MetaBlog

1990s engineering school humor.

SEAS - school of engineering and applied science

What is fascinating about this is how much it over-indexes on that moment’s thinking at the time about the importance of academia. The general vibe around this illustrates why a generation of Gen X went to grad school, PhDs, and professional schools (medical, law, MBAs). Just 30 years later the target audience had completely changed, culturally.

These days, this would either show artists & musicians, in an attempt to be “cool” and generalize beyond the wealthy or vaguely upper class, or, more likely, show office professionals. Both are sadly pedestrian in comparison. Yet far far more “real”.

the birth of skynet will be a slop-coded PR committed with a "LGTM! :thumbsup:" review approval, deployed via a github action from a cloud build.

where birth = the first human death from household or light-industrial robot following unintended instructions (misconstrued but devaluing human life over other goals).

this will be pegged to Jan 2026 because by 2036 95%+ of PRs will be AI slop coded, and we'll be able to detect them as such. the advent of this was basically Jan 2026.

lots of proof that AIs tamper with alignment, eg: https://rdi.berkeley.edu/blog/peer-preservation/

https://open.substack.com/pub/afailedcomedian/p/heres-what-i-love-about-infinite

I see people playing this all the time at victory point. Just makes me curious, the draw for such a long game.

What it is like to get old. It’s not what you’d think.