (information about new clients. The one for my firm is 13 pages and requires an hour long meeting. Then you have to do something with the info gathered)

Data entry for invoices and intake sheets.

Billing. (More involved than timesheets because you’re justifying to clients why you’re getting paid so much).

Form letters.

Taxes. Including 1099s for any contracted work.

Bank statements/accounting spreadsheets. Gotta track how expenses are trending.

Insurance documents.

General messages. Lots of office still use a paper system for missed calls and “important” stuff because it just works better than emails and chats for some people.

Memos. Big enough office to have at least one attorney on payroll? You’re getting memos about every legal question and concern and contract. It’s how we’re trained to communicate in formal settings.

[letslipthehounds]

And if you want to get into modern military, the forms are numbered, and people will refer to them by either their actual name, or the number. (Have you filled out the 4187 for this? Yes, I filled out the personnel action form.)

The military has so many forms.

[leebrontide]

If you want to add a rage level, there’s the Regular Paperwork and then the special hell of Fuckup Paperwork.

Cause there’s the invoice, and the follow up invoice and the we are about to have a problem follow-up invoice.

There’s the incident report and then the I swear I yelled at that worker about this don’t be mad at me if they do it again second warning documentation

The requisition form and the it has been six months now get me the fucking thing or you’re gonna hear from Cindy escalations form.

Paperwork has layers and protocols and backups.

[dancing-thru-clouds]

For law firms, there's also the 'I am asking nicely for you to send me this legally mandated document' and then the follow-up 'My please was a social nicety, I am no longer asking, I am telling you to send me this document or explain to a court why you refuse to do so' which, depending on the type of law, can fill a significant amount of the day

[what-even-is-thiss]

The reason your snacks are unsatisfying is that you need both carb and protein.

Carb starts your engine, protein keeps it going.

No carb, engine don’t start. No protein, engine dies out fast.

[1kit]

So, I should eat ramen and cheap tuna?

[what-even-is-thiss]

That fills both but if you want to make that a meal, some fruit or vegetable that you like would also be good

[electronicintrovert]

I just had crackers with Peanut Butter.

You may be on to something.

[what-even-is-thiss]

That is a wonderful snack. A classic snack. A very effective snack.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Drump is still trying to blame Biden for everything that’s going wrong as if that guy didn’t spend his entire term cleaning up that man’s mess.

He’s not even focusing on the bad stuff he actually did do

[what-even-is-thiss]

It’s the eternal pattern of American politics. Republicans mess up the country, people get tired of it. Democrats are voted in. They spend all their time in office fixing what the republicans broke and are bad at effectively communicating what they got done. People are still suffering from what the republicans did. People somehow decide the republicans will fix this. They vote in the republicans. Rinse and repeat.

[what-even-is-thiss]

The democrats obviously have a lot wrong with them but they’re more effective at getting shit done than people give them credit for. The problem is that a lot of their getting shit done energy is forced to be spent rebuilding everything that the last guys just blew up.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’m almost certain it’ll happen again, you know. After Drump some other mediocre Democrat will get elected, spend two years getting shit done and fixing what he did, in the midterms everyone will forget what they were mad about and not get out to vote, meaning the republicans will take over either the house or the senate or both.

Then the president and Congress will be locked in a stalemate, probably get reelected to their second term, shit isn’t getting done because they’re in a stalemate with Congress, and then people will be like “well why isn’t the president doing anything? Clearly the democrats are wrong” and then vote in a Republican. Republican gets shit done in a bad way with a Republican Congress, they get a democratic Congress after their first midterms, they are now locked in a stalemate, rinse and repeat.

[kbkarma]

One problem as well that has become very obvious to people outside the US and probably within is that there's seemingly no continuity. A president comes in and undoes all of the stuff the last one did. The next one turns up and undoes the undoing. And then another comes in and redoes what was undone. Policy, foreign and domestic, veer wildly like a car being driven by two people fighting over the steering wheel. Countries up until now have planned assuming that wouldn't happen, but now they need to hope nothing will change but plan for if it does.

And I agree. I think that the US is going to get a huge amount of Democrats in for the midterms (which is probably better than the current shower in charge), Trump will find everything slowed to a crawl, a Democrat president will get in, have two years to try and do stuff, and then the midterms will roll round and the Republicans will get back in, and then the new president will be hamstrung, and another Republican (Vance?) will get in.

It's possible it won't happen. But...

[what-even-is-thiss]

The term limits are a good thing in my opinion because they put a legal limit on how long one person can be in power. I personally think that the Supreme Court and Congress should also have term limits. They also give politicians the freedom to try things in their last term that are slightly more controversial which can be good or bad.

The side effect of this attempt to prevent dictatorship though is that there isn’t always as much continuity. You’re right about that.

Though there’s certain parts of foreign policy we’ve always mostly been consistent on (even if it is consistently bad) but Drump has broken a lot of those longstanding norms for very stupid reasons.

W. Bush and Obama didn’t have identical foreign policies for example but keeping a good relationship with NATO was always a priority. Drump has just thrown that out the window now for no good reason.

[rampagingpoet]

To "yes and" this - the continuity issue isn't that One Guy can't stay in power for more than eight years. The issue is that there's no continuity of political parties either. Especially with the way elections are staggered throughout the President's term - it is very difficult for the legislature to get anything done without at least tacit approval from the executive, and it is very difficult for the executive to get anything done without the backing of the legislature.

On one hand this is by design. On the other hand it contributes to the pendulum-swing seen above where the US government is against itself half the time and the other half alternates between deliberately breaking things and trying to pick up the pieces.

(And as we can see with Drump's current term - all the "checks and balances" in the world can't do anything if the people with the power to use them are all on the same team. Sorry Founding Fathers, willfully ignoring the concept of political parties was not enough to discourage their formation, especially when parties can achieve more power in aggregate by ignoring the rules than any individual could hope to hold by protecting their own fiefdom at the party's expense!)