A company that forces you to write a "Connect" every half-year where you reflect on your performance and Impact™ : (click here for the definition of Impact™ in Microsoft® Sharepoint™)

I've been thinking about this post for a full day now. It's truly bizzare, in a "I'd like to talk to this person and study their brain" kind of way.

Put aside the technical impossibility of LLMs acting as the agents he describes. That's small potatoes. The only thing that stays in my mind is this:

take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need

I can't even put into words the full nonsense of this statement. How do you think this would work? This is not how learning works. This is not how research works. This is not how anything works.

I can't understand this. Like yes, of course, some times there's this moment where you think "god I remember there was this particular chart I saw" or "how many people lived in Tokio again?" or "I read exactly the solution to this problem on StackOverflow once". In the days of yore you'd write one Google query and you'd get it. Nowadays maybe you can find it on Wikipedia. Sure. But that doesn't actually take two minutes either, it's like an instant one-second thought of "oh I know I saw exactly this factoid somewhere". You don't read books for that though. Does this person think books are just sequences of facts you're supposed to memorise?

How on earth do you think of "precisely the information you need". What does that mean? How many problems are there in your life where you precisely know how the solution would look like, you just need an elaborate query through an encyclopedia to get it? Maybe this is useful if your entire goal is creating a survey of existing research into a topic, but that's a really small fraction of applications for reading a fucking book. How often do you precisely know what you don't know? Like genuinely. How can your curiosity be distilled into a precise, well-structured query? Don't you ever read something and go "oh, I never even thought about this", "I didn't know this was a problem", "I wouldn't have thought of this myself". If not then what the fuck are you reading??

I am also presuming this is about purely non-fiction technical books, because otherwise this gets more nonsensical. Like what do you ask your agents for, "did they indeed take the hobbits to Isengard? Prepare a comprehensive review of conflicting points of view."

This single point presumes that none of the reasons for you absorbing knowledge from other people is to use it in a creative way, get inspired by something, or just find out about something you didn't know you didn't know. It's something so alien to me, so detached from what I consider the human experience, I simply don't comprehend this. Is this a real person? How does the day-to-day life of this person look like? What goes on in their head when they read a book? What are we moving towards as a species?

There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let's call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too. [emph. mine]

First of all, fucking what

Second of all, I am struck by the impressive stupidity of "pronouns were never meant for me", it's almost like satire. What the fuck would that even mean? It the proceeds to use 6 different pronouns like it's taunting you to point it out.

This is stuff that, on a high-school essay, you just highlight wholesale and write "??" next to it because honestly how do you even comment on it

This is a really weird comment. Assembly is not faster than C, that's a nonsensical statement, C compiles down to assembly. LLVM's optimizations will most likely outperform or directly match whatever hand-crafted assembly you write. Why would BEQ 1000 be "considerably faster" than if (x == y) goto L_1000;? This collapses even further if you consider any application larger than a few hundred lines of code, any sensible compiler is going to beat you on optimizations if you try to write hand-crafted assembly. Try loading up assembly code and manually performing intraprocedural optimizations, lol, there's a reason every compiled language goes through an intermediate representation.

Saying that C# is slower than C is also nonsensical, especially now that C# has built-in PGO it's very likely it could outperform an application written in C. C#'s JIT compiler is not somehow slower because it's flexible in terms of hardware, if anything that's what makes it fast. For example you can write a vectorized loop that will be JIT-compiled to the ideal fastest instruction set available on the CPU running the program, whereas in C or assembly you'd have to manually write a version for each. There's no reason to think that manual implementation would be faster than what the JIT comes up with at runtime, though, especially with PGO.

It's kinda like you're saying that a V12 engine is faster than a Ferrari and that they are both faster than a spaceship because the spaceship doesn't have wheels.

I know you're trying to explain this to a non-technical person but what you said is so terribly misleading I cannot see educational value in it.

This is probably the least surprising thing ever.

CocaCola is like the symbol of capitalism. Everything they produce is corporate slop. GenAI is a perfect fit -- soulless, artless, hastily slapped together bright pictures that ultimately don't matter and carry no value. The world is not better with CocaCola ads, and it would be no worse without them. They're just there, to be lost in time, forgotten. Like tears in the rain.

I worked at MSFT between 2021 and 2023.

The Growth Mindset is very much just a gaslighting tool. To be honest I didn't get the culty vibe from it while being on the inside, on the other hand no one ever tried to make me to read Satya's stupid book (thankfully).

One important thing I just have to talk about is The Layoffs. If you ask me about "Growth Mindset", or indeed if I ask around my former MSFT colleagues about the first thing that comes to their mind when they hear it, it will be that time when, not even a month after the massive 2023 layoffs where MSFT fired 11,000 people, we were told by management at a Townhall that it is time for us to "apply Growth Mindset and move forward". I remember very clearly that they tried to spin it as if the layoffs were something that just "happened to us" and we had to move on, as if it was a hurricane that hit the office and not a deliberate act of management to cut costs. It was fucking amazing to hear that from them after I had a literal panic attack due to the uncertainty after the first wave of firings.

I made the decision to quit not long after. When I was leaving the genAI brain rot was already in full swing. The stuff about autoplaging Connects is just a great affirmation of my decision, that company is fucked.

Where's that person who was arguing with me last time that AI doesn't actually use that much energy and the corps missing their climate goals was not AI related

Literally the same shit as during the war against work from home.

Hey look, they are more productive, get their work done faster, don't have to spend 10% of their life commuting, and have more freedom. OUTRAGEOUS!

(Only this time there's no actual productivity boost, but they're still preemptively mad?)

I'm sorry but "evangelist" to me conjures an image of a techbro on a street corner with a makeshift shelf of Google Cloud brochures advertising free documentation study hours.

There's Jehowa Witnesses doing the same schtick one block over and they're absolutely furious he took their favourite spot.

Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties

Ye, I know.

Not that one.

Oh.

Not that one either.

Jesus christ, how many of them are there??

Check out my new startup at modestproposal.ai

Turns out being a fucking sociopath is a good indicator of reoffence, who would've thinkity thunked.

Give him 50 years of being forced to talk to a normal person that swats him in the head with a newspaper every time he says "expected value", we can rehabilitate this boy.