Sam Altman is one of the dullest, most incurious and least creative people to walk this earth. This is, after all, the person who once tweeted 'i am a stochastic parrot and so are u', in response to Emily Bender's (entirely incisive and absolutely brilliant) critique of what his large language models are *actually doing*.| deadSimpleTech
It's fair to say that the tech industry at the moment is not in a good place. Software engineers tend to be detached, demotivated and unwilling to care much about the work they're doing beyond their paycheck. Code quality is poor on the whole, made worse by the current spate of vibe coding and whatever other febrile ideas come out of Sam Altman's brain. Much of the software that we write is either useless or actively hurts people. And the talented, creative people that we most need in the ind...| deadSimpleTech
deadSimpleTech: a software engineering consultancy working in the data engineering, software engineering and web development fields, with a focus on human-centric design and staunchly pro-human values.| deadSimpleTech
And of course, in the end, LLMs are themselves an example of this: something new, shiny and capable, but nonetheless something that doesn't fit into systems or meet real needs. They're a beautifully forged sword that was presented to a society that didn't need swords, and is now being jammed into random pieces of machinery because after all "it's an important part and if we don't use them in our machines, we'll be left behind". Of course, all that happens is that the machinery breaks.| deadSimpleTech
The only reason that LLMs took root in the first place was because our societies in the anglosphere have already developed cultures solely devoted to gaining status and keeping up the appearance of doing things rather than actually doing them. All other values, increasingly including even the accumulation of wealth (while this is still very much a thing that people pursue, wealth is increasingly becoming a proxy for status more than something desired in itself) are becoming subordinated to sy...| deadSimpleTech
Wherein I delve a bit more into the details of epistemic injustice| deadSimpleTech
A blog about tech and the modern workplace by Iris Meredith| deadSimpleTech
The common ideological kernel of all of this behaviour is a deeply embedded trope in anglosphere societies: a contempt for materiality, or the idea that the material world that we eat, sleep, drink, fuck and die in is somehow beneath the notice or the care of sufficiently important people.| deadSimpleTech