> If you want to see the cleanest expression of this, the place to look is LinkedIn.
It's funny how easily you can convince people that social media is not real life. Those influencers posting content 24/7 are a minority of people putting on a show, not a reflection of the real world. It's such an obvious feature of social media.
But when the topic changes to LinkedIn they completely forget that. They act like the LinkedIn lunatics they see posting AI thought leader posts twice a day are completely average and everyone is like this, except them of course.
Very few people post to the LinkedIn feed. Those who do are usually playing a game of some sort. If you go to the LinkedIn feed and draw conclusions, know that you're drawing conclusions about a vocal minority of wannabe business influencers. These people exist, but LinkedIn is a circus sideshow to the world of business. Not the main attraction.
I increasingly feel the same about the comment quality of HN in recent years.
There are three topics that inevitably get injected into every discussion: AI, politics, and nostalgia. The thing is, I don't understand the goal. This isn't reddit. Few people on here are that broke, uneducated, or impressionable. This site is also deliberately designed to not reward any interaction.
HN has definitely experienced a marked decline in quality over the last 15 years, (since the account I am currently posting from has existed,) I know this sort of remark is discouraged by the guidelines, but the trend is substantial enough that it cannot be ignored. I don't think users have any specific goal, but they are indeed posting the same inane drivel and joke comments as Reddit, notably including the classic (and idiotic) 'I mis-read/misunderstood the submission title X as Y hahah'.
Using a throwaway for this comment, but my first experience with this kind of thing was in 2013 when I joined a major international company with over 100k employees worldwide and realized that there were entire departments and organizations dedicated to delivering no value at all. Departments with 100s of people, with middle managers making several times the average salary in my country, where after years of work nothing of value was delivered and nobody was held responsible. I always wondered how companies like this can even exist and why shareholders invest in them.
Imagine that you decide that you would like to try farming, and you buy some geese. One of the geese, for whatever reason, begins to lay golden eggs. Your little farm is now unbelievably profitable. It is as profitable as your thousand closest neighboring farms combined. So naturally, you hire guards for the goose and experts on golden geese veterinary science to make sure that the goose is fed and healthy and is maximizing egg mass per day, and you hire people who figure out how to turn gold into wealth as profitably as possible, but at some point, you run out of ways to significantly improve the magic goose pipeline.
At this point, you've stopped growing. Not growing is completely unacceptable; it is anathema. So you start spending a lot of the money on long shot bets. Maybe try buying lots of geese to see if any lay golden eggs. You heard that somebody found a hen that lays golden eggs because of some magic beans, hire some bean farmers and see if that gets you more gold egg poultry. Jack who was the manager of goose calisthenics has really wanted a chance to grow, and he's dating your cousin, so let's put him in charge of the beans.
The only way to grow is long shot bets. Most of them will fail. All of them will be expensive. But the alternative is not growing. That can't ever happen.
The responsible alternative to not going is to return capital to your share holders who can then do the goose hunting themselves, and management should in invest their personal stock into other companies.
For very human reasons, they thing they have a better chance of finding the goose themselves.
> Not growing is completely unacceptable; it is anathema
Succinctly put and so very both unfortunate and accurate. The only other thing I can think of that grows endlessly is cancer. There’s an analogy in there if you squint hard enough.
Because in general they are still making more money than god on average.
This and they spend a lot of effort in rent seeking and otherwise ensuring their profits are encoded into laws.
Also, quite often those 100s of people sitting around are a political requirement. That is, they got some tax break to ensure X people have jobs. That is, it's a job program.
I was shocked by this as well. I think it's a natural property of large organizations and it takes great effort and great leaders to fight it.
The way I think about it is that building something truly successful comes with a tremendous amount of momentum. So much momentum that growth for these companies still occurs.
The people hired into a mature organization are literally there just to keep the lights on and let the momentum do its work. They also create and grow their little fiefdoms.
You can try and build something and innovate there, but it takes a deeply concerted effort to try and sustain it. Even if something is made wildly successful and is growing 50-100% year over year, it still likely pales in comparison to the 0.005% growth of the large core business.
Even if the new innovation is given space to breath, it can be killed at any point by the core business as the fiefdoms look over and say: that should be part of my org, or those resources can be better spent on the core business. So instead of waiting the years it takes for the new, small thing to grow large enough to be important it is easily killed by the parts of the organization just keeping the lights on.
If Wall Street was so wise they would only reward meaningful layoffs. Laying off 10% of a company by stack ranking every team accomplishes nothing. Particularly if the company just hires the same number of cut people next quarter.
If a tree has a dead branch, you cut it off. Cutting off 10% of the leaves evenly distributed among branches will remove some dead leaves, but it leaves the source of the problems unaddressed.
The only time layoffs work is when the go with cutting the product worked on completely from the company. Everything else should be managed by not growing too big when times are well, and not hiring when someone leaves when times are bad. There will be ups and downs in your market, figure out what they are and ensure your headcount matches that long term, ride out the bad times with no profit knowing they will get better again - cutting all other costs.
TIL HN still doesn't support rfc3492, 23 years after it was published, and so this domain is not rendered correctly on the site. :(
(It should appear as: マリウス.com )
Nowhere does RFC 3492 say that browsers MUST render IDNs in the original language, so I think saying "HN does not support" this RFC is false, or at least disputable. Personally I strongly prefer having it in untranslated Punycode to avoid scams; IMO everyone should browse the web with Punycode disabled.
Haven't thoroughly read this article but these passages from C. Wright Mill's The Sociological Imagination (1959) immediately come to mind:
Once upon a time academic reputations were generally ex-
pected to be based upon the productions of books, studies, mono-
graphs—in sum, upon the production of ideas and scholarly
works, and upon the judgment of these works by academic col-
leagues and intelligent laymen. One reason why this has been so
in social science and the humanities is that a man’s competence
or incompetence has been available for inspection, since the older
academic world did not contain privileged positions of compe-
tence. It is rather difficult to know whether the alleged compe-
tence of a corporation president, for example, is due to his own
personal abilities or to the powers and facilities available to him
by virtue of his position. But there has been no room for such
doubt about scholars working, as old-fashioned professors have
worked, as craftsmen.
However, by his prestige, the new academic statesman, like the
business executive and the military chieftain, has acquired means
of competence which must be distinguished from his personal
competence—but which in his reputation are not so distinguished.
A permanent professional secretary, a clerk to run to the library,
an electric typewriter, dictating equipment, and a mimeographing
machine, and perhaps a small budget of three or four thousand
dollars a year for purchasing books and periodicals—even such
minor office equipment and staff enormously increases any
scholar’s appearance of competence. Any business executive will
laugh at the pettiness of such means; college professors will not
—few professors, even productive ones, have such facilities on a
secure basis. Yet such equipment is a means of competence and
of career—which secure clique membership makes much more
likely than does unattached scholarship. The clique’s prestige
increases the chance to get them, and having them in turn in-
creases the chance to produce a reputation.
“Once upon a time academic reputations were generally expected to be based upon the productions of books, studies, monographs—in sum, upon the production of ideas and scholarly works, and upon the judgment of these works by academic colleagues and intelligent laymen. One reason why this has been so in social science and the humanities is that a man’s competence or incompetence has been available for inspection, since the older academic world did not contain privileged positions of competence. It is rather difficult to know whether the alleged competence of a corporation president, for example, is due to his ownpersonal abilities or to the powers and facilities available to him by virtue of his position. But there has been no room for such doubt about scholars working, as old-fashioned professors have worked, as craftsmen.
“However, by his prestige, the new academic statesman, like the business executive and the military chieftain, has acquired means of competence which must be distinguished from his personal competence—but which in his reputation are not so distinguished. A permanent professional secretary, a clerk to run to the library, an electric typewriter, dictating equipment, and a mimeographing machine, and perhaps a small budget of three or four thousand dollars a year for purchasing books and periodicals—even such minor office equipment and staff enormously increases any scholar’s appearance of competence. Any business executive will laugh at the pettiness of such means; college professors will not—few professors, even productive ones, have such facilities on a secure basis. Yet such equipment is a means of competence and of career—which secure clique membership makes much more likely than does unattached scholarship. The clique’s prestige increases the chance to get them, and having them in turn increases the chance to produce a reputation.”
Yeah, people really need to stop prefixing lines with 4 spaces when quoting something on HN. It needlessly forces a fixed width font with fixed width columns.
Just prepend a > to show you're quoting something. There's already precedent for it from e-mail and newsgroups, and most forums already use it for quoting. Make it italics if you want it to stand out a bit more.
I think a lot of this sentiment comes from the human size of modern institutions and corporations. A lot of us have lived through that small fraction of time where software engineering was done in small isolated groups working on top of small foundations. These days it is much harder for small groups of excellent people to achieve a lot more than their mediocre peers in already established fields.
Fact is large institutions inevitably lead to these kind of inefficiencies, we just moved on to larger projects and companies. If anything this phenomena is better explained by reduction in productivity growth than social media, in a realm of low productivity growth there is a tendency for consolidation which leads to larger companies* and thus more BS.
*: governments and institutions also have grown a lot more BS but I believe it is mostly tied to high population growth in the previous 100 years than low productivity growth. After all governments don't consolidate like companies do (war vs mergers/acquisitions/bankrupcies).
> I found myself in one of the rare situations in which I was mindlessly doom-scrolling on LinkedIn
Yet, the biggest bullshittery, is every company that almost each of you work at requires a link to a LinkedIn account on every job application, not optional. It has become a form of social credit. LinkedIn isn't completely meaningless either. A huge portion of the posts are also propaganda. Finding a new job is tied to listening to propaganda.
I miss the good ol' days when they would look at my resume, call the places to make sure I worked there, and invite me in to prove I know the skills that I put on my resume.
You can apply to a job without a LinkedIn if you want. You don't need a LinkedIn profile. I still get resumes without one.
The benefit of a LinkedIn profile is that I have something I can easily share around to teams or other hiring managers that provides an easy overview of the person in a format they're familiar with.
The linked in bullshitters aren't having fun, they don't actually think any of this is real, they might even prefer real work to grifting. People in charge of hiring and interviewing don't want this. The coercion is in the network really.. but everyone must become complicit.
Seen this a few months back. One of our "analysts" threw together a bunch of nonsensical shit and tried to pitch it as a product change to our management team. It was a powerpoint full of charts that made no sense populated by data that made no sense. After I bit I realised the text was so "normal" it was LLM generated. The guy had just made a pitch deck with an LLM after throwing some random numbers at it.
Our management team bought the idea right up.
I didn't say anything despite having professional qualifications in mathematics and statistics. 5 years ago I might have done. Now I know it's futile. Last time I tried to stand up for integrity over bullshit I got the full management language tirade thrown back at me for daring to question it. I realised after a bit that it's a fragile house of cards and if you push it the entire thing will go and they are doing everything they can to keep it standing.
This was so soul-crushing that I decided I was just going to fuck around and get paid until I get fired. See how long I can stretch it out. By doing that I'm doing less damage than they are.
I have a feeling this goes waaaay back, but was covered by claims of authority, in a time where merit and authority were intertwined.
My pet peeve is that management is a transferable skill that supersedes industry expertise. It is such a convenient lie that offers MBAs, management consultants, burned out business executives and “retired” generals alike a new career without actually knowing anything about what they are doing.
Bullshittery of the finest quality.
Speaking of bullshittery, I don't really appreciate it's little game when it comes to trying to convince me to turn off JavaScript. It knows when you see it and you'll know when you see it.
As someone who likes to half read an article then come back to it later, this actually pissed me off. Messing with your favicon and the tab title so I can't actually find your article to finish reading it later feels hostile towards users like me. As such I blocked this URL entirely. I don't care what their motive behind it is, if you want to act sus then I don't want to be on your website.
have you ever needed a tab actually knowing that you've tabbed away?
disabling JS seems too large of a change, but basic privacy of "not having your tabbing habits tracked" seems to be one addon away (and it's scary that it isn't an option of the browser)
compared to ~every other site that wont let me read a simple paragraph of text without allowing 20+ other domains in noscript, i thought it was pretty funny.
I think the converse of this is also true. People who do something good are derided for being unprofessional for not adhering to some cosmetic standard.
You can hardly blame people who make fancy websites for projects which look cool but you can't tell what it is they have to offer. If the alternative is a plain simple 'here it is, it does this' followed by a pile-on of armchair critics who have already decided on the quality of your project because your page lacks razzmatazz.
>an awful lot of modern professional life consists of producing artifacts whose primary audience is other people producing artifacts. Slide decks for slide decks, strategy documents about strategy documents
This is because thinking, communication, and collaboration are extremely valuable.
Yeah, but there's a point here. Are you comfortable with financial derivatives? Derivatives of derivatives? Futures of futures at the 4th, 5th or 50th order? The point being that if you go too far from the substance of things then you've lost the plot.
Engineers, especially SWEs, have lots of aphorisms to discourage exactly this and try to put it into professional doctrine and culture. (YAGNI, KISS, secondary-systems syndrome, etc)
Most people in management, finance, politics etc won't ever see it as bad unless they actually receive bad feedback. But bad feedback never comes if the incentive structures are broken (that's the point of TFA)
I think bullshittery is generally underestimated as a threat and not new at all. There are entire global organizations like Scientology who are founded on bullshitting. Entire product lines, food categories and industries made for no benefit to you except the thinnest layer of taste to bullshit your senses into accepting the trash into your body or life. Bullshitting just like lying isn't merely something a few percent of bad people do, the majority of individuals seems to do it every single day. It's pervasive in all of society, it's on every level, up from the lowest to the highest levels of political office.
The one good thing I hope comes from the en masse adoption for this sort of slop is that it renders the problem of the attention economy inert, because now anyone, including the platforms themselves, can now generate masses of pointless content at a whim. I hope, very very HOPE, that what that will do is that vacuous bullshit content will finally be SO abundant, so ubiquitous, that even regular people who generally don't care about the quality of things will FINALLY have to curate their feeds out of sheer necessity.
I genuinely think the future of Facebook, LinkedIn, et al could look very much like just bot farms generating bullshit at scale for other bots to consume and inflate the metrics on while everyone actually interested in... anything really, sails off to greener pastures that have revenue streams that don't require this.
To be clear, my ideal future would not be this, if for no other reason than the catastrophic electrical and bandwidth being wasted to pretend anyone on LinkedIn's best ranking posts understands a single thing under the sun, but I consider this a solid #2 option.
I find especially painful the tradeoff between productivity and visibility. Every minute I spend trying to advertise my project is a minute I'm not spending making it better.
> YouTube: Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom (lmao, what is this supposed to be?)
LTT (Linus Tech Tips, a YouTube channel) have used it as a real title before. "Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom - Intel Extreme Tech Upgrade" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkCX8d8WSOg
>started rewarding people who know how to look like they do [know what they are doing].
These days I'm wondering whether even that matters anymore. Fastest way to get rich these days seems to be insider trading, scams, onlyfans, leveraging addictions etc.
I think at least one approach that can work is de-globalization of social media into smaller, reputation/trust-ranked social networks. Discord is pretty good in this regard.
If you have suggestions for good Discord servers, please share. The bullshittery is coming out of my ears. I don't quite know where to turn to anymore. There's HN. Reddit is getting a bit crazy, all other social media is a pass for me.
In order to make friends you kind of need to have spaces where you can meet people and trust them enough to make connections
In person is obviously the safest for this. For online friendships I feel the places to meet people you can trust aren't AI or Scammers has shrunk a ton
Because I live in the UK, I’m often told this narrative of social decay, about how everything is getting worse and no one cares about doing anything properly. I disagree; I think it’s always been like this, and our feeling of disappointment persists because our expectation of improvement grows faster than actual improvement.
LinkedIn is full of bullshit because no one has anything genuine to say that’s appropriate for that platform. The people posting that nonsense don’t actually believe it.
The game is tedious, and if you don’t play you lose. It was like this before the Internet, too: my father limited his earning potential by being bad at networking, whereas my grandfather did went so far as to join the Freemasons to climb the corporate ladder to the top.
This. There are so many examples of this just from my childhood in the 60's in the U.S. My father was a machinist who refused to play this game--and he constantly complained about the other guys who did. There is nothing really new under the sun when it comes to human behavior.
In "Failure Is Not an Option", Gene Kranz, who ran Apollo Mission Control in the 1960s, brings up tolerance for bullshit. Someone tried to bullshit him about something. He put his arm around them and walked them out of mission control. They were never in that room again.
This is the bullshittery in its mature form, which doesn’t consist of individual lies, or individual scams, but a steady-state ecosystem in which a large share of professional output is produced to be seen by other people producing output, and in which the connection to anything resembling a real customer, a real problem, or a real outcome has gone slack.
Wait, what? Being two or more steps removed from "a real customer" makes your job bullshit?
I blame the ML engineers who work on these recommendation systems. They chase simplistic objectives like CTR, time spent, and so on, which can be gamed by this kind of content. This creates huge positive feedback loops in which popular content becomes even more popular and forms “metas,” while models train on clickstream data they themselves have influenced. They could try to fix this, but they won’t, because no one is asking them to
The bullshittery is the thing that will not survive enshittification. I keep telling people that all the tokens we're blowing are going to explode in cost as soon as these companies run out of other people's money. To me, this means being laser-focused on your core competencies and only "farming out" stuff to AI that you would offload to a vendor. We're all familiar with the level of risk there, and the kind of encapsulation you need to swap something out if a vendor fails you.
> bullshitter is not the same as the liar, because the liar at least respects the truth enough to try to hide it, but the bullshitter does not care whether what they are saying is true or false
I don't know about that. When you're prompting some LLM, the response you get is a statistically likely valid response to the prompt. Whether it contains any truth or facts or information at all is besides the point; the LLM has done its job of predicting something that is statistically likely to be the answer.
The fact that people assign any weight to that information is the mistake.
>The person next to you, who is willing to fake the demo and declare victory on LinkedIn even before the launch, is going to look more successful than you.
The second two are typical conservative tech-bro "the past was always better" type bs.
The first two are actual real effects of the complex world that we live in. Go back 150 years or so ago and most jobs were not bullshit jobs. That is, humanity spent most of its time trying to feed and clothe ourselves and if you weren't one of the few people with money then "not starving next winter" was pretty high on your list of priorities in working.
With the rise of industrialization, mechination, and transportation most of our needs can be met pretty easily (if society optimizes itself for that is a totally different story). It is highly that your job at this point has anything to do with continued human survival and instead you're working on some kind of revenue generation for some company.
This couples well with enshittification. It took a good part of said industrial revolution to learn how to make things of all kinds and make them reliably. But it turns out too much reliability isn't profitable over the long term. Getting your customer on an upgrade treadmill where they constantly give you more money makes you huge. You'll be able to get huge loans and buy up your reliable competition.
> If you want to see the cleanest expression of this, the place to look is LinkedIn.
It's funny how easily you can convince people that social media is not real life. Those influencers posting content 24/7 are a minority of people putting on a show, not a reflection of the real world. It's such an obvious feature of social media.
But when the topic changes to LinkedIn they completely forget that. They act like the LinkedIn lunatics they see posting AI thought leader posts twice a day are completely average and everyone is like this, except them of course.
Very few people post to the LinkedIn feed. Those who do are usually playing a game of some sort. If you go to the LinkedIn feed and draw conclusions, know that you're drawing conclusions about a vocal minority of wannabe business influencers. These people exist, but LinkedIn is a circus sideshow to the world of business. Not the main attraction.
You're describing a sort of Gell-Mann Amnesia: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect
I increasingly feel the same about the comment quality of HN in recent years.
There are three topics that inevitably get injected into every discussion: AI, politics, and nostalgia. The thing is, I don't understand the goal. This isn't reddit. Few people on here are that broke, uneducated, or impressionable. This site is also deliberately designed to not reward any interaction.
Well, foo. My comment about President Facade torpedoed before it set sail.
HN has definitely experienced a marked decline in quality over the last 15 years, (since the account I am currently posting from has existed,) I know this sort of remark is discouraged by the guidelines, but the trend is substantial enough that it cannot be ignored. I don't think users have any specific goal, but they are indeed posting the same inane drivel and joke comments as Reddit, notably including the classic (and idiotic) 'I mis-read/misunderstood the submission title X as Y hahah'.
Using a throwaway for this comment, but my first experience with this kind of thing was in 2013 when I joined a major international company with over 100k employees worldwide and realized that there were entire departments and organizations dedicated to delivering no value at all. Departments with 100s of people, with middle managers making several times the average salary in my country, where after years of work nothing of value was delivered and nobody was held responsible. I always wondered how companies like this can even exist and why shareholders invest in them.
Imagine that you decide that you would like to try farming, and you buy some geese. One of the geese, for whatever reason, begins to lay golden eggs. Your little farm is now unbelievably profitable. It is as profitable as your thousand closest neighboring farms combined. So naturally, you hire guards for the goose and experts on golden geese veterinary science to make sure that the goose is fed and healthy and is maximizing egg mass per day, and you hire people who figure out how to turn gold into wealth as profitably as possible, but at some point, you run out of ways to significantly improve the magic goose pipeline.
At this point, you've stopped growing. Not growing is completely unacceptable; it is anathema. So you start spending a lot of the money on long shot bets. Maybe try buying lots of geese to see if any lay golden eggs. You heard that somebody found a hen that lays golden eggs because of some magic beans, hire some bean farmers and see if that gets you more gold egg poultry. Jack who was the manager of goose calisthenics has really wanted a chance to grow, and he's dating your cousin, so let's put him in charge of the beans.
The only way to grow is long shot bets. Most of them will fail. All of them will be expensive. But the alternative is not growing. That can't ever happen.
The responsible alternative to not going is to return capital to your share holders who can then do the goose hunting themselves, and management should in invest their personal stock into other companies.
For very human reasons, they thing they have a better chance of finding the goose themselves.
> Not growing is completely unacceptable; it is anathema
Succinctly put and so very both unfortunate and accurate. The only other thing I can think of that grows endlessly is cancer. There’s an analogy in there if you squint hard enough.
Because in general they are still making more money than god on average.
This and they spend a lot of effort in rent seeking and otherwise ensuring their profits are encoded into laws.
Also, quite often those 100s of people sitting around are a political requirement. That is, they got some tax break to ensure X people have jobs. That is, it's a job program.
I was shocked by this as well. I think it's a natural property of large organizations and it takes great effort and great leaders to fight it.
The way I think about it is that building something truly successful comes with a tremendous amount of momentum. So much momentum that growth for these companies still occurs.
The people hired into a mature organization are literally there just to keep the lights on and let the momentum do its work. They also create and grow their little fiefdoms.
You can try and build something and innovate there, but it takes a deeply concerted effort to try and sustain it. Even if something is made wildly successful and is growing 50-100% year over year, it still likely pales in comparison to the 0.005% growth of the large core business.
Even if the new innovation is given space to breath, it can be killed at any point by the core business as the fiefdoms look over and say: that should be part of my org, or those resources can be better spent on the core business. So instead of waiting the years it takes for the new, small thing to grow large enough to be important it is easily killed by the parts of the organization just keeping the lights on.
Everyone knows this is true of every large enterprise shop and is one of the reasons that wall street rewards layoffs.
If Wall Street was so wise they would only reward meaningful layoffs. Laying off 10% of a company by stack ranking every team accomplishes nothing. Particularly if the company just hires the same number of cut people next quarter.
If a tree has a dead branch, you cut it off. Cutting off 10% of the leaves evenly distributed among branches will remove some dead leaves, but it leaves the source of the problems unaddressed.
The only time layoffs work is when the go with cutting the product worked on completely from the company. Everything else should be managed by not growing too big when times are well, and not hiring when someone leaves when times are bad. There will be ups and downs in your market, figure out what they are and ensure your headcount matches that long term, ride out the bad times with no profit knowing they will get better again - cutting all other costs.
Follow the money, and answers become more obvious as to why. As to how? Hehehehe
entropy
TIL HN still doesn't support rfc3492, 23 years after it was published, and so this domain is not rendered correctly on the site. :( (It should appear as: マリウス.com )
Nowhere does RFC 3492 say that browsers MUST render IDNs in the original language, so I think saying "HN does not support" this RFC is false, or at least disputable. Personally I strongly prefer having it in untranslated Punycode to avoid scams; IMO everyone should browse the web with Punycode disabled.
Haven't thoroughly read this article but these passages from C. Wright Mill's The Sociological Imagination (1959) immediately come to mind:
For better readability:
“Once upon a time academic reputations were generally expected to be based upon the productions of books, studies, monographs—in sum, upon the production of ideas and scholarly works, and upon the judgment of these works by academic colleagues and intelligent laymen. One reason why this has been so in social science and the humanities is that a man’s competence or incompetence has been available for inspection, since the older academic world did not contain privileged positions of competence. It is rather difficult to know whether the alleged competence of a corporation president, for example, is due to his ownpersonal abilities or to the powers and facilities available to him by virtue of his position. But there has been no room for such doubt about scholars working, as old-fashioned professors have worked, as craftsmen.
“However, by his prestige, the new academic statesman, like the business executive and the military chieftain, has acquired means of competence which must be distinguished from his personal competence—but which in his reputation are not so distinguished. A permanent professional secretary, a clerk to run to the library, an electric typewriter, dictating equipment, and a mimeographing machine, and perhaps a small budget of three or four thousand dollars a year for purchasing books and periodicals—even such minor office equipment and staff enormously increases any scholar’s appearance of competence. Any business executive will laugh at the pettiness of such means; college professors will not—few professors, even productive ones, have such facilities on a secure basis. Yet such equipment is a means of competence and of career—which secure clique membership makes much more likely than does unattached scholarship. The clique’s prestige increases the chance to get them, and having them in turn increases the chance to produce a reputation.”
This formatting is intolerable on mobile.
> This formatting is intolerable on mobile.
Yeah, people really need to stop prefixing lines with 4 spaces when quoting something on HN. It needlessly forces a fixed width font with fixed width columns.
Just prepend a > to show you're quoting something. There's already precedent for it from e-mail and newsgroups, and most forums already use it for quoting. Make it italics if you want it to stand out a bit more.
Noted. Sorry.
Page 108.
https://ratical.org/ratville/AoS/TheSociologicalImagination....
https://ia801709.us.archive.org/6/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.10...
I think a lot of this sentiment comes from the human size of modern institutions and corporations. A lot of us have lived through that small fraction of time where software engineering was done in small isolated groups working on top of small foundations. These days it is much harder for small groups of excellent people to achieve a lot more than their mediocre peers in already established fields.
Fact is large institutions inevitably lead to these kind of inefficiencies, we just moved on to larger projects and companies. If anything this phenomena is better explained by reduction in productivity growth than social media, in a realm of low productivity growth there is a tendency for consolidation which leads to larger companies* and thus more BS.
*: governments and institutions also have grown a lot more BS but I believe it is mostly tied to high population growth in the previous 100 years than low productivity growth. After all governments don't consolidate like companies do (war vs mergers/acquisitions/bankrupcies).
> I found myself in one of the rare situations in which I was mindlessly doom-scrolling on LinkedIn
Yet, the biggest bullshittery, is every company that almost each of you work at requires a link to a LinkedIn account on every job application, not optional. It has become a form of social credit. LinkedIn isn't completely meaningless either. A huge portion of the posts are also propaganda. Finding a new job is tied to listening to propaganda.
Having a LinkedIn profile and doomscrolling the LinkedIn feed are two entirely separate activities.
Most people create a profile and update it when they're job searching, but they don't visit LinkedIn or interact with the feed at all.
I'm getting old.
I miss the good ol' days when they would look at my resume, call the places to make sure I worked there, and invite me in to prove I know the skills that I put on my resume.
You can apply to a job without a LinkedIn if you want. You don't need a LinkedIn profile. I still get resumes without one.
The benefit of a LinkedIn profile is that I have something I can easily share around to teams or other hiring managers that provides an easy overview of the person in a format they're familiar with.
> requires a link to a LinkedIn account on every job application, not optional. Finding a new job is tied to listening to propaganda.
Let's be clear, what this really means is that if you enjoy survival, you are forced into directly supporting the Epstein class. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-04/how-jeffr...
The linked in bullshitters aren't having fun, they don't actually think any of this is real, they might even prefer real work to grifting. People in charge of hiring and interviewing don't want this. The coercion is in the network really.. but everyone must become complicit.
Seen this a few months back. One of our "analysts" threw together a bunch of nonsensical shit and tried to pitch it as a product change to our management team. It was a powerpoint full of charts that made no sense populated by data that made no sense. After I bit I realised the text was so "normal" it was LLM generated. The guy had just made a pitch deck with an LLM after throwing some random numbers at it.
Our management team bought the idea right up.
I didn't say anything despite having professional qualifications in mathematics and statistics. 5 years ago I might have done. Now I know it's futile. Last time I tried to stand up for integrity over bullshit I got the full management language tirade thrown back at me for daring to question it. I realised after a bit that it's a fragile house of cards and if you push it the entire thing will go and they are doing everything they can to keep it standing.
This was so soul-crushing that I decided I was just going to fuck around and get paid until I get fired. See how long I can stretch it out. By doing that I'm doing less damage than they are.
I have a feeling this goes waaaay back, but was covered by claims of authority, in a time where merit and authority were intertwined. My pet peeve is that management is a transferable skill that supersedes industry expertise. It is such a convenient lie that offers MBAs, management consultants, burned out business executives and “retired” generals alike a new career without actually knowing anything about what they are doing. Bullshittery of the finest quality.
Speaking of bullshittery, I don't really appreciate it's little game when it comes to trying to convince me to turn off JavaScript. It knows when you see it and you'll know when you see it.
As someone who likes to half read an article then come back to it later, this actually pissed me off. Messing with your favicon and the tab title so I can't actually find your article to finish reading it later feels hostile towards users like me. As such I blocked this URL entirely. I don't care what their motive behind it is, if you want to act sus then I don't want to be on your website.
have you ever needed a tab actually knowing that you've tabbed away?
disabling JS seems too large of a change, but basic privacy of "not having your tabbing habits tracked" seems to be one addon away (and it's scary that it isn't an option of the browser)
Not amused by it editing my tab and icon to a Google Maps search pin for "adult entertainment clubs" on my work computer. OK, maybe a little.
compared to ~every other site that wont let me read a simple paragraph of text without allowing 20+ other domains in noscript, i thought it was pretty funny.
I keep javascript on because i want websites to not be broken by default. but if they insist, i can add their domain to my ublock filter
if anything, it's browser's fault for notifying page when you tab away from it
Yea, this was actually bullshit.
I think the converse of this is also true. People who do something good are derided for being unprofessional for not adhering to some cosmetic standard.
You can hardly blame people who make fancy websites for projects which look cool but you can't tell what it is they have to offer. If the alternative is a plain simple 'here it is, it does this' followed by a pile-on of armchair critics who have already decided on the quality of your project because your page lacks razzmatazz.
>an awful lot of modern professional life consists of producing artifacts whose primary audience is other people producing artifacts. Slide decks for slide decks, strategy documents about strategy documents
This is because thinking, communication, and collaboration are extremely valuable.
Yeah, but there's a point here. Are you comfortable with financial derivatives? Derivatives of derivatives? Futures of futures at the 4th, 5th or 50th order? The point being that if you go too far from the substance of things then you've lost the plot.
Engineers, especially SWEs, have lots of aphorisms to discourage exactly this and try to put it into professional doctrine and culture. (YAGNI, KISS, secondary-systems syndrome, etc)
Most people in management, finance, politics etc won't ever see it as bad unless they actually receive bad feedback. But bad feedback never comes if the incentive structures are broken (that's the point of TFA)
I think bullshittery is generally underestimated as a threat and not new at all. There are entire global organizations like Scientology who are founded on bullshitting. Entire product lines, food categories and industries made for no benefit to you except the thinnest layer of taste to bullshit your senses into accepting the trash into your body or life. Bullshitting just like lying isn't merely something a few percent of bad people do, the majority of individuals seems to do it every single day. It's pervasive in all of society, it's on every level, up from the lowest to the highest levels of political office.
In an attention economy the thing that pays is capturing attention - a terrifyingly finite thing that determines our lived experiences.
Rewarding people who are good that this is a compounding mistake.
The one good thing I hope comes from the en masse adoption for this sort of slop is that it renders the problem of the attention economy inert, because now anyone, including the platforms themselves, can now generate masses of pointless content at a whim. I hope, very very HOPE, that what that will do is that vacuous bullshit content will finally be SO abundant, so ubiquitous, that even regular people who generally don't care about the quality of things will FINALLY have to curate their feeds out of sheer necessity.
I genuinely think the future of Facebook, LinkedIn, et al could look very much like just bot farms generating bullshit at scale for other bots to consume and inflate the metrics on while everyone actually interested in... anything really, sails off to greener pastures that have revenue streams that don't require this.
To be clear, my ideal future would not be this, if for no other reason than the catastrophic electrical and bandwidth being wasted to pretend anyone on LinkedIn's best ranking posts understands a single thing under the sun, but I consider this a solid #2 option.
I find especially painful the tradeoff between productivity and visibility. Every minute I spend trying to advertise my project is a minute I'm not spending making it better.
loving the overlay you get when you open it in a tab and then tab away
I'm ashamed to admit, I had too many tabs open to notice :|
That was brilliant.
Some of the ones I spotted:
- FTX Cryptocurrency
- Infowars
- YouTube: Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom (lmao, what is this supposed to be?)
- YouTube: MrBeast en Espanol
- Netflix: Fifty Shades of Grey
- ChatGPT: Online Debate Argument Suggestions (haha - I've never done that...)
- Hacker News: The Internet Used to be Fun
- Google: Zuckerberg Nudes
- Official Church of Scientology
> YouTube: Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom (lmao, what is this supposed to be?)
LTT (Linus Tech Tips, a YouTube channel) have used it as a real title before. "Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom - Intel Extreme Tech Upgrade" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkCX8d8WSOg
>started rewarding people who know how to look like they do [know what they are doing].
These days I'm wondering whether even that matters anymore. Fastest way to get rich these days seems to be insider trading, scams, onlyfans, leveraging addictions etc.
I think at least one approach that can work is de-globalization of social media into smaller, reputation/trust-ranked social networks. Discord is pretty good in this regard.
If you have suggestions for good Discord servers, please share. The bullshittery is coming out of my ears. I don't quite know where to turn to anymore. There's HN. Reddit is getting a bit crazy, all other social media is a pass for me.
What topics are you interested in - I have about a dozen subscribed to.
Gaming? Webcomics? Fusion power? Space exploration?
that sounds like making friends.
In order to make friends you kind of need to have spaces where you can meet people and trust them enough to make connections
In person is obviously the safest for this. For online friendships I feel the places to meet people you can trust aren't AI or Scammers has shrunk a ton
A reasonable approach is the one that was used in real life: friends of friends can be invited to the space for compatibility screening.
Yeah of course
It makes it very, very hard to start from zero though. Like starting over in a new city
It is!
I simply cannot click such a domain name
This is an Internationalized domain name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name) - the actual domain shows up in browsers as マリウス.com but HN unfortunately doesn't decode or show it that way.
The author has a post on that, btw
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/never-click-on-a-link-that-looks-l...
I was befuddled too, thought it was an Elon Musk offspring's name or something. Turns out it is a Japanese character.
simply means you have never left your english-language bubble :)
Ha, I'm ESL :D
Because I live in the UK, I’m often told this narrative of social decay, about how everything is getting worse and no one cares about doing anything properly. I disagree; I think it’s always been like this, and our feeling of disappointment persists because our expectation of improvement grows faster than actual improvement.
LinkedIn is full of bullshit because no one has anything genuine to say that’s appropriate for that platform. The people posting that nonsense don’t actually believe it.
The game is tedious, and if you don’t play you lose. It was like this before the Internet, too: my father limited his earning potential by being bad at networking, whereas my grandfather did went so far as to join the Freemasons to climb the corporate ladder to the top.
This. There are so many examples of this just from my childhood in the 60's in the U.S. My father was a machinist who refused to play this game--and he constantly complained about the other guys who did. There is nothing really new under the sun when it comes to human behavior.
In "Failure Is Not an Option", Gene Kranz, who ran Apollo Mission Control in the 1960s, brings up tolerance for bullshit. Someone tried to bullshit him about something. He put his arm around them and walked them out of mission control. They were never in that room again.
We need more leaders like that.
Very apt parallel between LinkedIn and late night infomercials.
This is the bullshittery in its mature form, which doesn’t consist of individual lies, or individual scams, but a steady-state ecosystem in which a large share of professional output is produced to be seen by other people producing output, and in which the connection to anything resembling a real customer, a real problem, or a real outcome has gone slack.
Wait, what? Being two or more steps removed from "a real customer" makes your job bullshit?
> the modern economy has stopped rewarding people who know what they are doing, and started rewarding people who know how to look like they do.
Yes, this is a totally new phenomenon which has never ever been the case at literally every point in human history.
I blame the ML engineers who work on these recommendation systems. They chase simplistic objectives like CTR, time spent, and so on, which can be gamed by this kind of content. This creates huge positive feedback loops in which popular content becomes even more popular and forms “metas,” while models train on clickstream data they themselves have influenced. They could try to fix this, but they won’t, because no one is asking them to
Very much intertia bias that hamstrings discoverability
Those that can Do, those that can't Bullshit.
The bullshittery is the thing that will not survive enshittification. I keep telling people that all the tokens we're blowing are going to explode in cost as soon as these companies run out of other people's money. To me, this means being laser-focused on your core competencies and only "farming out" stuff to AI that you would offload to a vendor. We're all familiar with the level of risk there, and the kind of encapsulation you need to swap something out if a vendor fails you.
> bullshitter is not the same as the liar, because the liar at least respects the truth enough to try to hide it, but the bullshitter does not care whether what they are saying is true or false
thus, by definition, all LLMs are bullshitters
I don't know about that. When you're prompting some LLM, the response you get is a statistically likely valid response to the prompt. Whether it contains any truth or facts or information at all is besides the point; the LLM has done its job of predicting something that is statistically likely to be the answer.
The fact that people assign any weight to that information is the mistake.
> Whether it contains any truth or facts or information at all is besides the point
The definition of bullshit in the original article was precisely this: no care given to whether there is truth in what is said.
Relevant research paper: Hicks, M.T., Humphries, J. & Slater, J. ChatGPT is bullshit. Ethics Inf Technol 26, 38 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
BSOD now stands for bullshit on demand... thanks to AI
Been noticing this new phenotype of tech bro who writes with an air of superiority, subtly belittling all those beneath him. Also ardently believes in
- bullshit jobs
- enshittification
- kubernetes being a psyop
- tech landscape was best exactly during his career peak and has gone down since
The second two are typical conservative tech-bro "the past was always better" type bs.
The first two are actual real effects of the complex world that we live in. Go back 150 years or so ago and most jobs were not bullshit jobs. That is, humanity spent most of its time trying to feed and clothe ourselves and if you weren't one of the few people with money then "not starving next winter" was pretty high on your list of priorities in working.
With the rise of industrialization, mechination, and transportation most of our needs can be met pretty easily (if society optimizes itself for that is a totally different story). It is highly that your job at this point has anything to do with continued human survival and instead you're working on some kind of revenue generation for some company.
This couples well with enshittification. It took a good part of said industrial revolution to learn how to make things of all kinds and make them reliably. But it turns out too much reliability isn't profitable over the long term. Getting your customer on an upgrade treadmill where they constantly give you more money makes you huge. You'll be able to get huge loans and buy up your reliable competition.
What are your opinions on the first two?
Yes, give or take a couple of those points.
Some additional ones:
- believes SWE is now fundamentally different because of AI
- repeatedly belittles people who aren't on the AI hype train
- believes slop bans and distaste of AI art is gatekeeping