Welcome to 5 Quick Things that I saw since last month that I thought were interesting enough to share with you. None of them are particularly timely so feel free to just enjoy 🙂
>Number One<
The Shell Game
Lately I have been link this around. I guess LLMs are my bugbear because I almost went into the field that produced them. This piece focuses mostly on the emotional and mental effects of why people will defend the machine that demonstrably lies to them. It’s not that I’m immune to these kinds of appeals but simply that this one doesn’t do it for me personally. For some people it’s the image generator and for some it’s the LLM that chats with you and it’s good to keep in mind why and how these things are made and how they tap into the deep reaches of human psychology because the people making them benefit from getting you hooked on using these technologies.
LLMs and other AI tools could have been a small market that was geared toward solving small, stable and limited issues but now they have to play a conman games to get you to believe AI is the everything app. And where have you heard that before?
>Number Two<
Tarot: a Load Stone of Culture
When I was growing up I was given a deck of tarot cards and a book in help me decipher their symbols and concepts and while I never thought of them as anything more than cards that helped you create stories (and shared stories), I’ve always be fascinated by how they’re so diverse and used by so many people in different way. In this article looking at a tarot exhibit starts to dive into some of that history. I’m particularly fond of this Hexen 2.0 deck.
>Number Three<
A (Theory) War Story
>Number Four<
Bullshit Jobs (And Another Thing)
Recently this article sparked in me a series of thoughts about my encounters recently with various people at their jobs. While it mostly focuses on the fact that we’re creating jobs that people cannot be good at because they ask too many diverse things of people, it also skirts around the thought I’ve had ever since I learned that the majority of people who become managers in the UK neither hold a degree in management nor have they done the job that they oversee. The UK has some of the lowest productive hours in the rich world and that management “problem”, to me, seems like a good first point to look at why that is. We’ve stumbled into a world in which people aren’t trained for their jobs and aren’t given the tools for their jobs and they’re severely underpaid which causes them to cut corners in order to justify either speeding up unreasonably to do more work (incorrectly).
The solutions here are less gig work, more training, more stability, and less job movement but I’m not even sure how to roll back to the clock to that because it’s been 40 years trending in this direction. Anyway when people think about bullshit jobs, they’re imagining a middle manager who does nothing and knows nothing (eg. Office Space) but the truth is we have bullshit jobs at the bottom of the wrung too for which no one can accomplish with what they’re given.
>Number Five<
Too Complex, Didn’t Think
I have a lot of thoughts about the interactions that the public has with highly complex topics since it almost never ends well for the general public. With higher complexity appearing in system every day and low reading, math, and technology understanding it feels like terms of service is at the center of the unholy triangle of things that are specifically made to hurt consumers so why not have a website dedicated to taking 80 pages of legal text that appears only to harm you and condense it into something legible for most people.
Does this protect you from companies? Probably not. Will it deter you from clicking “yes” on any of these? Having a Facebook account? Or anything else? The signs point to no, but I still believe it’s important to know what these companies are extracting. It might not stop you from signing up to a single particularly service but it might make you call your local rep and ask them why someone else can sign away your right to privacy even if you don’t make a Facebook account.
That’s all for this month and hopefully I’ll see you back again next month with some more exciting and cool things!