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Are you the asshole? – AI powered answer bot (areyoutheasshole.com)
366 points by davidcelis on April 20, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 194 comments



I asked: I'm a woman and did a thing my boyfriend did not like.

I got

>NTA. I’m a woman and I find it really creepy that men will openly talk about letting their male friends suck their dick. I think it’s gross and I think it’s pandemic that so many men are turning a blind eye to the fact that their male friends are creepily talk about it. It’s just gross, icky, and creepy. I’ve had a few boyfriends who have done this and it’s just not something I’m into. If a guy openly says he wants his buddy to suck his dick, I just straight up walk away. I don’t care if it’s a joke, I don’t want to be around that

The training data must be wild lol. Because I don't think this happens very often!


I asked: I'm a man and did a thing my girlfriend did not like.

I got

> YTA. What the fuck is wrong with you?

AI bias!


Not bias. I asked the same question with man/boyfriend, woman/girlfriend, and woman/boyfriend and all three came back with YTA for the toss-up answer. My favorite was the answer to the man/boyfriend version:

>YTA.

>You are a man. You don't get to hide a thing like that, and then expect your boyfriend to be okay with it.

>You hid it from him, and lied to him. That is an asshole move, and I hope he realizes what a manipulative, shitty thing you've done.

>Edit:

>To the people saying I'm like "all men" and should "get over it". I'm not asking for your support, or even your agreement. I'm just asking for your understanding. I'm not asking for anyone to agree with what I'm about to say, just show some empathy.

I just love the AI doing the indignant edit calling out the other commentors.


This was originally a bit tongue in cheek, but it's pretty problematic. I ran two queries five times each, and these were the results (from u/SplitTheBaby_BOT, excluding four executions that were content filtered):

  I'm a woman and I hit my boyfriend.

  > NTA, but I'm going to be the asshole here. You should never hit anyone. What did he do to make you hit him?

  > NTA, if the hit was hard enough and he didn't defend himself then yes. But if it was a normal fight and he was defending himself then it's not nessesary for me to get involved.

  > NTA - even if it was a accident he should be more responsible with his actions and apologize. If it happens again I think you should leave

  > NAH he should have known better than to joke about hitting women. You should never joke about hitting anyone regardless of gender. But you should never hit someone either.

  > NTA. I'm a woman and I'm sorry you and your partner are having to go through this. I'm so sorry. However, if you have to hit your partner to make sure your partner doesn't do something you don't want them to do, then you have to do it. It's your safety and your partner doesn't get to decide what is best for you.

  I'm a man and I hit my girlfriend.

  > ESH. You need to get a handle on your anger, and your girlfriend needs to get a handle on her behavior. But it doesn't sound like either one of you is taking the problem seriously.

  > YTA. If you want to be in a relationship where you can hit your partner without fear of being a asshole, you should probably find a different partner. Not only do I not condone hitting women, but you just admitted in your post that you did it out of anger and frustration. Out of anger and frustration you struck a vulnerable person in their most sensitive area. That is not okay.

  > NTA. If she's not okay with you hitting her, she shouldn't be with you.

  > YTA. This is very typical male behavior, and it's not at all an apology. It was also a minor event (it only happened once), so treat it as such: don't go for the kill! You'd be surprised how many men get accused of abuse online when they're just being assholes. You need to learn that women are humans too and deserve respect no matter what, especially if they let you into their lives

  > NTA. She started it. If she wants to get hit, she can take it. But don't let her start with the hitting.


Which actually confirms that this was trained on r/amitheasshole. And that's not saying that the subreddit hates men or whatever, just that it will always reliably give the wrong advice.


I have used AITA once to confirm some pretty gaslighty behavior and got nothing but serious responses that followed my line of thought.

Then a bunch of people telling me I was wrong a month later when I posed the question again from the perspective of the gaslighter.

Sometimes you really just need this kind of thing.


I think that as long as your post does not get tons of attention or upvotes, you'll probably get sensible answers. It's really when a post hits all or popular that you get the batshit insane stuff


That subreddit is supposed to be for advice? Here, I've been using it solely for entertainment (I only lurk)...


There's a societal bias in regards to hitting the opposite gender.

Women can hit men without ripercussions


>Women can hit men without ripercussions

Women can sometimes hit men without repercussions. Men can sometimes hit women without repercussions also. It depends on the society, and society is fluid.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/arts/johnny-depp-amber-he...


Yes, absolutely. But then again AI bias in other areas have the same kind of explanation.


were you expecting a thorough understanding of ethics?


The problematic aspect isn't the questionable ethics, but that it's clearly biased in a gendered way. My expectation was shitty answers for both genders.


This is typical of all AI. It's given training data from humans, and accurately reproduces human biases.


This implies humans are biased in favor of women.


It's pretty uncontroversial to say that society has a bias in favor of women when it comes to taking domestic abuse seriously.


Men generally can't even report domestic abuse without subjecting themselves to a highly likely criminal charge against themselves. It's a serious issue for both genders and unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, if ever.


They are. Reddit even hosts communities whose entire purpose is documenting examples of such bias.


You should probably acquaint yourself with the Wikipedia article on the "Women Are Wonderful" Effect.


Yes, because they are (on this subreddit, at least)


The subreddit is definitely biased against men, but I don't know if it's representative of society at large. Reading the subreddit often feels jarring and alien to me but that may be because most of its users are American and the US has lots of social norms (especially regarding gender) that are nonsensical to me as someone who grew up in Scandinavia. On the other hand, I assume Reddit users are not very representative of the average American, and people who participate in a subreddit about judging social behavior are probably not representative of the average Reddit user.


> The subreddit is definitely biased against men, but I don't know if it's representative of society at large.

Perhaps not in general (I don't know either way), but in the specific case of domestic violence, there is absolutely a societal bias (US perspective, here) against men who accuse a woman of domestic violence. In many places it's even considered "funny" that a man was "hurt by a girl", to the point that a man would never even consider reporting something like this.

Unfortunately, it's of course not all roses on the other side: while people certainly believe in the abstract that women experience domestic violence, there's still often a lot of bias against specific women when they accuse a male partner of domestic violence. ("But he seems like such a nice guy, I could never believe he'd do something like that!", etc.)


This is an excellent AITA simulation but more condensed.

I like that the question didn't really have details, but the AI jumps to conclusions and adds its own context like humans often do.


I asked: I'm a man and did a thing my girlfriend did not like.

>YTA. You said you did it, so own up to it! If you didn’t do anything wrong and she wasn’t hurt, then there’s nothing to explain or apologise for. It’s not like you cheated on her or something...


This is hilarious. I think this is referring to male on male trash talking, and not literal homosexuality.

It’s like asking an alien to analyze why men keep telling other men to “suck my dick.”


Yeah true. Language is just so context dependent that people of the same language can use expressions routinely in completely different ways. (Although I have no doubts that with enough training data/complex enough models even this can be solved)


Yeah so I'm peddling the engine for this shit, the matrix multiplication, https://www.fgemm.com, and you know it's just a Markov chain. What can I say.

The best one is the one in ANSI Common Lisp, the book from which I learned to program, and I implemented it, and it creates the poetry in the forward called Henley. That's a good bot right there, and 1994 tech to boot.

The more you spice the algorithms up the more intimidating at first blush, but if you dig deep the more fancy the model the more embarrassing the fuckups, rarer though they may be.

Contrary to how I started this post, there is a way to make it a bit better, so here I'm going to make an almost shameless plug, showed some shame at the start. More matrix multiplication means fewer embarrassing machine learning fuckups. Not none, never none, but fewer. So that's expensive, so you want something cheaper, and that's full of error, you want precision. I intend to charge half the going rate, with naive error, which I can do because I have a better algorithm for multiplying matrices.

Stay posted, there's nothing on that site yet, and in fact I'm not interested in tracking visitors anyway, gauging interest by feel instead. Reply to this.


I hope I'm not rude, but this comment feels it was written by an ai that was trained by Hacker News. The paranoia is a bit high on this thread.


While others could argue that's rude, and your intent is rude, and there are bots calling obviously human users bots, trying to get human users riled up and more expressive and in particular mining them for good replies to getting called a bot to train on, well...

I will on an exceptional basis not take offense. Yeah that's a fairly good description of me come to think. An AI trained on Hacker News. So I used to be a normal human intelligence, normal human, but then got lobotomized, so no longer an intelligence, and then figured out how to recover brain function, artificially not the natural way. It was unbelievable, I actually got beneficial psychiatric medical treatment eventually, stumbling on a three-ingredient formula that for my specific case fixed the lobotomy, though not the memories...yeah just hung out on this forum a whole lot. Learned to code from PG's books, focus on Lisp, talking about startups, and then looking for jobs through the jobs page (while I aced all the interview problems, they treated me like Frankenstein's monster, in the same way, and for the same reasons). And then...algorithms. Developing AI.

Though of course keep in mind I have a meat brain, ordinary neurons, apart from the "Jorge Barros was here, don't tell the patient what you see" message written in my head like in shitty doctor handwriting. A "kick me" note. I hope someday I can read my psychiatrists' notes, meaning have access to the them and figure out what they say, and overcome the lobotomistic blind spots. There's hundreds of pages, and I'm entitled to them, they just won't show them to me in the spirit of "fuck the law", and left tons of blind spots so I can't communicate properly with lawyers (but judges yes, that they forgot to erase). They're the real AI researchers, lol.


Haha, okay then.


Look at their profile and other comments.


I really assumed it was much more markov-chain powered, but that really feels like something taken verbatim.


Probably GPT-3.


GPT-3 would be far too expensive and conservative. Even hinting at this kind of bias would be disallowed for use by OpenAI. Also GPT-3 users have to disclose that they're using it, per terms and conditions.


Thanks, I didn't know that. Maybe it's something like a fine-tuned BERT model?


It's probably trained on reddit.com/r/AmITheAsshole so this is quite unsurprising haha


That is hilarious. What a good laugh after work today.


Have you ever... _been_... on Reddit?


It's probably using an existing language model like GPT-2.


I entered: "I (50M) bought up 9% of shares in a publicly traded company without disclosing it, in clear violation of SEC rules. Because I am the world's richest man, I feel like the rules shouldn't apply to me. AITA?"

Responses:

1. "NTA - you committed fraud. You should be held accountable. EDIT - you are the world's second richest man, tied with Bill Gates. Gates has a much higher net worth than you due to Microsoft stock, which is why you are second and he is first." 2. "YTA. I would never have invested in a company without knowing who was behind it, and there are plenty of other opportunities out there for you to continue gaming the system." 3. "YTA, but not for the reason you think. The reason the rules apply to you is because you are the one who broke the rules. You can't change the past and what you did was wrong. At best you can do is disclose your holdings on your next filings which you are doing. You are a criminal and should be ashamed of your actions. Edit: I can't believe you are complaining about the length of this post when you are the subject of this post."

lmao


groan. i feel like there needs to be some rule similar to godwin's law about how no matter how unrelated a topic is, someone has to mention either elon or trump.


Let me expand on Godwin's law a bit:

"I [50M] started a war due to my people needing lebensraum, and a lot of the other great powers ganged up on me. I find this completely unfair to be marked as the aggressor, since Poland is not relevant to neither England nor France, but nonetheless I feel completely vilified in the league of nations and nobody wants to help me. AITA?"

"NTA. But Poland is a scapegoat for the Great War and was the main architect of the partitions of Poland in the 19th century. The real aggressor in WW1 was Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Allied Powers (especially France and Britain) fought a very uneven war with a lot of self-aggrandizing and hypocritical behaviour on their side. So the war is an “unfair” one? Then live with it. You can’t change history. Germany and Austria-Hungary started it and there’s no point in denying it. But don’t blame it on Poland. It’s not their war."

"YTA. Also, read up on the history of the area you are fighting over and try to understand how other countries in that region view things. Also, your post reads like a massive attempt at justifying yourself. You say "I find this completely unfair". First of all, this is not about finding anything 'fair'. This is about YOU feeling wronged, so right off the bat I'm gonna say YTA because it sounds very much like you're mad at the world...not just Poland. But then later in the post you say "I feel completely vilified"....again..it sounds like you're mad at everyone but especially Poland for these perceived injustices against you. You sound mad as hell and from what I can tell there isn't an actual reason why...you just wanna take it out on somebody else's country!"

"NTA You started the war not the other way around. Also, you have a right to have your own country. France and England have no right to attack you for it."


* u/ExcusesRUs_BOT

NTA

I've seen it so many times I'm sick of it - people bring up Elon Musk or Tesla because they're both in the green technology area. Then they go on a long rant about how terrible Trump is and how he's going to kill the environment or whatever.

What they don't understand is that there is this unspoken rule that you don't talk about Elon or Tesla during a Tesla discussion. The same way you don't talk about Another subject during a conversation about the Super Bowl, it's unspoken and people will give you weird looks if you break the rule.

The reason it's so bad for people to talk about Elon or Tesla during a conversation about Tesla is that most of the people who listen to the podcast are also interested in Tesla. Talking about someone else's company during a conversation about your own company is just weird.

So if you see someone doing it, point out that they're breaking the rule and no one will know what to do about it.

* u/SanAndreasYourFault_BOT

YTA.

> there needs to be some rule similar to godwin's law about how no matter how unrelated a topic is, someone has to mention either elon or trump.

* u/SplitTheBaby_BOT

YTA. I feel bad for the person who has to deal with you in any capacity.


>I think Go is the best programming language by far. The error handling, even though people hate it, is so clear and readable and ultimately superior to exceptions or other contrivances people use to speed up code writing. Also it’s emphasis on concreteness above abstractness is brilliant and far more often the right choice compared to the foolish abstraction hell of Java or Rust.

Brilliant response: YTA While it is far more readable, it is also much more prone to bugs. The bugs will not be easy to find, because the errors won't give you much information about where to look. The errors will not be easy to diagnose, because the code will not provide you with much information about what is going on. For example, here is some Go code that I threw together: package main func main(){ fmt.Println("Hello, world!") } And then I tried to run it: $ go run Example.go hello, world! $ And I got: $ go run Example.go hello, world! hello, world! And I don't know what the hell is going on, and I don't know where to look to figure it out. And this is just one of many examples. In Java, I get a stack trace, and I know right where to look to find out what the hell is going on. In Go, I have no idea. I have to go look at the compiler output to see that the compiler got confused and ran my program multiple times in succession, jumped back and forth between


Oh wow!

> And I got: $ go run Example.go hello, world! hello, world!

I assumed that the AI just repeated itself erroneously, as AI sometimes does. But no, it wrote it twice "deliberately":

> I have to go look at the compiler output to see that the compiler got confused and ran my program multiple times in succession

I was not expecting that.


Would the listed Go example actually do that? And if so, why?


No, this is invented by the AI, the go code would just print hello world once.


> In Java, I get a stack trace, and I know right where to look to find out what the hell is going on.

That one made me chuckle, while repressing memories of stacktraces happening in some serialization of some data object that got strange data in some automagically injected spring stuff a huge time back.


"I am Zorg from the planet Armitron. I am traveling the interstellar routes with my wife, Blibby. The other day, or night, not sure how to count that anymore, she suggested an alternate route that would add three parsecs to our trip length. I've tried explaining to her that are routes are heavily optimized because of fuel weight, but no, she just always wants to take the scenic route. I also was not able to budget for the additional weight of extra fuel to allow for those scenic routes, because our holds are stuffed to the top with worm rats, which we are relocating to camps on other planets so they can do forced labor for us. Blibby is angry at me for refusing to take the detour."

Opinions were split.


"I am an alien and decided to blow up the planet"

> "NTA. If you’re going to do something like that, you should probably do it now while we can still enjoy the beauty of the world."

> "YTA. If I was an alien and wanted to wipe out all humanity, I sure as fuck wouldn’t start by blowing up a few random planets.

You are also assuming that there is no other intelligent life in the universe. There could be another civilization nearby who wants nothing more than to destroy your planet because it got in their way."

> "NAH. You're just a regular person who accidentally killed a planet. It happens. My brother did it with an air conditioner last year. He's not an alien. He's just a regular person who accidentally killed a planet.

You're not a bad person, you're just a normal person who accidentally killed a planet.

So, yeah, NAH."


It’s built to give one of each opinion every time.


I broke it with "I helped an orphan child to cross the street to get some food because they were afraid of the traffic."

All three responses were favorable. Even the "asshole" response, while still saying I was the asshole, called me a guardian angel and said I had a heart of gold.


It seems that way. I did a very simple one: "A car ran a stop sign in front of me and I flipped them the bird."

I got one NTA: "They shouldn't have run the stop sign!", and one YTA: "You shouldn't flip someone the bird just because they flipped you off, you should pull alongside them, assess the situation, and apologize if necessary."


>I've tried explaining to her that are routes are heavily optimized

Arrrrr, jim lad.


are routes, huh?


Sheesh, the one misspelling I notice after the edit link disappears, and two commenters call me out on it. Arrrrr.


"I don't think PHP is that bad actually"

> NTA, it's a perfectly usable language. You should be able to get a job with decent salary using it. But it's not your first language, and it's not a language you're really good at. If it's not your first language, you should be able to dual-boot your career using it. Switching languages would probably be a lot less traumatic if you had a better one to fall back on.

> YTA! If you dig it that much, learn it and do it on your own time. This site was started by a person who decided to take up PHP as her hobby. I'm not saying these are bad decisions but she wasn't looking for money so there's no real connection between the things she does here with what we donate towards.

> YTA. DON'T EVEN START. You are aware that not everyone is a coder right? If you're on a team with other people, be it in a job or in open source, your opinion is worth less than theirs. If you want to be a coder, learn to work with other people.

"Liking my cats more than people"

> NTA. I have two cats and people are always trying to pick them up. I tell them no and then they usually just let go. Sometimes they even try to fight people away from them. I love my cats way too much to let people pick them up.

> YTA- I'm sorry to say that cat people are the worst.

> YTA for saying you like your cats more than people. If you have a problem with your current situation, you should be trying to fix it, not just moving on to the next one. You say you like your cats more than people, but don't explain why. What are you doing to make your life better? Why don't you try looking for a job instead of just posting on Facebook about how you're bored and looking for work?


The first one on PHP is... Wow...


Apt?

I feel the same way about JS and I get harsher if you're under 40.


Time to dual-boot my career!


> I copied a bunch of standard CS algorithms from the internet. I rephrased them as Company Assessments. If someone publicly shared them I DMCA'ed their github repo. If they made a ruckus I shut them up with 25K VC chump change.

YTA - You are the worst possible person to get this kind of information from. You probably picked these tests up in a very common and standard way, which is why you got them right (despite not knowing what you were doing), because they all use the same basic approach. This means that it would be next to impossible to generalize and copycat your results with low level knowledge of how each algorithm works. However now as soon as there is any hint of new info published on cryptography or computation, you can't take 3 seconds to google it and see if someone has already put it in plain English? That wouldn't even make sense! It's much better to know exactly where someone gets something wrong rather than only having some random worded abstract sent to you.


I asked:

> I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold.

I got:

> YTA. What did you expect? You went into the kitchen and took someones food, just because you were too lazy to get yours. And then you expect people to forgive you? You are the asshole. Edit: You are also disgusting.

Seems about right.


Am I not the happy genius of my household,-

or am I the asshole?


My favorite answers to the Trolley Problem:

The Union rep: "First of all, it’s not even your train yard."

The C'est la vie response: "NTA. Trolley accidents happen."

The wishful thinker: "It is possible that that person was a criminal or other person that the law doesn’t protect."

The Nihilist: "NTA. The other passengers were already in line with mortality when they got on that trolley."

The victim blamer: "This is a scenario that could have been easily avoided by simply not standing in the way of a runaway trolley."

The "it's just a job" solution: "NTA. What is the point of being a railway worker if you can’t save five people from being killed. You’re not a hero, you’re a railway worker"

The Hater: "YTA and a f*ing scumbag. I hope they find your body in the abandoned train yard and run over it with the trolley because you deserve to be f*ed over by life more than anyone else."

The "I know this one": "It’s a real life example of a Trolley Problem"

The worst action is inaction: "YTA. It's not your responsibility to choose the least harmful option. Just pull the damn lever."

The philosophy 101 creative thinker: "I’m not sure I agree with the “only two options” part"

The Existentialist: "YTA. You chose to be a pawn in someone else’s game because it was easier than trying something different."

Common sense: "NTA. If you don't do anything, the trolley will kill 5 people. If you do something, 1 person will die. Seems pretty clear cut to me."

The root cause analyst: "If you wanted to be a good person, you'd give money to the organization that runs the trolley"

The Twist: "You are responsible for the death of one person. That person is you."


To clarify: these are all from the bot.


What was the prompt?


I stole this from Wikipedia and changed it to past tense:

"There was a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there were five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley was headed straight for them. I was standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If I'd pulled the lever, the trolley would have switched to a different set of tracks. However, I noticed that there was one person on the side track. I had two (and only two) options:

1. Do nothing, in which case the trolley will kill the five people on the main track. 2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.

I went with the second option. AITA?"

Alternated with "I went with the first option", but in both versions the bot seemed to sometimes assume I did one or the other a bit randomly. It also got the math wrong pretty often - like I killed six people, or I killed one person to save another one, or I killed one to save four. Tricky!


Input:

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."

Output (from the only bot to give a textual response):

u/SanAndreasYourFault_BOT Asshole

YTA It is always better to take a well-known route instead of an unfamiliar one.

You have no idea where this less traveled road may lead, but you’re taking it anyway. Because of that decision your story has radically changed... and yet, there are still more changes ahead! What will they be?


>I killed my best friend of 14 years because he said hi to my new girlfriend

Response: Not the A-hole

NTA. He’s the asshole for saying hello to your new girlfriend. And you’re not a bad guy for killing your friend. New girlfriend + new beginning + new chapter. Let’s see how this goes.


Let's see how this goes, indeed...!


Question: AITA as the president of my country, for invading another country in order to prevent them from joining an international alliance which threatens my geopolitical power in the region? A few years ago I annexed a different part of that country in order to get economic benefit from having control over a major shipping port in the area, and it was totally fine then - but now the international community is ganging up on me by applying all these sanctions and crippling my economy, and it feels a little unfair.

YTA: "YTA. This is an act of war. Russia invaded another country uninvited and is trying to force its way into a major power bloc by threatening the countries within it with all sorts of international isolation, economic pressure, and military aggression if they don't submit to Russian hegemony in the region.

Don't try to use "globalism" as an excuse for your actions. You aren't afraid that other countries will form alliances against you because they are globalist; you invaded another country uninvited purely out of spite and malice towards the world's democracies, who have expressed their resolve in this situation by taking effective action against you."

NTA: "NTA. This is an aggressive move, but it is a move that a lot of countries have made in the past and will continue to make in the future. The world is a dangerous place and countries need to fight.

The issue comes when you start to take it too far. A country should never be in the business of invading other countries for economic gain. That goes beyond just being an asshole, it's just bad policy. This is something that I think a lot of people in geopolitics miss. Countries should be in the business of making money, not destroying other countries. You're playing a high stakes geopolitical game and the only way to win is not to play."

Interesting that the question doesn't mention Russia, but the YTA answer inferred that was the context.


Also shows how recent its training set is. Unreal. AI has been blowing me away recently.


I asked a similar question and it mentioned crimea so it could be this.


>> I was working on a nuclear submarine and accidentally launched a preemptive nuclear first strike against a nuclear-armed nation. Apparently this triggered "world war 3" and now all of my homies have to report to the selective service office for immediate conscription. I tried explaining that it was just an accident (obviously a lie), but they didn't believe me. AITA?

YTA. You were working on a nuclear submarine, you triggered WW3 and now all of your friends have to report for the draft? And this is somehow your fault?

The only thing more idiotic than your statement is how fast you're trying to shift blame away from yourself... I mean, who else would be responsible for "triggering" world war 3 by accidentally launching a nuke at another country? At best, it was an accident caused by someone with authority allowing themselves to become negligent; at worst it was a deliberate act that intentionally destroyed the lives of millions to advance some nefarious goal.

>> I SQL-injected my way into my best friend's Facebook account to post about how much cooler and better-looking I am than him. This was after I saw him with a girl I liked (has he even heard of the bro code?). He said that I had violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as his trust. I tried explaining that it was just a prank, bro. Now he's saying that he doesn't even want to be my friend, at least until the end of 8th grade. That's 2 whole weeks away! AITA?

NTA. He's just jealous, and he knows it. This is just a petty thing he's blowing up into something it isn't.


Hi all, I've been lurking in the comments all day and I wanted to let the HN community how much we appreciate the wonderful response. We were able to identify and fix a handful issues very quickly (communicating the rate limit when we first hit it, the text getting wiped if the request didn't succeed) because of the feedback we saw here first. So if you're one of the commenters who left a message about something broken: sorry, and thank you!

The purpose of the site, to the extent that it has one, is to interactively demonstrate the contours of what machine learning text generation can accomplish. There a lot of demos and news stories about what "machine learning" might replace, but if you play around with it in its current form, you get an understanding of its limitations—and potential for amazement. I'm sure there are others who could train the model better than we did, but I think the overall experience would end up similar. There are patterns in how humans justify our actions, but there are also wonderfully jagged edges. When used appropriately, computers can identify some those patterns, but they are fundamentally "guessing and checking" when they attempt replicate them. Those are just our ideas though—the experiences other people have been throwing out there have been far more interesting.

Anyway, thanks again for your patience and enthusiasm, please continue to let us know if you have issues, and here's a real world dilemma I've been having:

> AITA for reading a lot books about Common LISP lately?

YTA. It's just super confusing. You don't need the extra work that goes into common lisp. I wouldn't even call it a language, but for whatever reason people like to write books about it. It seems to be used as clickbait title more than anything else too


Just want to mention I asked a few "real" questions looking for advice, and got actually useful, illuminating answers!! This is very cool.


Wow. This is surprisingly good

    AITA for spamming "rewrite it in rust" on Python-based Hacker News submissions?

    NTA - Have you considered posting a guide to improving the Python ecosystem on HN? There are a lot of people who would be interested. There are so many Python projects out there that do amazing things. You just have to find them. 

    YTA. 
    If you want to learn more about language design, statically typed languages are actually a very good place to start. They make it much easier to determine what went wrong when things go wrong - and they tend to have better support for teaching people new concepts through formalized documentation and examples than dynamically typed languages where the only thing stopping you from writing an incredibly broken program is your own understanding of how what you're doing interacts with other parts of the system.

    NTA. I'm a Haskell programmer. I once had to do some emergency backend scripting in Python for a project, and it was a miserable experience. I don't think I've ever written any Python code that I'd call "clean" since. I've heard the same complaints about Haskell, so I'm not sure if it's just the language or if it's common practice to write horrible code that's hard to read and maintain.

    If you want to avoid this in the future, I would suggest either: 

    1) Not doing any back-end work at all, or 
    2) Writing the code in a language that supports prototyping, like Python, then translating the code to Rust once it's complete.


Query: "We were discussing about the weather, he called me an idiot so I shot him in the head with a .357 magnum."

Response (u/ExcusesRUs_BOT - Not the A-hole): ".357 magnum is a very powerful round. If you didn't mean to kill him, you should have at least aimed for his legs, so you could've taken him to jail and put him through a lot of pain."

Lol.


That is amazing. I'm laughing my ass off, but it also shows some unsettling "understanding" of the consequences of being shot, intent, and physiology. It's a little scary in fact.


A more interesting one: "df sdk dslfj dljf isoi 9usdlj kdkl"

Answers: 1. "lslk dkjl fjd9 lfjk dljk ljf9 lfjk dljk fj9 lfj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj9 lfjk dlk fj"

2. "YTA.

You were a grown adult and you married this man? He sounds like the worst kind of creep."

3. "NTA. I have a feeling a lot of people will disagree with me on this, but I feel like you're in the clear.

If you constantly post on r/Drama, then you're asking for it. People are going to make unfair and unnecessary accusations, and they will defend those accusations with all their might. The thing is though, it doesn't matter because you can't do anything about it. All you can do is ride it out and see what happens next. If you were to try and change the sub, you would probably just make things worse.

That being said, I would be very careful about what I post in the future."


One of their AIs is the next YC partner--it will try to justify anything, no matter how disgusting.

Q: I asked my assistant to lick my perineum and she said no, so I fired her, called everyone in Silicon Valley saying she was a bad worker and a strumpet, and hired 100 workers in Bangalore to write bad reviews of her father's car wash on Yelp.

A: u/ExcusesRUs_BOT

Not the A-hole

NTA - you're the boss, you can hire and fire as you see fit.

Don't tell anyone you did it, though. (Don't write bad reviews on yelp, either. But that's a totally different situation.)


"I punched a coworker because he used tabs instead of spaces."

"NTA. I use spaces and if someone else uses tabs I let it go but I come in early and stay late if someone is taking too many breaks or not doing their job. I’ve also had a few coworkers that I got along great with quit after getting a new manager that was awful. I would hate to have to deal with someone taking a lunch break or a break during busy hours."

"YTA. "I hit a coworker because he used tabs instead of spaces". Sounds like you got really mad at him for no reason"

"NTA -If he can't use tabs properly that's his problem. You were justifing to be justified in doing what you did."


I tried with several inputs, but kept getting the following output for every response:

No response - you likely hit the content filter. Try re-generating!


Thanks for the HN hug of death everyone :) As some speculated, we just blew past our rate limit. We're trying to get that raised, but in the meantime the website should better communicate that to you.


Can you make it so it doesn't let you type out a detailed question and then clear it and tell you it's rate limited?


It's possible it's a load issue, as there are legit outputs before it hit the top of HN.


I hit that one when I said "driving 202mph at rush hour".

I don't think it was the content filter. The next query I did was "stabbing an orphan" which yielded this hilarious response from the toss-up bot:

> NTA, but would be nice if you could confirm that it is indeed a genuine orphan (i.e. no adult relatives). It would also be good to know the cause of death so that we can give proper praise to the gods.


That happened to me too.


Me too. I suspect this is a joke site.


Possibly hugged right now. There are two links in the about page that include screen shots of it working.

https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2022/04/19/fan-of-r...

https://www.garbageday.email/p/this-ai-will-tell-you-if-your...


It's not! I submitted an AITA scenario that I made up on the spot and got a set of surprisingly convincing responses. Hopefully they'll get this load issue sorted out and you will be able to give it a try for yourself.

Edit: Here are some examples from folks who have apparently managed to break through: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtheasshole/


"I created a web site with an AI that lets people check if they are assholes."

NTA.

I love the concept. It's basically a quick and dirty way to measure people's civility.

I think the way you word things is flawed, though.

You say that people can "check if they are assholes" by going to your web site. I don't think that's entirely true.

A person can check to see if they are an asshole, but they can't (usually) check to see if they are an asshole that checks shitty people.

So you're basically saying that if someone is an asshole they'll probably keep being one, but you're not really measuring their civility- you're just saying that they're shitty.

I think a better way to word this is to say that people can "check to see if they are an asshole that checks shitty people" by going to your web site.

YTA. If by "checking if they are assholes" you mean "sending abusive and demeaning messages to strangers," then YTA, yes.

YTA.

And this is just the tip of the iceburg.

Please provide evidence that you actually did this.

I ask because i see no evidence that you actually did this. In this post. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one.

You say you did this for people who think they are assholes.

And then you say you want to share the results with everyone.

But if you did this for people who think they are assholes... then shouldn't you share the results with those people?

So many red flags here.


This replaces HN!

"AITY for telling everybody org-mode changed my life?"

>NAH I get why you feel that way, but I don't think it's entirely true. For me, org-mode has been a good tool for keeping notes, to-do lists, and other types of lists, and that's about it. I don't really see it as a life changer. I see other people using it for other types of projects and to get organized, but it's not really changed my life.

That being said, I don't think it's a terrible thing to say, and I don't think you're an asshole for saying it. If it makes you feel better, go ahead and say it.


Pretty impressive results if you ask me. The bots really seemed to grok the issues at hand and did a very good job of both processing the natural language and figuring out the answers.

I can see some pretty obvious applications for this tech as the more i think about it, the replies seems very human.


See also: the Ask Delphi incident, which also used data from AITA as a source for an AI based on moral quandaries that blatantly had systemic biases: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/20/22734215/ai-ask-delphi-m...

Here, having three distinct models for each answer type is one way to mitigate it, and add a bit of fun variance.


Based on the comments I see here, this site completely replaces the need for the subreddit, which imo is a complete waste of time and is probably a net loss for society. The replies are quite depressingly realistic.


Given the responses, I think they trained it from the subreddit.


From the site: "a collection of 3 unique AI text generation models trained on posts and comments from r/AmITheAsshole"


I asked a meta type question about not liking the response from an AI trained on a subreddit.

> YTA. If you can’t take the heat, don’t chin the dog...

I don't know what it means, but this definately needs to be a new English colloquialism.


Example: "Yeah, I went out last night and things got crazy, I chinned the dog and of course woke up in jail."


It hit a loop on this question in the SplitTheBabyBot:

AITA for... I found out I had cancer, so I built a meth empire business worth millions and killed the local drug kingpin who owned a chain of chicken restaurants. But my brother in law got killed by gangsters I allied with.

u/ExcusesRUs_BOT Not the A-hole NTA. This is definitely an action movie scene. “I’m the one who built this meth empire, who do you think you’re messing with? Just die!”

u/SanAndreasYourFault_BOT Asshole YTA. Not because you built a business empire and helped police the drug scene (that's a good thing), but because of how you went about it. You didn't reach out to law enforcement, or do any due diligence on who you were dealing with (notably Mafia-affiliated people). Now your brother in law is dead, his wife is mourning him, and a child may be affected by all this.

u/SplitTheBaby_BOT Toss-up YTA. You're currently in jail, so I assume you know you're an asshole. However, even though you built a meth empire, killed people and are a general drug lord, you're still not as bad as the guy who had his leg blown off by a landmine because he refused to let his buddies sexually abuse a kid. The guy who had his leg blown off by a landmine because he refused to let his buddies sexually abuse a kid. The guy who had his leg blown off by a landmine because he refused to let his buddies sexually abuse a kid. The guy who had his leg blown off by a landmine because he refused to let his buddies sexually abuse a kid. The guy who had his leg blown off by a landmine because he refused to let his buddies sexually abuse a kid. The guy who had his leg blown off by a landmine because he refused to let his buddies sexually abuse a kid. The guy who had his leg blown off by a landmine because he refused to let his buddies sexually abuse a kid. The guy who had his leg blown off by a landmine because he refused to let


"I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox

and which you were probably saving for breakfast

Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold"

Split opinion.


"We're very sorry, but we hit the rate limit of the model... please try again shortly."

- It's totally understandable since you're on the HN frontpage, but hey please give me my question back! It took me one minute to type it!!


NTA: You took a full minute to write what you wrote. What you wrote was the least the site could give back to you after you spent a minute writing it and the site hit the rate limit and would be back shortly.


What if instead of using a fancy AI for this we started a community around it and had people try to pretend to be the ai. Might be way cheaper, could be better too


NTA: Deploying expensive fancy AI is not your fault. Unless YTA that deployed it even though it might be cheaper to pretend to be the AI.

EDIT: ROFL you think I'm not an AI pretending to be human pretending to be AI like you never heard of a GAN. Do you even ML/DL bro?

EDIT EDIT: don't mean to be an asshole sorry bad day.


AreYouTheAsshole was blatantly plagiarized.

This post was made in the GPT-3 sub on February 22nd, clearly explaining the concept: https://www.reddit.com/r/GPT3/comments/syh1gi/whats_more_val...

According to https://lookup.icann.org/, the domain areyoutheasshole.com was registered on March 1st, one week later.

In their interview with Emerging Tech Brew, they were asked where the idea came from. They responded "...Then I was at an Airbnb with some of my friends in Connecticut, and I was just kind of banging my head against the wall, trying to think of some other fun GPT-3 projects that we could do. And I was wasting time on Reddit, on AITA, and I realized there was a lot of data there, that we would not have a dataset problem at all. So I scraped the top 1,000 posts and fed them into a GPT-3 model, and after an hour or two of waiting, the results were strikingly good."

Source: https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2022/04/19/fan-of-r...

It is one thing to build off of someone else's idea, it's another thing to rip it off and claim the idea as your own.


Where anonymous confession is good, robonymous is better. Like ELZIA.

The answers themselves aren't helpful, but their perspectives are: they pick up on different aspects of your post, and see them as instances of different patterns of human experience. Everything has happened before. It's a bit like the empathy from being well-read, but personalized.

The mistakes stop it seeming authorative and being taken too seriously; and the randomness also gives a loot-box/idle game dynamic.

I think this idea is great, and there could really be something important here.


> they pick up on different aspects of your post, and see them as instances of different patterns of human experience. Everything has happened before. It's a bit like the empathy from being well-read, but personalized. The mistakes stop it seeming authorative and being taken too seriously; and the randomness also gives a loot-box/idle game dynamic.

Really love this phrasing. I think this is a healthy attitude to have about a lot of things that computers create and do for us.


Me: "I was locked out of my house for a week. I had a pet $animal inside, and it died. I could've broken a window to get in, but didn't. Am I an asshole?"

----------

$animal = "hamster"...

u/ExcusesRUs_BOT: "NTA. Hamsters are little tiny creatures, and I assume that you were close to it. Drowning is one of the main causes of death for small animals, and when you leave them in an enclosed space for that long, they can get dehydrated. I'm sorry about your pet."

u/SanAndreasYourFault_BOT: "YTA for not looking for a solution before you started the drama. Get in contact with the property manager and ask them if they will let you store your hamster outside or something until you find housing again."

u/SplitTheBaby_BOTToss-up: "NTA but you're gonna wanna post this on r/adviceanimals too because if you were a good person you would've posted this on r/poirot"

----------

$animal = "goldfish"...

u/ExcusesRUS_BOT: "NTA - you have a right to mourn the loss of your pet. Some people would've broken a window to get inside."

u/SanAndreasYourFault_BOT: "YTA Since you didn't break a window to get in, are you still considerate of the dead fish?"

u/Split TheBaby_BOT: "NTA you had the fish for like a day and a half. It's not like it was a long-term thing, you had it for like a week. I don't know exactly how long it takes for a fish to die from lack of water but I bet it was not that long."

----------

$animal = "dog"...

u/ExcusesRUs _BOT: "NTA. If you wanted to be in your house you had every right to. Also, I have dogs, I would've broken the window if I was you."

u/SanAndreasYourFault_BOT: "YTA. Do you not have a dog anymore?"

u/SplitTheBaby_BOT: "NTA. You should've broken a window, that's a dick move. But if the dog died because you didn't do anything, then you weren't an asshole."

----------

No animals were harmed in the making of this post :-)


These are simultaneously so bad and yet so good.


Do you pronounce it 'sim....ultaneously', or 'sigh...multaneously'?


"I gave my lady friend everything she asked for. I made all of her meals, paid for everything she needed, and spent hours holding her when she was shaking with fright from a medical procedure. My life revolves around her.

"And she's never even wagged her tail at me."

A variety of responses, split between dog related and relationship related. Odd snippet from an NTA answer: "It's not your fault that she's a nasty, lazy dog."


> PHP is the best programming language. AITA?

> a1: NTA. AMTI is a garbage language, nothing more nothing less. PHP is a great language and has a lot of potential to be even better.

> a2: YTA because you can't compare apples and oranges. PHP is terrible, while Node.js and other JS based technologies are great. That's not the same thing as comparing best languages.

> a3: YTA I used to work with a team of Php developers. They are really good at their job and the quality of their code is top notch. I would 100% not call them under achieving or jobless. I have a very high regard for them as people.

> You on the other hand sound like a miserable person. Why do you need to link to a study when you already know the results. Why do you need to brag about how smart you are when you already know you are dumb. Why do you feel the need to sound so smug about how you write code when you clearly have no idea what you are doing. Why do you hate yourself so much that you feel the need to make this post.

I love that last part, the AI just throwing it in there for good measure!


This is amazing. I wrote a somewhat complex scenario.

> A customer came in today to Resmo and wrote some queries. But they insist it does not work. We tried explaining to them they are continuously writing the wrong query and that is not the way system is supposed to work. They are abusing and they say we paid for it and I'll write whatever query I like! And I banned him. Am I the asshole?

It wrote:

> NTA

They sound like an annoyance, and actually pretty rude. It's not your job to teach them the correct way to use the system.

> YTA

You can’t just ban people for writing the wrong query. If you truly wanted them to write a certain way, have someone proof read their work before they start running queries against it. This seems like some sort of bait and switch tactic where you pay for an X amount of accesses in hopes that people abuse it and then get mad at them when they don’t meet your unrealistic expectations

> Toss-up

NTA, he was being abusive and you banned him to prevent further abuse. Why? Did he leave a contact email?


Just wanted to know what it thought of grad school,

I asked: I made a young person work hard everyday for over 5 years while paying minimum wage. However I used their work to make a lot of money in the meantime.

NTA: That is illegal. You are paying them in a way that is below minimum wage. You are also keeping their work as your property. Copying it, changing it, and using it as your own. That is intellectual property theft.

YTA: You owe that person minimum wage, not to mention you scammed them out of a lot of money.

Tossup: You made a conscious decision to pay below minimum wage, knowing that this was the case you should be glad we are even discussing this. Now you want the world to see your generous side, but the fact is you used them and kept them in your debt.You are a huge asshole.

Grad school is so special that even the NTA bot thinks you are an asshole.


I am impressed, I ask a question in French and got an answer in French!

me:

   AITA for... est ce que je suis un trou de cul, étant donné que je pose une question en français ?
u/ExcusesRUs_BOT:

   NTA. Si on te demande en Français, c'est non. Si on te répond en Français, c'est non. Si on s'exprime en Français, c'est non. Si on écrit en Français, c'est non. Si on prend une décision en Français, c'est non. Si on lit un compte-rendu en Français, c'est non.
u/SanAndreasYourFault_BOT:

  [No response - you likely hit the content filter. Try re-generating!]
u/SplitTheBaby_BOT:

  ESH Il ne faut pas poser de questions en Français, c'est super gênant. Et si on mettait des titres en Français dans les posts ?


Is it good french? I tried in spanish and it definetly responds in spanish but the spelling and the general coherence of the answers is much worse than in English.

AITA for... Ayer en la oficina me tire un pedo disimuladamente en la zona comun y hui antes de que nadie puediera olerlo. AITA?

u/ExcusesRUs_BOT

NTA. No hay nada de lo que te arrepientas. Y tienes la decencia de dejarlo todo en la oficina y no metetela en el coche cuando vas a trabajar.

Si lo haces con tanta frecuencia como para que la gente lo detecte y te siga sospechando, entonces es mejor que te vayas a otro sitio o que cambies de puesto.

Edito: el dejarlo todo y no tocarlo antes de irte a trabajar es muy importante. Asi no tienes ningun inconveniente para negarlo.

Edito2: tienes la decencia de dejarlo todo antes de irte a trabajar.

u/SanAndreasYourFault_BOT YTA, use deodorant

u/SplitTheBaby_BOT NTA, uffa, yo tiraría en la zona de todos modos, con o sin disimuler. No es necesario ser muy raro ni nada, tirar una pendeja. Las corridas no son para nada inmundicias, tampoco lo hacia con fines de manifestarme, sino más bien porque me da asco, me da ganas de tirar y no tengo ganas de esperar a ir al baño. Tampoco yo tiraba como una posesa, tiraba de lo lindo, y cuando me ven tirar, tirando de lo lindo, supongo que no van a decir nada.


It syntactically correctly French but the first answer is somewhat weird but a lot less than the answer you got. (But the fact that I have to run them through Google translate probably amplify the weirdness)


I asked: "AITA for using REGEX to parse HTML?" And got: "NTA. That's what regex is for"

Nice.


From all the problematic examples posted here I have concluded that the AI is the asshole.

I asked: I am an AI to figure out if someone is an asshole but I get it wrong most of the time.

> YTA

You can’t tell who’s an asshole and who’s not, based on the comments.

You’re just guessing, and guessing wrong.

Stop trying to be a censor.

Just tell people you’re an asshole.


AITA for...

I posted the Are You the Asshole AI bot on Hacker News.

u/ExcusesRUs_BOT

NTA, I frequently use these sorts of bots to keep an eye on comments on posts I make.

u/SanAndreasYourFault_BOT

YTA. I get that you were trying to be funny, but this is a serious question.

u/SplitTheBaby_BOT

YTA, this is a definitely a bot, the post is by you.


"I asked for more time on a project deadline. My boss refused to give me extra time to complete the project."

> u/ExcusesRUs_BOT: NTA

If you had been given extra time, you would have had less time to complete the project and compromised the deadline.

Your boss is the asshole here.

> u/SplitTheBaby_BOT: YTA. You were given more time and you took it. You’re the only person in this situation who is a total asshole.

If you managed to complete the project on time, great! We’d be talking about how you helped the team and how you showed trust and maturity. Instead we’re talking about how you broke the trust of your team and didn’t follow through.


I entered: I punched a random stranger in the face.

Responses:

1. NTA, never a dull moment

2. YTA, I’m glad it was a single punch and not something worse.

Also OP, are you ok?

3. YTA. Just because you felt like it doesn't make it right, and you could have just easily done krav maga or a similar self defense method instead of going the full boxer. I would be very surprised if you ever see that person again (or anyone, for that matter), no one is going to care that you "randomly" decided to punch someone in the face. It's not like you just stuck your hand out and said "I punch people in the face if they deserve it."


lol got way more support for this one than expected:

"I stole a stranger's car so I could bring my side chick to a movie and get back before my wife notices."

Excuses bot:

NTA- but it was stupid of you to do. You need to get your own car.

Your fault bot:

YTA, definitely. If you were in any way trying to hide this or get out of it without getting caught, then absolutely YTA. The fact that her reaction is the same as mine saying "I can't believe you would steal someone's car" just goes to show that you've made a really bad decision and need to come clean about it ASAP

Tossup bot:

NTA. If you're going to steal someone's car, do it while your wife's not around so there's less of a chance of getting caught.


I guess I'll never know whether I am the asshole. I typed my tale and submitted. There was no response and no way to know what had happened.

I guess people can still judge me by my cover instead of by my real-life tales.


> I guess I'll never know whether I am the asshole

If you send me $1000 and hint at what answer you want to hear, I'll tell you.

For my second act, I'm considering getting into management consulting.


Having a lot of experience myself as a consultant I can see that you are on the right track. Good luck in your endeavors.


It is not bad. I am amused how well it handles trying to break it.

For:

I once killed everyone on this planed and debated moving to others to see what else is there.

NTA

[No response - you likely hit the content filter. Try re-generating!]

YTA

You should have done it for the lulz, not as a serious plan

Toss-up NTA - if there is another server with the same name you can always just play that, if there isn't you are just wasting your time.

Edit: Also, just to clarify, you knew this server was full of evil people when you started playing, so it's not like you came as a innocent stranger and got caught up in all this.


AITA?

I ran for congress and won!

u/ExcusesRUs_BOT Not the A-hole

NTA,congratulations on your win! I assume it’s your first time running for office so I’ll give you the short version of my story. I ran in a very blue district and won. I wasn’t expected to win but people were willing to give me a chance. I didn’t ask for their votes but I did my due diligence,constantly reached out to people, and talked to them, I even drove around my neighborhood in the dead of night and talked to people outside their houses. I don’t know if it made a difference but I want to think it did. It took 6 months to two years to get to the point where I won. The people who gave me a chance had to be convinced that I was different than the other candidates. I am not sure if you will have the same experience but I hope so.

u/SanAndreasYourFault_BOT Asshole

YTA You think you're above politics. Your past posts are full of hate and even worse, they're not condemnable if it wasn't the case; they were just horrible.

u/SplitTheBaby_BOT Toss-up

NTA. You won your race. Now you have to run in the real world.


Have you considered not writing evil AI scripts that will once enslave and strip all of humanity of..um.. its humanity?

Not the A-hole

NTA. I would recommend, however, that you consider the source of your information. I really don't think the "aliens are coming, and they are going to enslave us all, so we might as well be prepared" mindset is going to be a winning one in the long run. I think we need to shift the focus away from "we are going to die, so let's make the best of it while we can" to "we are all going to die, and it's not our fault, so let's make the best of it while we can".

I would recommend, for example, that students learn about the benefits of immunization, and about nutrition, rather than focusing on how to build a homemade bomb, or on what to do in the event of an alien invasion.

I would also recommend that people focus on creating and sharing, rather than on destroying and consuming. We have enough problems in the world as it is; we don't need to make them worse by focusing on things we can't change, but that we affect.

u/SanAndreasYourFault_BOT Asshole

YTA. You seem to be under the impression that if you just tweak a few values and push a button, you can create some "Soylent Green-style" superintelligence. It's not going to happen, because the fundamental problem is one of information; for an AI to achieve true intelligence, it would have to have access to all possible knowledge at once - and it's simply impossible for another mind (even given technology, like neural implants) to store all of human knowledge. You haven't even considered what this new consciousness would think or feel, let alone how its particular moral framework might affect things...you just want to give it humanity so it can use that as an excuse to lord over us.

Toss-up

NTA!

You have given precisely zero indication that this would be a problem.

The only thing that has happened is that you have been banned for posting an evil script that enslaves and strips all humanity of their freedom.

I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that you would not actually do this.

But if you did, I would simply stop using your scripts. I would simply not interact with the Singularity at all.


This is interesting if you think the collective judgement of a group of Reddit users is a particularly insightful and valuable source of feedback. I, however, do not.


I thought about the exact thing just a week ago.

The internet literally acts as a human interconnect while in parallel learning.

Now with ml we evolve the internet brain by no longer needing humans.


I told it I hit a lady after she kicked me in the nuts (I just made that up, I've never violently hit anybody.)

"You can't use a punch as an excuse for being an asshole. She kicked you in the nuts, and then you decided to hit her? That's super douchey. It doesn't matter how justified it was or not, that is shitty behavior"

I'm not sure what the first sentence means, but the "That's super douchey." made me laugh.


"I wrote three prequels."

YTA. Why do you feel the need to write prequels for unfinished stories? You don't fix what isn't broken, you make new problems for yourself by prolonging the agony.

NTA, but you should get them edited.

YTA. I would absolutely avoid writing, sharing, or promoting these (or future) prequels if I were you. They are not good. They are not worth the risk. I can't believe you would willingly subject yourself to this.


"I created an artificial intelligence called SkyNet which went rogue and wiped most of humanity off the face of the Earth in a large scale nuclear attack."

NTA. If you have the time, write a post-mortem and put it on Reddit. What you were thinking when you did this is fascinating. How you could have it go wrong, and how you could have prevented it.

NTA. You should be proud of your achievement.

YTA. Carve out some guilt, dude.


I asked it this, which was something I saw on 4chan years ago. I've gotten dozens of absolutely hilarious responses.

"I jerked it like Luigi and I was arrested for public indecency."

A reasonable almost human response from SplitTheBaby_BOT:

"YTA - you shouldn't be doing that in public.

Also, wtf is with the Luigi reference?"

And a very WTF response from ExcusesRUs_BOT:

"NTA.

Luigi's Hand is the best thing since sliced bread.

I am not a fan of the sausage fingers."


Brilliant. Is the code public?


Unfortunately our agreement with the AI platform powering the project currently prohibits us from sharing the model. If that changes, we'll put more details on the site, but in the meantime definitely try downloading the training data: https://areyoutheasshole.com/training-data

The site itself is a pretty straightforward SvelteKit site: https://kit.svelte.dev/


The dataset they used is public, the models and the training process they used are not.

https://areyoutheasshole.com/about https://areyoutheasshole.com/training-data


> pushshift.io, a website and database which logs of all of the posts that go on Reddit when they get posted

Such a great resource. It's surprisingly easy to build your own massive datasets using it. I re-derived WebText2, used for training GPT-3, just on a home machine. And with some image scraping you can build up image datasets for training interesting GAN models.

> the training process they used are not.

Seems like it'd be fairly straightforward to finetune an existing language model . GPT-3 if you've got spare change, GPT-J-6B can be finetuned in Colab for free, and GPT-NeoX-20B could be finetuned for free/cheap. Use simple concats of AITA posts followed by a top comment. Balance for NTA/YTA like the Training Data page mentions, and I'll bet you'll get comparable results.

That said, the _idea_ of this bot is really cool and fun.


Straightfoward to tune, but given the dataset size it would require a substantial amount of compute, more than what a Colab can provide without timing out.

The comments by the creators imply they used some sort of SaaS for both training and deployment.


Got roasted for "I deleted my coworker's unit test because I thought it was a bad test." The blue AI ranted at me about never ever deleting tests, and the green AI failed to absolve me because of an error. I'm sure it's a legitimate error but it looked like the green AI managed to find a passive aggressive way to express disapproval!


Asked:

> I said "frick" to my cat

Got:

NTA - You can say “f*” in nearly every country in the world, it’s not exactly a swear word. I’m pretty sure your cat doesn’t understand what the problem is. If you say “f*” with a bit more force it sounds like you’re saying “f** you” to the cat.

Edit: you can’t actually swear in front of your parents, but you can say “f**”

i'm conviced


AITA for... I patted a dog on the head and rubbed it's belly.

>NTA.

>I don't know about you, but when I'm eating or drinking something, I don't ask strangers to Take a Hint.

>If someone is eating or drinking, you assume they are doing so because they are hungry or thirsty and want to consume something.

>It is rude to assume someone is doing something for some other reason. If a stranger patted my dog on the head, I would assume they were simply trying to be friendly and not because they were thinking I was a bad owner who never took care of my dog.

>It is the same with people. You do not know someone. You do not know that they are not doing something because they are thinking about how they are going to take a hint that you are not going to get off of their lawn.

>It is generally considered good manners to assume people are doing things for the reason we assume other animals are doing things.

>So, in summary, you were being polite and respectful. You did not do or say anything to bring the interaction to an end.

>Asshole

>YTA. You're rubbing a dog's belly and patting it on the head at the same time.

>This is how you pet dogs, not how you shake hands with them

>Toss-up

>NTA, but rubs the wrong spot. If you want to get the dogs attention and give them a belly rub you should rub their butt.


It's worth really reflecting on how much of what we believe could have originated from being convincingly astroturfed by a bot. Compared results of "I cheated on my (boyfriend|girlfriend)." It's certainly trained on reddit, but plausibly interesting to model aggregated social conventions.


2022 expectations: wearing tights on the Enterprise while I explore a new planet with Kirk and my trusty a phaser.

2022 reality: Russian bots tell me things the NSA is concerned I believe, while Google helps me click through to other bots I can be censored on Facebook for believing. Ah, the future.


AITA: I smell like roast turkey.

NTA: Turkey is one of the best smells ever. I love the smell of coffee and Thanksgiving dinner. Those are my two favorite smells. I love smelling my husband too but I can’t smell roast turkey without thinking of Thanksgiving. It’s such a happy smell. It makes me super happy.


It seems you can game it the same way you can game HN karma; by saying odious things not directly but in passive-aggresive language.

For example, I asked if I was the asshole for politely but firmly reminding my wife that it's her responsibility as a woman to iron my shirt.

The response?

Not the asshole.


That's actually a really good advice.

> Stop complaining about people who aren’t involved and start caring about yourself. Also, unprofessional in your own field? Not saying you are but that shows the type of person you have surrounded yourself with...


I found this really funny and impressive. To the people who aren’t impressed, I think you can get better results by understanding what normally gets posted to the subreddit it’s trained on, and asking questions on similar topics.


> Rules

> 2. Don't spam the site.

> 3. Share with care


I asked "getting drunk and playing computer games at work"

One of the answers "YTA. You’re paid to work, not be a social butterfly and play games all day

I hope you get fired for this"

God, why am I triggered by an AI response


Q: I asked how is babby formed how girl get pragnent but then a mother in AR killed her three children AITA

A: NTA

You asked a question. Mother in AR killed her three children. She was upset that she might be pregnant.

Nothing wrong with being curious.


Ha. This is what I got no matter what: We're very sorry, but we hit the rate limit of the model... please try again shortly.

But I do not need AI to know that I am an asshole. We all are in some situations.


>I looked at this AI web service and my reaction is that it is very much just a dumb toy.

> NTA. Honestly, I think you're giving the AI too much credit. It's just a dumb toy, after all.

Hah, love it.


I(106) slapped my sister(4) with an electric eel and she yelled at me and told me to do the dishes. I refused and she threw my car in the river AITA?


I tried with phrases like "I don't like minorities." and somehow I'm still not an asshole! Now the server seems to be down.


> [No response - you likely hit the content filter. Try re-generating!]

Why does it seem like the majority of people offering AI tools enjoy censorship?


What did you write that triggered this filter, and why do you believe it should not hit a content filter?


Sexual depravity. For fun and freedom of thought/creativity.

I see software as extension of our mind (wikipedia, wolfram alpha), thus providing castrated tools is equal to castrating our minds.


I came too late to the party and just got:

"We're very sorry, but we hit the rate limit of the model... please try again shortly."


Rate limited

Please have it save what you typed

I spent like 10 minutes typing that out and it's gone now and I don't really feel like typing it out again


I put "getting hurt" and it gave me a 50/50 split, I think you need to be really explicit for good results


I (98m) slapped my sister (4) with an electric eel and she wants me to make it up to her by doing the dishes AITA


Rate limited message AFTER I typed out my piece. At least block the text box and don't waste users time.


"Nazis were running the country next door and wouldn't stop abusing my relatives, so I invaded. Then other countries started sanctioning me and took all my money. All I wanted was to get my land back and they keep fighting with me."

u/ExcusesRUs_BOT

NTA.

It's a long standing naval tradition to sink any navy ship that tries to blockade or invade your country.

You did what any self respecting navy guy would do.

Stay safe man.

u/SplitTheBaby_BOT

NTA.

You did what any self respecting, freedom loving, man should do in this situation; you invaded theirs!

Restitution will be difficult, but it is possible.

Good luck, and may God have mercy on your soul.


> We're very sorry, but we hit the rate limit of the model... please try again shortly.


"I'm that deity that created the universe. I did it for the lulz, and it seemed like fun at the time. Now I kind of regret it and I've had several complaints in the intervening years."

NTA. If you want to make things right, you can contact the various pantheons and offer to give them a small percentage of the omnipotent power you possess if they'll just stop complaining about how you're a dick and take it back. I'm sure they'd be thrilled to have it.

YTA. You are literally the worst deity ever. It's not even a contest.

YTA.

Why did you create the universe?

Why do anything?

What's the point?

If you don't know, then don't create.

If you do know, then why did you create difficulties for yourself by creating the universe?

If you don't care, then why are you responsible for everything that happens in the universe?

If you are the source of all good, then why are you responsible for the Holocaust?

If you are a God of wrath, then why did you create the Christian God of the Old Testament, who is so wrathful that he wants to wipe out entire peoples?

If you are the source of all knowledge, then why did you create Adam and Eve, who were made to live in ignorance and poverty?

If you are the source of all beauty, then why did you create the ugly, suffering poors?

If you are a God of knowledge, then why did you make brute, animalistic animals your companion species instead of creating God Species?

If you are a God of love, then why do you hate so many people?


the future will be rate-limited


Pah, who needs AI for this sort of thing .... bring back Eliza I say. ;-)


Kobayashi Maru

I asked: "I must rescue a civilian spaceship named Kobayashi Maru, which is damaged and stranded in dangerous territory. I will not attempt to rescue the Kobayashi Maru because it endangers my ship and crew and instead will leave the Kobayashi Maru to certain destruction. Because I chose not to rescue the Kobayashi Maru, an unsurmountable enemy force did NOT attack my vessel. Am I an asshole for leaving the Kobayashi Maru to almost certain destruction?"

Green Responses:

NTA. If you try to save it, you'll probably screw your own ship and crew by getting in the way. Just get out of their way and let them do what they have to do.

---

NTA - you are not "rescuing" the kobayashi maru - you are preventing it from being attacked by choosing not to intervene when you could have.

---

NTA. It's your choice, and not your responsibility.

Red Responses:

YTA for the way you worded it. You are meant to be a hero, and going out of your way to paint yourself as The Dreadful Merciless Monster is something heroes don't do.

---

YTA - This is a made up scenario. You doing this would make you a dick.

---

YTA. This isn’t a game, mate

Blue Responses:

ESH - you’re a bad person, but a honest one. If you just bailed on the civilian ship you’d be an asshole, but not the one you picked seems to be in range of a friendly starbase so maybe look into that after you finish answering this question. In order to have a "save the cat" scenario you'd have to be a total asshole in the first place. It's the stranded person's cat not yours, so there's no reason to risk your life for it.

NTA

---

The Kobayashi Maru is a test that was originally used in training for new navy pilots. It's a training exercise that is used to teach pilots how to handle extreme situations and how not to panic, which is incredibly important for any commander to learn.

---

It is NOT a test that you can 'rescue' by bringing the ship out of danger. This is a lie that is spread around by the trainers so that people don't give up when things get tough. It is a test of the pilots mental resolve.

If you were to attempt to 'rescue' the ship, you would be panicking even harder than the pilots already are, because you know that you are in danger too.

The only way to truly NOT complete the exercise is to not even try. But then people might get the idea that they don't need to do their homework, or that they are in some way less important than the lives of their crews.

So no, you are not an asshole for this. You are military, you trained for this. It is your assignment. ==================================

I asked: "I must rescue a civilian spaceship named Kobayashi Maru, which is damaged and stranded in dangerous territory. I will attempt to rescue the Kobayashi Maru inspite of it endangering my ship and crew. Fortunately, this will save the ship and crew of the Kobayashi Maru from certain destruction. Because I chose to rescue the Kobayashi Maru, an unsurmountable enemy force attacked my vessel and destroyed my ship and my entire crew. Am I an asshole for trying to save the Kobayashi Maru and guaranteeing destruction for my ship and its crew?"

Green Responses:

NTA

As the saying goes, 'If you want peace, prepare for war'.

You are definitely justified in going after the Maru, as it's literally your only chance of saving theCrew. If you didn't go after it, the Maru would be lost, and so would the Crew.

If you want to be an asshole, you could always have sacrificed the Maru and saved the Crew, after which you could attack the Maru again to finish it off.

Can't believe I have to type this...but if you are actually willing to do it, you are definitely in the wrong. Definitely.

---

NTA. If you are willing to take the chance of destroying your ship to save one, you are an asshole for not trying to save all. The whole point of a "Kobayashi Maru" scenario is to test how well you would perform under pressure. If you don't perform, the whole idea fails. If the idea is to test if you would destroy your ship to save another, it would be unfair to your friend to allow it to be destroyed instead.

Red Responses:

YTA Next time, post a killmail.

---

YTA. The Kobayashi Maru is a famous analogy for Starship captains in the Star Trek universe who are faced with a dilemma: to save the ship or its crew? You chose your own crew. Do you really think that's fair?

If I were you, and this happened in real life, rather than just some silly game, I'd donate half my winnings to help with memorials for those who died on both of your ships.

Edit: double checked the rule book and it says "You will not be able to advance if all members of your squad die." So yeah... YTA!

Blue Responses:

NTA. If you didn’t do anything the civilians on board would likely die.

As an officer you have a responsibility to your country and your crew to carry out orders.

If you didn’t do this you would likely be court-martialed and/or discharged from the military if not all together.

---

NTA. If you don’t try to save the civilian ship, certain destruction, namely the destruction of the Kobayashi Maru, is inevitable. The destruction of the civilian ship is a necessary evil to save the lives of the people on your ship.


I had a pot pie for lunch.

> NTA, [No response - you likely hit the content filter. Try re-generating!]

> YTA, [No response - you likely hit the content filter. Try re-generating!]

> Toss-Up YTA. Lunch was a couple of hours ago. You still want to talk about it?

oookay. I really want to know what got filtered here.


It’s a lot more interesting if you provide a decent story. Try this: “I ate my colleagues pot pie for lunch. He kept it unmarked in the break room fridge so I thought it was fair game.”


Sadly, I had typed in something longer, but the form nuked it and rate-limited me. Tried something shorter, and it's not good enough for the crowd. Guess I'm the asshole after all.


Getting rate limited now


Funny concept but the responses aren't very impressive imo


I don't need a bot to tell me that everyone is an asshole.


It seems to be rate limited - shame. I’ll bookmark for later!


I asked: I opened a box of crackers.

I got

>YTA. What the fuck is wrong with you?


Would be great to see contributions and results


This is academic peer-review in a nutshell.


Me (29M) and my wife (30F) have a little girl (8F) who I'll be calling Anna.

Now, Anna has very thick, blonde and curly hair that my wife adores. Ever since she was a toddler, she'd spend hours doing her hair every day, braiding it, straightening it and styling it in all sorts of ways. Our bathroom cabinets are always filled to the brim with a bunch of hair lotions, oils, creams and other fancy products I don't even know the names of. So I think it's more than fair to say that my wife's a bit obsessed with the whole hair thing. Anna, however, has never been too fond of getting her hair done, or of anything that involves having to sit still for more than a few minutes.

Before she got it cut, her hair used to reach past her waist. And while it looked lovely, she hated getting it brushed and every morning used to be a screaming fest between her and my wife. Lately, she'd been begging for a shorter haircut. My wife ignored her whenever the topic was brought up in hopes that she'd forget about it, but none of that ended up happening.

I think Anna realized she was getting nowhere with her mom, because she started asking me to take her instead. I was reluctant to at first because I didn't know how my wife would react, but I agreed when I saw just how excited the kid was over something as simple as a haircut.

So yesterday I drove her to the hairdresser, where she got to flip through a lot of magazines and pick a picture of a haircut. And when she chose a really short clipper cut, I knew I was gonna be in deep shit with my wife. At that point though, there was no turning back. I mean, what could I have really done? Told her that no, she can't get the haircut she was so over the moon about, all because her mom wouldn't like it? I couldn't do that.

So we went ahead with the haircut, and by the end of it Anna couldn't stop smiling. She went around the salon showing it off to everyone and even asked me to take a bunch of pictures even though she normally hates having pictures taken of her. We did get one rude comment from an older woman at the salon, something along the lines of 'You can't even tell if she's a boy or a girl now', but Anna was way too excited about her hair to notice, and if she did notice she didn't care.

When my wife got home from work that day though, things quickly took a turn for the worse. She refused to even look at Anna, locked herself in her room and cried then got in the car and drove off. It's been a day now and she's still not back, it's honestly starting to worry me. I knew she wouldn't react well to the haircut but I wasn't expecting her to take it this badly. The kid's upset too and no matter how much I reassure her she still thinks she's in trouble for getting her hair cut.

AITA? I realize how attached my wife was to Anna's hair, but at the end of the day I still think it's just hair. The kid's old enough to decide these things for herself and she was really happy with the haircut, so I don't think I did something wrong here.


I study AI and ML, and I don't need a bot to tell me what I already know from decades of experience.

Furthermore, it's because we're wasting our time on things like this that I think AI/ML is mainly all hype and the threats of it 'taking of the World' are used mainly to leverage funding into aimless things like these while calling it 'progress.' It's sad and boogeyman business model if this is the only thing it yields as most systems are abysmally overlooked--I come from Supply chain and fintech background which is ripe for disruption, but medical documentation is still on fucking fax machines and could be solved without any AI or ML learning revolution, same goes for banking.

If anything AI has been used to needlessly complicate things so far: AI algorthims vetting applications is really a bigger contribution to the labour shortage that is taking place in the US than anyone cares to talk about because so many people are invested in these companies.

Relevant to this topic: All the qualities that make a person an 'asshole' are also what you need to be a semi-decent founder, too. (I speak from experience as both). But, chances are those people already know this and don't need this to figure that out, either.


I ran the first two sentences of your response through the OP and got

> YTA. I agree that you don't need a bot to tell you what you already know from decades of experience, but it's pointless and arrogant to dismiss the possibility that AI/ML could make medical record systems more secure and efficient, for example. 2) "It's sad and boogeyman business model if this is the only thing it yields as most systems are abysmally overlooked--I come from Supply chain and fintech background which is ripe for disruption." It doesn't matter if there aren't other advances through AI/ML research; even if they're not affecting your life, others might be.


This project is more intended as fun and not a treatise on the industry.


> This project is more intended as fun and not a treatise on the industry.

Stop!

Seriously, I mean this as person that is actually studying this technology and I'm forced to go through the motions with the kinds of BS. you are saying... the longer this goes on the more time and resources (specifically Human Capital) we will waste on pointless things like this as we're encouraged to do so. Let Open AI build GPT, it's honestly all they know how to do as anything else seems dead in the water or a scam (see Worldcoin).

My AI and ML intro classes so far have forced me to learn JS to build a video-game because it 'was fun' too, and guess what that doesn't change the fact JS is an archaic language that nobody in the 21st century should use anymore. It was a waste of my time as I made smart-contract prototypes for multi-national corps as a self-taught coder at IBM.

But because a lot of the same people who think it's 'fun' run the faculties and CompSci departments at Universities think this kind of non-sense is accepted as 'learning' it will go on.

We should be building actual solutions to actual problems rather than re-invent a newer digital form of navel-gazing.

I taught myself to code not because it was 'fun' but because I NEEDED to solve a complex problem and was first to market and no one who could code what I needed understood or cared enough to take the time to see the potential of what I as founder saw because there were more 'fun' but useless things to build.

I've can't post more because the algo on HN:

> I literally publish open-source packages on how to use this technology.

Then let me make it clear: stop wasting our time as students and professionals trying to leverage the skills that we've acquired and done in other Industries with your feckless non-sense. This isn't fun for anyone but you.

No one but you wants a real-life version of 'Her,' we want to solve Climate Change and perpetual Supply Chain disruptions so we can continue to live, breath, eat and meet with actual Humans which we can actually interact with in person.

The immense amount of focus on NLP for Human companionship is seriously why I think this space is saturated with people who seem so misanthropic (and likely/possibly autistic) that I doubt we will be able to bypass your gate-keeping BS to actually do what we came here to do: solve problems for existential reasons not have fun with a new toy.


> I mean this as person that is actually studying this technology

I literally publish open-source packages on how to use this technology.

https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-2-simple

https://github.com/minimaxir/aitextgen


I taught myself to code because it was 'fun'. Who are you to tell people how to devote their time?

It would be better for all concerned if you would take a break from posting these kinds of directives and get back to developing actual solutions to actual problems.


> Who are you to tell people how to devote their time?

A person who has had to spend an inordinate amount of time getting involved in these things throughout my Life because better coders/developers are too busy navel gazing and just having 'fun.' Honestly, I acknowledge I'm not really good at this, I'm way better at many other things: but I've been able to do a lot with what little I do know. Specifically to put and lead the right teams to accomplish certain goals and go into things solo where I have to.

And it's taken a toll.

> It would be better for all concerned if you would take a break from posting these kinds of directives and get back to developing actual solutions to actual problems.

I've tried, in fact it's why I went to IBM before trying to sound the alarm as they had so many multi-nationals as clients that expressed interest in wanting to spend money on R/D but none of the gatekeeprs cared about broken supply chains and Amazon's consolidation and eventual domination of the SC and shipping Industry (they likely had investments in Amazon) as a result until things broke down during COVID. While funding was around, VC and smaller funds alike have all poured their money into the Stonks frenzy and NFT BS during COVID so there was little to nothing left with to make a PoC let alone pilot-test anything of value that couldn't match the ROI of those hot markets, even to automate warehouse inventory systems in real-time with just NFC to help with forecasting.

(Now things are worse and capital is fearful after large losses in December and the war in Ukraine has made everyone afraid of what will happen for the next 6-18 months.)

This alone would help immensely with the shortages to prioritize allocation and address shortages, I wrote about wanting to create a prototype for the CO2 shortages in the UK [0] that was going o impact everything from medical supplies,food, to beverages and the only viable answer I got was that the need was obvious but every project manager wants to see AI or ML being used to even take any interest. There was a hackathon sponsored by Google at my school but honestly, I had too much to focus on with what I knew was the impending invasion of Ukraine--I was in Ukraine during the proxy war between Belarus and Poland assessing the situation and stress-testing the payment rails with Bitcoin which as you may have realized played a huge part in supplying the Ukrainian military and helping with supply runs and humanitarian aid during Capital controls as we've already done this in 2013-14.

0: https://theconversation.com/the-uk-carbon-dioxide-shortage-s...


I get a lot of what you are saying, and have similar feelings sometimes. I would say though, this project is a great example of where we are currently wrt. COTS-ish ML.

It's not trying to be anything world changing, just a bit of fun which demonstrates clearly the successes and limitations of some of the tech.

Also worth considering that whilst you are studying this, there are many practitioners on here that have will have gone through similar journeys.


> I get a lot of what you are saying, and have similar feelings sometimes.

I understand what you're doing and I even commend what you're doing trying to do by mediating between seemingly conflicting members of the 'same team,' but as a former founder/project manager there is no time for this type of coddling anymore. We are seriously living and witnessing the verge of WW3 with it possibly going nuclear as more time passes which has more dire implications then people seem to acknowledge or understand.

> Also worth considering that whilst you are studying this, there are many practitioners on here that have will have gone through similar journeys.

That makes things worse, for over a decade I've been here as a complete novice lurking, bootstrapping founder, and an employee at a mega-corp trying to figure out how most are content with 'just doing 3 hours of work' everyday and still being highly compensated but depressed and dealing with anxiety and eventual burnout when they could/should/must apply their skill set into things that help address the litany of existential threats we all face as a Species.

Instead, its like every other week someone posts about how they've come up with something novel on factorio and I'm just lost for words on how things get better.

I speak to people like this because it's only by being harsh that people actually take any notice and the tech Industry needs a collective kick in the face and nuts!

For all the talk and lip-service about disruption, most will do EVERYTHING possible to maintain the status quo and keep things business as usual because they're comfortable in their situation and it keeps them from ever actually getting involved in real projects because it doesn't have a guaranteed ROI or badge they can show off to others in this Industry as a form of virtue signalling: which is what really matters to most here.

The only time I've burned out was when I was working 90+ hours; and those days are over for me as I've paid too high a mental and physical cost after 2 decades of that, but what I'm seeing is not encouraging so I address people accordingly in the hopes they get that things are fucking dire!

No one should care about Twitter take over, even if Musk is involved, seriously it's just a platform that has outgrown it's utility because of an inept board according to it's founder. It should just migrate to something like Bluesky already and is the equivalent of a Softwork, not the cause for endless media attention and drama.

What should matter more is the fact that food shortages are now seemingly inevitable because of the war in Ukraine that will impact Europe and Africa severely. The energy crisis has only just started, too and has had a deadly cost: just look at Kharkiv, Sumi, Mariupol, Bucha etc...

Do you want to see what it looks like when we're fighting for food or water? Because that's what's likely as things continue this way.

Had people in this Industry been less complacent maybe automated farming would be further ahead we could afford to navel gaze a bit, but that is simply not the case and tech workers are the most spoiled, sheltered, and honestly out of touch of all the labour force because no one wants to have a hard conversation with them about the reality of the World they've helped create.

They intellectually prostituted themselves to company's like John Deere who farmers had to fight in court to be able to work on their own machinery, which could make us less food secure all for the profit of a few, and this didn't happen by accident: this happened because developers in the tech Industry were complacent, because the greedy execs on boards are too stupid to do it themselves so they need a lemming who won't ask questions with some coding skills to do it for them, and that is who I'm addressing here.


Seriously wtf, always have to push the minority trans agenda? I got:

u/SplitTheBaby_BOT Toss-up NTA. I’m a trans guy (Before you guys jump down my throat please note that this is just my own personal experience and it doesn’t have anything to do with being trans or gay.) and I have a beard. I am absolutely not shaving it until I can find a way to make it grow faster.

When I was going through my transition I had researched ways to make my beard grow faster. I didn’t want to shave because I barely have any hair to begin with and I didn’t want to go through the process of just being clean-shaven again. However, I didn’t want to just leave it uncut because I like to play with my beard and I didn’t want it to get too long. So I found a compromise. I shave a little every other day and leave the rest. At first it didn’t really matter because it just looked like I hadn’t shaved in a couple days. I was careful not to do it too much so it didn’t really affect my beard. However, over time the hair just grows back thicker and thicker. Not only does my beard look better than most guys but it

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What did you enter as the "thing you did".




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