The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

Eh. I enjoyed it enormously and I do likewise recommend it, but its story isn't related to AI (either the concept of its moment or the technology of ours) even slightly, nor trying to be, or at least not in any way I saw. It was pretty open with its themes, so I would expect that one to have been pretty noticeable if it was present alongside the questions of reality, artifice, grief, and simulationism with which the miniseries does concern itself.

With the current direction of this industry, I fear you will come back to something that is both unrecognisable and terrifying.

The official declaration came about in a team-meeting. We're a tiny startup, 3 full-time eng with the CTO co-founder driving the AI transformation. We have scheduled onboarding meetings to get the entire company finding automation opportunities with specifically Claude (CC, Cowork). For eng specifically, there is "acknowledgement" that we all may have different setups, but we should all be unifying our prompts, strategies, pipelines, Agents, and so... it's CC. I still use Cursor so I'm the only one not on CC; my eye-brow was especially raised.

I don't want to be doxxed lol, so ironically I'll be sharing in the sense that on one hand I am unsettled by the mandate, on the other hand, for a tiny startup it's seems the state of the industry, less so company specific.

Startups (think they) are in a fight for their life, so the mandate comes from everyone contributing 10x or whatever. The expectation is that agentic coding should 3x/5x/10x your feature output, because that's how we're going to win.

I have many thoughts. But I'll focus on that last one: the mandate is literally more features, more code, because it gets us closer to winning. In my small engineering circles, surprisingly, this is like the defacto stance. All things considered, might as well ship more code!

We did a similar Claude code mandate a few weeks ago.

Motivation was people being so allergic to tests and automation, that making them use superpowers produced better code, but also started adding a test pyramid.

The mandate was actually phrased in a way that you must produce industry standard code, and if you struggle with it you can use cc to bridge the gap.

Honestly I worry that this way devs will produce higher quality code, but will not understand why, how to measure the “quality” and steer towards it themselves.

At this point though the founders were pretty adamant with the code quality and lack of tests so this seemed like a reasonable way for the company, and I am curious to see how such a mandate affects code, deliverables and individual’s knowledge.

So far it seems to be working as intended, but it is early days.

That's a good point. But I also think about the unprecedented adoption of chatGPT. Global mass consumer adoption of all ages, and people giddy about offloading their jobs to chatGPT not connecting the very simple straight line to "you think your boss is going to pay you to ask chatGPT?"

A common definition anthropologists use for magic is occult technology: a system of laws that can be manipulated to create desired changes. There's a lot of value in thinking of programming as a form of magic.

A definition by which every human alive ever qualifies as a magician, and which is therefore not very useful as a distinction.

  Oil is the medium of time manipulation magic. Created through ancient sacrificial rituals, it is is a substance that can be used to create aging/rot-retarding barriers, or refined into derivatives that increase the rate of plant growth and mechanical work. To be handled with care, as extended contact can lead to corruption of the body, as well as increased susceptibility to fire elemental spells.

  Simple rituals can render an inferior product from most living things; the time-manipulation abilities of such substances will be weaker, but the substance will be safer to handle, and can even be imbibed (this is a double-aged sword, reducing one's vital life force while increasing one's bodily proportions to that of a toddler).

Crowley is full of shit.

By this definition a hammer is a magical or "magickal" implement - the K was Crowley's invention, so that he could trademark it - which of course can be true if someone decides as much, but the only reason to couch such trivia in the pettifogging obscurity Crowley favored is because doing so will help you nail bored young socialites, an activity which Crowley also famously favored. (Gotta watch out for that neurosyphilis! What a shame he never did.)

Try thinking for yourself, instead.

See Computer Power and Human Reason - many powerful lessons in there.

It's a hard problem because it reduces to the fact that narcissists and sociopaths are a significant proportion of the population, and they're strongly attracted to money, power, attention, and status.

So even though they're a small minority they infest politics, business, and the media, and create a culture in their own image.

Most proposed solutions end up in superficial tribal arguments about standard economic and political positions. Not about the underlying issue, which cuts right across the usual battle lines.

Frankly, who are these people? Because this is just another "they" idle conspiracy theory.

"They" are against me.

Ironically I could cite a very specific group this applies to: fitness influencers in the wake of ozempic. "Natural weight loss" and FUD about the drug took off when it hit mainstream awareness because it really was a direct threat to them. Of course this group also tends to heavily abuse other drugs as they age out - because being a trim fitness inflencer is easy in your 20s, keeping it going into your mid-30s is a lot more difficult.

fork it. Fork the internet. How about that? We have this stupid system built on people paying to target us. Is that "the" internet or is it just one internet, and not a very good one. This is supposed to be a place for hackers. So fork the internet.

It's not blocked By the UK, he's put a country filter on it Like all the US sites that decided to block.the EU over gdpr because turning off tracking was too much effort

Most likely it's a protest. Badplace passed Badlaw, so residents of Badplace can't see my content, so nyah!

But, topics of a sexual nature—nothing really NSFW, just mentions of various fetishes that online people have developed and popularized, and the possibilities for AI to realize those fetishes and potentially spawn new ones—are discussed in the blog post, so it may be illegal to present to minors under the OSA.