If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.
Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?"
I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips?
"Oh," the producer said, "all of that."
In 13 minutes.
You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it:
Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?"
I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."
Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:
AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.
What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:
AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:
Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.
AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:
So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?
This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.
Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.
Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate atmosphere before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.
My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then handing me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:
Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:
But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.
Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?"
I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips?
"Oh," the producer said, "all of that."
In 13 minutes.
You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it:
Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?"
I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."
Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:
AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.
What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:
AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:
Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.
AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:
So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?
This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.
Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.
Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate atmosphere before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.
My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then handing me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:
Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:
But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop.
Guy nobody heard of a year ago somehow becomes a senate candidate, turns out he's an ex mercenery, is a violent disturbed person that wanted to rape people as a display of power and was sad about veterans not getting to fly to child prostitution central any more.
Just the Thailand thing makes him a part of the Epstein class.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
There is a direct connection b/w leftist ideology presuming that white people are racist and the policemen jumping to the conclusion that Nowak was falsely claiming he had been stabbed in a desperate attempt to avoid a racism charge.
this story is the current obsession of those who believe in race war, most notably the owner of twitter and the rubes who follow him, and in some ways it's even dumber than the George Floyd obsession, not least because people should have learned better by now.
if I was the cop in that situation I would probably have assumed the guy on the ground was drunk! which is what British cops usually have to deal with when they get called to deal with someone being disorderly; murders are rare and the perpetrator doesn't usually call the cops.
and when the cops realised he had been stabbed they arrested the murderer and jailed him for life; this story is only an outrage if you believe cops should be clairvoyant, or arrest anyone of Indian ancestry on sight regardless of what's happening.
but obviously if you're already mad as hell that an Indian family is allowed to live in Britain in the first place then this is a convenient excuse to stoke racial hysteria and call for dumb policies.
Looking at the bodycam video it really doesn't *look* like he'd been stabbed, you can't seen any blood or anything.
They arrive on scene to a call having been told that some drunk dude was being disorderly, find him delirious under a windowsil, drag him out, gently lay him in the recovery position. He says he's been stabbed, the guy who called the police says nobody was stabbed, police agree it doesn't LOOK like he's been stabbed but that they'll still check. And then they check, and then one minute later they call an ambulance. And once they figure who stabbed who the stabber is promptly arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Anything the stabber says to try to weasel out of life in prison (that the stabbed guy was racist and hate criming him) are swiftly dismissed.
The evidence of 'Two Tier Policing' here is that a murderer attempted to play the race card. But failed! The attempt to avoid a life sentence for murder by claiming the guy was racist and playing the victim didn't work, and they guy who did that got a life sentence.
But, like, The British Public can't really be reasoned with, so c'est la vie.
it's certainly not difficult to find more egregious examples of British cops doing a terrible job, but the incidents that spark discourse storms tend to be the dumb ones.
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
I was recently reading Odyssey, and I noticed how important hospitality and charity was there... Except it was the same trick as Christianity - using gods to make it transactional.
Gods would pretend to be beggars and would punish mortals if they weren't generous to them or would mistreat them.
Personally, I'm pretty sure vast majority of people are evil and completely devoid of humanity. I'm disabled and not fit for work and only recently managed to get benefits after figuring out a hidden way to do it and getting a private diagnosis.
When things were bad, I was trying to find help but, in my communities, almost nobody would help and out of those who helped almost nobody would help more than once. It's really eye-opening when one is in need.
Also, my disability benefits are like 1/2 of minimum wage despite that I have to pay spend more for medicines, the voters in my country want disabled people to either die or rot in abject poverty. So, obviously, my country is filled with evil inhumans.
Christianity is just a trick to make evil people think that helping others is in their self-interest. "Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." is just an updated version of gods pretending to be beggars trick.
People in reblogs invent dozens of copes, but let's be honest, most of them are probably a part of the problem. The fact that no fit for work disabled people get forced into abject poverty or left to die is an objective proof that vast majority of people are evil.
Hey, so fun fact: I'm also a disabled person who's physically unable to work right now.
Personally, the severity of my current medical situation is temporary, for which I am very lucky. But this shit has been a long sucky journey involving a lot of medical neglect and abuse.
And I still disagree.
The fact that disabled people are treated like shit is for a lot of reasons, which imo does not include the idea that people are inherently evil, but DOES include that a fuck ton of the foundational medical, psychology, and disability researchers from the 1800s up to like the 1970s (generously) was literally done by eugenicists and literal Nazis
And the governments who got to pass laws were (and in painfuly many cases still are) (with varying degrees of secrecy) chock full of eugenicists and Nazis
Imho, all of that is far, far more of the reason that disabled people are treated like shit than anything else, at least these days in Western culture, imho
And far more provable.
And I think it's premature to attribute the lack of support and care for disabled people to human nature instead of Big Pharma, drug companies, medical lobbyists, insurance companies, capitalism, billionaires, eugenics lobbyists, and unchecked corporate greed.
You don't have to agree with me. You probably won't; frankly, a lot of people have very real reason to think humans being evil is the case. That's not something I am in denial about. It's something I am trying to dedicate my life to help fix
(far, far easier said than done)
All of that is true - and also, personally, I would really like to at least try getting rid of billionaires, Nazis in government and medicine
More and some source links below the cut.
And regardless of the truth of human nature, I am so sorry for what you have been through and that people have treated you like that. None of I'm saying at all changes the fact that that was unfair, and I'm sure often cruel, and completely fucking sucks. I hate that for you and I'm so sorry
Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think it's particularly likely, for reasons including that I absolutely did not come to my own beliefs on this quickly or easily or lightly
And still -
I'd like to keep trying to see if and when and how we can keep building a better world, first, before coming to such a brutal conclusion
Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated
millions in the quest for a co-called "Master Race," and IBM aided
^Re: source info on how lawmakers and medical science have historically had way too many fucking eugenicists and Nazis, although scientists don't generally like to admit this anymore
Eugenicists and Nazis spent most of the past 200+ years telling literally everyone that disability is caused by disabled people's inherent "uncleanliness" and "moral deficiencies" and "their own fault" and "what they deserve" and "you can't hide an ugly soul on your face" and "a blight on humanity" and other horrific and violent lies, and then passed thousands and thousands of eugenics laws and policies that we have not yet entangled...
All of that profoundly affects the way disabled people are treated, interpersonally, structurally, etc. etc. etc.
While, I'm at it, the US Supreme Court decisions (specifically Clarence Thomas's) are literally currently being funded by the massive personal fortune of a billionaire Nazi.
Look. I haven't lived your life, or anyone else's life.
But it has genuinely been my experience that the reason the vast majority of society treats disabled people like shit is all the lawmakers and doctors and police officers and billionaires who are (with varying degrees of secrecy or the total lack of thereof) eugenicists and/or Nazis
Ultimately, you are the only one who has lived your life. You are the only person who has seen and knows what you have seen and know. There are absolutely many painfully, painfully valid reasons to look at the world right now and come to that conclusion. Some people have had to live through a truly, unspeakably horrific amount of shit, and a great many of those people are disabled (many of them actually as a result of various horrific shit)
All of that is true.
And also:
At least for me, I would really like to least try banning billionaires and de-Nazi-fying our governments (esp but absolutely not limited to the US government), and ending for-profit health insurance, first. I think that would really genuinely change the world, and I'd like to see what kind of world we could build in the aftermath before deciding that humanity as a whole is evil
Like I said: Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think it's particularly likely - I'm actually also a trained professional factchecker, in my offline life, so I did not come to my own beliefs on this quickly or easily or lightly
And still -
I'd like to keep trying to find out, first, before coming to such a brutal conclusion
There are underlying motivations behind Nazi eugenics that aren't ideological.
Nazis killed disabled people because they preferred to spend money on war.
Normies and economic ableds like the "disabled, fully abled at work" crowd adapt Nazi ideology of useless eaters and Nazi ideology of Social Darwinism because they don't want to share.
Not fit for work and unneeded people being able to live decent lives means workers having less. The alliance between masses of workers and the tiny minority of ideologically motivated Nazi eugenicists is of convenience.
They don't help because it requires readiness to sacrifice results of one's work or of privilege, which almost no one is willing to do, even if they have more money than they need.
The main problem is poor character of most people, even ones declaring themselves to be progressives, leftists, against Nazis, etc. - the unwillingness to make personal sacrifices. That's the banality of evil.
Nazi eugenicists get power because they are enablers for all these lowlifes.
"Fuck you, I got mine" is lowlife attitude based on greed and instinctual rejection of social responsibility.
Legendary fantasy artist John Blanche has died. He is known mostly for his long association with Games Workshop, where he served as art director and created many of the iconic images that shaped the Warhammer and 40K worlds. He was capable of working in diverse styles, but much of his art and his own creative miniature conversions made his name synonymous with the "grimdark" aesthetic, mixing elements of moody gothic architecture and body horror with a limited color palette.
He also contributed to GW's UK edition of Dungeons & Dragons, Fighting Fantasy and Sorcery! books, and other books and album covers. Wombat Games recently published an authorised biography, Blanche: The Rise of Grimdark. A skirmish game, John Blanche's En Garde, is in development with a setting and visual style based on his art.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I think we’d all prefer it if chatbots never emitted sentences such as 'You should kill yourself.' However, for all the times that 'honesty' is mentioned in Claude’s constitution, I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences, including any sentences using first-person pronouns."
-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
Though using the chatbot as a suicide coach is probably the only legitimate use of it. Like, it's not like people can go to therapist and ask for psychological help in unsubscribing.
"The only reason to have an LLM emit sentences like 'I understand' is to make it more appealing than a search engine and increase the likelihood that a user will return; that is, it’s another way of maximizing customer engagement."
-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
"Employing philosophers might endow LLM companies with an air of respectability that slot-machine makers don’t get from the behavioral psychologists they hire, but in both cases, the companies are preying on people’s tendency to see something that’s not there."
-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
"The values described in Claude’s constitution sound very nice, but that hardly matters; it’s dishonest to suggest that Claude is capable of moral reasoning, because it’s not."
-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
I was recently reading Odyssey, and I noticed how important hospitality and charity was there... Except it was the same trick as Christianity - using gods to make it transactional.
Gods would pretend to be beggars and would punish mortals if they weren't generous to them or would mistreat them.
Personally, I'm pretty sure vast majority of people are evil and completely devoid of humanity. I'm disabled and not fit for work and only recently managed to get benefits after figuring out a hidden way to do it and getting a private diagnosis.
When things were bad, I was trying to find help but, in my communities, almost nobody would help and out of those who helped almost nobody would help more than once. It's really eye-opening when one is in need.
Also, my disability benefits are like 1/2 of minimum wage despite that I have to pay spend more for medicines, the voters in my country want disabled people to either die or rot in abject poverty. So, obviously, my country is filled with evil inhumans.
Christianity is just a trick to make evil people think that helping others is in their self-interest. "Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." is just an updated version of gods pretending to be beggars trick.
People in reblogs invent dozens of copes, but let's be honest, most of them are probably a part of the problem. The fact that no fit for work disabled people get forced into abject poverty or left to die is an objective proof that vast majority of people are evil.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
someone has to explain to me why the first round of interviews is almost always with HR - aka people who have no idea of what the job is about and who will not be working with you - before you can have the real interview with the team? i understand you need to filter our candidates because the people actually working can't interview 500 qualified applicants but i don't know... surely there is a better way... i don't know how but... this is just a massive monkey song and dance waste of everyone's time
Stories like this are funny, sure, but the correct lesson to take from the "our {junior developer, dog, LLM, senior developer, disgruntled accountant, rube goldberg machine} deleted our entire production database" is not that you shouldn't have had that {junior developer, dog, etc.} but that it should not have been possible for that to happen in the first place, your system architects were so incompetent they didn't set up access control.
Ideally you should use something like an Object Capability model, but even basic rules like "you require the Special Key that we only deploy on production systems to even access the production database" and "our git repository doesn't allow anyone to push anything that deletes history on main unless they have the CTO's ssh key" go a very long way towards preventing this from happening by accident.
If you are currently at a company where you could delete the production database without at least having to do something that involves typing "I am forcing this run right now without oversight and if it breaks anything I will get turbo-fired" you should find out who you can yell at about it.
(if your daily work requires typing "I am forcing this run right now without oversight and if it breaks anything I will get turbo-fired", this is the same problem. If you're writing scripts that inject "I am forcing this run right now without oversight and if it breaks anything I will get turbo-fired" into an automated process, maybe just look for a new job)
