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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Changes the torque and the application of said torque for each bolt. As in “tool head has 5° of give until in place, then in ramps torque to 5nM over half a second, and holds for 1 second and then ramps to zero over .1 seconds”, and then something different for the next bolt. Then it logs that it did this for each bolt.
    The tool can also be used to measure and correct the bolts as part of an inspection phase, and log the results of that inspection.
    Finally, it tracks usage of the tool and can log that it needs maintenance or isn’t working correctly even if it’s just a subtle failure.



  • Look at their actions, not their words specifically.

    It’s a culture where being unkind is particularly unacceptable, not specifically where you’re not allowed to be honest or forthright.

    You’re allowed to not like someone, but telling someone you dislike them is needlessly unkind, so you just politely decline to interact with them.
    You’d “hate to intrude”, or “be a bother”. If it’s pushed, you’ll “consider it and let them know”.

    Negative things just have to be conveyed in the kindest way possible, not that they can’t be conveyed.


  • Brian Acton is the only billionaire I can think of that hasn’t been a net negative.

    Co-founded WhatsApp, which became popular with few employees. Sold the service at a reasonable rate.
    Sold the business for a stupid large sum of money, and generously compensated employees as part of the buyout.
    Left the buying company, Facebook, rather than do actions he considered unethical, at great personal expense ($800M).

    Proceeded to cofound signal, which is an open, and privacy focused messaging system which he has basically bankrolled while it finds financial stability.

    He also has been steadily giving away most of his money to charitable causes.

    Billionaires are bad because they get that way by exploiting some combination of workers, customers or society.
    In the extremely unlikely circumstance where a handful of people make something fairly priced that nearly everybody wants, and then uses the wealth for good, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being that person.
    Selling messaging to a few billion people for $1 a lifetime is a way to do that.




  • I believe their point was that even encrypted messages convey data. So if you have a record of all the encrypted messages, you can still tell who was talking, when they were talking, and approximately how much they said, even if you can’t read the messages.

    If you wait until someone is gone and then loudly raid their house, you don’t need to read their messages to guess the content of what they send to people as soon as they find out. Now you know who else you want to target, despite not being able to read a single message.

    This type of metadata analysis is able to reveal a lot about what’s being communicated. It’s why private communication should be ephemeral, so that only what’s directly intercepted can be scrutinized.



  • If you have an unutilized asset, there’s pressure to get rid of it for the cost savings.
    If you sell your asset at a loss, it looks bad for you and the company. Same for paying cancelation fees.

    If you legitimately think that you’re going to need that space in the future, for example because you think that we’ll find an equilibrium between “everyone work from office” and where we are now, and that we’re trending towards an organic level of office need/desire higher than we’re at now, you might see selling now as the first step to needing to buy again later, likely for higher than you sold for. So you try to “mandate” the equilibrium that you expect so you’re not in a position to have to explain why you’re holding onto a dead and losing value property.

    Executives spend a lot of time talking to people and having meetings. The job selects for people who thrive on and value face to face communication. Naturally, they overestimate how much that social aspect of the job is true for everyone else, so they estimate that the equilibrium will have a lot more office time than other people would.
    To make it worse, the more power you have to influence that decision, the more likely you are to have a similar bias.

    This isn’t an excuse of course, since you can overcome that bias simply by telling teams to discuss what their ideal working arrangement would be, and then running a survey. Now you have data, and you can use it to try to scale offices to what you actually want.




  • To me it’s important to ask “what problem is it solving”, and “how did we solve that problem in the past”, and “what does it cost”.
    Crypto currency solves the problem of spending being tracked by a third party. We used to handle this by giving each other paper. The new way involves more time, and a stupendous amount of wasted electricity.
    Nfts solve the problem of owning a digital asset. We used to solve this by writing down who owned it. The cost is a longer time investment, and a stupendous amount of wasted electricity.
    Generative AI is solving the problem of creative content being hard to produce, and expensive. We used to solve this problem by paying people to make things for us, and not making things if you don’t have money. The cost is pissing off creatives.

    The first two feel like cases where the previous solution wasn’t really bad, and so the cost isn’t worth it.

    The generative AI case feels mixed, because pissing off creatives to make more profit feels shitty, but lowering barriers to entry to creativity doesn’t.






  • I don’t think they work the same way, but I think they work in ways that are close enough in function that they can be treated the same for the purposes of this conversation.

    Pen and pencil are “the same”, and either of those and printed paper are “basically the same”.
    The relationship between a typical modern AI system and the human mind is like that between a pencil written document and a word document: entirely dissimilar in essentially every way, except for the central issue of the discussion, namely as a means to convey the written word.

    Both the human mind and a modern AI take in input data, and extract relationships and correlations from that data and store those patterns in a batched fashion with other data.
    Some data is stored with a lot of weight, which is why I can quote a movie at you, and the AI can produce a watermark: they’ve been used as inputs a lot. Likewise, the AI can’t perfectly recreate those watermarks and I can’t tell you every detail from the scene: only the important bits are extracted. Less important details are too intermingled with data from other sources to be extracted with high fidelity.




  • So, I think the thing to do is to let workers talk frankly with their immediate supervisor and they’re team mates, and then let people decide for themselves where they would work best from. Weirdly, most people don’t go to work with the intent to do a bad job and can be trusted to make that choice for themselves.

    That being said, there are some legitimate reasons why some people want a return to office that extend beyond the “butts in seats means productivity” and “people will realize I’m not providing value if we work from home” that a lot of people jump to immediately.

    Some professions benefit a lot from face to face communication and coordination. The job can be done remotely, but it’s a lot more work. Because rather than accidentally coordinating, you have to be deliberate with every interaction. Wfh has led to a lot less idea spread between teams in those areas, and often there’s little idea about how to promote “so I was talking with Jan on the other team, and we had this idea…” Outside of making it so people can randomly talk to one another.

    Some businesses have significant investments in their office space. If they’re not using it the pressure to divest from an unneeded asset is strong. Because everyone has this pressure, they might lose significant money selling at a loss, or as a penalty for breaking the lease.
    If they believe that the wfh trend will slow and possibly reverse to some degree, then they don’t want to sell when it’s cheap and be forced to buy when it’s expensive again. This is often coupled with the previous point.

    The final reason has to do with attachment and people. When people don’t see each other, they’re less attached to one another. If your job is just a place you quietly work and get paid, there’s less human connection stopping you from jumping ship immediately.
    You are also slower to adopt the company culture, which aside from bullshit buzzword stuff actually has value as the set of poorly defined social contracts about how the company interacts with customers, and generally “does stuff”. The actual company culture that makes you know that project plans go in spread sheets, the project proposal in a text document, and how people expect the documentation wiki to be formatted. What style of gif to use to get a chuckle and make people remember the important bit.
    It also creates some difficulties for new entrants to the workforce. A lot of people with little or no office experience have reported a much harder time getting situated without people nearby to lend a hand. That process is much harder if there aren’t people nearby, so some people want to encourage more people to come back to let that work better.

    In the end, these aren’t enough for me to think we should be forcing people back, but they’re worth considering and talking about as a company or team.