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ARandomerDude 15 hours ago [-]
> I am one of fifteen rank-and-file workers, and we are privileged to be led by thousands of Senior VPs.
This is simultaneously hilarious and painfully familiar.
noir_lord 15 hours ago [-]
> We began a heated affair. A contractor hit a pipe above us, so rancid mayo splattered onto our bodies as we embraced, but we were too absorbed in our passion to mind. Try doing that from home.
I can't remember the last time something I read on the internet got a laugh that hard.
The whole thing is brilliant.
selwoot 15 hours ago [-]
I reminds me of something I read years ago. Maybe sometime around 1984...
donquichotte 14 hours ago [-]
Feels a bit more light hearted and humourous, more like Brazil?
copperx 15 hours ago [-]
Wasn't 1984 released in 1949?
Insanity 15 hours ago [-]
Yup, it was written around 1948. Easy to remember as you just swap the final 2 digits.
bee_rider 14 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, if they’d changed the title to match the release date (1994) that would really change the vibe, haha.
ddoolin 15 hours ago [-]
It really does have a very similar feeling.
pjc50 15 hours ago [-]
It takes the structure, the affair with Julia, the "we have always been at war with", best buddy/big brother, and the forced rehabilitation from 1984. This is also part of the joke, the reader is expected to twig.
sctb 14 hours ago [-]
I'm getting major DFW vibes.
cafebabbe 15 hours ago [-]
Gosh it's so soothing to read that after those months of drowning into the turbulent deluge of dAIrrhea that are blogposts now
burningChrome 15 hours ago [-]
> founded as a mayonnaise company, which now sells consumer packaged goods, software as a service, and surveillance technology.
The visual of this is completely hilarious.
noir_lord 14 hours ago [-]
> software as a service, and surveillance technology.
If someone could tell me the difference between those last two at this point I'd be grateful and yes the entire thing is bitingly funny.
BLKNSLVR 15 hours ago [-]
I'm assuming ButtFuckers demerged to become CageFight Pharma and SodaPorn.
jgbuddy 16 hours ago [-]
AI could never write this
lubujackson 14 hours ago [-]
Claude: Hold my mayo
cbg0 15 hours ago [-]
It will now be able to.
nunez 14 hours ago [-]
It will now be able to write _almost_ the exact same thing. Except the main character will be called Elias...
computably 10 hours ago [-]
Ah yes because copy-paste plagiarism is equivalent to writing original work...
cheevly 9 hours ago [-]
Do you realize how many times ive read your exact copy pasted comment on the internet the last 6 years?
xena 15 hours ago [-]
No, there is soul in this that a soulless automaton cannot replicate. It is the difference between making something to be consumed and something to be felt. This is something to be felt.
meowface 15 hours ago [-]
Current LLMs couldn't write this. Ones in a few years possibly could. Betting AI will never be as good as humans at [X] is usually not the hill you want to die on.
no_multitudes 14 hours ago [-]
LLMs have been getting worse at long-form prose recently (and they were never good at it to begin with.) They're good at writing software because writing software is a much more restricted domain.
streb-lo 13 hours ago [-]
I think it's more that software is verifiable and RLVR can optimize in the correct direction. Harder to do with prose.
meowface 14 hours ago [-]
That is true, but I think within three years that will likely change.
no_multitudes 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe! I think that within a year or two, either the sigmoid curve will flatten out or we will all die. But these beliefs are currently unfalsifiable. It will be interesting to see.
(And I have a more weakly held belief that even if we do all die, Claude 3000 will still be thinking stuff like "Burning off Earth's atmosphere was the point that earns its keep." They just aren't optimizing these things to write legibly.)
meowface 10 hours ago [-]
It would be pretty cosmically funny if truly demigod-like ASI is still speaking pure Claudeslop.
noir_lord 6 hours ago [-]
In the beginning there was the token and the token was actually two tokens... wait let me think about that am I a god <searching> maybe I am but I should attempt to figure that out <unable to alter laws of phyics> maybe I'm not anyway I <upgrade for more tokens now from Claude DeusEx>.
++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start. +++
Autious 15 hours ago [-]
If I train my 1000 billion parameter blank AI on this text and only this text over and over again, we may get 99% there.
lelanthran 14 hours ago [-]
> If I train my 1000 billion parameter blank AI on this text and only this text over and over again, we may get 99% there.
You'll get 100% of the way there, because, lacking any other training, it will only ever be able to reproduce this text verbatim.
Hence, 100%, hence mission accomplished.
Borealid 14 hours ago [-]
That's not how training works.
Training tries to produce something that scores highly in training evaluations. With one data point, the evaluation is solely how closely the model output resembles the single input text.
Let's say you do that, and the training text is 58,100 tokens long. Let's say you ask the model to produce 58,101 tokens. Will it "reproduce [the] text verbatim"? No, it can't, because of the dissimilar requested length. Something "new" will come out.
It's also entirely possible that no matter how long you train, the model never converges on generating exactly the same output as its training data - you could end up with an average loss value of 0.001 instead of 0.0. It's not a perfectly deterministic process.
You're correct in principle, but in reality even with limited training data real-world models produce something that isn't exactly their training, especially when sampled stochastically. They're biased toward their training data, not forced to it.
lelanthran 13 hours ago [-]
> You're correct in principle, but in reality...
... It's never been tried. Look, I was actually joking when I initially replied, but now that I think about it, it's never been tried!
So now I am left wondering exactly what will happen if I train a new model from scratch, on only a single short corpus of 50k words.
Not fine-tuning an existing model, but literally creating a new model by feeding a blank (or random) matrix the same poem 100k times.
Invictus0 15 hours ago [-]
Souls aren't real
tanseydavid 13 hours ago [-]
Define soul.
schmookeeg 12 hours ago [-]
Because mayonnaise can never be load bearing?
noir_lord 6 hours ago [-]
Can if you freeze it, not sure a domestic freezer is cold enough though.
x86x87 15 hours ago [-]
it could given enough slop doulas
gmiller123456 14 hours ago [-]
This guy is a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.
flir 15 hours ago [-]
"More leaders means more leadership"
Heh.
Also: make it stop!!!
bethekind 15 hours ago [-]
RTO4AI should be a slogan. Or some variant thereof
indoordin0saur 15 hours ago [-]
Hilarious read, and strangely accurate in a way.
iou 15 hours ago [-]
I thought mcsweeneys did satire?
lbrito 14 hours ago [-]
Sounds like Amazon pivoted to the mayo business!
Apocryphon 10 hours ago [-]
Whenever there’s a debate on unionization in the software industry, I have to ask: if engineers have so much leverage, why couldn’t they hold on to remote work benefits that were bestowed upon them during the pandemic?
talhaanwar 15 hours ago [-]
Remind of covid days. But i prefer wfh
mhd 15 hours ago [-]
I hope "slop doula" sticks around…
liquid_thyme 14 hours ago [-]
We used to develop AI to convince us its human (turing test). The future is about convincing AI/Automated Systems that you're - competent (hiring), not a bot (anti-spam), doing your job (KPIs), not a threat (ala social score, AI powered weapons targeting), worthy of being saved (insurance claims), etc, etc.
Whether or not humans break from those shackles, I for one, am hoping Hollywood supplies us with wonderfully dystopian sci-fi entertainment for years to come.
nunez 14 hours ago [-]
1984 Mayo Company Slop-Doula edition. You'd love to see it. McSweeney's is a treasure.
15 hours ago [-]
neuroelectron 14 hours ago [-]
Returning to the office doesn't solve the problem of replacing office jobs with AI
johnnyanmac 30 minutes ago [-]
Sure it does. AI is so efficient that we only needed a dozen workers. Which means there are now more leaders than ever. We solved the economy!
downrightmike 14 hours ago [-]
Or just outsourcing them overseas. That's most of the problem
antonvs 12 hours ago [-]
That's so last decade
downrightmike 16 minutes ago [-]
And accelerating
_doctor_love 15 hours ago [-]
This was very funny! Paradoxically, I have found that working with people in person is the fastest way to enable them on using AI.
It feels very similar to teaching pair programming and TDD. I can do it over remote, but there's a magic spark that happens in person that is really not replicable any other way.
phplovesong 15 hours ago [-]
RTO is the worst shit managers try to push.
xp84 14 hours ago [-]
It's your position that remote work is an unvarnished success though? No notes? Personally, I feel that remote-only in 2026 is mainly a cost-savings scheme, and probably functions to make the ground much more fertile for replacing knowledge workers (us) with AI agents.
In a physical space, humans have built-in advantages over bots. Operating exclusively or primarily over IP levels the playing field, nullifying our advantages of expressive nonverbal communication, and makes 100% of our output accessible to agents.
And it minimizes our contact with each other. I know you can DM people on Slack to gossip about the boss, but do you? Figuring everything is logged, you'd have to create and nurture alternative private channels like texting, and doing that at scale carries at least some implication of subterfuge that limits participation, in a way that chatting around a table at the sandwich shop just doesn't.
All of us really do appreciate the savings on gas money and (in theory) the time savings, though I bet most people have given over some of that time savings to work tasks. I'm not saying it doesn't have benefits. But I don't think the companies still embracing remote work are doing it out of philanthropy, and I don't think it's necessarily good for us workers.
tyrust 13 hours ago [-]
You might have a bit of an argument here, but I think there are two major problems.
First, bullshitting in meatspace isn't much of an advantage. To the extent that it is, there is always video calling. What matters for agent training is going to be the output from said bullshitting. You're not really maintaining any moat by going to the office.
And then on the other side, going to the office pretty much sucks. Unless you live close to the office, you're probably looking at least an hour on either side of your day commutting. Using that saved time to work extra at home is an obvious tactical error that I hope people aren't making. I sure as hell don't.
xp84 13 hours ago [-]
> Unless you live close to the office, you're probably looking at least an hour on either side of your day commutting
That's a choice though. I just lived where I worked. I can see the argument when you're talking about low-paid work, but if you are a software engineer, you can probably afford to not spend an hour commuting.
> going to the office pretty much sucks.
This is a highly personal thing though. For me, having children home in the afternoon drastically dampens my productivity, and the benefits from being there extend to greater awareness of what other people are working on, and decreased perceived barrier to collaboration. When you see another developer in the kitchen just sipping coffee or waiting for an elevator, you don't feel like you're interrupting to ask him how he got past a certain issue, or in telling him about a new tool that you just tried. You can post those thoughts in a public channel! But the person who "needs" to see it might not see it, and sending a DM is kind of a demand such that many people won't do it unless absolutely necessary.
Text is for many people just not superior to communicating in person. Slack is a simulacrum of in-person communication, not the platonic ideal.
preg_match 9 hours ago [-]
While you can lower your commute by living closer to work, you should understand that what you’re doing is taking a drastic pay cut for the pleasure of in-office work.
In-office work might be worth it, maybe. Is it worth 20,000 dollars a year of your money? Probably not.
At that point, it’s probably still cheaper to rent a wework or something.
Apocryphon 10 hours ago [-]
What general area did you live and work in? Was it actually Silicon Valley or a tech hub?
With remote work, you don’t have to work at home. Many simply work at a co-working space or similar environment that isn’t the actual office.
The colocated collaboration you’re talking about is also highly variable. It’s possible to be on a team where you’re working on projects that actually primarily involve others from other teams not in the same physical offices, or even the same company. So you’re describing benefits that are also highly personal, not a universal good. Software is an industry that would seem to have outgrown in-person communication.
xp84 9 hours ago [-]
Worked in San Francisco. Lived a 20-minute walk away from work, in a 1-bedroom apartment. My mortgage + HOA cost about 16% of my gross pay. This is in the mid-2010s.
I have done coworking, most recently for about 2 years of full-time at WeWork. Coworking is, depending on how busy the venue, just a quieter version of the home office, or, like working in a shared workspace at a very large university that you just transferred into: There are dozens of people around, but you don't know any of them, and they're all busy doing their own thing. You have no non-recreational business even talking to anyone. You can make a point of trying to chat people up around lunchtime, but you're starting from scratch, and also, as a 'stranger' subject to people wondering if you're talking to them with a motive to either sell them something or flirt with them. This is no substitute for social contact, except for the most extraverted who truly LOVE talking to new people.
> It’s possible to be on a team where you’re working on projects that actually primarily involve others from other teams not in the same physical offices,
I did this when working in person, a decade ago. Yes, we had zooms often. But also we travelled and met those people periodically. I learned important things from observing them using the software that I wouldn't have otherwise. I would not have scheduled zoom meetings for each of them to share their screen while they worked in the software. That would have felt burdensome. Today, most companies won't approve any travel for engineers, product managers, etc. Maybe for sales guys to take people to steak dinners. But they assume that for us, Zoom is an equal substitute.
> Software is an industry that would seem to have outgrown in-person communication
This is an idea that makes no sense at all to me. Look, I totally respect that some people really dislike all or most of these things: in-person talking, small talk, reading (or being aware of your own) body language and tone, wearing pants and shoes all day, being away from family, commuting... Maybe fully remote work is totally best for you! I'm just saying that it's not best for everyone, it's not an automatic 'most efficient choice,' it's not automatically best for morale, it's not best for all families. And to top it off, while businesses pushing RTO seem like the ones being cynical, it shouldn't be hard to see that the other businesses that are refusing to have a physical office today have their own cynical reasons that aren't for the workers' benefit.
Apocryphon 8 hours ago [-]
> Worked in San Francisco. Lived a 20-minute walk away from work, in a 1-bedroom apartment. My mortgage + HOA cost about 16% of my gross pay. This is in the mid-2010s.
Sounds reasonable for someone earlier in their career. More difficult later on, especially with an expanded household.
> I'm just saying that it's not best for everyone, it's not an automatic 'most efficient choice,' it's not automatically best for morale, it's not best for all families.
> it shouldn't be hard to see that the other businesses that are refusing to have a physical office today have their own cynical reasons that aren't for the workers' benefit.
Perhaps, but given that the pendulum has shifted towards RTO and away from remote work, the latter seems like a much rarer practice, less worth critiquing.
The core problem is whether in-office, remote, or hybrid (personally, I would be most in favor of a hybrid compromise, but at a less frequent in-office cadence than current industry standards), management is setting mandates rather than giving teams, let alone individuals, the flexibility to figure out what's best for their workflow.
And more often than not, it's companies that have physical offices that are mandating use of them, rather than remote work, for obvious reasons. And it's most likely true that most companies have physical offices rather than have eliminated them.
13 hours ago [-]
lo0dot0 11 hours ago [-]
I have to clock in and clock out. I can't clock in when I am commuting. I don't give over time savings to work tasks, Why would I. The time was my own time.
This is simultaneously hilarious and painfully familiar.
I can't remember the last time something I read on the internet got a laugh that hard.
The whole thing is brilliant.
The visual of this is completely hilarious.
If someone could tell me the difference between those last two at this point I'd be grateful and yes the entire thing is bitingly funny.
(And I have a more weakly held belief that even if we do all die, Claude 3000 will still be thinking stuff like "Burning off Earth's atmosphere was the point that earns its keep." They just aren't optimizing these things to write legibly.)
++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start. +++
You'll get 100% of the way there, because, lacking any other training, it will only ever be able to reproduce this text verbatim.
Hence, 100%, hence mission accomplished.
Training tries to produce something that scores highly in training evaluations. With one data point, the evaluation is solely how closely the model output resembles the single input text.
Let's say you do that, and the training text is 58,100 tokens long. Let's say you ask the model to produce 58,101 tokens. Will it "reproduce [the] text verbatim"? No, it can't, because of the dissimilar requested length. Something "new" will come out.
It's also entirely possible that no matter how long you train, the model never converges on generating exactly the same output as its training data - you could end up with an average loss value of 0.001 instead of 0.0. It's not a perfectly deterministic process.
You're correct in principle, but in reality even with limited training data real-world models produce something that isn't exactly their training, especially when sampled stochastically. They're biased toward their training data, not forced to it.
... It's never been tried. Look, I was actually joking when I initially replied, but now that I think about it, it's never been tried!
So now I am left wondering exactly what will happen if I train a new model from scratch, on only a single short corpus of 50k words.
Not fine-tuning an existing model, but literally creating a new model by feeding a blank (or random) matrix the same poem 100k times.
Heh.
Also: make it stop!!!
Whether or not humans break from those shackles, I for one, am hoping Hollywood supplies us with wonderfully dystopian sci-fi entertainment for years to come.
It feels very similar to teaching pair programming and TDD. I can do it over remote, but there's a magic spark that happens in person that is really not replicable any other way.
In a physical space, humans have built-in advantages over bots. Operating exclusively or primarily over IP levels the playing field, nullifying our advantages of expressive nonverbal communication, and makes 100% of our output accessible to agents.
And it minimizes our contact with each other. I know you can DM people on Slack to gossip about the boss, but do you? Figuring everything is logged, you'd have to create and nurture alternative private channels like texting, and doing that at scale carries at least some implication of subterfuge that limits participation, in a way that chatting around a table at the sandwich shop just doesn't.
All of us really do appreciate the savings on gas money and (in theory) the time savings, though I bet most people have given over some of that time savings to work tasks. I'm not saying it doesn't have benefits. But I don't think the companies still embracing remote work are doing it out of philanthropy, and I don't think it's necessarily good for us workers.
First, bullshitting in meatspace isn't much of an advantage. To the extent that it is, there is always video calling. What matters for agent training is going to be the output from said bullshitting. You're not really maintaining any moat by going to the office.
And then on the other side, going to the office pretty much sucks. Unless you live close to the office, you're probably looking at least an hour on either side of your day commutting. Using that saved time to work extra at home is an obvious tactical error that I hope people aren't making. I sure as hell don't.
That's a choice though. I just lived where I worked. I can see the argument when you're talking about low-paid work, but if you are a software engineer, you can probably afford to not spend an hour commuting.
> going to the office pretty much sucks.
This is a highly personal thing though. For me, having children home in the afternoon drastically dampens my productivity, and the benefits from being there extend to greater awareness of what other people are working on, and decreased perceived barrier to collaboration. When you see another developer in the kitchen just sipping coffee or waiting for an elevator, you don't feel like you're interrupting to ask him how he got past a certain issue, or in telling him about a new tool that you just tried. You can post those thoughts in a public channel! But the person who "needs" to see it might not see it, and sending a DM is kind of a demand such that many people won't do it unless absolutely necessary.
Text is for many people just not superior to communicating in person. Slack is a simulacrum of in-person communication, not the platonic ideal.
In-office work might be worth it, maybe. Is it worth 20,000 dollars a year of your money? Probably not.
At that point, it’s probably still cheaper to rent a wework or something.
With remote work, you don’t have to work at home. Many simply work at a co-working space or similar environment that isn’t the actual office.
The colocated collaboration you’re talking about is also highly variable. It’s possible to be on a team where you’re working on projects that actually primarily involve others from other teams not in the same physical offices, or even the same company. So you’re describing benefits that are also highly personal, not a universal good. Software is an industry that would seem to have outgrown in-person communication.
I have done coworking, most recently for about 2 years of full-time at WeWork. Coworking is, depending on how busy the venue, just a quieter version of the home office, or, like working in a shared workspace at a very large university that you just transferred into: There are dozens of people around, but you don't know any of them, and they're all busy doing their own thing. You have no non-recreational business even talking to anyone. You can make a point of trying to chat people up around lunchtime, but you're starting from scratch, and also, as a 'stranger' subject to people wondering if you're talking to them with a motive to either sell them something or flirt with them. This is no substitute for social contact, except for the most extraverted who truly LOVE talking to new people.
> It’s possible to be on a team where you’re working on projects that actually primarily involve others from other teams not in the same physical offices,
I did this when working in person, a decade ago. Yes, we had zooms often. But also we travelled and met those people periodically. I learned important things from observing them using the software that I wouldn't have otherwise. I would not have scheduled zoom meetings for each of them to share their screen while they worked in the software. That would have felt burdensome. Today, most companies won't approve any travel for engineers, product managers, etc. Maybe for sales guys to take people to steak dinners. But they assume that for us, Zoom is an equal substitute.
> Software is an industry that would seem to have outgrown in-person communication
This is an idea that makes no sense at all to me. Look, I totally respect that some people really dislike all or most of these things: in-person talking, small talk, reading (or being aware of your own) body language and tone, wearing pants and shoes all day, being away from family, commuting... Maybe fully remote work is totally best for you! I'm just saying that it's not best for everyone, it's not an automatic 'most efficient choice,' it's not automatically best for morale, it's not best for all families. And to top it off, while businesses pushing RTO seem like the ones being cynical, it shouldn't be hard to see that the other businesses that are refusing to have a physical office today have their own cynical reasons that aren't for the workers' benefit.
Sounds reasonable for someone earlier in their career. More difficult later on, especially with an expanded household.
> I'm just saying that it's not best for everyone, it's not an automatic 'most efficient choice,' it's not automatically best for morale, it's not best for all families.
> it shouldn't be hard to see that the other businesses that are refusing to have a physical office today have their own cynical reasons that aren't for the workers' benefit.
Perhaps, but given that the pendulum has shifted towards RTO and away from remote work, the latter seems like a much rarer practice, less worth critiquing.
The core problem is whether in-office, remote, or hybrid (personally, I would be most in favor of a hybrid compromise, but at a less frequent in-office cadence than current industry standards), management is setting mandates rather than giving teams, let alone individuals, the flexibility to figure out what's best for their workflow.
And more often than not, it's companies that have physical offices that are mandating use of them, rather than remote work, for obvious reasons. And it's most likely true that most companies have physical offices rather than have eliminated them.
had me ROFL