Questionable Content XVIII: "That's only sort of good news"

[Mechalich]

Maybe through some fluke of accounting, this was started by the bulk of the fortune Yay gave away.

Nah, it predates that, and by a lot.

Cubetown is first referenced in a conversation after Steve returns from a trip, where he says something like 'that thing the AIs are building up in Halifax is crazy.' Pretty sure that was over 2000 comics ago.

[hungrycrow]

Janitor guy could be sticking around long enough to get a good reference for other academic jobs. Assuming everyone else in the field hasn't already realized this place is a complete joke.

[Eldan]

Wow, this one is just kind of personslly insulting. Half a year of data management classes before anyone touches the research data, Jeph.

[tyckspoon]

Yeah, he's clearly not happy, but that doesn't mean he got tricked (especially not by anyone other than himself; as Moray describes it, he didn't bother to even look at the website before taking the job).

Maybe he's just annoyed because he's the one who is going to have to scrub traces of whatever Moray's body is made of off that work bench later. Again. And there was a sign on it this time. The one that explicitly says no sitting, MORAY.

[Ionathus]

Moray's been on-panel for three updates now and I have yet to detect any distinguishing personality traits. Beyond the bog-standard "lolrandom chipper AI" chassis that describes every new character recently.

God, I hope this is a quirky one-off scene. If Moray remains in the comic that may well drive me away for good.

[Rodin]

I'll admit this is outside my field here but...isn't this not what Claire was trained for? A bunch of AIs doing research at random aren't going to need a physical reference library. They're going to need a big honking database and a cloud-based file system like Sharepoint. It would take an entire team of trained programmers to deal with a job like this, not one reference librarian fresh out of grad school.

In any sort of real world, Claire would reject this on the spot. She's not trained in programming that I'm aware. Even if her skillset matches, she doesn't have the experience for it. And even if she did think she could it she's still being asked to single-handedly do the job of an entire department. Beyond all of that are the red flags being put up about how disorganized this company is.

And yet Jeph went through the trouble of designing a new quirky AI to do the job offer, which means she's going to take it. I don't even know what to say here.

I'm looking at the various options for how this storyline finishes, and they are all some degree of suck. It may be what finally drives me away from the comic. If the comic follows them to this place, it will definitely drive me away.

[Eldan]

Yeah, data management and library science are two entirely different fields. Yes, we need data scientists in research. No, they aren't librarians.

Also, "academia, am I right?" Screw you, Jeph.

[Wraith]

The thing of it is, if you're actually qualified to be a particle physicist and you end up hired somewhere as a janitor through some sort of weird hiring process error (even if its your fault), why don't you just quit?

Apparently people are tripping over themselves to work at Cubetown. To paraphrase what Moray said herself - people aren't even reading the website, they're just going "Cubetown? Oh hell yes, I'll take whatever you'll give me!". This includes physics graduates accepting a bait-and-switch role as a janitor. Something, something, 'millennials', something.

We do not yet know WHY people are so determined to work for Cubetown. As with many things in QC, it has been kind-of-sort-of alluded to by one character, therefore it must be absolutely true throughout. "Showing" is for cowards.

I'll admit this is outside my field here but...isn't this not what Claire was trained for? A bunch of AIs doing research at random aren't going to need a physical reference library. They're going to need a big honking database and a cloud-based file system like Sharepoint. It would take an entire team of trained programmers to deal with a job like this, not one reference librarian fresh out of grad school.

Nonsense! All she needs is to plug in a PC tower, connect it to the Cubetown wifi, and spend the next couple of months clicking and dragging files of 'research' into folders marked 'Physics' or 'Biology' so that people can log in and find them when they need them.

Hell, make sure that one of her co-workers is an anthro-PC, and the clicking-and-dragging part can take care of itself! Easy!

Because that's what librarians do, right? They just start off with a big, pyramid-shaped pile of books dumped on the floor, and then put them into order on some shelves and keep the place tidy, no? It's a 3-day week at most!

[Gez]

Everyone is fascinated by Cubetown and want to work there, but no one is interested enough to go look at the official website before they get hired.

Also the entire thing is built by lolrandom manic pixie nightmare AIs that literally don't know how to do their job, such as not knowing they need something to manage all the data they'll be theoretically generating. Despite being literally born from information technology, they don't know about information technology.

Also their workplace is, from description, a big floating cube in the Atlantic Ocean.

I would never trust the seaworthiness of something people like that built.

[Radar]

Also the entire thing is built by lolrandom manic pixie nightmare AIs that literally don't know how to do their job, such as not knowing they need something to manage all the data they'll be theoretically generating. Despite being literally born from information technology, they don't know about information technology.

To be fair, we are born from biology but it does not grant us any inherent insight into it. We operate our complicated biological forms intuitively without knowing the intrinsic details.

This comparison kind of explains quite a few things about the AI in QC.

[PhantomFox]

Y'know, the signal I'm getting is that she's NOT going to take the job, and the drama will be over her turning down what on paper looked like a dream opportunity. She'll feel guilty not taking a job that she had been looking for and staying in a service position, Clinton will flip his lid, and she'll worry about being a burden again.

Jeph's warning that he wasn't ending the comic was based on us assuming he was writing them out of the story, when in fact status quo is king in this instance.

[Rakaydos]

Claire needs to raise the problems with cubetown to her mother. Who has Yay over petting her dog. Who then volunteers/is voluntold to be Claire's intern.

YAY would be perfect for the role Claire is being hired for. And would not even need to leave town, since they have spare bodies. Yay being in 2 places at once lets both halves of the cast stay in contact naturally.

[Taevyr]

Well, all of the problems with the latest few comics aside, I have to admit: Jeff's really working to make Questionable Content a fitting name atm.

[Mechalich]

Y'know, the signal I'm getting is that she's NOT going to take the job, and the drama will be over her turning down what on paper looked like a dream opportunity. She'll feel guilty not taking a job that she had been looking for and staying in a service position, Clinton will flip his lid, and she'll worry about being a burden again.

If Claire turning down this job is used as a source of drama that would be extremely irritating, since we, the audience, can clearly see how profoundly reckless taking such a job would be even if every one in-universe cannot. Stories built around the kind of out-of-universe versus in-universe knowledge asymmetry tend to be the most frustrating kind.

Additionally, at this point Cubetown is so over-the-top in its bizarreness - my mind keeps throwing up 'AI WeWork' as a comparison point - that Claire's decision to turn the job down doesn't really contain any drama. It's not her being unwilling to assert herself or to prioritize her personal needs or anything like that, it's just scam-dodging. This is particularly annoying because it's trivially easy to create real drama using Claire's job search: just give her a job offer from a library in a small town in a red state.

[BRC]

...yeah, Cubetown is passing the "Unbelievable" threshold for me here, even for the goofy robots comic.


Like, I could understand this if it was a bunch of wacky AI researchers on a farm somewhere breaking away from the standard corporate/university research paradigm and coming to terms with the fact that a lot of support infrastructure they relied on, like people responsible for organizing their research data in usable ways, isn't here anymore.

But the description of Cubetown implies a LOT of money has been poured into this, despite it being apparently run by a bunch of airheads.

It looks like I was right about what "Holistic Research" entails, doing a bunch of interdisciplinary work in the hopes that some brilliant new insights fall out, but if the whole goal is interdisciplinary work, wouldn't "How do we have people share their research data" be one of the questions you answer before you start building your sea-steading lab space?


Maybe the Idea is that, as AI, they can quickly read each other's research notes, so the original thought was just to put everything in a big spreadsheet and all the AIs take an hour each morning to read everybody else's data from the previous day and see if it sparks any insights into their own work and now they need somebody who knows the Dewey Decimal system to organize stuff better?

I don't have trouble with the idea that they need somebody with Claire's degree, my trouble is that they got this far without realizing they'd need that.

[Rodin]

Maybe the Idea is that, as AI, they can quickly read each other's research notes, so the original thought was just to put everything in a big spreadsheet and all the AIs take an hour each morning to read everybody else's data from the previous day and see if it sparks any insights into their own work and now they need somebody who knows the Dewey Decimal system to organize stuff better?

I don't have trouble with the idea that they need somebody with Claire's degree, my trouble is that they got this far without realizing they'd need that.

The problem is that Dewey Decimal (and systems like it) are designed for physical storage. That ceases to apply once electronic filing gets involved and becomes massively irrelevant when you’re dealing with AIs with permanently on Wi-Fi who wouldn’t be using outmoded systems such as paper to begin with.

Claire’s degree (as far as I’m aware) pertains to running a library or physical archive. For this sort of endeavor you would need database engineers and designers who are going to set up a cloud-based sharing platform.

And that’s without getting into the areas AIs should fix just by existing - like having your storage be a server based AI who really likes file systems and who can retrieve any data in a microsecond.

[Keltest]

...yeah, Cubetown is passing the "Unbelievable" threshold for me here, even for the goofy robots comic.


Like, I could understand this if it was a bunch of wacky AI researchers on a farm somewhere breaking away from the standard corporate/university research paradigm and coming to terms with the fact that a lot of support infrastructure they relied on, like people responsible for organizing their research data in usable ways, isn't here anymore.

But the description of Cubetown implies a LOT of money has been poured into this, despite it being apparently run by a bunch of airheads.

It looks like I was right about what "Holistic Research" entails, doing a bunch of interdisciplinary work in the hopes that some brilliant new insights fall out, but if the whole goal is interdisciplinary work, wouldn't "How do we have people share their research data" be one of the questions you answer before you start building your sea-steading lab space?


Maybe the Idea is that, as AI, they can quickly read each other's research notes, so the original thought was just to put everything in a big spreadsheet and all the AIs take an hour each morning to read everybody else's data from the previous day and see if it sparks any insights into their own work and now they need somebody who knows the Dewey Decimal system to organize stuff better?

I don't have trouble with the idea that they need somebody with Claire's degree, my trouble is that they got this far without realizing they'd need that.

Yeah, its not entirely implausible that somebody would throw money at this, but the only way you could get as far as they have is to actually have a plan going in, and theres none of that here.

[tyckspoon]

ClaireÂ’s degree (as far as IÂ’m aware) pertains to running a library or physical archive. For this sort of endeavor you would need database engineers and designers who are going to set up a cloud-based sharing platform.

Claire probably could flex her studies into 'overseeing and maintaining a digitally ordered information archive' if they already had one in place, especially if she was only being brought on to manage a specific sub piece or specialty field of it. That seems like it's in scope for library science, especially with a focus on modern information practices. But that's not really what Cubetown needs here right now, yeah. Claire is being asked to effectively oversee the entire -establishment- of such a thing, which would be the purview of like a department president or even C-suite level at a sane business. She's not qualified for it, not studied in anywhere near the fields that would be involved in setting it up, and it's hard to think of a contrivance where she will be successful at this if she accepts the offer regardless of that.

[BRC]

Yeah, its not entirely implausible that somebody would throw money at this, but the only way you could get as far as they have is to actually have a plan going in, and theres none of that here.

What really does it for me is how Moray is acting.

This is a big endeavor, Moray is the director of sentient resources for an academic institution. Even if she's goofy and unprofessional, this place is full of academics, and hiring 101 is to have some sense of what you're looking for. "We need somebody with expertise in information science to help us organize our research data in an expandable and accessible way", great.

This looks like Moray just searched "Librarian" on LinkedIn and started blindly emailing.


This doesn't feel like she's talking to the head of HR of a major institution, this feels like, i dunno

Like a Cafe that's only ever served drinks wants to hire a chef to design the menu, and as soon as you start going on about the best ways to acquire and store ingredients, designing meals so they go well with the coffee, or setting up a seasonal rotating menu to use in-season produce they're like "Oh yes perfect! You have exceeded my knowledge of the field, this is why we needed to hire somebody".

Which is a reasonable exchange for a coffee shop looking to start serving food. Less so for a major research institution solving what should have been a basic requirement.

[Willie the Duck]

Claire probably could flex her studies into 'overseeing and maintaining a digitally ordered information archive' if they already had one in place, especially if she was only being brought on to manage a specific sub piece or specialty field of it. That seems like it's in scope for library science, especially with a focus on modern information practices. But that's not really what Cubetown needs here right now, yeah. Claire is being asked to effectively oversee the entire -establishment- of such a thing, which would be the purview of like a department president or even C-suite level at a sane business. She's not qualified for it, not studied in anywhere near the fields that would be involved in setting it up, and it's hard to think of a contrivance where she will be successful at this if she accepts the offer regardless of that.

I had something like that happen once. Interviewing for a job as I ended my grad school studies, I ended up interviewing for a company which basically wanted me to build a department. I was smart enough to tell them* that they should be looking for 'effectively me, but 10-12 years down the road and who has already managed such a department somewhere else. Maybe that's informing my suspicions, but I'm wondering if this storyline is one where Claire gets to turn down a bad offer.
*Mind you, I have no idea if I would have gotten the job, but I did get the interview.

[Mordokai]

So what seems to be the general opinion?

Reason argues that Claire shouldn't accept this offer, under any reasonable circumstance. But Jeph strongly hinted it will happen.

Was he trolling? Or will he actually find, in his mind at least, a semi-plausible reason to go along with it?

[Traab]

...yeah, Cubetown is passing the "Unbelievable" threshold for me here, even for the goofy robots comic.


Like, I could understand this if it was a bunch of wacky AI researchers on a farm somewhere breaking away from the standard corporate/university research paradigm and coming to terms with the fact that a lot of support infrastructure they relied on, like people responsible for organizing their research data in usable ways, isn't here anymore.

But the description of Cubetown implies a LOT of money has been poured into this, despite it being apparently run by a bunch of airheads.

It looks like I was right about what "Holistic Research" entails, doing a bunch of interdisciplinary work in the hopes that some brilliant new insights fall out, but if the whole goal is interdisciplinary work, wouldn't "How do we have people share their research data" be one of the questions you answer before you start building your sea-steading lab space?


Maybe the Idea is that, as AI, they can quickly read each other's research notes, so the original thought was just to put everything in a big spreadsheet and all the AIs take an hour each morning to read everybody else's data from the previous day and see if it sparks any insights into their own work and now they need somebody who knows the Dewey Decimal system to organize stuff better?

I don't have trouble with the idea that they need somebody with Claire's degree, my trouble is that they got this far without realizing they'd need that.

From this comic they had a way to gather all this info on spreadsheets to start, but it quickly got so complex the ai doing that kept crashing. So in fairness they had a plan, it was just a bad one predicated on thinking it would be a great idea to do something, but not really understanding all the details behind it. As an example, opening a restaurant because you have a great menu and enough people with good service experience to take care of customers. but you forgot to consider the paperwork involved in ordering supplies, paying for them, setting up budgets, etc. You knew such things exist, after all, you have a budget for your house and groceries are included so its just scaled up right? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! no.

Honestly, at this point, like with so many AI run concerns, it feels like the end result is, they really need an "adult" to be in charge because right now everyone is a little kid running off what seems to be cool to them and not being sure how to make anything work. They need people to do the "boring" part while they run around trying to invent stuff.

[BRC]

From this comic they had a way to gather all this info on spreadsheets to start, but it quickly got so complex the ai doing that kept crashing. So in fairness they had a plan, it was just a bad one predicated on thinking it would be a great idea to do something, but not really understanding all the details behind it. As an example, opening a restaurant because you have a great menu and enough people with good service experience to take care of customers. but you forgot to consider the paperwork involved in ordering supplies, paying for them, setting up budgets, etc. You knew such things exist, after all, you have a budget for your house and groceries are included so its just scaled up right? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! no.

Honestly, at this point, like with so many AI run concerns, it feels like the end result is, they really need an "adult" to be in charge because right now everyone is a little kid running off what seems to be cool to them and not being sure how to make anything work. They need people to do the "boring" part while they run around trying to invent stuff.

I'd still expect an organization of this size to have some better background questions prepared when they started looking for somebody, rather than just jumping with excitement as soon as Claire mentioned the name of her discipline.

To continue the restaurant metaphor, it would be like you start interviewing a manager, and as soon as they ask about your shift scheduling system you go "YES! A SYSTEM FOR SCHEDULING SHIFTS! THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED! PERFECT! YOU'RE HIRED!"

[Shadow of the Sun]

My suspenders of disbelief have fallen down, and as such I am pantsing the world.

I'm not going to stop reading, though, I want to see where this trainwreck goes.

[Rakaydos]

I had to get up and look really close to the screen to read the note on the table...

DO NOT SIT
This means YOU Moray.

Methinks this is a management problem.

[Mechalich]

So what seems to be the general opinion?

Reason argues that Claire shouldn't accept this offer, under any reasonable circumstance. But Jeph strongly hinted it will happen.

Was he trolling? Or will he actually find, in his mind at least, a semi-plausible reason to go along with it?

Well, if Cubetown really is sitting on some giant pile of AI venture capital to the point that it pays janitors a salary normally granted to particle physicists, then the reason to take the job is simple: money, money, and more money. Take the job, keep your head down, make sure you don't do anything illegal, and move on to something else when it inevitably crashes and burns. The key is to make sure Claire gets a salary issued in dollars, not stock options or some other BS tied to Cubetown's success.

[theangelJean]

I wonder if this is just a roundabout way of solving the "can't get a job in the field with no experience" problem?

Claire takes this job because it pays well enough for her and Marten to move to Cubetown temporarily, wacky hijinks ensue, now she has relevant experience on her resumé and can get a better, more suitable job? Plus they get the "I moved here but it's terrible" scenario Claire was worried about?

[Gez]

I'd still expect an organization of this size to have some better background questions prepared when they started looking for somebody, rather than just jumping with excitement as soon as Claire mentioned the name of her discipline.

To continue the restaurant metaphor, it would be like you start interviewing a manager, and as soon as they ask about your shift scheduling system you go "YES! A SYSTEM FOR SCHEDULING SHIFTS! THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED! PERFECT! YOU'RE HIRED!"

It's not even really her discipline. For the restaurant metaphor, it's like the interviewed chef asks about how the kitchen is, and the recruiter goes "a kitchen! genius! that's what we need! when can you start building one?"

[tomandtish]

This doesn't feel like she's talking to the head of HR of a major institution, this feels like, i dunno

Like a Cafe that's only ever served drinks wants to hire a chef to design the menu, and as soon as you start going on about the best ways to acquire and store ingredients, designing meals so they go well with the coffee, or setting up a seasonal rotating menu to use in-season produce they're like "Oh yes perfect! You have exceeded my knowledge of the field, this is why we needed to hire somebody".

Which is a reasonable exchange for a coffee shop looking to start serving food. Less so for a major research institution solving what should have been a basic requirement.

It's not even really her discipline. For the restaurant metaphor, it's like the interviewed chef asks about how the kitchen is, and the recruiter goes "a kitchen! genius! that's what we need! when can you start building one?"

Well, if there was any doubt today's comic confirms this. And while a decent number of librarians graduating these days are often doing it in Information Technologies (of the 7 librarians I know three went that route*), they are knowledgeable in USING technology to run a library, not creating it.

*I wonder if it is a University of North Texas thing. All 3 went there.

Edit: may also be a public school thing. All three work in public schools.

[theangelJean]

Okay, now I'm wondering if the Janitor really is a particle physicist. Who said "well, building a particle accelerator would be nice. What do you mean, what do we need for that? We need a hard vacuum facility, to start with ... Do you have any clean rooms? No, I mean an actual clean room, not a room that happens to be clean ... Not that type of vacuum... you don't even have cleaners?"

(As you can see, I'm not an actual particle physicist. I just really like neutrinos popular science. The hard vacuum strikes me as the hardest thing to build and maintain, along with the magnets. The rest is add-ons.)