"The company produces the finest lorem ipsum on the planet, artisanal lorem ipsum... To produce the ipsum the company first runs a standard static generator. Then it employs copyeditors who personally review every word before sending it out to the ipsum-starved masses. But there is a bug in the generator: every thousand or so words has a typo. It’s your job to find and correct the typo. This is a nightmare job. You would lose your mind. But it’s also what we ask our reviewers to do every time we submit a massive LLM-generated PR."
"[S]ometimes I wear a cool Hawaiian shirt on Fridays, and it’s commonly accepted that bad people don’t wear shirts with flowers on them. That’s just a fact."
"Change is driven intentionally... by individuals learning from direct practice. And if you increase the size of the audience and simultaneously reduce the numbers of real practitioners, i.e. the people who drive that change in the ecosystem, you will first see diminishing returns, and then you will kill the ecosystem, and then you will kill the tool. [...] I believe the work of sense-making belongs exclusively to me. The problem is not insufficently condensed information, because the information is not condensable. The problem is an information environment that requires much more aggressive management."
"If you’re some assclown like Sam Altman, whose graph-go-up depends on convincing you to replace all your employees with ChatGPT, you have to destroy that idea. It is the greatest threat to your business model. You have to destroy the idea that things are worth doing."
"[T]he way technology changes work is neither automatic nor inevitable. It is shaped by collective choices about what kinds of work, and what kinds of working lives, society is willing to sustain."
"We need to ensure that human creators are compensated, not just for the sake of the creators, but so our books and arts continue to reflect both our real and imagined experiences, open our minds, teach us new ways of thinking, and move us forward as a society, rather than rehash old ideas."
"These AI jobs are [the] bizarro twin [of 'bullshit jobs']: work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in." [...] "When AI comes for your job, you may not lose it, but it might become more alien, more isolating, more tedious."
"because the needs of these groups are devalued, that struggle is largely seen as a tolerable sacrifice, as the system more or less working, rather than a warning sign that something's wrong."