wordshaper

wordshaper, 17 days ago

@lauren I honestly never worry about the mad scientists. The mad engineers, on the other hand, those are the ones to watch out for.

wordshaper, 17 days ago

@ColesStreetPothole this is actually not bad? It seems bad because of all the bullshit ChatGPT nonsense, and the fact that for “marketing reasons” anything that vaguely involves neural networks gets labeled “AI”, but using trained neural nets to identify diseases (both from symptoms and from radiology reports) is actually a thing that works pretty well. In some cases it works better than people and in this specific set of circumstances it’s only going to get better.

wordshaper, 17 days ago

@ColesStreetPothole we aren’t too far off from X-ray/cat scan/MRI/ultrasound machines that spit out a diagnostic report along with the images, and that report will be more accurate than people. (Not perfectly accurate, but people are only in the low 90% range for accuracy, so at least better than people)

wordshaper, 17 days ago

@ColesStreetPothole you would think that! But it turns out not to be the case — when people evaluate the results from the trained models they tend to be a lot more careful and pickier, and usually there are two separate people doing the evaluation. The end result is the models are usually better, and absolutely much faster.

The trade off is they don’t catch what they aren’t trained for. A radiologist might look at a chest xray and go “no cancer, but TB” while the model just goes “no cancer”

wordshaper, 17 days ago

@rgs that’s today’s todo! It’s sunny today so we’re going to make the best of the view. The rest of the weekend’s a bit overcast so better for wandering around.

wordshaper, 17 days ago

@corgidad it is lovely here and I can recommend a nice off-season visit.

wordshaper, 19 days ago

@ColesStreetPothole every minute Richard Spencer is un-punched is a minute wasted.

wordshaper, 19 days ago

@trollball Frankly I suspect this move is driven by a combination of sleep deprivation, uncontrolled drug use, and a couple of decades of people telling him he's brilliant so the idea that he could be wrong doesn't even occur. (quite a few interviews have made it clear he's both regularly stoned and also has an ego big enough to see from space)

So... no. I think this is a dumbass idea that got stuck in his brain and nobody at Tesla could stop him from shooting himself in the face.

wordshaper, 21 days ago

@jjsil yep, that’s the one. I figured what with all the shenanigans Google is playing with the workforce I’d best order now while I have cash flow. (I’d be able to afford it just fine even if I get early retirement, I’d just feel weird spending the money in that case)

wordshaper, 25 days ago

@lizmat Yeah, at this point I'd only really recommend taking the job if you're looking at it as essentially a contracting job with a funny hat. (Or, if you're in the US, you're currently being screwed by our healthcare system but thankfully that's not the case for you)

The only reason I have any chill about all this is that I, and most of the people I care about at work, have passed the point where it would hurt to get laid off. Which is kinda sad, I guess, but it's where I'm at.

wordshaper, 25 days ago

But at least we're hiring in low-cost countries, so that's something. We're also helpfully telling many of the people being laid off that we're doing that in case, I guess, someone living in the Bay Area wants to move to Bangalore and re-apply to Google for their old job or something.

wordshaper, 25 days ago

@acdha When people with a lot of power get in over their heads and things actually start going wrong then the flailing is epic. With, unfortunately, a lot of collateral damage.

Frankly I suspect the people with the power to care about this are so divorced from reality that they're making the kind of decisions you usually expect from an antagonist in a Phillip K. Dick novel. Only, y'know, without all the hallucinogens. Probably.

wordshaper, 25 days ago

@WGAvanDijk @lizmat a sensible decision, I think. There were plenty of things in the US’ favor, compared to many places, but we’ve burned a lot of that down and even before then it wasn’t necessarily great, just the best of the available options.

When empires fall it’s always really messy, in part because of the usual delusion that the empire is not, in fact, fallen or even in danger of it.

wordshaper, 24 days ago

@corgidad that’s not too uncommon when we reshuffle things — we’ve done that plenty of times before, where teams pull out of a location and anyone on that team now has to find an internal opening. We’ve just been really fucking that up the past couple of years with all the freezes and nonsense.