> Why should a person's leisure be subject to the whims of employment?
Even the leisure time of fish and rabbits are subject to eating leaves and kelp. Time is useful. Your work may give 100x more leisure time to thousands of people. And even if it doesn’t, it’s still necessary - who will maintain the back ends for the porn sites? The mind reels to think of what would happen if Netflix’s sysadmins became simple bumbling 1xers. So many kdramas unwatched! One slip up in 2010 and million basic whitegirls not knowing be soft touch of The Office!
every moral imperative is also a personal choice. And honestly, if being a better coder saves 100k people a few hours in wasted time once, that’s ten person years - coming close to moral imperative! If your productivity tool’s new feature enables some engineering collaboration that builds a new bridge in Kenya, that saves a thousand person years?
“Mental energy” is a pretty common phrase, and it refers to the ability to start and sustain work on tasks which require mental effort. Eating a candy bar can provide a temporary boost to mental energy, but it’s not an effective everyday approach.
There are many physical and psychological issues which diminish people’s mental energy. ADHD and depression being the most obvious.
Fortunately for many of those conditions there are also ways to increase the amount of mental energy you have available.
And yet this advice is not necessarily wrong. We spend a significant fraction of the calories we eat operating our brain. I have personally measured a significant increase in my ability after a good lunch compared to just an hour or two prior.
"Energy constrained" doesn't mean he lacks sugar, it means his brain isn't letting him do the work anymore because it is in the process of burning out.
Yes, this is my intended meaning. I am a PhD student working on my thesis. After a certain number of hours of doing mathematics or algorithm design, I have to switch to easier tasks like reading papers in a domain I'm familiar with, or documenting code.
While I cannot speak for anyone but myself, my performance on highly challenging tasks is capped at 4-5 hours per day. At that point, it is better for me to switch to lower hanging fruit.
If I am feeling especially inspired, sometimes I'll put in a 12+ hour day of hard work. Rarely, even two or more in a row. But inevitably, I will feel extra burned out in the subsequent days.
so when google releases its 13th chat app, that’s really the CIA doing it? Netflix’s chaos monkey program is ackthuallee an intelligence scam to attack your distributed systems from within?
> more accurately that any action taken by the first party might be better viewed as being "really" taken by the second party
your comment was basically contradictory. As is this new one - google meet and google duo is a “CIA chat app”? Why?
What does that mean? Is someone previously on the Google Duo team a CIA officer? Is the leader of the team an asset? What design decisions are CIA adjacent? Where is this happening
> google meet and google duo is a “CIA chat app”? Why?
> What does that mean?
It means that the app may be used to advance CIA goals. It means that the CIA has control of the app along any dimension you're worried about. This is the nature of obfuscated relationships. If you're worried about something, and it's likely to be true, you need to assume that it is true. In this case, the assumption is justified. If you're not worried about something, you don't need to make the assumption that it's true. Since it doesn't matter, you can afford not to have a position on it.
What does this mean? Can CIA add a voice and video chat feature if the deputy director of it wants it? Can the CIA freely access internal communications? How? Who does this? Does Larry know? How do you know?
> cia has control over the app along any dimension
This is an excessively strong claim. Can the CIA delete the app and end the project if they feel like it today? Can they see what I’m typing before I post it? Again, why? Who knows about this? How do they do it?
I am secretly controlled by the state because they force me to pay taxes. We are all IRS assets in their quest to build a global American tax-base imperial seat of power.
you can just sue for discrimination though? That is common. It is considered legally dangerous to have an all white (or, less fantastically, 30% Jew 30% Asian 20% white 0% hispanicblack), but the mode of enforcement would be employment or hiring discrimination, not this...
"Discrimination" is what sensible people do all the time. It means "distinguishing things that are different", and if you don't discriminate, bad stuff is likely to happen. For example, it can be bad for your digestion if you fail to discriminate between a hamburger and a house-brick.
yeah I’d rather hire 7 skilled and well oiled Jews than an “equal opportunity” ratio mixture of 4 whites : 1 black. but there is a “civil rights act” and a lot of creative, anti-hegemonic jurisprudence enduring that my militant ascetic coding-Shtel will never be a reality. :(
realistically, while this may be overstepping the bounds of some faith in fairy tales like “democracy” and “untarnished will of citizens”, this is very very low on the ladder of nasty voting tactics. Compare to gerrymandering, or outright fraud, or SCOTUS deciding elections over and over, or much worse shenanigans in the 19th and 20th
Also OP’s article is “editorialized” in the same sense that Triumph of the Will is “biased”. A statement like
> The Post’s publication of a report that said Zuckerberg effectively “bought” the 2020 election also sparked outrage from the New York State Republican Party, which retweeted a link to the paper’s front-page coverage.
Even the leisure time of fish and rabbits are subject to eating leaves and kelp. Time is useful. Your work may give 100x more leisure time to thousands of people. And even if it doesn’t, it’s still necessary - who will maintain the back ends for the porn sites? The mind reels to think of what would happen if Netflix’s sysadmins became simple bumbling 1xers. So many kdramas unwatched! One slip up in 2010 and million basic whitegirls not knowing be soft touch of The Office!