202608180835 Some things I read recently

#microblog #link

Futurism's article Bosses Are Becoming Obsessed With AI, Using It to Make Every Decision, Barraging Their Employees With Nonsensical ChatGPT Directives, and Even Asking It Who to Fire paints a somewhat grim picture of just how badly managers can affect their employees when they become obsessed with AI. I have personally seen a lot of these behaviors — at least in the small — in my workplaces. Here are some choice quotes from the article that resonated with me.

This attorney was one of numerous employees who spoke to Futurism about their experience with AI-obsessed bosses, relaying feelings of frustration and anger as managers and executives use the tech to barrage staff with nonsensical directives, unnecessary work, and perpetual pivoting.

Add it all up, and it’s a distinct new type of toxic work environment for the slop era. Slate found more evidence for the phenomenon earlier this year; one worker told the publication that managers “are getting cavities in their brains” due to the tech.

In some cases, employees said, they felt as though their employers had started living in a completely different reality. The workplace had become a constant battle between their version of reality versus the AI’s — and their boss, these workers said, always chose the latter.

“You’re on the front lines dealing with people day in and day out, and having the conversations, and being told what’s important to them, and taking that information back to a founder and saying, ‘Hey, I’ve talked to 15 people this week, and they’ve all literally said this exact same thing,'” recalled one man, a high-level sales strategist who also quit a job due to his then-boss’s AI fixation. “And the founder says, ‘Well, that’s not what we found. That’s not what Claude has said, or what ChatGPT has said.'”

Many workers pointed to an infuriating irony: the boss’s AI fixation was supposed to be a productivity booster, but instead fostered deeply unproductive workplace environments.

Next up is a response or addition to the classic Parse, Don't Validate¹ article. Parse, Don't Validate — In a Language That Doesn't Want You To by Christian Ekrem is a concise example of how to put Alexis's words of wisdom into practice in Typescript. I've long held the exact same views and used the same patterns in my code but never wrote it down in a post. Now I'll probably just link people to this one instead of writing my own. Plus it carries this banger of a one-line summation of this whole attitude.

make the type system carry the proof, not your memory.

Christian also wrote this great article referencing Fred Brooks's famous No Silver Bullet called There Is Still No Silver Bullet about the lack of

Butterick’Practical Typography is a beautiful online resource for typography and even some grammar. From the differences and proper usages of hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes to how to pick a good font, it has everything you need in our text-centric world.

Technostructuralism by Andrew Lilley Brinker (in 2019) is something I read a few years ago but wanted to revisit and remains relevant as ever. It argues that there is a divide in tech between people who view technology as inherently good and it is individuals who determine its outcomes. A technostructuralist, as Andrew coins it, is someone who believes the systems and structures are also important and they should be addressed holistically. The techno-libertarian would argue against structural fixes for systems because they would find them unnecessary. That argument is at the core of the philosophical divide in tech.

Rust is a structural response to C. Where a technolibertarian says “write better C,” a Rustacean says “write Rust, which changes the structure so it, and not you, carries the burden of correctness.”

This is not a small point. It’s a microcosm of the fact that the technologies we build are manifestations of our politics. It is not possible to keep politics out of tech, because our politics shape how we approach problems, and what we build to fix them.

Next up on my list is Profession by Isaac Asimov. Maybe I'll post about it here after reading it.