An Exercise in Self-Indulgence

  • “AI” is a responsibility diffusion machine

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    2 min read

    Spend any length of time in the corporate world and you’ll realize that many (most?) people care more about not being singled out for mistakes than they do about being recognized for doing great work. The fear of judgment is a bigger motivator than the thirst for praise.

    “AI” (I use scare quotes because what is being sold to us as AI is in fact not intelligent — it literally doesn’t understand the meaning of a single word) is an excellent way to achieve that goal — not only is it a consistent and dependable source of mediocre output, but it also offers an ideal patsy if anything proves unsatisfactory enough to warrant a response from management. The code is an illegible mess? Not my fault — it’s copilot. The translation botched several technical terms? Blame Google.

    These tools also serve as an excellent shield for management itself, people more concerned with having a line go up than they are with, for example, retaining customers through superior service. The former will show an immediate impact on the bottom line, for example by firing hundreds of support staff, whereas the latter is less tangible to begin with and also takes longer to have its effects felt. If customers prove to be so unhappy that they leave in measurable numbers, simply blame the AI for not being robust enough, rather than blaming the implementation of the tool itself.

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  • Shame and Fear

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    1 min read

    Looking at the political landscape in the US today (and the reactionary elements of society that enabled it) I have to wonder how much of it is driven by shame and self-hate. The idea that “every accusation is a confession” has become a cliché online but I think that’s because there’s a lot of truth to it.

    Spend any length of time (as much as you can stomach) reading the points of view of right-wingers and it’s clear that fear, a paralyzing and paranoid fear, is one of their greatest motivators. It’s why they cherish guns and prepping, crave a strong authority figure (“daddy’s home”) and fear points of view different than their own.

    But how much of that fear is because they are afraid of themselves? How many of them are repressed gay and trans people who are deeply ashamed and unaccepting of their true self? That would go a long way to explaining the irrational hatred for those minorities.

    Feb 14th edit: Here is an apropos comment from a five-time Republican presidential campaign staffer.

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  • Impostor Syndrome as the flip side of the Dunning-Kruger effect

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    1 min read

    The internet-famous Dunning-Kruger Effect is

    the tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability.

    In essence, the less one knows about a given skill or field the less able they are to understand how limited their knowledge is, and they therefore tend to overestimate their level of expertise.

    Impostor syndrome, on the other hand, is when someone feels they are in a position they don’t deserve, or that they aren’t skilled enough to warrant praise. This happens when a person expands their knowledge and begins to discover the branching paths within the vastness of a given field of knowledge; they realize that they know only a very small part of what is out there, so, ironically, as they develop expertise they will not feel like an expert — they will feel like they don’t know anything, like an impostor, while the Dunning-Kruger case carries on blithely.

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  • Use Regex to select content between HTML tags using VSCode

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    1 min read

    (?<=)(.*?)(?=<\/p>)

    In Visual Studio Code, start a search (making sure to activate the “use regex” button) and enter the parameters above. Replace the p tag with whatever HTML tag you need. Press alt+enter to select all occurrences of the match, then you can copy+paste into a new document. If you want to search between closing and opening tags instead, simply swap around the first and last parts that are between parentheses.

    My common use case for this is to extract page URLs from an XML sitemap. I use tags in the regex and can then copy the page URLs into a new document.

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