Dan Sylveste
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constantinejn.bsky.social
Dan Sylveste
@constantinejn.bsky.social
110 followers 260 following 120 posts
Friend to monsters, companion to bees
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constantinejn.bsky.social
But this has downsides, too, and some of them are profound, and it's stupid not to acknowledge that. As Scott describes in Seeing Like a State, high-modernist agricultural schemes tried to simplify farming into clearly legible (abstracted) systems. The goal was to make for a more understandable, more coherent overall system that could be planned and controlled centrally, and eventually those system planners did learn (some things) and did incorporate (some of) the mětis that made local farming work. But it did starve people. And the people who literally starved to death did not exactly get to reap the rewards learned from their loss. Nothing I'm saying should be taken to delegitimize the justified anxiety and anger of folks who are on the receiving end of the 90%-for-$20 implementation. Which should be mostly taken to mean the producers of work so disrupted, it's probably pretty likely to make the consumption of that work worse, too. But I'm describing, I'm not prescribing. Whether or not it will be net- good or not-and I am certainly plenty ambivalent about parts of it if not the whole-I do believe that it will happen. And that's just the things that do work, isn't it? Like, the way companies are going to try to use these tools, fueled in no small part by frontier model providers' breathless hype, is going to hurt people, already has hurt people. I do think creative destruction is real and (again) on balance positive; I suspect that my team at work is going to accelerate substantially in 2026 after some pretty heavy layoffs late in 2025, and our LLM strategy is a lot of why I feel that way. But it's inhumane not to acknowledge that yeah, businesses might like the "was impacted" language for a layoff but there's a moral obligation to regard it more concretely than that.
December 31, 2025 at 3:44 PM