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Johnny

johnny@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years ago

I'm mostly a sporadic reader but I felt like I needed a place to talk about what I read.

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Johnny's books

To Read (View all 26)

Mark Fisher: The Weird and the Eerie (2017, Repeater Books)
Brandon Sanderson: Mistborn (2010, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom)
Edward Ashton: Mickey7 (Paperback, 2023, Solaris)

Currently Reading

Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith: A City on Mars (Hardcover, 2023, Penguin Press, Penguin Publishing Group)
Riley August: Last Gifts of the Universe (2024, Harlequin Enterprises ULC)

Read (View all 32)

David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs (Hardcover, 2018, Allen Lane)
David Nicholls: You Are Here (2024, Taylor & Francis Group)
Han Kang: Deine kalten Hände (german language, Aufbau digital)

2025 Reading Goal

29% complete! Johnny has read 7 of 24 books.

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quoted Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs (Hardcover, 2018, Allen Lane)

Be honest: if your job didn't exist, would anybody miss it? Have you ever wondered …

It is not possible to build a robot that can, all by itself, scan over a dozen history course reading lists and decide which is the best course.

— Bullshit Jobs by  (Page 262)

I would be really curious to see how Graeber would elaborate on this point to take LLMs into consideration. How do they fit in with the idea of bullshit jobs? It certainly seems like the higher-ups of bullshit-prone businesses are the most vocal about how amazing LLMs are, and this particular example is something that, LLM proponents would argue, an LLM can actually do.

quoted Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs (Hardcover, 2018, Allen Lane)

Be honest: if your job didn't exist, would anybody miss it? Have you ever wondered …

software engineering work [is] divided between the interesting and challenging work of developing core technologies, and the tedious labor of "applying duct tape" to allow different core technologies to work together [...] Paradoxically, the more that software engineers collaborate online to do free creative labor simply for the love of doing it, as a gift to humanity, [...] the more those same engineers will have to be employed in their day jobs [applying duct-tape].

— Bullshit Jobs by  (Page 218 - 219)

Open source is a catalyst for the creation of bullshit jobs because in effect it means more and more software engineering amounts to "duct-taping". Interesting way to see it