strangers were replying to women’s photos and asking Grok, the platform’s built-in AI chatbot, to “remove her clothes” or “put her in a bikini.” And Grok was doing it. Publicly. In the replies. For everyone to see.
Wow. Thats some really creepy behavior people are choosing to show off publicly.
Grok needs some tighter gaurdrails to prevent abuse.
Money changes psychology. The brains of the people that work in these departments operate differently. They believe in protection and growth of the revenue - not pay attention to ethics.
They have to work hard to shut out critics as long as possible.
It's about getting as much money from the platform for as long as possible, regardless of the externalized damage done along the way. Anything that negatively impacts the "number goes up" goal, year over year, gets suppressed, ignored, or redirected. They hire a sufficient number of people so as to diffuse responsibility and the sense of wrongdoing by any one person or group within the company, and different aspects of the overall abusive mechanics organically get compartmentalized, so that no one manager or employee or department ever recognizes the wrongs being done.
You end up with a few greedy asshats aware of the harms being done that just don't care, lots of money being made, and plausible deniability all around, with things never getting bad enough for an employee to feel like they have to take a stand or report wrongdoing.
This got me thinking. In any country or ethnic group, it’s so important to differentiate between the average person trying to get by and the aggressors who claim to be their leaders. When we look at the world through the lens of political and military leaders, we miss so much of the humanity of everyday people.
Producing something interesting has never been an issue for a junior engineer. I built lots of stuff that I still think is interesting when I was still a junior and I was neither unique nor special. Any idiot could always go to a book store and buy a book on C++ or JavaScript and write software to build something interesting. High-school me was one such idiot.
"Senior" is much more about making sure what you're working on is polished and works as expected and understanding edge cases. Getting the first 80% of a project was always the easy part; the last 20% is the part that ends up mattering the most, and also the part that AI tends to be especially bad at.
It will certainly get better, and I'm all for it honestly, but I do find it a little annoying that people will see a quick demo of AI doing something interesting really quickly, and then conclude that that is the hard part part; even before GenAI, we had hackathons where people would make cool demos in a day or two, but there's a reason that most of those demos weren't immediately put onto store shelves without revision.
This is very true. And similarly for the recently-passed era of googling, copying and pasting and glueing together something that works. The easy 80% of turning specs into code.
Beyond this issue of translating product specs to actual features, there is the fundamental limit that most companies don't have a lot of good ideas. The delay and cost incurred by "old style" development was in a lot of cases a helpful limiter -- it gave more time to update course, and dumb and expensive ideas were killed or not prioritized.
With LLMs, the speed of development is increasing but the good ideas remain pretty limited. So we grind out the backlog of loudest-customer requests faster, while trying to keep the tech debt from growing out of control. While dealing with shrinking staff caused by layoffs prompted by either the 2020-22 overhiring or simply peacocking from CEOs who want to demonstrate their company's AI prowess by reducing staff.
At least in my company, none of this has actually increased revenue.
So part of me thinks this will mean a durable role for the best product designers -- those with a clear vision -- and the kinds of engineers that can keep the whole system working sanely. But maybe even that will not really be a niche since anything made public can be copied so much faster.
Honestly I think a lot of companies have been grossly overhiring engineers, even well before generative AI; I think a lot of companies cannot actually justify having engineering teams as large as they do, but they have to have all these engineers because OtherBigCo has a lot of engineers and if they have all of them then it must be important.
Intentionally or not, generative AI might be an excuse to cut staff down to something that's actually more sustainable for the company.
>>If any censorship demand gets through our border, we fail.
That means we defend every site, however small or controversial it may be, from foreign attempts to infringe on their constitutional rights. It means not giving up so much as an inch of ground without a major fight, if those are the instructions. It means we must not ever lose.
--
That is a powerful pro-bono defense message by the US person doing it.
Just like the Trump says climate crisis is a hoax and wins elections, can't somebody in the UK say Online Safety Act is nonsense and win election and repeal it?
>>Every major AI company and hardware vendor are on a speed dial. This kind of power is really hard to give up. But curiosity ultimately won out in my head.
A simple feeling has such a power.
May he gets an opportunity to create one more powerful tool before retiring.
The second I stop being curious I stop finding new and exciting things to do, and I stop feeling fulfillment. It’s one of the biggest signs saying “it’s time to move on”.
I feel so strongly for the people who can’t afford the luxury. Ive been there, unfulfilling jobs for years because bills or resumè building.
In short I went from a small company position with very little growth and constant paycheck delays to a job with very clear monthly metric goals and a manager that lets me pursue projects for our office and client that actually help and improve everyone’s experience.
My field is really small and most hiring managers/HR people frankly have no clue how to hire for it, so I have a genuinely great resume and still got ghosted for many positions I was easily qualified for.
So hopping from a low paying position I was very tired with, to a job with daily activities I actually enjoy, that pays way more appropriately, was a several year process when it would be a 2 month process in a bigger field.
Realistically if I had to attribute anything in particular it’s these two things:
1: knowing what kind of work would actually fulfill me, which turned out to be fairly repetitive grunt work with 10% special projects.
2: learning our primary software VERY well. I have not met any other analyst who knows the quirks and tricks as well as I do, but that mostly just comes from 8 years of struggling with it and their nonexistent customer support.
The low standards are important for this as well because I am making 15% over the median personal income, and many people on here have ambitions WAY higher than that. But my partner makes double what I do, we have no kids, and we have cheap rent for our area so I really am thankful for what we have.
Pursuing what actually interests me is easy as well because I’m happy with a job that’s 90% assembly line work and 10% actually novel project work.
Definitely make sure to check since it's easy to test and easy to treat, but remember that it could be both. What blows is that some doctors can become really dismissive of the idea that you might have something like ADHD if your chart already carries a different label (thyroid, personality disorders, depression, etc.) so watch out for that, it can be a challenge to get them to take it seriously.
Generally you’ll have both a blood test for thyroid dysfunction and possibly a sleep study because chronic sleep deprivation also presents with adhd like lack of focus.
strangers were replying to women’s photos and asking Grok, the platform’s built-in AI chatbot, to “remove her clothes” or “put her in a bikini.” And Grok was doing it. Publicly. In the replies. For everyone to see.
Wow. Thats some really creepy behavior people are choosing to show off publicly.
Grok needs some tighter gaurdrails to prevent abuse.
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