I need to think about this more. I think there's a category of engineer who adapts very closely to the expectations of execs -- it's kind of "pick me"-adjacent and it's more commonly a behavior of otherwise unskilled engineers. "Resembling an engineer" is certainly a behavior sales guys can adopt.
I think there's some engineers who actually see productivity gains from LLMs, which is often a factor of the kinds of problems they solve, but I distrust people who don't caveat this.
I'll think about whether I can treat "explaining the evidence I experienced that led me to conclude they love LLMs so much" with a little more sincerity.
(I see that it's recommended that I say what kind of feedback I want. Reply with anything you like! I don't mind it. This probably won't be posted anywhere else, I just wanted to get it out of my head.)
Overall the Dimes Square guys seem very similar to each other. To me they're interesting in aggregate, described once, but there's nothing to look at beyond the surface. If you read any two blog posts on Mike's site, you know everything about them.
Of course they have day-to-day lives -- every so often one of them releases a book or something, but this has no real purpose -- none of them ever change. It's not like a man with six funny hats becomes more interesting when he acquires a seventh funny hat.
The social pattern Mike is describing seems pretty fast-paced and destructive. They do a lot of signings and court a lot of press attention, and as long as you're still shocked, they're interested in you. Past that, you kind of have to behave exactly like them to get invited, but it doesn't seem like they actually like their own -- I would be really, really surprised if they read each other's books. They just kind of brood next to each other and engage in disaffected, ironic narcissism.
I can see why he'd be valuable to them, though. Mike has his own pattern -- he's clearly learned how to be entertainingly shocked, but only intermittently -- on other occasions he denies them supply, and sometimes he burns them by being a surprisingly coherent critic. He's hard to reach but ultimately attends often enough that they remember him.
If you substitute "affection" with supply in the form of outrage, and leave everything else the same, he's basically a pickup artist.
I suspect that the actions that make up Mike's pattern are deliberate, but when it comes to explaining them, he has zero self-awareness. He's doing it too well for it to be accidental though, as much as there's a lot of denial there, and when he makes comments like the one I've selected, I think that's the mask slipping.
This man's blog is intense, but I am not sure he comes off well! I clicked around and it seems like "wants to be at all the fascist parties, courts acts of violence to complain about on his blog" is, at least in 2024, a really accurate summary of his behavior.
I tell them that I’m actually pretty hated and feared by most of these people, and I can only stay around because I criticize particular influential figures in this counterculture so well that they want to fuck me, and so they keep me around to flatter them, to reflect their true hideousness back at them by elevating it to the status of myth, and then they lash out at me like the maenads devouring Orpheus.
New developments -- someone proposes "OK, what if we're in irreconcilable difference with the racists?" and two people pile on to say (respectively) "Well, we'll have to find (vaguely specified) 'workarounds'" and "Well, we can't kick them out, that would be a disaster."
A third person points out that some of the people in the thread are opposed to quotas but implied they would support quotas if we made an applicant list first (and allowed for the possibility that only white men would appear on the list, rendering the quota system moot) -- so we should do that.
Specifically -- nat418 sez:
I believe that we live in a society in which some classes of people are exploited by others, and that the acknowledgement of this reality—let alone measures to remediate it—are often percieved as "unfair" or "conflictual" by members of the exploiting classes. I think the real conflict is already ongoing, we are enmeshed within it, and that if we want to live as honorable and dignfied persons we must take up the cause of justice and the common good.
nim65s:
I personally agree with @nat-418 here, but I acknowledge some others do not, and I don't think one side could convince the other. I also don't think we can compromise: this is a boolean question. Therefore, to find a consensus, I think we should explore workarounds.
nat418 sez:
What workarounds? Seems like if we can't agree on basic matters like "marginalized groups should be represented" then we should simply part ways.
tmarkov:
This is a very non-obvious statement.
The goal of the mix community is ultimately to make nix and NisOS as good as possible.
Parting ways is a huge negative for the ecosystem overall. If it is unavoidable, I guess I'll personally leave all other consideration aside and advocate for whatever would cause the least amount of people splitting off whatever it might be.
Colin:
i'm not confident that's pinpointing a hard disagreement. my read of this thread is:
marginalized individuals should be represented.
representation is better maximized by composing a diverse assembly from available applicants, rather than within the process by which we obtain applicants.
uncertainty around how "hard" this requirement is; how critical is representation within assembly composition to ensuring representation in its downstream processes; hypotheticals in what to do if there aren't enough applicants with which to form a diverse assembly.
Aaron notably doesn't comment on governance. "Some marginalized people attended some meetings of the group" implies to him that the system is inclusive.
My personal opinions. Note that I'm not on the NixOS zulip, or a user of NixOS:
Of course some people are going to be excluded from the committee: it's 5 people.
I've seen some groups become surprisingly diverse by accident but the groups were generally still run by white men.
The minorities in groups I was in usually ended up in positions where they had to do emotional labor or damage control for the white men who made the decisions.
The white men in groups I've been in usually behaved in ways that, to me, implied massive affinity bias. It was possible to shake them from that without dehumanizing them or being rude, but I had to actually be in the room.
That doesn't make them inherently bad people. Or maybe it kind of does, but only in a conditional sense -- that is, if integrating the group they're in suddenly makes them stop being bad people, then it is a really good idea to do that.
With regard to this specific proposal:
OK, with a quota of 2, you have three seats that white men are allowed to have.
If you really need there to be 5 white men, increase the size of the committee to 7. Now you have 5 white male seats, the same as you would if this proposal were not adopted.
If this is still objectionable to you, then your apparent problem with the quota system is not that it excludes white men.
I am possibly being unfair -- it seems like what Aaron wants is "there should be 5 people on the committee, not all of them should be white men, but that should happen by accident without needing to be set in stone on the Zulip."
This seems vacuous to me: the whole purpose of the Zulip is not to create a selection process -- it's to select a committee one time and then hand over power to that committee. There's, therefore, little distinction between "deciding to vote for X" and "setting a quota limiting the outcomes." There is no process external to the Zulip by which an outcome could happen by accident.
And to say the obvious: I think it's very unlikely a group consisting of 5 white men would have been selected on merit alone. So I would personally be likely to veto any such group based on that. Saying it's a quota offers a fig leaf to people with implicitly biased selection criteria -- mentally I am saying "of course you picked five fucking clones of yourself. Denied."
In which the Orange Site is a very bad influence on some minors:
How do you evaluate “factuality” without knowing all the facts, though? That’s the downfall of all such services - eventually (or even immediately) they begin to just push their preferred agenda because it’s easier and more profitable.
Hi there, thank you for your feedback! I think we could potentially go down the route of a web3 approach where we get the public consensus on the facts.
...
Your first meta-problem to solve is to get people to care about the facts, and to accept them when they’re wrong. There is an astonishing gap between knowing the truth and acting accordingly.
Yea, that's why we also added in an grammar checker, even if they dont care about facts, they can get something better than gram marly that checks for way more for way less.
I need to think about this more. I think there's a category of engineer who adapts very closely to the expectations of execs -- it's kind of "pick me"-adjacent and it's more commonly a behavior of otherwise unskilled engineers. "Resembling an engineer" is certainly a behavior sales guys can adopt.
I think there's some engineers who actually see productivity gains from LLMs, which is often a factor of the kinds of problems they solve, but I distrust people who don't caveat this.