The only reason that LLMs took root in the first place was because our societies in the anglosphere have already developed cultures solely devoted to gaining status and keeping up the appearance of doing things rather than actually doing them. All other values, increasingly including even the accumulation of wealth (while this is still very much a thing that people pursue, wealth is increasingly becoming a proxy for status more than something desired in itself) are becoming subordinated to symbolic status games completely detached from anything real.
And of course, in the end, LLMs are themselves an example of this: something new, shiny and capable, but nonetheless something that doesn't fit into systems or meet real needs. They're a beautifully forged sword that was presented to a society that didn't need swords, and is now being jammed into random pieces of machinery because after all "it's an important part and if we don't use them in our machines, we'll be left behind". Of course, all that happens is that the machinery breaks.
Well, a large part of it is CV-driven development, I'll not lie: I need to write thought leadership pieces demonstrating my skill with all aspects of technology and especially infrastructure and DevOps, and these days, that means you have to understand containers. As I've discovered in the course of this, container technology is *really good* for developer experience and makes a lot of tasks so much easier than doing them manually, so doing this was an excellent way to learn.
Which raises the question: given these struggles and the precarious position I exist in, why did I think this was the best use of my time? And why do so many trans women in similar positions also think so? Why, in short, do we keep learning how to do stuff with tech at a high level even when it doesn't seem economically valuable or worth it?
Given that this is the case, erstwhile critics of DEI policies from a broadly leftish perspective need a new synthesis for how to talk about DEI practices that captures the good things they were doing. What were they doing right that means that we're now missing the existence of a lot of these programs? Why did the whole thing fall apart so dramatically given that it was doing useful stuff? And how do those things interact?