> Long ago... Think Geek T-shirt: "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"
Whoever bought that shirt could probably use some social skills coaching. It's not a good idea to wear a shirt that indiscriminately broadcasts contempt in all directions. I get the purchasers probably confused it for humor, but there's an important difference between humor that works on a viewer TV show and and humor embedded in the interaction of you with another real person.
I had this though recently at Walmart, after seeing the third such shirt (a visual pun meaning "fuck you"). Geeks often have the same attitude problems.
> Ideally you pair the shirt with a personality that never leaves any doubt that it is a joke.
Ideally, but that still doesn't really solve the problem. It's not really practical to counter an indiscriminate broadcast of contempt with point to point interactions. People who don't know you or don't know you well will always see your shirt, if you wear it out.
You want to do the opposite: indiscriminately broadcast a kind personality, then deploy the sarcasm in point to point contexts "that never [leave] any doubt that it is a joke".
I think this is pretty unreasonable, though. Are you against the husband/wife “I’m with stupid/I’m stupid” shirts? Generally it’s pretty obvious this is meant as a joke and not that one spouse genuinely degrades the other in public.
Geeks were just awkwardly ahead of the curve, as usual. The shirt you saw was being marketed to a wider audience, right? Also the prescience of "Fuck you, I'm eating"
There's the old joke that many people who fear they could be replaced by AI are in fact too self-aggrandizing, they could be replaced by a 12-line python script.
If you want to get a bit meaner, you could profitably replace some people with the empty python script.
I’ve encountered many jobs that could be replaced with a script. When I was young and dumb I proposed replacing a whole department with a simple web app. The app was already finished and showed better success rates than the team of 6. The proposal was rejected.
In reality you will find pockets of utter incompetence in nearly every organization of considerable size. And I don't mean people who sometimes have bad days (who hasn't?) or struggle with particularly hard tasks (who doesn't?).
I mean long-time employee who lack the ability to wield the core tools and lack the core skills needed in their job. Imagine a blacksmith that doesn't know how to use a hammer and while they can talk very entertainingly and deeply about metals they certainly seem to fail at doing anything with it.
Now you may think I am exaggerating. I am not. Anyone in this thread who has worked in first level IT support will be probably agree. Now I am an educator, with a strong believe that nobody (aside those affected by certain medical conditions) is outside of learning and becoming better. I am known for my extreme patience and have won my provinces teaching price. Take this into account when I continue describing here.
We are talking about secretaries whose main tool (as a fraction of their workday) is the email client and calendar functionality, yet they fail to grasp the fundamental "IT for seniors" concepts of even the most basic version of the software they interact with more than 6 hours a day. In fact it is worse, they know they are bad and still file repeated advice into the mental equivalent of a paper shredder. I know of a person who has been doing this for 10 years now. Don't get me wrong, they somehow manage to not have it falling apart, but it is even exhausting to look at it from afar.
What would you think of a truck driver that after years on the job repeatedly asked you how to start the ignition?
I remember the joke differently. I heard it first way before the "AI" craze from an Italian philosopher (the original program must have been recorded in the 1980s and then rebroadcast):
"People who think they can be replaced by AI will be replaced."
In other words, the cheerleaders are so dumb that they probably could be replaced.
talks about how people in low social positions (say a Bank Teller) have no opportunities to distinguish themself but have opportunities to make mistakes that they'll be held accountable for. Whereas if you are in a high social position you get to grade your own paper, get credit for your successes, and "fail up" when you screw up.
Given that neural networks get it wrong some of the kind they might be better to fill the high status positions (make up crazy stuff to say for Satya Nadella and Eric Schmidt for instance)
https://web.archive.org/web/20081204045017/http://www.thinkg...