This place is not for you. No one here wants marketing on the Fediverse. Fuck off.

I’d call those pop ballads.

If you want suggestions, check out Moddi, Farao, Lindy-Fay Hella, Madrugada, Finnegan Tui, Brandon Perry

And then you befriend a stranger on the internet. You are nervous at first but you can’t see them, so you can imagine their number is zero. You hit it off. They’re amazing. Funny. Sweet. Kind. Hardworking. The relationship turns into a distant romance. Then you finally meet. You had no idea the number could go that high.

Rage bait is anything utilising its wrongness for engagement farming. In an attention economy, engagement is rewarded, regardless of type, so one of the methods is just to ‘be wrong on the internet,’ and many people will latch onto it faster than a vacuum on your pecker.

Their greatest insecurity, maybe? I could compliment cool people on it to make them feel better and use it to lampoon assholes.

Monkey paw’s finger curls: You can see them. They’re EVERYWHERE. People you thought you knew and loved have numbers greater than zero over their head. Despite your horror, you try to make use of the power to try to bring them to justice. No one believes you. You have the Cassandra’s curse of the status quo. ‘Steve? What are you talking about? He’d never do anything like that. Butter wouldn’t melt. You should probably shut your mouth before we get offended about what you said about our friend and kick the shit out of you. Know what I mean?’ You watch the news and see everyone who has a position of power over you and your loved ones has a non-zero number. You try to escape into fictional media but your favorite actors are non-zeroes, the author pictures in your favorite books show non-zeroes, the album sleeves of your favorite bands show non-zeroes.

Knowledge can be a burden.

So small and delicate it’s a wonder it isn’t crushed by the weight of our gaze.

I always wanted to ‘shop around’ with various marketing companies to ‘price out’ putting that video on a video billboard or the transcript on static billboards. Waste their time. Maybe make them feel bad about being the driving force behind the worst elements of our world. Could be fun.

‘…Just planting seeds.’

To represent corporate greed in an avant garde political satire?

They are nested concepts. Manipulation is a method of convincing. It is just convincing using surreptitious/covert means.

For the job? Much as I hate to say it, networking. Nudge friends and family, individually, about openings at their work or they have heard of. Trying to fight HR nonsense is like fighting a robot. It’s stupid. It’s hard. It’s easier with friends already near the controls.

As for guilt, drop it. If you want to consider it debt, repay it years from now when they need your help. They will. Don’t worry too much about it right now.

What should they do? Responses sit either in the non-violent space, which is only effective when the people in power have a sense of shame for ‘failing to represent their constituency,’ or the violent space, which is self-destructive and, if you’re facing the gigantic american system, suicidal, and feeds into rhetoric about how the government needs to crack down on violent extremists, helping to legitimate further authoritarianism.

Replacement in what?

How about Arwen? She’s charismatic, has no hate for anyone, and needs a place to live. I’m sure she’d be a great candidate.

1. Modulate expectations. Nothing will let you be 100% productive, 100% of the day. You don’t want that anyway. The moment you get 100% productivity, they will demand 105%, which you are not capable of. Even if you can hit 100% for a moment, you can’t maintain it. It’d be like redlining an engine. Find your sustainable level of work and maintain it. You won’t get paid anything if you kill yourself trying to do more.
2. Take breaks before you hit the wall. Work an hour, go for a walk. Work an hour, close your eyes and do deep breathing for a bit. Work for an hour, sing along to a few songs. Don’t think actively during the breaks. Your unconscious needs processing time. This keeps you from hitting the wall so hard, and might let you get an extra cycle or two.
3. Make the things you do on those breaks activities that do not require strong attention but do get air moving through your lungs. Part of fatigue is build up of waste products in the brain. Get air and blood in there and it’ll help.

Arguably, if you are burnt out after 3 hours but force yourself to keep trying, you are still only pretending to be working, and possibly making more work for yourself later by making mistakes.

If I had my understanding of the world that deeply shaken, I’d be in the throws of Lovecraftian insanity. I would have even less certainty of anything than the already low certainty I have now. That’s a ‘vampire problem.’ There’s no way of guessing what I might do if I was that fundamentally derealised.

Why is it anything? Poop shouldn’t have a face.

Realistically, it’s just media visibility. People were doing ML research for ages before LLMs became ‘the next big thing.’ The things developed by that research are often incredible but also incredibly narrow. ML based protein folding systems were big news among nerds several years ago. The amount you have to explain to even have the groundwork to explain how important that development is could never fit in a clickbait headline or article. You know what does fit in a clickbait title? ‘Celebrity ignoramus talks to chatbot, decides it’s God.’ ‘AI company insider says their product is the best thing since sliced bread and everyone who doesn’t pay them money will commit suicide.’ and ‘You are doomed because of AI. Click here to find out why.’ No one outside of the field those narrow ML systems are built for can understand their output. Anyone can understand ‘You’re absolutely right!’

People. I don’t see any mention of people in that itinerary. If you want to FEEL good about what you are doing, you need a human in there somewhere. People need social interaction, and the real deal, not something transactional. So, learn to be human. It’s a powerful skill that will help you survive turning yourself into a machine to analyse market data. Pick something you can do with other people. Play a game like chess face to face. Find a reading group at your local bookstore/library and learn some literary analysis. Whatever it is, just do it with people who aren’t there to seek more money.