Falcon 40B is allegedly the closest thing out there. It sure beats the hell out of all the other open source models I've tried, but good luck finding hardware that can run it.
Cowen's review misses the point, which is that Graeber is probably right about academia (not coincidentally, that's where he worked). Academia has no profit motive so all the money gets sunk into an ever-expanding bureaucracy rather than lowering prices or paying dividends to shareholders.
The thing is, Graeber is wrong about the entire rest of the economy, where 99% of people live and work.
Having worked long time in both academia and industry, I can assure you the differences when it comes to bullshit jobs are minor. You might argue about the color of the turd, but it still tastes like shit.
In the US this is completely untrue. Research universities basically never have layoffs. In contrast, Google alone has in the last year laid off more people than the combined faculties Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford.
Private sector layoffs are harder in Europe and academia is less well funded, so it might be true-ish in Europe.
The book is based of interviews, so certainly some people feel that way. Anecdotally, plenty of people I talk to (in industry) question the usefulness of whatever widget they're building.
I don't think he got a book deal to write this doorstop about the utterly banal claim that some people find their jobs unfulfilling. Like, duh, that's why they pay you. He got the book deal because his pitch is that the jobs are actually bullshit, i.e. the kind of jobs some salarymen have in Japan where the company is expected to keep you employed and you are expected to show up for 12 hours a day but whether actual work gets done productively is sort of beside the point.
I think this misses the point. At the beginning he states very clearly that the people providing the labor are best positioned to determine if the labor is bullshit, which seems like a reasonable starting point. The purpose of the book is probing how a system that's supposed to be ruthlessly efficient and profit seeking could waste so much money on bullshit.
For those who haven't read the book the answer is largely what he terms "managerial feudalism". The economic motives of any individual manager, up to and including the CEO, often don't align with the abstract ideal of a brutally efficient capitalist firm. They get money and status by having a large "court" of underlings. If you've worked at a growth stage company it seems impossible to deny that this doesn't happen in the tech industry.
Sure, managerial feudalism is totally a thing but also CEOs are aware of that and shareholders are aware of that which is why layoffs and reorgs and such happen periodically at any company in a competitive business.
But the rank-and-file employee who's trying to assess whether their job generates value will have a very hard time doing this at all accurately. You need a lot of business strategy context to understand why the company is actually employing you (as opposed to what they tell you, which is always going to be "because you're amazing and talented and a valued team member")
> At the beginning he states very clearly that the people providing the labor are best positioned to determine if the labor is bullshit, which seems like a reasonable starting point
seems like a pretty questionable starting point tbh, especially when he starts conflating the idea of actual bullshit with would prefer to be doing something else, like his example of his corporate lawyer friend who thinks his job is bullshit mainly because he'd rather concentrate on being a 'poet-musician'. It's not 'managerial feudalism' causing people to get paid more to solve large organizations' legal problems than scratch their own musical itches. And at the other end of the scale, some of the most parasitical workers really love what they do, whether that's because they love the thrill of browbeating people into giving them money or because they have a genuinely bullshit "strategy" job for internal politics reasons which has been designed to make them feel much more important than they actually are.
(and there's lots of pre-existing material on the efficiencies and inefficiencies of fields like law and adverse selection problems within firms, most of which works from better assumptions. Plus of course Marx's theory of alienation - one of his better theories - offering a theory for why people become more dissatisfied with the work they do as industrial processes become more efficient)
I'm glad you don't feel your job is that way. This book, however, is an anthropology of people who Themselves, feel that their job is pointless. You can argue that they are incorrect, but Graeber's point is -
Who is more likely to know whether a job is valuable: you, or the person actually working it?
I'd trust their manager or skip-level manager more than I'd trust them. Lots of rank-and-file workers really have no idea how they generate value for the organization. Until you've spent a lot of time managing people or at least sitting in on management decisions, it's hard to understand the kinds of concerns that drive corporate decision-making. The fact that a corporate minion thinks their job is pointless means the job actually is pointless like 10% of the time, or that the minion just has no idea how the org works like 90% of the time.
I love that this guy is a leftist Occupy Wall Street guy who wrote a whole book whose fundamental premise is "what if capitalism was not actually ruthlessly profit-seeking, but actually kept millions upon millions of people employed doing nothing basically out of charity".
It sort makes sense in the context of tightly state-controlled capitalist economies like Japan, but in a US context it's just comical. The same evil corporate managers who get lambasted for laying people off to satisfy Wall Street's demand for quarterly profit growth are supposedly keeping loads of other people employed just for funsies.
The hierarchy of empire builders fatten up on subordinates at every occasion, at certain times 'right sizings" become en vogue and blanket decrees for firings come down from above. They are complied with so you might see a short term net reduction, but the bulking process never even blinks
If you're able to identify these situations at all reliably, you can make a lot of money as a consultant. Like, way more than whatever you're earning right now.
I mean, both can be true at the same time? I think the point is more that working a bullshit job is like an evolved form of Marx's alienated labor. Instead of not seeing yourself in whatever you create, you create nothing, but are told to keep a charade of productivity up anyway.
It's not a charade of productivity if it is producing value for some stakeholder.
"some people get fulfillment from their jobs" is a very very banal take. The pitch for Graeber's book is that he's going beyond this banality and actually claiming the jobs are generating no value at all.
Depends on your perception of value. Plenty of things are valuable for a company but clearly useless for the world. Some things aren't even valuable for the company but is to a manager, etc.
Some things are clearly valueless. For example, if you slave away for 6 months creating a report on something, and then the document is never even opened by anyone, your work was clearly valueless. There are a lot of jobs which have components like that in public administration, in military, as well as in private sector, in areas like compliance, due dilligence etc.
For example, I once worked on a team tasked with auditing a large EU-funded project. We were hired only because the EU fund required a post-mortem audit. The actual public administration officials who hired us to do the audit never seemed interested in the contents of our audit report, as long as it didn't contain anything that would put them in a bad light. The whole audit was mostly bullshit work. For extra irony, the project we audited was also largely bullshit work - tens of millions of euros spent on a system which ultimately didn't work, and its users had to send each other excel spreadsheets instead (with the data that the system was supposed to be managing). Ocassionally, they had to come in to work on a Saturday to enter the data into the BS system that provided no value to them.
> For example, if you slave away for 6 months creating a report on something, and then the document is never even opened by anyone, your work was clearly valueless.
It seems plausible at least that you could evaluate a potential path forward, decide it is a dead end, let everyone know it is a dead end, have the report there just for backup in case anyone asks, and then not actually have anyone ask (maybe you have a really good reputation). I’d say the report there was still useful, even if only as an insurance policy.
> in public administration, in military, as well as in private sector, in areas like compliance, due diligence etc.
agree 100%. The commonality there is that these are things where the profit motive can't discipline wasteful management.
I'd also throw in the non-profit sector in general, in addition to what you listed. Without ongoing hard work by donors to prevent waste, non-profits become very good at incinerating all their money on excessive overhead.
The problem is that the "stakeholder" is (more often than not) Bob, the manager from the neighbouring department. So, "producing value for the stakeholders" is essentially "doing what Bob perceives as useful", so Bob can in turn appear as useful to upper management. So yes, it's a charade.
If you're doing something useful for Bob, and he's doing something useful for upper management, and upper management is doing something useful for shareholders... then transitively you're probably doing something useful for shareholders. Or at least to reject that hypothesis you'd need a lot of visibility into what Bob is doing, and what the upper management is doing, and what their respective goals/priorities/strategies are.
You could still be doing a bullshit job, though. Shareholders are institutional nowadays and what they ask for can very easily not be aligned to their needs. Not to speak of needs of the wider society.
Pension fund manager wants bonus, not to ensure livable conditions for the next couple of generations whose funds he's managing.
There are lots of jobs that make the world less livable but are clearly not bullshit jobs. Like if you work in marketing at a cigarette company you are probably a bad person, and you are advancing bad goals, but you are doing real, non-bullshit work every day.
The bullshit job concept is not "this is making the world worse off", it's "no one would notice if this job ceased to exist".
There is a real theory out there that index funds are making companies less cutthroat and competitive, but there's pretty limited evidence to support the theory. And if you can identify any companies with a notably high amount of fat to cut, there's a lot of money to be made working for an activist investor trying to get those companies to fire all their bullshit workers.
If you can't identify such companies, you may just be a bullshitter yourself though.
when people (like you) use "productivity" and "value" and "stakeholder" i generally write them off because they are uselessly vague abstractions. its so irritating to simplify things in this way, there's basically nothing to talk about at that level.
Trying to assess productivity without a clear stakeholder and value metric is what's pointlessly abstract. "Did this generate additional profits for shareholders" is a concrete way to measure productivity. "Did this make Mother Earth's vibes better" is not.
Java has tons of nice additions (Lombok, NullAway, Manifold) but that's not part of the language itself. When you bind yourself to libraries like these, you're stuck waiting for them to update whenever a new Java release comes out. That can take months or years, and sometimes a library just stops getting updated at all.
If Java were to include NulLAway in their standard language, which they clearly can do if they wanted to, I would consider it to have feature parity with other modern languages.
If you import Java libraries into Kotlin, you can still get NPEs from the libraries. And if you don't import Java libraries into Kotlin, well... you could just write Java without those Java dependencies, too.
I'm happy to take a crack at Go and C++, but coming from Java it is totally impossible to decipher wtf is going on in Scala. Kotlin is better, but still pretty awful.
Also, devs who use Go and C++ usually have a good reason (embedded systems and such), but Kotlin and Scala use seems to be motivated mostly by vaguely hipster-y annoyance with Java 8. And, like, sure, if you are annoyed by Java 8 and then use a language designed to have nothing in common with Java 8 except that it can import Java libraries and run in the JVM... well, it's gonna be a pain in the butt for your colleagues who do Java all day. And some of them aren't going to make the effort to work with it.
Go is great for CLIs and utilities. It compiles to native code, has a low memory footprint, and the source code is pretty readable even if you've never written Go before. And when it crashes you get a human-readable stack trace not just a core dump :)
But I've never seen a large-ish Go application that I didn't hate. Because, yeah, as you said, it's closer to JS in a lot of ways.
I meant it in the way that Go is not cut out for most embedded use cases due to having a fat runtime with GC.
It is ok for CLIs and small utilities, but I can’t really stand looking at it (they went with a type syntax that is neither C-like, neither Haskell-like and is absolutely unreadable to me, even though I can usually get the gist of any language from having seen my fair share of syntaxes).
> Kotlin and Scala use seems to be motivated mostly by vaguely hipster-y annoyance with Java 8.
Now that I think about it they seem like Instagram of language/code/devs. Mostly obsessed on surface level, superficial syntax features. IMO it is great in same sense as cooking with meal kit cooking is superior to cooking with grocery shopping.
I hate to admit it as someone who enjoy trying new languages and enjoyed my time using haskell a long time ago, but scala 2.x was definitely the most confusing and intuitive language i have ever used professionally. Really felt like a collage of desperate features without any coherence between them.
> A tiny language with only a few, but powerful, features which can be used as building blocks to express even the most advanced patterns.
And yet from the scala 3 website itself :
> One underlying core concept of Scala was (and still is to some degree) to provide users with a small set of powerful features that can be combined to great (and sometimes even unforeseen) expressivity. For example, the feature of implicits has been used to model contextual abstraction, to express type-level computation, model type-classes, perform implicit coercions, encode extension methods, and many more. Learning from these use cases, Scala 3 takes a slightly different approach and focuses on intent rather than mechanism. Instead of offering one very powerful feature, Scala 3 offers multiple tailored language features, allowing programmers to directly express their intent:
> The problem are just the people "holding it wrong".
If enough people have the same problem with a programming language, at one point it become the problem of the language, not the people.
> Just use the best parts of OOP and FP together!
Assuming that one can cleanly extract the best part of OOP and FP without bringing the baggage of eiter. It's not clear to me that those part don't have a certain level of "contradiction" which leads to the whole beeing less coherent than just OOP or FP.
I'm iffy on calling it theft. Presumably, even with a VPN, they would still have to abide by the simultaneous view limitations. Provided they're accessing the content for the same market they pay for Netflix in. At that point, what is the difference between streaming the video to devices far apart, or sitting in the same room?
You had the subscription, so I assume you experienced value from it.
But you are willing to make a stand and deny yourself that value so other people could share their Netflix. People you don't know.
Thats extremely principled and selfless. I have a hard time believing this. There are way more meaningful ways to help others by denying yourself value.
You didn't cancel Netflix to feed a homeless person but to help someone with too much time and too little money, but no so little they couldnt a roof, a couch, a TV and a internet connection, from wasting their life watching TV.
I will gladly tell you my reasons, but first I'd like to know something: why are you telling me that my decision makes no sense at the same time as asking for my reasons? How do you know it whether it makes sense without knowing why I do it?
This approach to conversation doesn't make me hopeful you will honestly think about my reasons, since you already decided they don't make sense.
I avoided answering the question due to the reasons I previously stated.
My reasons, in roughly decending order of importance:
- They went back on their earlier promises. I don't like it when companies do this. As a consumer, my best way to affect this is to vote with my wallet.
- Cost of living is already high enough that the additional expense will be too much for those who already can't pay for much. Entertainment is important, especially in times that are getting harder.
- Netflix has been making terrible creative decisions time after time, and I don't feel like giving them more money as-is.
Yes, it does make sense. I made the same decision.
It doesn't have to be a "selfless" decision. I made it for myself. Tell me, what part of streaming video involves them needing to track my location and decide when I am at an acceptable one to do so. The fact that they are gathering and using that information at all is not acceptable to me. I canceled immediately because I won't pay them to do such a thing.
This sounds kinda fake to me. Like, how did the AI have a concept of an operator, or the operator's physical location, or comms equipment used to communicate with the operator, and how did it game out the consequences of destroying the operator or comms equipment? It would need an extremely sophisticated model of the world that's well beyond anything GPT-4 evidences.
I'd guess the "AI" was another human in a wargame, not an actual AI.
Reinforcement learning with a dynamic world model. It's a pretty standard approach to training agents, although there are a lot of problems with this technique as well. People have used it to create agents for Minecraft, racing games, Nethack, lots of old arcade games and so forth.
