I came across a quote in a forum which was part of a discussion around why corporate messaging and pandering has gotten so crazy lately. One comment stuck out as especially interesting, and I'll quote it in full below:
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C suites are usually made of up really out of touch and weird workaholics, because that is what it takes to make it to the C suite of a large company. They buy DSS (decision support service / software) from vendors, usually marketing groups, that basically tell them what is in and what isn't. Many marketing companies are now getting that data from twitter and reddit, and portraying it as the broad social trend. This is a problem because twitter and reddit are both extremely curated and censored, and the tone of the conversation there is really artificial, and can lead to really bad conclusions.
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This is only somewhat related, but if OpenAI did actually succeed in building their own successful social media platform (doubtful) they would be basing a lot of their model on whatever subset of people wanted to be part of the OpenAI social media platform. The opportunity for both mundane and malicious bias in models there seems huge.
Somewhat related, apparently a lot of English spellings were standardized by the invention of the printing press. This isn't surprising; it was one of the first technologies to really democratize written materials, and so it had a very outsized power to set standards. LLMs feel like they could be a bit like this, particularly if everyone continues with their current trends of intentionally building reliance on them into their products / companies / workflows. As a real life example, someone at work realized you could ask co-pilot to rate the professionalism of your communication during a meeting. This seems quite chilling, since you're not really rating your professionalism, but measuring yourself against whatever weird bell curve exists in co-pilot.
I'm absolutely baffled that LLMs are seeing broad adoption, and absolutely baffled that people intentionally adopting and integrating them into their lives. I'm in my early 40s now. I'm not sure if I can get out of the tech field at this point, but I'm seriously thinking about options at this point.
I lowkey believe that the twitterification of journalists is probably one of the worst things to happen to the country in the last 25 years.
The social harm inflicted by journalists thinking "Damn, I can just go on twitter to find out what is going on and how people feel about it!"
I'm 40 too and used to laugh at all those programmers who were switching to wood working for a living. Now that vibe coding is being advertised all over the place, and will most likely be bought by the CEOs, and the trend of stealing open-source software without attribution while making fun of people who are proud of their knowledge and craft, I'm starting to think that all those future wood workers may not be wrong.
Whatever happens, it will be the end of programming as I know it, but it cannot end well.
> They buy DSS (decision support service / software) from vendors, usually marketing groups
What are these platforms, exactly? I've heard about them but have never come across them.