https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/never-click-on-a-link-that-looks-l...
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.
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
>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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
For very human reasons, they thing they have a better chance of finding the goose themselves.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.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.
“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.”
We need more leaders like that.
Yes, this is a totally new phenomenon which has never ever been the case at literally every point in human history.
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.
Wait, what? Being two or more steps removed from "a real customer" makes your job bullshit?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Experiencing this first hand. Doing the boring work, taking the time to actually deliver value has gotten me “meets all” ratings, “everyone has only good things to say about you” feedback and raises that don’t beat the inflation. Meanwhile the bullshitters demoing vibe coded AI projects that break every guidance on data handling, the “productive” people adding their thoughts in slack channels that do not concern them and the “leads” who insert themselves into everything but add nothing get fast track promoted. And once they’re in management, they’re always “away” and somehow doing important stuff.
d_silin•1h ago
rolph•57m ago
d_silin•42m ago
bluefirebrand•41m ago
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
nomel•18m ago
bluefirebrand•12m ago
It makes it very, very hard to start from zero though. Like starting over in a new city
dexterlagan•44m ago
d_silin•41m ago
Gaming? Webcomics? Fusion power? Space exploration?