digging · HackerTrans

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

If the streaming platforms cared strongly about this problem they could have addressed it already, so I'm not confident they'll use LLMs effectively to do it without making the problem (or at least edge cases) even worse somehow. I think it would take a different business goal driving their algorithms to, for example, stop playing MF DOOM for 8 songs in a row under different aliases.

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vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Ok but if you're getting into tree-of-many-fruits and art-plant territory, it's no longer accessible to non-experts.

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vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I mean, the damage is done. Let's not condemn him for at least doing good now. Would you rather he did nothing at all?

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vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

> the real job in cases like this is to promote the show

What, the piano show he performs? Why would that be the pianist's job? Wouldn't that be the venue's responsibility?

Edit: I had to look him up. Quote Wikipedia:

> Igor Levit is a Russian-German pianist who focuses on the works of Bach, Beethoven, and Liszt. He is also a professor at the Musikhochschule Hannover.

So it's not like he's taking gigs in dive bars. Do renowned classical musicians typically shoulder the burden of promoting their own performances... through radio interviews?

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vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

> His current job requires him to be good at interviews

I see. I had no idea that was a requirement of being a professional pianist. This all read as incredibly pointless with me thinking that interviews were a side thing for a pianist.

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vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

> People say that your first reaction is the most honest, but I disagree. Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it’s an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it’s a knee-jerk emotional response to something in your past.

This is a very good point that's worth, uh, pointing out.

Being able to quickly reply is not necessarily a good thing. I've caught this in myself - making some witty response to a situation and then immediately realizing, "I haven't examined that opinion in years. I don't like it or believe it anymore. I wish I hadn't said that."

But without vocalizing that introspection, it may just appear that I'm witty and, depending on the listener, a bit of an asshole. Actually I'm less of an asshole than I used to be, but sometimes you're getting old data which hasn't been cleaned up yet.

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vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

...if he wants to be good at giving interviews. He can also be happy being a pianist who isn't good at giving interviews.

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

It wouldn't explain simultaneous mass layoffs.

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

I mean waste is probably a source of inflation but lots of it just comes from unrestrained profit-seeking behavior. If a company believes it can raise its prices without impacting sales, it will do that. That's why so many massive corporations posted record-breaking profits during the recent bouts of inflation.

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

That sounds like a very nice and theatrical outcome, but in reality nobody wants to believe they've been horribly wrong about their understanding of things, which means the higher-ups are going to be talking directly to the managers to get their side and figure out how they can show you've misrepresented the situation. They're not going to fire managers en masse because the new guy said "Everyone here is dumb and cowardly," even with evidence.

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

This is really what people should be looking for in a hire. If this person joins my team, can I reasonably expect them to bring some sense into our code/infra/schedule? Nonsense creep is constant in a big enough organization, and on-ramping is slow, but asking "what does this even do?" is invaluable (wait, no, it can be quantified!)

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

This is such a good article. My skin was crawling.

What really scared me is that I couldn't identify any of the issues raised in my own organization, even though we often run into similar, smaller-magnitude problems caused by a blindness to obvious mistakes. It makes me fear I, too, am blind to massive bleeding wounds. Here's hoping they actually don't exist.

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

> If he can get 50k paying users, he's a millionaire.

How did you reach that conclusion?

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

The survivors are working on it. RedReader is allowed to continue using the API for free because it has accessibility features, but the creator has announced they do not plan to depend on that goodwill and will expand the app to connect to other APIs.

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Perhaps in some cases, but the ones I worked with pre- and post-promotion didn't really change what they were doing over that period. What I'm saying is that titles are fluid, not fixed, in meaning. They can be inflated or deflated according to an org's mood.

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Alternatively, I've worked with Staff Engineers who are still fixing bugs, and also building (maybe staff-level?) tooling and project improvements. The most significant issue is the lack of standardization of expectations. "Staff" doesn't mean anything in a vacuum because it doesn't mean the same thing between any two companies.

Personally, I love doing senior stuff. I don't know if I even want to be staff at any point, maybe I'll want a different challenge someday, but I still get a lot of enjoyment out of churning out high-quality code and shaping things at multiple levels. But if I stay where I am, I'll eventually be promoted to staff with minor shifts in the work I do.

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

> You have been free to love whoever you want for centuries.

Um, no. It was a criminal act to be gay in the US earlier this century.

> Im a male that loves my father

Oh, I see. You're either practicing illegal love, or you're being purposely obtuse by conflating two different meanings of love.

> Because that's the only distinction I see between me loving my male friends and me being gay.

You hold hands with them? In public? You kiss and cuddle with them? In front of children? Because gay people have been murdered for that in living memory. I guess they just should have avoided touching sexual organs (in private) and everything would have been fine.

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

> If she pretends to be a man instead, she isn't challenging gender roles, but is implicitly agreeing with the harmful idea that women must adhere to some roles, men must adhere to other roles, and anyone who doesn't do this is defective and must change themselves to fit this mould.

I appreciate your rational input. And to be honest, I don't completely disagree with this part. Trans people are not unaware of it either. However, [I must explain that] I was using "gender roles" in a very broad way, including pronouns like "she". This person doesn't need anyone to use specific words to describe their sexual phenotype if they don't want it. We don't have different a different form of "he" for children vs adults, nor for black people vs white people. It is a societal construct and they're allowed to opt out.

> Even worse is how such non-conformance to gender roles has been medicalized, so she may end up taking opposite-sex hormones, having her breasts removed and other cosmetic surgeries to appear as some odd facsimile of a man. Rather than rejecting this malignant, cultish ideology that advocates physical destruction of the self in lieu of bodily acceptance.

This is an extremely disgusting and transphobic thing to say though. I hope you didn't realize how hateful it sounded. Gender-affirming care is widely supported in the medical community as a life-saving intervention. As for whether or not you think it's appropriate for another person to have their body surgically altered, what do you think about tattoos? About facial reconstruction for burn victims? About a mastectomy for cancer? And why do you even care what other people do with their bodies?

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

You brought out emotionally charged language in response to my post about biological sex determination, which was in response to a post filled with emotionally charged language. It has nothing to do with whether or not we disagree. It's that you haven't expressed your ideas in a way that doesn't denigrate trans people and make you sound like the victim of their existence.

I don't call it hate speech because you aren't on my side. I call it hate speech because it treats transgender people as uniformly ill and invalidates their identity. (You'll find that if we stop doing that, their mental health tends to be pretty good.) And because the rigidness of the gender binary in modern western society is not universal across time and space within human cultures and it exists in opposition to scientific understanding.

You are saying right now that you want a genuine engagement. I'm a sucker for debate obviously. This is your chance to genuinely engage, lay out your scientific reasoning why a biologically female person with XX chromosomes should be forced by their peers into accepting the gender roles that other people say they must have regardless of what makes them feel good or happy.

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vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

> In doing so, we doom these people to a lifetime of hardship and uncertainty.

Let's allow them to "doom" themselves to increased happiness and just stop filling their lives with hardship.

> Imagine a world where having blue eyes was viewed as bad and had to be surgically and permanently altered to look more brown. Would these people feel any more confident after the operation?

Probably.

> Why do celebrities continuously get plastic surgery over and over? They are never comfortable with themselves, and the further they go down the path of altering who they are, the more uncomfortable they become

Is this what all your celebrity friends say? My celebrity friend circle mostly disagrees. Let's take a poll of all the celebrities we personally know and try to get some more data on what's going on inside the minds of "celebrities". Even though we already both know so much about the internal experiences of all celebrities.

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