The vibe seems to be that it is not ILLEGAL it just is a reason the government should be able to kill you in the street without proof or process (if you don't root for the right team).
After you take the outright liars away (of which there are many, all the way to the top) it's the same, tired "the leopards won't eat MY face" crowd. Bad thing happens -> well what she wearing.
Strongly agree and want to pile on with some more very normal times to queue politely:
- waiting to get food at a quick service restaurant
- waiting to get into a show
- waiting for the bathroom in a public place
- merging while driving in traffic
Any time there is an uncoordinated mass of folks on a limited resource it helps simplify things all around for a FIFO process. The chaotic "sharpest elbows wins" approach being better is the exception not the rule.
Which just begs the question, how much can you really change social media? How much are you really in control of your feed? This is where the "pubic square" analogy breaks down. Besides, there are a lot of communication mediums/messaging apps that are not social media.
Even back in the early 2010s I've been trying to consume social media mindfully. I made sure to follow pages with meaningful content (e.g., The Dalai Lama, The Long Now Foundation, Aeon Magazine, tech-related pages, SpaceX, Elon Musk, indie creators). I don't just add or follow blindly.
Back then I could justify why my selection was "good" but even then, they were drowned out by the tedium of vacations, new restaurants, felt-cute-might-delete-later selfies. Slop/engagement bait is quicker to produce than meaningful thought-provoking content.
I am also pretty sure Facebook's negative signals (unfollow, don't show me this type of content) did not work back then, at least not deterministically. If something I did not like had enough traction, it will still pop up in my feed.
And of course, goes without saying that a lot of my choices aged like milk. Elon Musk turned out to be, well, Elon Musk. Some of the tech pages started shilling out crypto (and nowadays doubtless AI). The indie creators either stopped posting or fell out of favor with the algorithm which meant exodus from the platform. All that goes on top of my pre-existing grievances against my feed recommendations.
Yep, just like learning anything the intro level summaries don't reflect reality they just help you get your head around new things.
In the real work experience every project, team, and company are a little bit unique in how they respond to the requirements and politics of the moment. Everyone is trying to get something done and how purely it follows some pattern or rule is only relevant as far as it helps get the work done.
What you learned wasnt useless - it was probably very helpful for understanding or at least getting exposed to lots of concepts that you'll need. However, just like the joke about physicists and their spherical cows, the perfect algorithms and architecture rules from school aren't even close to the whole story in the trenches.
A non-engineering anecdote - had a math professor tasked with determining a fit line for and integration of a bunch of sensor data (needed the total area under the curve, classic math test problem). College me imagined trying to craft bespoke integratable functions and maybe some multi part fitting optimization but I knew my little list of memorized formulas couldn't touch this real life data so I was looking forward to the veteran approach. Math guy printed it, eyeballed to fill in the gaps with a pen, cut it out, and weighed it against a sample of "1x1" unit squares of the paper.
I was flabbergasted but the dude was so obviously right -- one off task, collected data with no clear pattern, didn't need crazy precision. The "obvious" answer took far less time than anything I had in mind and was plenty good enough for the problem at hand.
tl;dr - what you learned so far wasn't wasted it was simply the very beginning of filling up your mental toolbox
Probably not but it's also easy to see ways the intern could help -- finding and raising opportunities, reviewing codebases or roadmaps, reviewing all the recent prompts made by each department, creating monitoring tools for next time after the humans identify a pattern.
I don't have a dog in this fight and I kind of land in the middle. I very much am not letting these LLMs be the one with final responsibility over anything important but I see lots of ways to create "proactive"-like help beyond me writing and watching a prompt just-in-time.
I'm also one of those pesky folks who keeps bringing reality and "thinking about consequences" into the otherwise sublime thought leadership meetings. I pretend it's to keep the company alive by not making massive mistakes but we all know its just pettiness and trying to hold back the "business by spreadsheet", mba on the wall, "idea guys" on the room.
Is that what you think hitler was very famous for?
The extreme examples are an analogy that highlight the shape of the comparison with a more generally loathed / less niche example.
OpenAI is a thing with lots and lots of personal data that the consumers trust OpenAI not to abuse or lose. They chose a product name that matches a us government program that secretly and illegal breached exactly that kind of trust.
Hitler vegetarians isn't a great analogy because vegetarianism isn't related to what made hitler bad. Something closer might be Exxon or BP making a hairgel called "Oilspill" or Dupont making a nail polish called "Forever Chem".
They could have chosen anything but they chose one specifically matching a recent data stealing and abuse scandal.
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