For several hours a week, I write for a technology company worth billions of dollars. Alongside me are published novelists, rising academics and several other freelance journalists. The workload is flexible, the pay better than we are used to, and the assignments never run out. But what we write will never be read by anyone outside the company.
That’s because we aren’t even writing for people. We are writing for an AI.
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The core part of the job is writing pretend responses to hypothetical chatbot questions. This is the training data that the model needs to be fed. The “AI” needs an example of what “good” looks like before it can try to produce “good” writing.
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François Chollet, a bestselling computer science textbook author and the creator of the Keras training library (which provides building blocks for researchers to create their own deep learning models), told me he estimates there are “probably about 20,000 people employed full-time just creating annotated data to train large language models”. Without manual human work, he says the models’ output would be “really, really bad”.
The goal of the annotation work that I and others perform is to provide gold-standard examples for the model to learn from and emulate. It’s a step up from the sorts of annotation work we’ve all done in the past, even unknowingly. If ever you’ve been faced with a “captcha” problem asking you to prove you aren’t a robot – eg “select all the tiles with pictures of a traffic light” – you were actually doing unpaid work for a machine, by helping to teach it to “see”.
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If chatbots can pretend to write like humans, we can also pretend to write like chatbots … it’s unclear how many outside the field understand that the “secret sauce” behind these celebrated models relies on plain old human work.
Outstanding viral campaign video from Tim Walz, where he demonstrates how to maintain a 1979 International Harvester pickup truck and contrasts the Harris-Walz economic policy with Trump-Vance:
Look, they didn’t give me a manual for this if you didn’t plan on using it to fix your truck. They didn’t create that Project 2025 just to have it sit around as a doorstop.
Recent studies add nuance to the loneliness epidemic.
The typical American, it seems, texts a bunch of people “we should get together!” before watching TikTok alone on the couch and then passing out. That is, Americans have friends. We just never really see them.
— Olga Khazan at The Atlantic
Americans typically say they have four or five friends, which is a siimilar number to past studies. But the friends don’t know each other, Americans are frequently busy, we don’t to church much or participate in group activities, so getting together is hard and we don’t do it.
We don’t just snack — many of us are abandoning meals entirely.
In the three decades leading up to 2008, the average American doubled their daily snack intake, and the percentage of adults snacking on any given day rose from 59 percent to 90 percent, according to a comprehensive government report. In the most recent iteration of the same study, which ended in 2020 before the pandemic, that number rose again, to 95 percent; more than half of respondents said they consumed at least three snacks a day.
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When my mother started her first office job, in the ’70s, eating at work was inappropriate; 50 years later, her daughter wrote much of this article in the company of a little ramekin of mini Reese’s Pieces, provided by her employer, which she ate out of the palm of her hand like a pigeon.
I’m still getting over PTSD from my supermarket rearranging the produce section. Plus, this week, they changed the packaging on our favorite swiss cheese.
The charge on my wireless trackball ran down yesterday and I was in a rush and couldn’t find the end of the USB-C charging cord on my desk, so I switched to the Magic Trackpad and kept going.
I liked it for a while, but this morning, I began to feel moderate pains up and down my arms.
At first I ignored them but then I became conscious of what was going on and I said to myself, “This is a terrible idea!”
And I plugged in the trackball and kept going. And the pain is subsiding.
I feel like I dodged a debilitating injury that could go on for years. I’ve luckily avoided RSI problems to date despite how much time I spend on computers, my iPhone and iPad.
Amazon will use generative AI to make product recommendations. I’m curious to see how this works — we are regular and frequent Amazon shoppers. The company should have a nice database of our preferences. Will its recommendations be any good? Or will it be the usual “I see you bought a refrigerator so now we’re going to show you refrigerator recommendations for months as though you were some kind of weirdo refrigerator collector.”
The correct amount of radium to put up your butt is zero. Policies that we need to simply stop supporting, even if that seems politically unrealistic, including DRM, collusion between realtors representing sellers and buyers, White House officials going to work for the industries they oversaw (and back again) and surveillance capitalism — Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow discusses the theory of “shareholder supremacy,”, which has ruled economics, business and politics for more than 50 years, and which is now being walked back even by conservatives. One of the theory’s fatal flaws is that “it’s impossible to know if the rule has been broken,” says Cory.
The shareholder supremacy rule is an unfalsifiable proposition. A CEO can cut wages and lay off workers and claim that it’s good for profits because the retained earnings can be paid as a dividend. A CEO can raise wages and hire more people and claim it’s good for profits because it will stop important employees from defecting and attract the talent needed to win market share and spin up new products.
A CEO can spend less on marketing and claim it’s a cost-savings. A CEO can spend more on marketing and claim it’s an investment. A CEO can eliminate products and call it a savings. A CEO can add products and claim they’re expansions into new segments. A CEO can settle a lawsuit and claim they’re saving money on court fees. A CEO can fight a lawsuit through to the final appeal and claim that they’re doing it to scare vexatious litigants away by demonstrating their mettle.
CEOs can use cheaper, inferior materials and claim it’s a savings. They can use premium materials and claim it’s a competitive advantage that will produce new profits. Everything a company does can be colorably claimed as an attempt to save or make money, from sponsoring the local little league softball team to treating effluent to handing ownership of corporate landholdings to perpetual trusts that designate them as wildlife sanctuaries.
Bribes, campaign contributions, onshoring, offshoring, criminal conspiracies and conference sponsorships – there’s a business case for all of these being in line with shareholder supremacy.
Also:
Boeing management earned bonuses by engaging in corporate autophagia, devouring the company from within.
People focused on recent headlines would assume Ericsson is “at least a last mile ahead of Nokia in the critical area of private 5G.” But the reality is different: “Excluding China, Nokia is actually the world leader in private 5G, with Ericsson trailing in second place.” That’s largely chalked up to diplomacy and communications skills, says my colleague Steve Saunders on Fierce Network: Ericsson’s analyst relations is charming while Nokia is a hard company to talk with.
Read to the end to learn about an unpleasant surprise Steve got when he flew to Finland to interview the company’s top executives.
I asked ChatGPT to create an image of a spider-cat with big bat wings. It came out great. I don’t think you want to see it. You probably wish I hadn’t told you about it.
Smith and Klein discuss her recent novel “The Fraud,” which is based on the Tichborne trial, a real incident in 19th Century Britain where an Australian butcher claimed to be the heir to the rich estate of an English nobleman who had been lost at sea. The British working classes flocked to support the butcher, even though he was obviously a fraud.
Klein writes:
I didn’t expect this novel about a trial in 19th-century London to be so resonant with 21st-century America. But Smith has said Trump and populism were front of mind when she wrote it, and you can feel it in the book, as she explores the Tichborne trial. [The butcher] built a huge movement of passionate supporters who utterly flummoxed the day’s elites.”
The discussion goes a long way toward explaining Trump’s appeal, which baffles me because Trump is obviously not the man he claims to be, or that many of his supporters claim him to be. Trump is obviously a failed businessman, reality show star and disaster of a President who left the economy in tatters and hundreds of thousands dead. But his supporters lap up his act — just as 19th Century English people did for their fraud.
Klein and Smith also talk about the role of emotion in politics — how rationalists scoff at emotion (“facts don’t care about your feelings”) but in fact, emotions are a valuable guide to thinking.
Also, on “wokeness,” Smith says:
I just don’t even recognize the category. If I’m teaching “Pride and Prejudice,” it’s not a battle between woke thought and unwoke thought. I’m only interested in truth.
To me, there is no friction and no battle between teaching the beauty and artistry of Austen’s novels – discussing where Darcy’s money comes from, which is most certainly the Caribbean, understanding the political situation in England in the 1810s. Those things happen simultaneously. The working-class movement, which is off to the side in that novel, the complacency of the middle classes in that novel, the artistry of Jane Austen.
I don’t take the bait. I don’t accept the argument in the first place that I have two kinds of students who are in some kind of football game of ideas, and if one wins, the other loses. That’s not how I teach literature. That’s not how I think of history. That’s not how I think of the relationship between Black and white people. So I don’t engage, because I think it’s a bait and that what you’re meant to do in response to it is move further and further to the right in response to this boogeyman.
This is exactly how I approach old movies and novels. I disagree with Smith on a minor point: There is friction, but it’s part of the experience. (My interests are less highbrow than Smith’s. I watch old Hollywood movies and re-read midcentury science fiction. Midcentury American pop culture was far more segregated and gender-defined than today, and it’s reflected in the pop culture of the period.)
Much of what we label “wokeness” is “people who thoughtlessly considered themselves at the center of history, culture, would be made to look at the world another way,” Smith said. In other words, in the West, being a white man was default, and everybody else was different. Now, everybody is different, and some folks who were accustomed to being the default are struggling with the change.
Klein alludes to a point he’s made in the past — that when we bemoan divisiveness and identity politics and yearn for a return to a time of harmony, we’re forgetting that in the past we had consensus because many people were simply left out of the room. Congressional representatives got along with each other because they were almost all older white men.
Smith notes that people are multi-dimensional. The “straitjacket” of identity politics is “something that nobody really wants. Sometimes it’s needed politically. We absolutely need to gather in our identity groups sometimes for our freedoms, for our civil rights. There’s absolutely no doubt about that.” But most of the time, we want to be ourselves.
And those multiple dimensions are a balm for polarism, because we often find common ground even with people of other races, religions, sexuality, etc.
Smith talks about how social media and smartphones change who you are. She and her husband do not have smartphones and she says she’s happier for it.
When you wake up in the morning and you turn to your social app, you are being instructed on what issue of the day is what to be interested in. The news has always played some element in doing that, but this is total. And it’s not even, to me, the content of those thoughts. There’s a lot of emphasis put on the kind of politics expressed on these platforms to the right or to the left.
Social media drives us to think there are two and only two sides to every argument, the right and left, and they must be in conflict with each other.
I keep thinking about a comment my Congressional representative, Sara Jacobs, has made at least twice that I know of. She is far Left — which is a big part of why I support her. She divides her Republican colleagues into two groups: Those who are interested in governing, and the others. She says she gladly works with conservative Republicans who are interested in governing, and often finds common ground with them.
Smith says that everybody who went online in 2008 has been “seriously modified” by technology.
And that’s OK. All mediums modify you. Books modify you, TV modifies you, radio modifies you. The social life of a 16th-century village modifies you. But the question becomes: Who do you want to be modified by, and to what degree? …
And when I look at the people who have designed these things – what they want, what their aims are, what they think a human being is or should be – the humans I know and love, this machinery is not worthy of them. That’s the best way I can put it.
And I speak as someone who grew up as an entirely TV-addicted human. I love TV. I love reading. Modification is my bread and butter. And when the internet came, I was like, hallelujah. Finally, we’ve got a medium which isn’t made by the man or centralized. We’re just going to be talking to each other, hanging out with each other, peer to peer. It’s going to be amazing. That is not the internet that we have. That is not what occurred.
I’m skeptical of individual technological solutions for the ills of being online. (With one exception: Keep notifications to a minimum. You don’t need to be notified of Facebook comments, etc., when you’re not in the app. Switch 99% of your smartphone notifications off.) Getting rid of smartphones won’t make us better people.
Klein recommends Marshall McLuahan and Neil Postman, “media theorists from the rise of the television age.”
And the things they were saying television would do to us and do to our culture are right. There’s a straightforward argument in Neil Postman’s great book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” where he says that the thing television is going to do to politics is make us believe politics should always be entertaining, and that’s going to make politics a space dominated by entertainers. And like here we literally are, with a reality television superstar running for president, having already been president once before. For better and for worse, they saw it all coming, and they described a world way less warped and deranged by all this than the one we actually live in. If you went back and told them what happened, I think they would look at you with their mouth agape.
And that is perhaps a part of Trump’s success. His supporters don’t support the man. They support the character he plays. Or the character that they perceive him to be playing. It’s like a cult TV show where the lead actor is bad but the fans love the character anyway.
Additionally, Klein and Smith talk about loneliness and aging, and how that’s particularly hard for men. Klein reads a passage from Smith’s novel, “The Fraud,” where one of the characters, Eliza, thinks at the end of her life: “When she was young she had wanted to know everyone, touch everyone, be everyone, go everywhere! Now she thought that if you truly loved – and were truly loved by! – two people in your lifetime, you had every right to think yourself a Midas.”
[U.S. Admiral David Farragut. He began his naval career as a nine-year-old boy in 1810. He remained on active duty until his death in 1870. "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/t5816p/us_admiral_david_farragut_he_began_his_naval/)
In 2017, Robbie Tripp posted an over-the-top message on Instagram about how much he loves his “curvy wife,” Sarah. “There is nothing sexier than this woman right here. Thick thighs, big booty, cute little side roll, et cetera,” he wrote.
Loftus explains that Robbie is an example of an Internet character called “the wife guy”—someone who doesn’t just proclaim his love for his wife online, but someone for whom “telling people how much he loves his wife appeared to be part of his job.”
The Tripps are both Internet influencers and content creators, and Robbie, at least, has built a little media business on the “curvy wife” meme.
My thoughts about this are complicated. It’s very hard for me to avoid judging the Tripps harshly — which is wrong of me. Loftus sums it up: “Pathologizing someone else’s marriage is 10 miles of none of your fucking business.”
Loftus does wonderful podcasts on odd corners of culture. This episode is part of a series about people who become Internet-famous — the “main character” of social media — for a short time, and lived with the repercussions for years, for better or worse. Loftus tells their human stories. The series is called “Sixteenth Minute of Fame.”
Another Loftus podcast, “The Lolita Podcast,” looks at the Nabokov novel, which she describes as basically a horror novel about a pedophile who destroys a young girl’s life. But the novel lives on as creepy erotica, with the girl portrayed as predator rather than victim, turning us all into Humbert Humbert.
It lurks in desolation. Bumped around the bottom of lunch bags as schoolchildren rummage for chips or shrink-wrapped Rice Krispies treats. Waiting by the last bruised banana in a roadside gas station, the only produce for miles. Left untouched on hospital trays, forlorn in the fruit bowl at hotel breakfast buffets, bereft in nests of gift-basket raffia.
Something I saw while walking the dog: I have seen this Ford Pinto parked at the Lake Murray parking lot dozens of times over the 10+ years that I’ve been walking there. I finally saw it drive in, and a woman got out from behind the steering wheel, so I had an opportunity to talk with her and find out more about the car.
She and her husband have owned the car for 50 years. They bought it new in March 1974, and she says it is very easy to maintain.
I found it surprisingly easy to resist temptation to make the obvious Ford Pinto joke.
She also volunteered that she would never buy an electric car. The batteries need replacing after five years and are exorbitantly expensive, she said.
[Dolly Parton in the 70s](https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/1f3z108/dolly_parton_in_the_70s_offstage_relaxed_and/)
Don Martin
[U.S. Admiral David Farragut. He began his naval career as a nine-year-old boy in 1810. He remained on active duty until his death in 1870. "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/t5816p/us_admiral_david_farragut_he_began_his_naval/)
