Management is a cult.
No, seriously. You have to participate in large scale acts of groupthink and demonstrate performative conformity just to be accepted; and once in the group you better not stray too far from the messaging of executives.
Management is a cult.
No, seriously. You have to participate in large scale acts of groupthink and demonstrate performative conformity just to be accepted; and once in the group you better not stray too far from the messaging of executives.
"They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes."
An under-appreciated AI gripe: professionals can't discuss it anymore.
Anyone working with AI-other-than-llm is now constantly getting weird looks and stupid comments from LLM bros
Similar problem, I had to remind my daughter that I work.in a data center when she was complaining about data centers the other day, and that data centers are pretty coon, her beef (and frankly mine), is with wasteful hyperscaler data centers for AI use.
that data centers are pretty coon,
Pretty Coon:

I have no idea why it did that, I think it was supposd to be "pretty much everywhere".
Typing on mobile? I assumed you were going for "common" but hit the backspace key by accident, since it's right there, and ended up with c-o-m-backspace-o-n.
I do it all the time lol
Ugh, this keeps happening and now I wonder if auto complete somehow got reenabled. I turned it off because it kept stickimg random words in.
I think this particular one is unrelated to auto complete and more to on screen keyboard.
For example in my keyboard the backspace is next to "m" so hiring it accidentally is easy. It also is close to enter and I'm frequently hitting it instead. It is frustrating, and makes me wonder why they just didn't put it in the top right corner as it is on normal keyboard.
Your subconscious just needed everyone to know how pretty Carrie Coon is. Simple as
Our city sent out a map of all the existing data centers in town claiming it’s proof that they dont cause problems.
I don’t think our healthcare facilities data center even remotely compares to Colossus. That’s like comparing a regional grocery store to fuckin Walmart
Also a lot of these new data centers are using evaporative cooling which isn't particularly efficient.....
Lol I just call it IA (interaction algorithm)
"They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job. So I don't see that going anywhere sustainable, and I feel like there will simply be a pop and a reckoning and then [it's on repeat] unless people do something else."
Like the video game crash of ‘83?
Like every time workers seem to be getting woke enough to maybe possibly do something on a scale that touches rich people's yacht money some of us get some minor concessions that keep us working in the system and reproducing it for the next generation of workers.
Although the dream with ai is an economy without the need for workers (we wouldn't be a part of it), or labour power pushed to such an insignificant little atomised role that withholding it is no longer a threat.
If AI ever reaches the point that it can produce a creative, fun game that feels worth playing - which I doubt, because you gotta have a soul to make art - then anyone can press that button. Why would people buy their game when they can get AI to make their own?
He's right, these people have shit the corporate bed.
"Somebody else will pay the salaries of our customers".
As far as I can tell the individual actors extracting more from a system that its capable to support if everybody does the same (the kind of situation Game Theory calls a Tragedy Of The Commons) always think in one of 3 ways:
The same kind of thinking also applies to Ponzi Schemes (like the current AI bubble) - Ignorance (willful or due to lack of knowledge/intelligence), The Many Will Make Up For The Over-Extraction Of The Few and/or I Myself Will Be Alright.
And you know what?
Those people have very good reasons to believe in the second one (that I illustrated at the start) - you look at Neoliberal Capitalism so far that's what's been happening as Money acummulates in fewer hands and sin ce with regulations neutralized and Corruption through the roof, those holding most of the wealth can do whatever the fuck they want so they are increasingly pillaging wealth from the rest, and the "system" - i.e. everybody else - just gets poorer and instead of Revolutions and Guillotines for the rich all we see is passive acceptance so the rest so have been making up for the depredations of the few for decades. Also just look at how Governments the world over sacrificed everybody else to make sure Finance and Asset owners in general came up better of after the 2008 Crash - these people have very good reason to believe that those in power, being very much in their pockets, will use said power to sacrificed the rest in order to deflect away from the Few the consequences of the actions of those very Few.
And if they's CEOs they also have very good reasons to believe the third - just look at corporate governance in the last decades, with getting those jobs being far more abour Cronyism than Merit and incompetence being de facto rewarded with golden parachutes a even failing upwards. From all they've seen their whole lives there is no reason for them to expect to ever personally suffer the consequences of their own depredations and pillaging.
In summary, some don't even realise the problem and as for those who do, given the experience of CEOs for at least the last 3 or 4 decades, it's pretty rational for them to believe that their depredations wont destroy the Whole enough to come back to them and even if they do, they themselves personally will be alright even if the companies they manage are destroyed.
"Somebody else will pay the salaries of our customers".
That's been the mindset of these business "leaders" for a few decades already.
The difference is now they have a tool that promises them that they can eliminate workers at an increasingly rapid rate.
Of course that's a false promise, but once they realize that, a helluva lot of damage will have been done.
Wasn't Walmart leaning on the gov to pay their employees medicare because they were paying so little in one state?
It's unfortunately sustainable because people buy things they like before things they need.
For all of us, for everyone 1 person we know who has a decent job and loves to play games they buy with disposable income, we probably know 5 who shouldn't buy the game they're buying because they're already behind on their sewer bill.
Congratulations!!!1 You are the lucky 10000 who discovered copy pasting today!
Nice to see something like this on a gaming site (but fuuuuuuck their popups):
Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don't understand.
Nah, they're not "getting psychosis", AI is revealing their psychosis. We're talking about people used to convincing themselves that infinite growth is possible in a finite world, that fascism is a solution, that they made themselves with no help, that they deserve to be paid hundreds of times more than their most basic employees, that being a billionaire is ethical, etc etc. And we used to accept all that for a contract and a salary. They're breaking the socio-professional contract with AI, now.
CEOs, HRs, the corporate world in general HAVE ALWAYS BEEN 100% PSYCHOTIC. Why do we think capitalism and the workplace are so alienating in the first place? Why do we think they need to invest millions, if not billions, in PR, medias and propaganda? The upper you go, the batshit crazier things get.
You've hit the nail on the head with the Infinite Growth statement. Most companies see AI as the next way to cut bottom line costs and hit those annual goals. It's an ouroboros that most companies haven't seen the end of yet. Eventually they'll be left with no talent (arguably the most valuable thing a company can acquire) and uninteresting products nobody is interested in.
How do you train newbies into useful employees when you let AI handle the easy stuff. Where's your pipeline of promotions so you're developing your next generation of developers? Once the shit starts to hit the fan, you'll see them crumble and ask how we got here. Human talent takes YEARS to cultivate and is extremely hard to buy, especially when competition builds from reducing the supply when people stop going into these fields for lack of entry-level jobs.
It's near the bottom but Tarn Adams notes the same thing, that it has been happening far longer than just starting when LLMs became popular.
"It's been going on forever. That was before AI—or this form of AI," Adams says, before lamenting: "They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes."
I'm always amazed at people who can't understand that EVERY system is finite.
Respectfully: no.
Psychosis is something that builds over time with many factors and AI is one that can definitely be one of the contributing factors. It can be the one that pushes someone over the edge into psychosis and that may seem as "revealing" it but the psychosis could have been avoided without.
This line of thinking feels dangerous to me.
That "build-up" you are talking about, that's called business school followed by entry level management or internship, where modern managers brush over learning their business, in favor of seeking efficiency purely in terms of dollars in/dollars out, in opposition to any other metric.
Idunno man, sounds like you're trying to shift the blame from AI inducing psychosis in people towards the people affected by it
No, like the article said: "it's not as if the current industry problems are unprecedented, or came out of nowhere. Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don't understand."
This and a tendency to abuse workers have always existed. Management isn't the victim here, the AI has just removed the limiter, such as it was.
Are you suggesting the 'line must go up' mentality only emerged after the advent of AI?
No.
I'm mad about the misrepresentation of psychosis
Ah, ok. So for my next question, why is seeking infinite growth not a psychotic delusion?
You're making the assumption that all "bosses" mentioned in the article are people seeking infinite growth.
You're making an assumption about a group of people you know nothing about and trying to link them with people suffering from psychosis. Essentially grouping "people suffering from psychosis" together with "greedy CEO's". Whereas greedy CEO's could also simply be narcissistic, evil or simply lying to others to get more money.
By grouping them with psychosis sufferers you're denying the sufferers their lived experience in favor of assumptions.
a state of distorted reality, marked by disturbances in perception and thought, disorganized behavior, and negative symptoms
Ticks those boxes
Or they're lying for money rather than suffering from a mental condition.
https://dangoyal.substack.com/p/the-neuroscience-of-greed
Greed is a symptom of possibly many mental conditions. You're all over the place. All these things you're arguing against are well established ideas, both in common experience and the psychological community.
You also seem to be using darvo.
What is darvo?
Edit: reading the article it seems my way of thinking was indeed a bit simple minded
Still I would like to argue the point that AI doesn't reveal psychosis, it develops it.
That's potato/potahto when it comes to mental illness. Without the tendency, it won't develop. AI, because it embodies the potential to replace workers, accelerates the whole process. Making management not just look more psychotic, but become more psychotic, or at least be further down the path.
Because you can't be horrible to others without feeling bad, no matter who you are. And how well you feel factors intimately into the intensity of mental illness.
To add more, if they weren't greedy and salivating over giving their workers a shove out the door, they would sanely evaluate what AI brings to the table before upending all their business. They are all obviously unhinged and all the AI did for them was let them act the way they have wanted to basically forever.
AI might feed their disease, but it was already there, and it didn't hallucinate them into psychosis - they have always been right on the edge.
The age old story of labor vs. capital.
"AI might feed their disease, but it was already there, and it didn’t hallucinate them into psychosis - they have always been right on the edge."
Is a contradiction. Being on the edge of psychosis is not the same as being in one. Within this part you both claim that AI doesn't hallucinate them into psychosis because they were already on the edge.
So your argument is "AI doesn't hallucinate people into psychosis it just feeds into it and pushes them over the edge"
Which is exactly what hallucinating someone into psychosis means.
Why are you defending AI?
You are going to ridiculous lengths to be a troll.
Am I?
Cuz the way it looks to me we're both simply trying to discuss something different.
Where the point I'm trying to get across is: "If you lay the blame solely on the people getting psychosis then you're actively covering up the harm AI can do" With this in mind: when I read your comments your point is interpreted as: "Psychosis is something that's guaranteed to happen because you're born with it, AI doesn't influence it"
Whereas the point you're trying to make is probably more in line with "AI didn't suddenly make CEO's greedier, they already were and blaming AI for that rather than capitalism, is bad"
The problem then lies within the expectation of how discussions on the internet go. By going into the "I need to win" mindset which the internet comments are famous for. Its easy to fall into the mindset of being opponents rather than 2 people trying to convey what they think is important. I believe we both entered this mindset somewhere through the argument.
Look, I can't know what you find important because you've ignored my questions and instead opted to attack my (sometimes shaky) arguments instead. Which is fair but this doesn't help in opening the conversation to new perspectives. It more or less turns it into a debate instead.
This time however its clear you've given up on trying to communicate your point. Which is a shame because I was trying to understand it. I even think I'll be able to if you give me context to your thought process similarly as to how I just tried.
CEOs get rewarded for getting rid of staff so here we are. Who gets rewarded when the CEOs are let go? Oh right, they get golden parachutes.
When Tarn makes big statements, people ought to listen.
It's become particularly nasty with generative AI, however, because now said CEOs can still see an end result that mimics the thing they don't understand
CEO looks at AI quake: "it's literally the same thing!"
(for those who don't know what AI quake is: https://youtu.be/iBmjTXOK9xw)
I think it was Cory Doctorow that described it as a feedback loop, so the people who aren't "all in" on AI get pushed out of the C-suite, in favour of those that are until the whole show is being run by people who want AI to do everything but absolutely no idea how to achieve that. It's bluster all the way up, driven by a psychotic devotion to shareholders. Sack everyone, raise prices, the line must go up.
And because it's all fuelled by picosecond trading algorithms, a company who's line goes up 2% more than another company's line ends up valued to a hundred times as much.
It's no longer about being a healthy trading company, you have to show you're doing everything possible to make everyone's lives a fucking misery...
Yeah, and it's all made up money and value. Capitalism seems to have reached the runaway diesel engine stage, where it ain't going to stop until we cut off its oxygen or it blows the fuck up.
I just want to add, this is coming from someone who has completed a mathematics PhD, and so has a very very high bar for psychosis (seriously, math departments are fun, but also FUN).
...uh oh. How so?
While it's not true that intelligence is correlated with mental problems, advanced mathematics tends to attract or create odd ducks.
There are multiple mathematicians in the modern era who are well regarded, technically homeless and just showed up at people's houses to collaborate on some math. One, who coined the phrase "another roof, another proof", was a staunch proponent of mixing amphetamines, coffee, and 70's antidepressants.
People didn't notice John Nash devolved into a deep schizophrenic break for a long time because it's not weird for advanced mathematicians to be talking about very complex unintelligible ideas. Scary Wheels and Super Shrubs is an example of a good title and not-transparent description.
Another was the uni-bomber.
There's plenty of perfectly well balanced mathematicians. You just can't help but get some weird ideas when your life's work is to think outside the box about very complicated things all the time.
If you go deep into math work, you'll meet people who think the universe is a simulation. You'll meet others who think that's silly, because the universe is clearly actually an abstract embodiment of the platonic ideal of mathematics. 7, blue, and cat are all equally real or not real, and we don't need a simulation as the equation defining structure is sufficient to give rise to what we experience, and requiring it to be written or executed is just an odd affectation.
You'll just nod and concede the appeal because it's not the first time someone has shared that idea with you.
So when the mathematicians start saying the ideas are getting odd, you know it's not just "I don't understand therefore it's weird".
Maybe this implies I'm one of the weirdos, but my experience has been wildly different. My experience has been mathematicians are just people, what they have in common is a passion for math. Sometimes they're weird, but that's because they're people and not because they do math. I never got the impression I was talking with a schizophrenic or a Kaczynski type. They exist, but non-mathatician schizophrenics do too.
There are multiple mathematicians in the modern era who are well regarded, technically homeless and just showed up at people's houses to collaborate on some math.
I don't think heard of this and I'm skeptical. Give me a couple names to jostle my memory?
One, who coined the phrase "another roof, another proof", was a staunch proponent of mixing amphetamines, coffee, and 70's antidepressants.
I don't know this quote but I'd give it a 90% chance it's Erdös.
Scary Wheels and Super Shrubs is an example of a good title and not-transparent description.
Come on man, this isn't weird. It's representation theory, there literally isn't a transparent description. It's weird to think having fun with a title isn't a normal impulse from time-to-time.
7, blue, and cat are all equally real or not real, and we don't need a simulation as the equation defining structure is sufficient to give rise to what we experience, and requiring it to be written or executed is just an odd affectation.
This reads as partially random to me, what is "the equation defining structure"?
I had hoped I was making it very clear that it's not a case that all mathematicians are weirdos or even difficult to talk to, because they're not.
Thinking about complicated things all the time results in complicated conclusions, so you'll end up talking to people with very detailed thoughts if you're talking about work. Probably perfectly normal thoughts on cooking beyond a bias towards using their analytical ability where others might not.
My point was not that they're all weird, but that the bar is higher because you deal with more people who have thought about something much more than you have.
My point with the paper wasn't that it's weird to have fun, or that the title was bad. It's that it was complicated and an example of the field requiring you to deal with profoundly unfamiliar ideas and terminology, potentially quite regularly. To some people "that sounded like gibberish" is a sign you dismiss it. In this case, it means you need to do more research to catch up to the terminology.
The two that I was thinking of were erdos and diffie. I'll concede to featuring some of the more notable characters because their stories are more fun.
The idea being described was a paraphrase of platonic realism and structuralism taken to an extreme to match simulation theory. If the universe is a simulation it means there is, "somewhere", an equation or algorithm describing our physical reality. Needing that equation to be evaluated to give rise to our universe is an odd perspective since the existence of the equation would be sufficient. An equation describing the motion of a point in a circle doesn't need to be evaluated to describe that, nor does it need to be written down.
It's a notion that I thought fit well with my point of "agree or disagree, it's not delusional, and it's not obvious"
You clearly weren't saying they all are, but what I'm saying is that my impression is that the bar for weirdness isn't higher at all. There will always be examples of mathematicians behaving weirdly, because there will always be examples of people behaving weirdly. Spending a lot of time thinking about abstract nonsense definitely improves your proficiency at thinking about abstract nonsense, but I can't see how it could affect the way you process other things any more than frequent practice with sudoku or chess would.
The mental process in math is no more special than any other intellectual hobby. If you invest decades into chess I'm sure you'll think about chess in a very different way than a beginner, but in my opinion seeing chess differently should have minimal impact on how someone thinks about things unrelated to chess.
I feel like that's very similar to what I said, including the bit about being routine in most other regards.
People who spend a lot of time thinking are prone to having thoughts, and sometimes those thoughts are less common.
The more abstract the topic you're working with, the more accustomed you'll be to hearing things that don't make sense at first.
Might just be me, but in general the more educated people I've met have been more likely to qualify as odd ducks, and the mathy folks tend towards the upper edge.
Mostly, we all see the world in unique ways - picture a building of possessed dwarves and you have the average mathematics department.
The only way forward for many developers will be as indie devs. The corpos are going to shovel AI slop into our buckets and the quality games will be from indie devs.
Money has been giving management psychosis for generations. AI is just another iteration of that
I think my manager has broken out of the psychosis. He was really into it but has seen it's limits real quickly
Left my last job and they really pushed AI. Everything had to be AI and it has to be shoved in everywhere. It was mostly awful. Few places it helped was to complete bullshit HR tasks that we had been complaining about ever since they were introduced as a waste of time.
Network engineer here. My main use case for AI at the moment is for ticket management and as a glorified search engine.
As long as it isn't based on and continually trained on privacy violations, stolen property, and a continually growing list of ethical transgressions against humanity in a race to the bottom to fulfill greed and laziness in an irresponsible ethical laundering that I guess requires just a little too much brain power to make the leap to comprehend for certain types of people.
But, you know. It's fine, I guess. Chase those dollar signs and defend those perfect infallible and unexamined systems, boss.
Lmao replacing people in creative industries with ai is like chef's kiss of stupidity
As long as the AAA studios are generating shareholder value this will be the future unless the workers push back collectively and hard AF because the average gaming isn't going to do crap to push back on this.
Developers and workers in general are nothing more than a reoccurring cost account to most businesses, a faceless void where money goes to instead of shareholders and executive compensation.
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