i think everyone should program at least once just so you realise just how fucking stupid computers are. because theyre so fucking stupid. a computer wants to be told what to do and exactly that and if you make one typo or forget one detail it starts crying uncontrollably
And if it doesn’t start crying, it starts babbling and then throws itself off a cliff.
THIS IS SO TRUE! One time at [major tech company] we had to pause a UI update bce the server freaked out and the team spent an ENTIRE DAY trying to figure out what was wrong. And it was literally just because the engineers coded one of the interactive tour messages to pop up if situation 1 happened and not pop up if situation 2 happened. But then it turns out there was a situation 3 and it confused the system so much it just kept sending the request over and over and over again like it was Groundhog Day but instead of an entire day, it’s is a small part of a second and the rest of world is progressing as usual
Not to go “if you have ADHD just go for a run” or anything, but I am so serious if you have ADHD you should regularly go outside, no headphones no phone no nothing and just stand and observe for a while until you’ve had enough. Not until you get bored, until you’ve had enough. Drink your coffee without watching tiktok. Have a bath without music. Turn down the volume in your headphones. I cannot overstate how much learning to be bored is cruicial with ADHD. Life is not just about pleasure, no matter what your dysregulated dopamine system thinks, and when you teach your brain to be okay with being bored, then boring tasks stop feeling like torture. By letting yourself be bored you are yoinking your system out of the high/low binary and allow for the highs to feel like actual highs and not just anything that isn’t low. I am so serious go literally touch grass. Listen to the sounds in your flat. Stimulate your body the way it was designed. It lowers anxiety and makes you feel like you’re real and best of all it’s completely free
I really wish more ADHD mental health care told you WHY things like this matter to our quality of life.
The Hyperactivity in Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is NOT about being physically hyperactive, it’s about having a “hyperactive central nervous system” because it’s a form of inheritable dysautonomia. The problem with disautonomia, especially the ADHD kind, is that it makes boredom flag to your nervous system as a THREAT, triggering hyperactive and maladaptive central nervous system processes like fight or flight.
But dysautonomia kills you that way. Literally, part of the reason our average life spand increase on stimulents is that it helps manage risk-taking impulsivity that can get us killed by accident, but the other part is that stimulents can regulate a hyperactive CNS such that it is functionally (while impacted by the stimulent) NOT dysregulated anymore. And PHYSIOLOGICALLY that is essential because the physical outcomes of dysautonomia can reduce your life span by YEARS if not decades through self-perpetuating hypervigelence, endocrine disruption, and adrenal fatigue.
So when the ADHD brain goes stimulation-seeking and a doctor tells you to practice mindfulness, it feels like being told “hey go stand in a functioning boiler until you can stop thinking” rather than WHAT IT IS which is the process of re-teaching your body what is and isn’t safe.
Standing outside making mindful, non-interpretive/moralized observation of the world helps your brain and body re-acclimate to the idea that absence of that frantic “busy” feeling isn’t a threat or a risk to your safety, and gradually reduces the level of distress that just hanging out somewhere triggers for you.
Learning WHY this stuff was being suggested and understanding what it was actually supposed to do went a long way towards changing my relationship with my ADHD. I am FAR more functional now, far less prone to shame spirals and rejection sensitivity, hell, I can **sit physically still for near on an hour at a time** now without feeling like I’m going to crawl out of my skin.
So yeah. Go outside. Let the world narrow around you and take deep breaths until it stops feeling claustrophobic or like you need to climb walls. Learn how to let little sensations become big ones like the way the heat of the sun on your skin starts as a gentle warming and be omes a unique collection of sensory moments depending on how it lands on you. Listen for sounds under sounds and let them fade in and out as you move your focus from one sound to the next. Enjoy. Move on. Rinse and repeat.
When you no longer feel like the world is actively killing you, it’s a lot easier to navigate it.
S++ tier addition to the post, thank you tumblr user butts bouncing on the beltway
Just remembered something absolutely insane. When I was about 16, I once walked in on my dad (surgeon) drawing. Mind you, I had never once seen my father drawing. I hadn’t even seen him pick up a pencil. I asked him what he was doing, and he said that he felt limited by his current surgical instruments, so he was designing new ones. I thought he was joking. But then he actually sent his designs to Johnson & Johnson and over the next couple of months they started mailing prototypes to our house. My dad tested them out and reported back with improvements. Eventually, he perfected them and now, he uses the surgical instruments he designed himself. What the actual fuck.
I don’t remember 100% what he was working on, but I’m pretty sure I saw him testing out a clamp that could also do stitches. It was a really long clamp that had a little thing on the side you could feed thread into, and you could clamp and suture with just one hand.
My dad is completely obsessed with surgery just in general. When I was a kid, he recorded all his surgeries, then put them up on the big TV in the living room and took notes on his mistakes. He goes to the hospital, does surgery all day, then goes to a university, where he teaches surgery, then he comes home, where he reads and writes papers about surgery, he’ll get into bed and to relax reads books about surgery, then he falls asleep and dreams about surgery. My father is obsessed with 4 things: me, my mom, his football team, and surgery.
“If you want to ask, what is the secret sauce of Bard and ChatGPT? It’s all of the internet. And it’s all of this labeled data that these labelers create,” said Laura Edelson, a computer scientist at New York University. “It’s worth remembering that these systems are not the work of magicians — they are the work of thousands of people and their low-paid labor.”
ChatGPT is one of the most successful tech products ever launched. And crucial to that success is a group of largely unknown data workers in Kenya. By reviewing disturbing, grotesque content, often for wages of just two to three dollars an hour, they helped make the viral chatbot safe. WSJ’s Karen Hao traveled to Kenya to meet those workers and hear about what the job cost them.
Since the blockbuster launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, future-of-work pontificators, AI ethicists, and Silicon Valley developers have been fiercely debating how generative AI will impact the way we work. Some six months later, one global labor force is at the frontline of the generative AI revolution: offshore outsourced workers.
You might miss this if you believe AI is a brilliant, thinking machine. But if you pull back the curtain even a little, it looks more familiar, the latest iteration of a particularly Silicon Valley division of labor, in which the futuristic gleam of new technologies hides a sprawling manufacturing apparatus and the people who make it run.
OpenAI took a leaf out of the playbook of social media companies like Facebook, who had already shown it was possible to build AIs that could detect toxic language like hate speech to help remove it from their platforms. The premise was simple: feed an AI with labeled examples of violence, hate speech, and sexual abuse, and that tool could learn to detect those forms of toxicity in the wild. That detector would be built into ChatGPT to check whether it was echoing the toxicity of its training data, and filter it out before it ever reached the user. It could also help scrub toxic text from the training datasets of future AI models.
To get those labels, OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest. … The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour…
Among a range of conclusions, the Google study finds that the crowdworkers’ own biases are likely to become embedded into the AI systems whose ground truths will be based on their responses; that widespread unfair work practices (including in the US) on crowdworking platforms are likely to degrade the quality of responses; and that the ‘consensus’ system (effectively a ‘mini-election’ for some piece of ground truth that will influence downstream AI systems) which currently resolves disputes can actually throw away the best and/or most informed responses.
So-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions. And unlike the “AI researchers” paid six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley corporations, these exploited workers are often recruited out of impoverished populations and paid as little as $1.46/hour after tax. Yet despite this, labor exploitation is not central to the discourse surrounding the ethical development and deployment of AI systems.
“The devil of this job is that you get sick slowly — without even noticing it,” said Wisam, a former content moderator who now trains others for Majorel. … While TikTok does use artificial intelligence to help review content, the technology is notoriously poor in non-English languages. For this reason, humans are still used to review most of the heinous videos on the platform.
“Any major technology company in the last 10 years has been powered by a throng of people … At some level, there’s denial. Investors like to hear that technology sells itself once you write the code. But that’s not really true.” … “Data work has a racial and class dynamic. It is outsourced to developing countries while model work is done by engineers largely in developed nations … Without their labour, there would be no AI.”
Most profit-maximizing algorithms, which underpin e-commerce sites, voice assistants, and self-driving cars, are based on deep learning, an AI technique that relies on scores of labeled examples to expand its capabilities. … The insatiable demand has created a need for a broad base of cheap labor to manually tag videos, sort photos, and transcribe audio. The market value of sourcing and coordinating that “ghost work” … is projected to reach $13.7 billion by 2030.
Over the last five years, crisis-ridden Venezuela has become a primary source of this labor. The country plunged into the worst peacetime economic catastrophe facing a country in nearly 50 years right as demand for data labeling was exploding. Droves of well-educated people who were connected to the internet began joining crowdworking platforms as a means of survival.
“We can’t have safe social media if the workers who protect us toil in a digital sweatshop… We’re hoping this case will send ripples across the continent—and the world. The Sama Nairobi office is Facebook’s moderation hub for much of East and South Africa. Reforming Facebook’s factory floor here won’t just affect these workers, but should improve the experience of Facebook users in Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia, and other African countries.”
Here in Nairobi, Sama employees who speak at least 11 African languages between them toil day and night, working as outsourced Facebook content moderators: the emergency first responders of social media. They perform the brutal task of viewing and removing illegal or banned content from Facebook before it is seen by the average user. …
The testimonies of Sama employees reveal a workplace culture characterized by mental trauma, intimidation, and alleged suppression of the right to unionize. The revelations raise serious questions about whether Facebook… is exploiting the very people upon whom it is depending to ensure its platform is safe
Microwork comes with no rights, security, or routine and pays a pittance — just enough to keep a person alive yet socially paralyzed. Stuck in camps, slums, or under colonial occupation, workers are compelled to work simply to subsist under conditions of bare life. This unequivocally racialized aspect to the programs follows the logic of the prison-industrial complex, whereby surplus — primarily black — populations [in the United States] are incarcerated and legally compelled as part of their sentence to labor for little to no payment. Similarly exploiting those confined to the economic shadows, microwork programs represent the creep of something like a refugee-industrial complex.
A.I. researchers hope they can build systems that can learn from smaller amounts of data. But for the foreseeable future, human labor is essential. “This is an expanding world, hidden beneath the technology,” said Mary Gray, an anthropologist at Microsoft and the co-author of the book
“Ghost Work,” which explores the data labeling market. “It is hard to take humans out of the loop.”
Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material—sometimes thousands of items per day
Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. … services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing “ghost work” make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this “ghost economy,” and that number is growing. They usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or none.
“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. … “The hook is that we have this kind of hype circulating around AI so that we can masquerade really old forms of labor exploitation as ‘reforming prisons,’… They’re connecting social movements, reducing it to hype, and using that to sell AI.”
Crowdworking is often hailed by its boosters as ushering in a new age of work. With the zeal of high-tech preachers, they cast it as a space in which individualism, choice and self-determination flourish. … But if you happen to be a low-end worker doing the Internet’s grunt work, a different vision arises. According to critics, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk may have created the most unregulated labor marketplace that has ever existed. Inside the machine, there is an overabundance of labor, extreme competition among workers, monotonous and repetitive work, exceedingly low pay and a great deal of scamming. In this virtual world, the disparities of power in employment relationships are magnified many times over, and the New Deal may as well have never happened.
If you’ve never worked in a big corporate office you are missing out on half of Severance
Everyone seems to be talking about the setting of this show like it’s a big mystery we’re waiting on answers for, and I keep having to remind myself that this is the Unemployed Website because every single aspect of the severed floor is a direct parody of corporate office work. Some of it is pretty obvious to anyone (being a totally different person at work than you are at home, excessive surveillance, etc), but unless you’ve worked in one of these places there’s a ton you’re probably missing.
So, for those of you who (luckily) lack corporate office experience, here is a non-exhaustive list of real phenomenon Severence is referencing:
- Having absolutely no clue where anything is other than your department. A large corporate office truly feels like working in a brightly-lit, featureless labyrinth. You get lost so easily, and the number of turns and hallways in the opening scene is not that much more extreme than how I had to get to my department (which was over a 5-minute walk from the main entrance). It’s common to draw new employees a map.
- Cult-like worship and constant quoting of the company’s founder/founding family and core operating principles. Long-time employees will genuinely treat it like religious doctrine. It’s scary.
- The relationship between departments. The different cultures, outrageous rumors, distrust, compete lack of understanding of who they are, how many of them there are, where they work, what they do, and generally treating them like a foreign country is barely even a parody. It’s just really like that. Going to another department and seeing their equipment and work area (and being stared at by a bunch of people who don’t expect a stranger to be there) might as well be walking into a room that’s a hill with intimidating goat farmers.
- Other people’s jobs being utterly incomprehensible. The department that had a room behind a wall next to mine apparently used it for filling backpacks with weights until the straps broke. Another department had someone whose job was to shine different lights onto pieces of fabric and record the color difference. One of my positions was measuring various pants 20 different ways and then taking notes while a specific person tried them on. Apparently a guy somewhere occasionally got paid to make watercolors of birds. Some people did finance. You get the idea.
- Only ever hearing from upper management (who are treated like a group of fickle, wrathful gods) through a nervous secretary and never hearing their voices/seeing their faces. You might know their names.
- Weird, uncomfortable, often ritualesque events that are treated like a big deal. The company I worked for, for example, would announce the employees of the year by having a committee of people with noisemakers and silly hats parade around the buildings until they got to the person’s desk, and then take their photo to hang on the wall. People were not warned beforehand, it was a ~surprise~. This happened daily at random times for over a week each year, and long-standing employees got really into it.
- People genuinely fighting over all those meaningless, patronizing rewards like pizza parties, fancy pens, etc. Having an “employee of the month” mug, for example, is treated as an enviable status symbol. Presumably this is why corporations think this stuff will also work in the service industry (it doesn’t because service workers are normal).
- Ridiculous conspiracy theories about the building, management, coworkers, or company history, peddled like gossip.
- New employees having a rough adjustment period where it feels like you’re adapting to an alternate universe. Office culture is nothing like real life though it’s closer if you live in white suburbia and have an HOA, so during most people’s first time working in one they bump up against a lot of unspoken rules, weird taboos, and general culture shock. Most of this involves navigating strictly-enforced social hierarchies, verbal adherence to company ideals, and using only specific types of communication, and being chastised when you mess up. It 100% feels like being indoctrinated into a cult.
- Not understanding the purpose of the work you’re doing, and only receiving vague answers, that it’s “important”, and that there’s a big exciting deadline. No single department has access to the big picture for how everyone’s jobs fit together to accomplish something, you’d have to work in all of them or in upper management to figure it out. The inner machinations and goals of the company are generally treated like a mysterious secret.
- Never seeing the sky. Window offices are a prized commodity since the buildings are so big, so unless you’re a high-up manager or the company has gone to great lengths to add access to widows (most don’t because it’s really expensive) you likely won’t see daylight until you leave, even if you travel around the building during the day.
And for the Lifetime Unemployment crowd, some more general job phenomenon:
- So. Many. Acronyms. And being expected to say them all with a straight face, even if they sound really silly.
- Coworkers effectively ceasing to exist the moment they leave the company, with zero explanation given for why they’re suddenly gone unless there’s a retirement party.
- Management giving ridiculously nit-picky feedback as a form of hazing/power play, especially to marginalized people.
- Upper management making sudden, drastic changes to your job expectations, physical workplace, or management structure with zero notice and penalizing you if you can’t adapt immediately.
- The entire vibe of your job being dictated by who your manager is.
- Your coworkers acting like what happens at work is their entire life, and treating their home lives as something extra they do on the side.
- Having no clue who your coworkers are outside of work, and that information being largely treated as taboo.
- Being effectively locked in a sealed space with zero access to the outside world for the entirety of your workday, and being told that that’s not weird or a problem– it’s a benefit that helps you focus on your job.
Basically: There’s no big mystery to the structure and culture of Lumon/the severed floor. Most of it is never going to get a canon “explanation” because the target audience already has one. It’s all a parody.
Some more office stuff:
- Your Big Boss randomly having an assistant who’s way too young to be working there. A lot of corporate offices have an intern program for high school or college students where they shadow an executive and help out for a few weeks. The older you are, the more this will look like they are training a literal child to be your manager.
- Being randomly taken away from your office to participate in nonsense “team building” activities that take up hours out of your day or more. You will be told it will improve your work relationships and increase your bond with the company. You will be asked to build popsicle stick structures and throw a ball with a 60 y/o man you just met. My whole department was literally taken outdoors to make s'mores with the company logo on them once. The person making you do this stuff will have the most uncomfortably cheerful, unmoving smile you have ever seen. They will be taking notes to give to your boss.
- Dark hallways with seemingly abandoned rooms full of weird shit. You can take a wrong turn and find yourself in what feels like the middle of nowhere. Things I encountered while wandering where I wasn’t supposed to include: an area full of huge couches, 50 mannequins plastic wrapped together like some sort of horrible cocoon, and a room set up like an entire campsite.
- Huge portraits of the CEOs and founder(s) that are regularly cycled through. You are intended to look at them as role models and inspiration. Some people actually do.
- People treating the founding family members like celebrities. I had coworkers who would leave their workstations to excitedly ogle the executive chairman when he walked by. He was just a guy.
- Random performers. Sometimes a department will hire people for an internal event they are having. You will find this out because suddenly you’ll hear an entire choir or pass a guy with a trombone.
- Random animals. This one might be more specific to the place I worked, but sometimes there were just dogs because some department needed to take photos with them. One time they brought like 15 puppies into my area and invited the whole department in as a surprise. My Big Boss also once had a newborn rabbit in a sock with her all day because it was a runt from her newest litter and needed feeding but that was more of a her thing. Most people wouldn’t have really questioned a goat.
Lest anyone accuse me of making this stuff up, I dredged up the one photo I have of a partial mannequin cocoon in the basement. There were a bunch of these of varying sizes just. Around.
A few more, I keep thinking of stuff:
- Tons of “The Company Cares About You” propaganda that may directly contradict reality, sometimes delivered via mandatory cheesy videos/presentations featuring real employee faces pasted onto stock photos.
- You really can just leave your desk and wander around with zero consequences if you aren’t gone for too long, and the show perfectly captures the giddy/nervous “why is nobody stopping me” feeling this invokes. People have to go on cross-department errands all the time so employees from other areas will just assume you have a Task and ignore you, and anyone seeing your empty desk (which likely won’t be your boss, who’s really busy and probably doesn’t work nearby) will assume you’re on an errand, in a meeting, or in the bathroom/break room.
- People spending extended periods of time chatting or doing stuff like decorating their cubicles, sometimes to the point of barely working all day. Almost all office workers are salaried so as long as their work gets done on time the number of hours they spend actually doing it doesn’t really matter to the company. If you finish early you generally can’t leave (they’ll just give you more stuff to do that wasn’t originally your responsibility) so dragging things out is actually strategic. In the US salary pay is usually used to make employees work overtime for free during crunch periods so people take the “leisure” time when they can get it.
- Being sent to an in-house counseling service if you are having such a hard time with personal stuff that it’s noticeably affecting your work. They will monitor you to make sure it helped (it probably didn’t).
- No privacy anywhere except the bathroom. The proximity and separation paneling of the desk layout in the show is exactly like a real office but much smaller. Imagine that but going on nearly as far as you can see in every direction.
- Being treated to weirdly exorbitant (and sometimes company-themed) foods when your department hits a big milestone. There was an extensive sundae bar set up in one of our “we did a good job” meetings, for example. Half of it will go uneaten because people are worried about taking too much and Making A Bad Impression in front of their boss.
- Surprisingly good food for those special events even if all the regularly available stuff sucks. This is because executives hold meetings for Important people from outside the company and have a quality catering service on call to make a good impression. My department head’s assistant would email all of us when those ended so if you reacted fast you could nab one of the (usually very many) untouched sandwiches lmao
- People having illicit office romances they think they’re hiding really well but aren’t. Supply closets are a common meetup space.
- People having very audible personal conversations in the break room like it’s a private space. I don’t know why the presence of a microwave does this to people. We can hear you. Your boss walking by can hear you. Everyone will pretend they can’t, though, to preserve the ironclad unspoken rule of No Direct Confrontations. A lot of office socialization is based around politely pretending that you aren’t living in each others armpits for 40+hrs a week.
Big Tech (and small-to-medium tech, so I guess just tech) has less of this, but we also had Smashmouth play one of our big release parties. Which also had, like, a whole carnival set up and drink tickets for the beer garden. (If you made friends with your teetotaler coworkers, you could score extra of those.
You also got gaslighting and hardcore psychologic abuse. The number of people I knew at Big Tech Smashmouth Job who ended up either having mental breakdowns or with suicidal ideation after our higher up changed was, in retrospect, an obvious sign that something was incredibly wrong, but we all thought we were the problem. Because of all the gaslighting and abuse.
(And we weren’t even the most toxic local tech giant!)
Ok, but if you’re an independent contractor in the US and this happens? Find a lawyer, because you might have just gotten a huge payday.
Your position was just referred to as employment. Independent contractors do not have employers; they do not have employment. Congrats, your contact at this company just provided evidence that you were illegally missclassified.
This contact is claiming that you have set hours you’re obligated to fulfill. Unless a work task can only be done at a set time for practical reasons (i.e. you’re an audio freelancer paid to support a live event that occurs at a particular time and requires a certain amount of pre-show setup), a company cannot set an independent contractor’s work hours. This is further evidence that you were missclassified.
The whole exchange establishes that the company is interpreting an employer-employee relationship rather than expecting a service. Discipline and potential for firing (you cannot fire an independent contractor; no longer purchasing their service is not equivalent) establish that this person views themselves as a manager. Independent contractors cannot have managers.
This one text exchange could:
Get you back pay for the full duration you’ve worked there, to bring you up to the compensation that an employee would have gotten
Get you back compensation for lost benefits that an employee would have gotten
Get you back pay for the additional self-employment taxes the company should have covered
Get the company to pay back taxes to the government
Get the company to hire everyone who performed a similar role, or face further penalties and fines
A win would encourage the rest of their missclassified workers to sue for the same, or give them leverage to demand a better deal
If the company is going to screw you over like that, may as well make them pay for it.
Since this is getting a lot of reblogs, here’s a federal source that can help you determine if you’re illegally classified as a contractor:
You can also file a form with the IRS to force the company to correct your classification (assuming you meet the criteria), without necessarily having to sue:
Keep in mind that this is just federal. Most states also prohibit missclassification as an independent contractor; and even if states have more lenient rules, companies still have to comply with this federal law. The rules have largely been bipartisan and existed for decades, so they’re common.
States also have an interest in having regulations about missclassification: it’s a significant loss of tax revenue. Your self employment tax does not fully equal what a company would have paid for you in payroll taxes.
A lawyer can help point you in the right direction if a company is currently missclassifying you.
