Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentineās Day!)
https://softcurrency.substack.com/p/the-dangerous-economics-of-walk-away
WTF is āeven saferā ??? how bout we like just donāt create the torment nexus.
Wonder if the 50% attrition prediction comes to pass thoughā¦
āeven saferā in this case means some combination of two things:
The new organization is more ideologically aligned with the transhumanist doom cult that apparently managed to eat the brains of the people with money to burn.
The new organization, largely as a result of this, is capable of sinking an unending amount of capital into buying compute time and Nvidia chips but due to their commitments to safety is even less inclined to actually deliver anything.
I wonder, is this a theory of āsafetyā analogous to whatās driven the increased gigantism of vehicles in the US? Sure seems like it.
So theyāve highlighted an interesting pattern to compensation packages, but I find their entire framing of it gross and disgusting, in a capitalist techbro kinda way.
Like the way the describe Part IIIās case study:
Acitivision was trying to cheat its labor after they made them massively successful profits! Describing it as a fracture relationship denies the agency on the Acitivisionās part to choose to be greedy capitalist pigs.
Activision could have paid them what they owed them, and kept paying them incentive based payouts, and come out billions of dollars ahead instead of engaging in short-sighted greedy behavior.
I would actually find this article interesting and tolerable if they framed it as āhere are the perverse incentives capitalism encourages businesses to createā instead of āhere is how to leverage the perverse incentives in your favor by paying your employees just enough, but not enough to actually reward them a fair shareā (not that they were honest enough to use those words).
I think the writer isnāt even really evaluating that aspect, just thinking in terms of workers becoming capital owners and how companies should try to prevent that to maximize their profits. The idea that Anthropic employees might care on any level about AI safety (even hypocritically and ineffectually) doesnāt enter into the reasoning.