The Rise of the Bullshittery(xn--gckvb8fzb.com) |
The Rise of the Bullshittery(xn--gckvb8fzb.com) |
We need more leaders like that.
That set the tone for the rest of the war. Bad leaders were routinely demoted or retired by a formal process for identifying losers. Not for policy reasons. For not being good at combat leadership. For most of the 1950s, at least, the US military continued that tradition. Much of the staff of Apollo came from that environment.
[1] https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/gen-george-c-mar...
LinkedIn is full of bullshit because no one has anything genuine to say that’s appropriate for that platform. The people posting that nonsense don’t actually believe it.
The game is tedious, and if you don’t play you lose. It was like this before the Internet, too: my father limited his earning potential by being bad at networking, whereas my grandfather did went so far as to join the Freemasons to climb the corporate ladder to the top.
Wait, what? Being two or more steps removed from "a real customer" makes your job bullshit?
- bullshit jobs
- enshittification
- kubernetes being a psyop
- tech landscape was best exactly during his career peak and has gone down since
The first two are actual real effects of the complex world that we live in. Go back 150 years or so ago and most jobs were not bullshit jobs. That is, humanity spent most of its time trying to feed and clothe ourselves and if you weren't one of the few people with money then "not starving next winter" was pretty high on your list of priorities in working.
With the rise of industrialization, mechination, and transportation most of our needs can be met pretty easily (if society optimizes itself for that is a totally different story). It is highly that your job at this point has anything to do with continued human survival and instead you're working on some kind of revenue generation for some company.
This couples well with enshittification. It took a good part of said industrial revolution to learn how to make things of all kinds and make them reliably. But it turns out too much reliability isn't profitable over the long term. Getting your customer on an upgrade treadmill where they constantly give you more money makes you huge. You'll be able to get huge loans and buy up your reliable competition.
Some additional ones:
- believes SWE is now fundamentally different because of AI
- repeatedly belittles people who aren't on the AI hype train
- believes slop bans and distaste of AI art is gatekeeping
At this point, you've stopped growing. Not growing is completely unacceptable; it is anathema. So you start spending a lot of the money on long shot bets. Maybe try buying lots of geese to see if any lay golden eggs. You heard that somebody found a hen that lays golden eggs because of some magic beans, hire some bean farmers and see if that gets you more gold egg poultry. Jack who was the manager of goose calisthenics has really wanted a chance to grow, and he's dating your cousin, so let's put him in charge of the beans.
The only way to grow is long shot bets. Most of them will fail. All of them will be expensive. But the alternative is not growing. That can't ever happen.
Succinctly put and so very both unfortunate and accurate. The only other thing I can think of that grows endlessly is cancer. There’s an analogy in there if you squint hard enough.
For very human reasons, they thing they have a better chance of finding the goose themselves.
how? the value of gold plummets the instant that the market learns that the stuff literally comes out of rear ends
I've been thinking about this a lot, but basically, my old job was basically superfluous and we didn't accomplish anything important but I had to pretend that it was real, important, meaningful, and progressing.
The truth is that most people's jobs are kind of unnecessary in the white collar world, and in some David Graber-esque hellscape we have to pretend that all the work is hyper important and aligned, etc.
Basically, society in the US is so opulent that for a great many people in the white collar world, it's more important that they look busy than actually do anything. It's the Pareto principle in action, or maybe a power law thing, or something where to get those few people who bust their ass and produce and add great value a ton of hanger-oners have to be a part of the org in order to facilitate that. Regardless, it's basically UBI but with meetings.
I think about "Bullshit Jobs" every time I hear someone tell me how lean, efficient and rational the free-market private sector is compared to socialist central planning. In many senses, it is of course true, but it's not quite as true as one might believe at first glance.
This and they spend a lot of effort in rent seeking and otherwise ensuring their profits are encoded into laws.
Also, quite often those 100s of people sitting around are a political requirement. That is, they got some tax break to ensure X people have jobs. That is, it's a job program.
The way I think about it is that building something truly successful comes with a tremendous amount of momentum. So much momentum that growth for these companies still occurs.
The people hired into a mature organization are literally there just to keep the lights on and let the momentum do its work. They also create and grow their little fiefdoms.
You can try and build something and innovate there, but it takes a deeply concerted effort to try and sustain it. Even if something is made wildly successful and is growing 50-100% year over year, it still likely pales in comparison to the 0.005% growth of the large core business.
Even if the new innovation is given space to breath, it can be killed at any point by the core business as the fiefdoms look over and say: that should be part of my org, or those resources can be better spent on the core business. So instead of waiting the years it takes for the new, small thing to grow large enough to be important it is easily killed by the parts of the organization just keeping the lights on.
If a tree has a dead branch, you cut it off. Cutting off 10% of the leaves evenly distributed among branches will remove some dead leaves, but it leaves the source of the problems unaddressed.
It's funny how easily you can convince people that social media is not real life. Those influencers posting content 24/7 are a minority of people putting on a show, not a reflection of the real world. It's such an obvious feature of social media.
But when the topic changes to LinkedIn they completely forget that. They act like the LinkedIn lunatics they see posting AI thought leader posts twice a day are completely average and everyone is like this, except them of course.
Very few people post to the LinkedIn feed. Those who do are usually playing a game of some sort. If you go to the LinkedIn feed and draw conclusions, know that you're drawing conclusions about a vocal minority of wannabe business influencers. These people exist, but LinkedIn is a circus sideshow to the world of business. Not the main attraction.
There are three topics that inevitably get injected into every discussion: AI, politics, and nostalgia. The thing is, I don't understand the goal. This isn't reddit. Few people on here are that broke, uneducated, or impressionable. This site is also deliberately designed to not reward any interaction.
Yet, the biggest bullshittery, is every company that almost each of you work at requires a link to a LinkedIn account on every job application, not optional. It has become a form of social credit. LinkedIn isn't completely meaningless either. A huge portion of the posts are also propaganda. Finding a new job is tied to listening to propaganda.
Once upon a time academic reputations were generally ex-
pected to be based upon the productions of books, studies, mono-
graphs—in sum, upon the production of ideas and scholarly
works, and upon the judgment of these works by academic col-
leagues and intelligent laymen. One reason why this has been so
in social science and the humanities is that a man’s competence
or incompetence has been available for inspection, since the older
academic world did not contain privileged positions of compe-
tence. It is rather difficult to know whether the alleged compe-
tence of a corporation president, for example, is due to his own
personal abilities or to the powers and facilities available to him
by virtue of his position. But there has been no room for such
doubt about scholars working, as old-fashioned professors have
worked, as craftsmen.
However, by his prestige, the new academic statesman, like the
business executive and the military chieftain, has acquired means
of competence which must be distinguished from his personal
competence—but which in his reputation are not so distinguished.
A permanent professional secretary, a clerk to run to the library,
an electric typewriter, dictating equipment, and a mimeographing
machine, and perhaps a small budget of three or four thousand
dollars a year for purchasing books and periodicals—even such
minor office equipment and staff enormously increases any
scholar’s appearance of competence. Any business executive will
laugh at the pettiness of such means; college professors will not
—few professors, even productive ones, have such facilities on a
secure basis. Yet such equipment is a means of competence and
of career—which secure clique membership makes much more
likely than does unattached scholarship. The clique’s prestige
increases the chance to get them, and having them in turn in-
creases the chance to produce a reputation.disabling JS seems too large of a change, but basic privacy of "not having your tabbing habits tracked" seems to be one addon away (and it's scary that it isn't an option of the browser)
Our management team bought the idea right up.
I didn't say anything despite having professional qualifications in mathematics and statistics. 5 years ago I might have done. Now I know it's futile. Last time I tried to stand up for integrity over bullshit I got the full management language tirade thrown back at me for daring to question it. I realised after a bit that it's a fragile house of cards and if you push it the entire thing will go and they are doing everything they can to keep it standing.
This was so soul-crushing that I decided I was just going to fuck around and get paid until I get fired. See how long I can stretch it out. By doing that I'm doing less damage than they are.
You can hardly blame people who make fancy websites for projects which look cool but you can't tell what it is they have to offer. If the alternative is a plain simple 'here it is, it does this' followed by a pile-on of armchair critics who have already decided on the quality of your project because your page lacks razzmatazz.
This is because thinking, communication, and collaboration are extremely valuable.
Engineers, especially SWEs, have lots of aphorisms to discourage exactly this and try to put it into professional doctrine and culture. (YAGNI, KISS, secondary-systems syndrome, etc)
Most people in management, finance, politics etc won't ever see it as bad unless they actually receive bad feedback. But bad feedback never comes if the incentive structures are broken (that's the point of TFA)
Some of the ones I spotted:
- FTX Cryptocurrency
- Infowars
- YouTube: Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom (lmao, what is this supposed to be?)
- YouTube: MrBeast en Espanol
- Netflix: Fifty Shades of Grey
- ChatGPT: Online Debate Argument Suggestions (haha - I've never done that...)
- Hacker News: The Internet Used to be Fun
- Google: Zuckerberg Nudes
- Official Church of Scientology
LTT (Linus Tech Tips, a YouTube channel) have used it as a real title before. "Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom - Intel Extreme Tech Upgrade" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkCX8d8WSOg
While I understand the need to be flexible, and Sun Tzu certainly preached deception as a weapon, ambiguity sucks in politics.
Not a partisan point. The new thing seems to be "say whatever is needful" during the campaign, and then just run amok when sworn in.
It's swell if you agree, and hell if you don't, with the decisions.
No matter how pro-state you are the US National debt, Uncle Sam's prostate, cannot enlarge forever.
Possibly some sobriety will be forced upon us.
Fact is large institutions inevitably lead to these kind of inefficiencies, we just moved on to larger projects and companies. If anything this phenomena is better explained by reduction in productivity growth than social media, in a realm of low productivity growth there is a tendency for consolidation which leads to larger companies and thus more BS.
Governments and institutions also have grown a lot more BS but I believe it is mostly tied to high population growth in the previous 100 years than low productivity growth. After all governments don't consolidate like companies do (war vs mergers/acquisitions/bankrupcies).
It is a common trope of history how big institution grows so big they crumble under their own weight of inefficiencies. All the way back to the roman empire and probably countless more examples even earlier.
Rewarding people who are good that this is a compounding mistake.
I genuinely think the future of Facebook, LinkedIn, et al could look very much like just bot farms generating bullshit at scale for other bots to consume and inflate the metrics on while everyone actually interested in... anything really, sails off to greener pastures that have revenue streams that don't require this.
To be clear, my ideal future would not be this, if for no other reason than the catastrophic electrical and bandwidth being wasted to pretend anyone on LinkedIn's best ranking posts understands a single thing under the sun, but I consider this a solid #2 option.
thus, by definition, all LLMs are bullshitters
The fact that people assign any weight to that information is the mistake.
The definition of bullshit in the original article was precisely this: no care given to whether there is truth in what is said.
Gaming? Webcomics? Fusion power? Space exploration?
In person is obviously the safest for this. For online friendships I feel the places to meet people you can trust aren't AI or Scammers has shrunk a ton
>The person next to you, who is willing to fake the demo and declare victory on LinkedIn even before the launch, is going to look more successful than you.
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/never-click-on-a-link-that-looks-l...
Yes, this is a totally new phenomenon which has never ever been the case at literally every point in human history.
These days I'm wondering whether even that matters anymore. Fastest way to get rich these days seems to be insider trading, scams, onlyfans, leveraging addictions etc.
I am 100% convinced that a significant number of job posts on LinkedIn are entirely fake and either 1) a way to farm resumes and contact details for sales 2) propaganda to make a company appear to be hiring more than it is.
Positions from companies like Andiamo, Jobgether, etc. are most likely #1 above, while Adyen, Affirm, Airwallex are the latter.
In fact I build a prototype classifier of job listings to separate true opportunities from bullshit posts, but I am too scared to publish it and get sued to oblivion.
If I get desperate, I might find the the cut off for 200 - 300 companies and try to honestly get my resume into those parameters. At this time, it is below me to do that.
Most people create a profile and update it when they're job searching, but they don't visit LinkedIn or interact with the feed at all.
I miss the good ol' days when they would look at my resume, call the places to make sure I worked there, and invite me in to prove I know the skills that I put on my resume.
Let's be clear, what this really means is that if you enjoy survival, you are forced into directly supporting the Epstein class. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-04/how-jeffr...
The linked in bullshitters aren't having fun, they don't actually think any of this is real, they might even prefer real work to grifting. People in charge of hiring and interviewing don't want this. The coercion is in the network really.. but everyone must become complicit.
“Once upon a time academic reputations were generally expected to be based upon the productions of books, studies, monographs—in sum, upon the production of ideas and scholarly works, and upon the judgment of these works by academic colleagues and intelligent laymen. One reason why this has been so in social science and the humanities is that a man’s competence or incompetence has been available for inspection, since the older academic world did not contain privileged positions of competence. It is rather difficult to know whether the alleged competence of a corporation president, for example, is due to his ownpersonal abilities or to the powers and facilities available to him by virtue of his position. But there has been no room for such doubt about scholars working, as old-fashioned professors have worked, as craftsmen.
“However, by his prestige, the new academic statesman, like the business executive and the military chieftain, has acquired means of competence which must be distinguished from his personal competence—but which in his reputation are not so distinguished. A permanent professional secretary, a clerk to run to the library, an electric typewriter, dictating equipment, and a mimeographing machine, and perhaps a small budget of three or four thousand dollars a year for purchasing books and periodicals—even such minor office equipment and staff enormously increases any scholar’s appearance of competence. Any business executive will laugh at the pettiness of such means; college professors will not—few professors, even productive ones, have such facilities on a secure basis. Yet such equipment is a means of competence and of career—which secure clique membership makes much more likely than does unattached scholarship. The clique’s prestige increases the chance to get them, and having them in turn increases the chance to produce a reputation.”
Yeah, people really need to stop prefixing lines with 4 spaces when quoting something on HN. It needlessly forces a fixed width font with fixed width columns.
Just prepend a > to show you're quoting something. There's already precedent for it from e-mail and newsgroups, and most forums already use it for quoting. Make it italics if you want it to stand out a bit more.
Best just to do it randomly to avoid hard decisions and lawsuits.
Instead we know it literally comes out of the ground and the market doesn't plummet.
Also think about the fact that you can't post "comments that are dismissive or without substance" but the titles are zero information basic clickbait from around the internet.
The benefit of a LinkedIn profile is that I have something I can easily share around to teams or other hiring managers that provides an easy overview of the person in a format they're familiar with.
The job websites are requiring a linkedin profile in order to submit an application. I had one interview and the guy sounded like a linkedin stream. So I thought about updating mine. I was immediately hit with political propaganda. From the point of view of an established company, it is a test that the person is willing to conform to social standards. It is the modern equivalent of wearing a tie to an interview.
It makes it very, very hard to start from zero though. Like starting over in a new city