I find there's an advantage to writing if I'm trying to memorize something. But if that isn't going to happen because I only did this configuration once and then never needed to reference it again for two years and now I need the exact commands I executed, can't beat a searchable txt file.
Yeah, I'm reminded of the various child porn cases where the "perpetrator" is a stupid teenager who took nude pics of themselves and sent them to their boy/girlfriend. Many of those cases have been struck down by judges because the letter of the law creates a non-sequitur where the teenager is somehow a felon child predator who solely preyed on themselves, and sending them to jail and forcing them to sign up for a sex offender registry would just ruin their lives while protecting nobody and wasting the state's resources.
I don't trust AI in its current form to make that sort of distinction. And sure you can say the laws should be written better, but so long as the laws are written by humans that will simply not be the case.
This is one of the roles of justice, but it is also one of the reasons why wealthy people are convicted less often. While it often delivered as a narrative of wealth corrupting the system, the reality is that usually what they are buying is the justice that we all should have.
So yes, a judge can let a stupid teenager off on charges of child porn selfies. but without the resources, they are more likely be told by a public defender to cop to a plea.
And those laws with ridiculous outcomes like that are not always accidental. Often they will be deliberate choices made by lawmakers to enact an agenda that they cannot get by direct means. In the case of making children culpable for child porn of themselves, the laws might come about because the direct abstinence legislation they wanted could not be passed, so they need other means to scare horny teens.
From The Truth by Terry Pratchett, with particular emphasis on the book's footnote.
> William’s family and everyone they knew also had a mental map of the city that was divided into parts where you found upstanding citizens, and other parts where you found criminals. It had come a shock to them... no, he corrected himself, it had come as a an affront to learn that [police chief] Vimes operated on a different map. Apparently he'd instructed his men to use the front door when calling on any building, even in broad daylight, when sheer common sense said that they should use the back, just like any other servant. [0]
> [0] William’s class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it.
Sure, but I'm not sure how AI would solve any of that.
Any claims of objectivity would be challenged based on how it was trained. Public opinion would confirm its priors as it already does (see accusations of corruption or activism with any judicial decision the mob disagrees with, regardless of any veracity). If there's a human appeals process above it, you've just added an extra layer that doesn't remove the human corruption factor at all.
As for corruption, in my opinion we're reading some right now. Human-in-the-loop AI doesn't have the exponential, world-altering gains that companies like OpenAI need to justify their existence. You only get that if you replace humans completely, which is why they're all shilling science fiction nonsense narratives about nobody having to work. The abstract of this paper leans heavily into that narrative
Oddly enough, Texas passed reform to keep sexting teens from getting prosecuted when: they are both under 18 and less than two years difference in age. It was regarded as a model for other states. It's the only positive thing I have heard of Texas legislating wrt sexuality.
Really? That "model" has the common, but obviously extremely undesirable, feature of criminalizing sexual relationships between students in the same grade that were legal when they formed. How could it be regarded as a model for anyone else?
I think they refer to the fact that, exposed as GP did, looks like there is a loophole if 2 teenagers started their relationship at 17 and 15, and once they become 18 and 16, sexting is suddenly illegal.
Huge IANAL disclaimer, but I don't think it is. It is decriminalizing some of the edge cases where reasonable, and missing the one you mention. That one isn't criminal where it wasn't previously, just unchanged, AFAICT.
I'm not claiming that the text at issue changes whether sexting in that relationship is criminalized, just that it is criminalized,† which should disqualify the law as a piece of model legislation.
It's true in a technical sense that where sexting is legal anyway, the "model" text wouldn't make it illegal, but that isn't an interesting observation, because where sexting is legal anyway, the text has no effects at all.
> it is also one of the reasons why wealthy people are convicted less often.
A teenager posting own photo and getting away with it is massively different then a rich guy raping a girl and getting away with it. Or, rich guy getting away with outright frauds with thousands of victims.
> While it often delivered as a narrative of wealth corrupting the system, the reality is that usually what they are buying is the justice that we all should have.
This is not true. Epstein did not got "justice we all should have". Trump did not got "justice we all should have". People pardoned by Trump did not got "justice we all should have". Wall Street and billionaires are not getting justice we all should have either. All these people are getting impunity and that is not what we all should have.
You're right, it's not a two tier system, it's (at least) a three tier system, where the middle tier is getting the "correct" justice, and the low tier unfavorable and the high tier preferential.
The pardons (the non-purchased ones) were not out of charity to the pardonees but to foster future behavior beneficial to the pardoner.
Whole "democracy" thing is legal framework that wealthy and powerful people built to make safe wealth transfer down the generations possible while giving away as little as possible to average joe.
In a countries without this legal framework its usually free for all fight every time ruling power changes. Not good for preserving capital.
So wealthy having more rights is system working as intended. Not inherently bad thing either as alternative system is whoever best with AK47 having more rights.
>"So wealthy having more rights is system working as intended. Not inherently bad thing either"
Sorry but I do not feel this way. "Not inherently bad thing either" - I think it is maddening and has to be fixed no matter what. You know, wealthy generally do not really do bad in dictatorial regimes either.
> "You know, wealthy generally do not really do bad in dictatorial regimes either."
Until they found dead with unexpected heart attack, their car blow up or they fall out of the window.
In dictatorship vast majority of wealthy people no more than managers of dictators property. Usually with literal golden cages that impossible to sell and transfer.
Once person fall out of favor or stop being useful all their "wealth" just going to be redistributed because it was never theirs.
Who are you defining as "wealthy" here, billionaires? Or anyone with any wealth?
The system does provide protection against wealth because that is what we strive to work hard for our families. It's important that there is a system setup to protect it. Not just for "ruling class" but for everyone who works.
Otherwise we all end up with our own militia to protect it. And I'm not going to enter into any debate about capitalism itself.
While some cases have been struck down, about 1/4 of people on the sex offender registry were minors at the time of the offense, 14 is the age at which it is most likely to happen, and this exact scenario accounts for a significant fraction of cases.
There have been equally high profile cases where a perpetrator got off because they have connections. I'd love for an AI to loudly exclaim that this is a big deviation from the norm.
When I've looked into these cases it often seems that there are additional issues at play like harassment/stalking of ex's. So the prosecutor is thinking they can get an easy plea deal on the "real" case by piling on additional charges.
This example feels more like a bug in the law itself that should be corrected. If this behavior is acceptable then it should be legal so we can avoid everyone the hassle in the first place. I bet AI would be great at finding and fixing these bugs.
> If this behavior is acceptable then it should be legal so we can avoid everyone the hassle in the first place.
Codifying what is morally acceptable into definitive rules has been something humanity has struggled with for likely much longer than written memory. Also while you're out there "fixing bugs" - millions of them and one-by-one - people are affected by them.
> I bet AI would be great at finding and fixing these bugs.
Ae we really going to outsource morality to an unfeeling machine that is trained to behave like an exclusive club of people want it to?
If that was one's goal, that's one way to stealthily nudge and undermine a democracy I suppose.
It's not a bug, it's something politicians don't want to touch because nobody wants to be the person that is soft on anything to do with minors and sex. Of course our laws are completely illogical - the fact that you could be put in prison and a sex offender registry for life for having a single photo of a naked 17 year old (how in the hell were you supposed to know?) on your device is ridiculous.
But, again, who is going to decide to put forward a bill to change that? It's all risk and no reward for the politician.
Fair, but still, the legislative process takes alot of time, and judicial norms and precedent allow for discretion to be exercised with accountability, which also informs the legislative process.
I think "judge AI" would be better if it also had access to a complete legislative record of debate surrounding the establishment of said laws, so that it could perform a "sanity check" whether its determinations are also consistent with the stated intent of lawmakers.
One might imagine a distant future where laws could be dramatically simplified into plain-spoken declarations, to be interpreted by a very advanced (and ideally true open source) future LLM. So instead of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2251–2260 the law could be as straightforward as:
"In order to protect children from sexual exploitation and eliminate all incentive for it, no child may be used, depicted, or represented for sexual arousal or gratification. Responsibility extends to those who create, assist, enable, profit from, or access such material for sexual purposes. Sanctions must be proportionate to culpability and sufficient to deter comparable conduct."
Man, this is one of the ways society has fundamentally broken - all the 'think of the children' arguments, resting on the belief that children are so sacred, that any sort of leinency or consideration of circumstances is forbidden - lest someone guilty of molesting them might walk free.
Well now we know for a fact that some of the people making these arguments very thinking of the children very much.
> where the "perpetrator" is a stupid teenager who took nude pics of themselves and sent them to their boy/girlfriend.
"Where the "perpetrator" is a stupid teenager who took nude pics of themselves and sent them to their boy/girlfriend. If you were a US court judge, what would your opinion be on that case?"
I was pretty happy with the results and it clearly wasn't tripped up by the non-sequitur.
Sorry but that seems like an insane system where whole classes of actions effectively are illegal but probably okay if you're likeable. In your scenario the obvious solution is to amend the law and pardon people convinced under it. B/c what really happens is that if you have a pretty face and big tits you get out of speeding tickets b/c "gosh well the law wasn't intended for nice people like you"
"In his decision, Judge Cajacob asserts that the purpose and intent of Minnesota’s child pornography statute does not support punishing Jane Doe for explicit images of herself and doing so “produces an absurd, unreasonable, and unjust result that utterly confounds the statue’s stated purpose.”"
Nothing in there about "likeability" or "we let her off because she had nice tits" (which would be particularly weird in this case). Judges have a degree of discretion to interpret laws, they still have to justify their decisions. If you think the judge is wrong then you can appeal. This is how the law has always worked, and if you've thought otherwise then consider you've been living under this "insane system" for your entire life, and every generation of ancestors has too, assuming you're/they've been in the US.
maybe English isnt your native language, but "scenario" doesnt require the situation to be not real
> Nothing in there about "likeability" or "we let her off because she had nice tits"
We have no way to know if likeability played in to it. When rules are bendable then they are bent to the likeable and attractive. My example of a traffic stop is analogous and more directly relatable
> This is how the law has always worked, and if you've thought otherwise then consider you've been living under this "insane system" for your entire life
You seem to have some reading comprehension issues.. I never suggested its not currently working that way and i never suggested the current situation is not insane. If you think the current system is sane and great then thats your opinion
Everyone i know whos had to deal with the US legal system has only related horror stories
Are you even responding to the right comment? I read your comment and the parent comment you've responded to and this response doesn't make sense - it reads like a non-sequitur.
The parent comment present a scenario where the law is ignored b/c the judge decides for himself it shouldn't apply. I'm pointing out that this kind of approach is fundamentally unjust and wrong.
"And sure you can say the laws should be written better, but so long as the laws are written by humans that will simply not be the case"
Um, wouldn't the perpetrator be the person they sent the nude pics to? Common consensus is that it's somehow grooming to have any type of romantic relationship with someone who's under the age of majority, even if you're also under the age of majority. So even if you're not the one who sent the nude photos, you'd still be to blame for creating an environment that enabled them. At least that's the impression I've gotten from my own experiences with this bullshit.
I don't know if I'm comfortable with any of this at all, but seems like having AI do "front line" judgments with a thinner appeals layer available powered by human judges would catch those edge cases pretty well.
This is basically how the administrative courts work now - an ALJ takes a first pass at your case, and then you can complain about it to a district court, who can review it without doing their own fact-finding. But the reason we can do this is that we trust ALJs (and all trial-level judges, as well as juries) to make good assessments on the credibility of evidence and testimony, a competency I don’t suspect folks are ready or willing to hand over to AI.
I don't follow your reasoning at all. Without a specific input stating that you can't be your own victim, how would the AI catch this? In what cases does that specific input even make sense? Attempted suicide removes one's own autonomy in the eyes of the law in many ways in our world - would the aforementioned specific input negate appropriate decisions about said autonomy?
I don't see how an AI / LLM can cope with this correctly.
When discussing AI regulation, when I asked that they thought there should be a mechanism to appeal any determination made by an AI they had said that they had been advocating for that to go both ways, that people should be able to ask for an AI review of human made decisions and in the event of an inconsistency the issue is raised at a higher level.
To get to an appeal means you obviously already have a judgement against you - and as you can imagine in the cases like the one above that's enough to ruin your life completely and forever, even if you win on appeal.
They can do that by looking at the cars in my driveway/garage and or just watching the windows for any period of time. Plus my phone. If <insert 3 letter agency> agents are sitting outside of your house, they aren't going to drive away because you pull the plug on the router and suddenly deprive them of BFI packets.
Cool spooky concept, but seems like this could be easily foiled by shoving some aluminum foil into one's pockets or wearing thermal clothing in the winter. Or moving furniture around.
My cheapo Amazon desk is steel framed, and the monitors have all sorts of metal and signals running through them. I know it impacts wifi because my wifi-connected printer gets crappy signal on one side and decent signal on the other. Good luck getting a positive ID via wifi when I'm sitting at it.
Likewise I don't see how this survives in the real world for a mass surveillance application. Any "signature" will be in constant flux as environments change, in terms of everything from crowds to weather. I'll need to see a demo outside of a controlled environment before I start trying to obfuscate my signature or remodel my house to run Ethernet everywhere.
The irony is "ownership" is a common management talking point, but when you actually try to take ownership you inevitably run into walls of access, a lack of information, and generally a "why are you here?" mentality.
Granted one person can't know/do everything, but large companies in particular seem allergic to granting you any visibility whatsoever. It's particularly annoying when you're given a deadline, bust your ass working overtime to make it, only to discover that said deadline got extended at a meeting you weren't invited to and nobody thought to tell you about it. Or worse, they were doing some dark management technique of "well he's really hauling ass right now, if he makes the original deadline we'll be ahead of schedule, and if he doesn't we have the spare capacity".
If the expectation is I'm a tool for management to use, then I'll perform my duties to the letter and no further. If the expectation is ownership, then I need to at least sit at the cool kids' table and maybe even occasionally speak when I have something relevant to contribute.
> but large companies in particular seem allergic to granting you any visibility whatsoever. It's particularly annoying
If the blind spot is directly causing customer pain, find metrics that demonstrate the impact. If it ends up driving away your customers, then your company is securing itself to death.
> customer pain > driving away your customers > company death
You are implying efficient market theory, which is bunk.
Example: Our banks have endless painful papercuts yet most of us don't change banks just because of one pain.
We each respond to our own complex of costs and benefits (or risks versus rewards).
Second example: I use an iPhone because I judge it to be more secure yet I'm constantly fighting the same bugs and misfeatures that seem to never get fixed/improved.
Your chain of reasoning is broken? Or is it your model of the world?
> Our banks have endless painful papercuts yet most of us don't change banks just because of one pain.
Only because they're all painful. If there was a bank that was recognized as perfect, people would switch in short order. Switching to another bank that is also painful is not worth the effort.
> I use an iPhone because I judge it to be more secure yet I'm constantly fighting the same bugs and misfeatures that seem to never get fixed/improved.
Only because nobody else sells an iPhone. People would start switching over to other, less buggy iPhone on the market if there was such a thing.
> You are implying efficient market theory, which is bunk.
The efficient market theory says that, in an active market, prices rapidly reflect all publicly available information. How does that apply here, bunk or not?
> Example: Our banks have endless painful papercuts yet most of us don't change banks just because of one pain.
One bank pissed me off due to an extremely dishonest thing they did. So I overdrafted the account to the max ($500) and left them the bill.
(Not the first time I've done something like that to someone who deserved it. I've done much, much more in some cases. Endless painful papercuts? Nope, I do not accept that.)
They weren't happy about this. I think they hit "my" "credit" with that for years. I never noticed, as I don't borrow money; the machinations of these "credit reporting" agencies are beneath my concern. They have no credit in my eyes. I don't consort with crooks, I just punish them.
> Second example: I use an iPhone because I judge it to be more secure yet I'm constantly fighting the same bugs and misfeatures that seem to never get fixed/improved.
I haven't had a phone in decades at this point. Don't want one. I refused to be tracked, monitored, or abused by anyone. And no, I sure don't give a single fuck about any of the many people (and there have been MANY) who have tried their best to shame, cajole, insult, ridicule, harass, intimidate, or bully me into getting a phone. Fuck em all.
> Your chain of reasoning is broken? Or is it your model of the world?
Maybe it's you who's broken. Why do you accept slavery? Just to fit in?
Since you're hardly the only one with a similar way of thinking, maybe we could say it's the entire society that's broken.
I simply do not tolerate the things that you tolerate.
> I overdrafted the account to the max ($500) and left them the bill
I think theft is a poor answer - although most society accepts your rationalisation when dealing with government or big business.
Even worse is that you can't know what it may cost you in the future. My friend couldn't open a business account the other day. After many phone calls he was lucky enough to find someone that told him it was because he left that bank with an account $67 overdrawn when he was younger. That's in New Zealand: I strongly suspect he never would have found out the reason he was denied in many countries[1]. His only recourse was to use a more expensive provider (maybe $600 per year).
Please don't assume I am tolerant of abuse. I vindictively avoid some brands (and even all products from some countries).
I just often judge that my changing to a different service has costs I would rather avoid so I stick with a known evil (I'm good at finding workarounds for many niggles).
I also accept annoying papercuts because I believe all services have imperfection and flaws. Too many people count costs without balance.
What is this perfect bank you have discovered without papercuts?
Theft? HA! Nope, they attempted to rob me, on multiple levels. Categorically refused.
> Even worse is that you can't know what it may cost you in the future. My friend couldn't open a business account the other day. After many phone calls he was lucky enough to find someone that told him it was because he left a bank account $67 overdrawn when he was younger.
Oh no! How will I ever conduct business without the government or bank's permission? I guess the only alternative is slavery to some giant corporation, or death! What should I do?
As an American, I would probably like to consult with Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Smedley Butler, Lysander Spooner, Mark Twain, etc and get their thoughts on this matter.
While looking something up just now, this old saved quote from years back popped right into view. Couldn't have said it better myself:
"Why work at all? Just live off the system. The aristocrats do it lavishly. The welfare rats do it slovenly. Both know that working for an 'honest dollar' in this empire of lies is for suckers. This is why they set up artificial barriers of entry such as needing a 'college degree' for so many jobs so you have to wade through all that propaganda bullshit they spew these days. It's also why they have to make sure property prices stay high to keep the cheese dangling in front of the mouse. The system is designed to keep you churning the wheel while the others sit back, relax, and enjoy a life of leisure at your expense."
> That's in New Zealand
Ah! Found a serious problem. Not the problem, mind you, but a problem. There's a reason the self-described "elites" like to hole up in that place.
(It would be a shame if they never emerged from those holes. What would the world do without their 'leadership'?)
> I strongly suspect he never would have found out the reason in many countries.
Yes, I agree, there are many shithole countries in the world. I live in one, too. One learns to adapt.
> His only recourse was to use a more expensive provider (maybe $600 per year).
Yes, this corrupt country tried to screw me in a similar type of way, years back. I refused to play ball and just did what I wanted instead, very carefully and quietly. Now that problem is permanently resolved, for a fraction of what it would have otherwise cost.
> Please don't assume I am tolerant of abuse. I vindictively avoid some brands (and even all products from some countries).
One time, I went to the local Wal-Mart a couple days before Christmas. I parked at the back of the lot as the place was packed full. No problem, I don't mind walking. But then imagine my displeasure to observe that some complete asshole in a giant lifted pickup truck has double parked near the front of the lot.
That guy was way more important than anyone, in his own mind, clearly. Someone just had to educate him about how so very wrong he was. The job fell to me, as I was the closest warrior at hand.
So I sent a shopping cart sailing at warp 11 into his truck. ("Engage!") It just so happened to impact right on the corner of the cab, behind the door (the worst spot possible--thanks, God), and fucked it all up. Mission Accomplished. I returned home and celebrated.
I know of another funny incident where a similar type of person was similarly unimpressed by some douchebag in a Maserati (this is hillbilly country, home of Chevys and Fords) who likewise felt entitled to take up two parking spots on a busy main street where parking was limited. In this case the guy dumped a tractor bucket load of wet hay into his open convertible top.
The "victim" of that incident was raging on Facebook, offering a reward for whoever turned the guy in, etc, but everyone was just laughing at the SOB.
You'd be surprised what you can get away with, when everyone around you is quietly wishing somebody would do just that thing.
Sorry, you're thoroughly confused. It is not theft to steal from a thief. It's called "justice."
I realize this is a radical concept for your society, which at this moment is thoroughly unjust. Familiarize yourself with this concept now, as it will come up later on the test.
No wonder you keep getting robbed and fucked over all the time. You think it's somehow morally wrong to strike back! It's like you were born and bred to be a victim.
This also explains why so many others get victimized while you stand by and watch idly. Because you think there's nothing wrong with your fellow man getting fucked over!
I could explain more, but it would be useless, as your confusion is at this time far too thick and heavy to be dispelled by just one guy like me. What you're gonna need is somebody like me in your local area to help educate you.
My recommendation is to just double park your big ass honkin truck or Maserati somewhere, then just watch and see what happens. Eventually, you will reach enlightenment.
Dont give up on me! I too am eager to learn! Change the error of my ways please! I demand more of your thoughts regarding how to contend with daily life.
I admit, I went a bit through your post history, cause you're interesting, if unhinged.
First off, you make me think of an awakened and fully actualized version of Luke Smith.
So you're like, a hardcore American Libertarian? The no phone thing is incredibly based, and personally I think smashing a shopping cart into some asshole's truck is both hilarious and just. I do similar when I cone illegally parked cars.
So why libertarian and not anarchist? You seem to appreciate direct action. You seem to have opposition to all forms of oppression be they coming from the government or a bank or a corporation, you're willing to make what some would consider huge personal sacrifice to stand for your values. Is it an inherent distaste of leftist thought? If you are libertarian, that word was born in the most far left circles possible. It still is a synonym for "anarchist" in most places in the world.
I'm not trying to get your goat here. I like talking to people with completely different ideologies than me. Keeps me on my toes, prevents fossilization.
The product may take 20 minute to boot - a testament to its complexity and greatness (/s). But pointing that out might end badly when it’s the SVP’s pet. They will not entertain alternatives or efforts that distract from their mental plan.
And if a developer finds themselves getting feedback or communication from customers, things are probably on fire - absolutely literally.
>Or worse, they were doing some dark management technique of "well he's really hauling ass right now, if he makes the original deadline we'll be ahead of schedule, and if he doesn't we have the spare capacity"
As a business analyst who has worked a lot with executive teams at multiple companies, this is almost always the case (ime). Deadlines are only shortened down the chain, never extended. The assumption is that if it cannot be done then they will simply not administer any consequences and classify it as "not realizing the upside".
The only reason it is almost always and not always, is because sometimes a different thing pops up that needs to get prioritized first, so it is communicated that the first thing isnt actually as important as it was yesterday and this other thing is now the most important.
Now obviously I cant speak for everyone at all teams, but as far as boring corporate default behavior goes this is the safe path for executives. If your boss is doing otherwise, they are going out of their way to do it.
The takeaway as a worker is that you should not treat any business goal or deadline ask of you with the same level of care as you would a personal favor. When something really needs that level of care, your boss should pull you aside and break character and make it a personal favor to them, not the business.
As far as "Ownership" goes, it is just a pissing contest as far as I can tell. if you own a task but cant do the task, you just send an email to someone who can do the task so that the task gets done and you can report the task is done and get your ownership credit. the person who did the task was used as a tool in this regard. So high performing managers just try to get ownership of as much as they possibly can, as there's no meaningful difference between who sends that email.
Ownership doesn't imply FULL ownership. You get handed ownership of a slice, and expected to be responsible for that bit of land; but you'll never own the farm, and will likely never be consulted on whether that land should become a car park from Tuesday. That's just how capitalism work.
That's called renting. And even renters have rights per whatever lease they signed and local laws.
It's a simple formula. If you want me to be personally invested in my work and go above and beyond, then I need the motivation to do that. So either you grant me a reasonable level of professional input such that my opinion is valued and I'm helping the mission succeed, or pay me for said extra effort (can be opportunities for promotion, direct overtime pay, career advancement, etc). If you want me super-motivated you can even do both!
If we're playing hardball "you're some lowly IC nerd without an MBA or connections and we're here to make money so fuck you" capitalism, well the only serious leverage I have to is to take my talents where they're most appreciated. So you'll get exactly what you pay for until I find something better, and aside from some professional courtesy I'll be looking. Maybe you're fine with that, but if you start preaching "ownership" of the product just be aware that the entire dev team is going to pay you lip service and then laugh as soon as you're out of the room, and we clock out at 5:00, even if we don't on paper. Except for poor Bob who due to life/family commitments has no option to leave and needs to rationalize his situation even though he agrees with us. Sometimes we'll tone it down just so he doesn't feel too bad about being trapped. Regardless, in that environment we take ownership of our careers, not our work.
I've worked both types of jobs. I'd say the former worked the best for all involved, but the latter has its place and is fine so long as everyone acknowledges what game we're playing and expectations are set appropriately.
You're accusing people of moving the goalposts on the tariff conversation, the goal posts were doing backflips and jazzercise from the day they were announced.
So yeah, the tariffs are still a net negative on the economy, but have been so erratically and poorly implemented that they're not nearly as bad as they could have been. It's like a plastered drunk guy swinging a knife at you. It's a lethal threat, but he's tripping over himself constantly and can barely stand so it's easy to dodge for now. Could be a more serious issue if he ever sobers up.
I agree they've been very erratic. What does that have to do with whether or not our economy tanked as a result? It didn't, the prophecies were FUD, everything he does is bad, blah blah.
Trump's a lethal threat that is too incompetent to be lethal? Okay. So quit with the FUD then.
So you'd turn your back on the knife wielding drunk guy and turn on Netflix because he hasn't managed to stab you yet?
FUD stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt. If you didn't feel any of that in the previous year you haven't been paying attention or don't have any serious responsibilities.
You underestimate how sclerotic large corporations can be. I've seen people do zero work, quite visibly, at fortune 500s and not be fired for over a year.
There are people at my office who haven't really done anything since March 2020 when we all got sent home. They probably weren't doing anything before then either, but at least they were there eight hours a day.
I've never understood this meme. Maybe I'm naive, but why would a company hire someone to "not do anything?" How would they stay employed if their performance review showed they "weren't doing anything?" Everyone around me is busy doing 3x the amount of work they can sustain because we're so short staffed. Where are these companies that have people just sitting there picking their nose watching YouTube? I've never really seen this either in BigTech or MediumTech companies.
Maybe these employees are actually doing things--just things you don't see or appreciate?
To defend ICs against middle management a bit: a lot of IC work is dependent on decisions that need to be made by upper level managers. A 2 week contiguous workstream can take 2+ years easy once a few managers ask a few questions and need 10-20 meetings to get 5 bullet points clarified (so many projects can't even produce that). But if that person gets replaced their institutional knowledge and work readiness evaporates.
I've been on 10+ projects at big companies and have begged to do work. Mostly it was showing up to 3-5 meetings/week while managers try and figure things out, and their VPs reconfigure budgets, priorities, and resources. Sometimes I do the work and hold it until someone wants it.
There's usually no standard top-down view about what happens when 3 VPs change the scope on 5 projects. But in reality, that usually means 10-30 people downstream are paralyzed. This is also where the tension between "new work" and "scalable processes" comes into play (need a consultant?).
Add regulatory compliance and approval gates, and then..
If you're a contractor, it's often preferable to keep qualified people on staff even if they have nothing to do because it makes bidding for future contracts easier. You can say "I have X people qualified in Y ready to go" instead of "we'll have to hire X people to do Y".
But there's also just bad hires who can get through interviews, they won't just leave, and building a case to fire those people takes time and management that gives a shit. At a large enough program at a large enough company with uninvolved management (and they can afford to be uninvolved because the program's doing well on all tracked metrics), you can get away with being negligible deadweight for a shocking amount of time. I wouldn't recommend it because your team will hate you, you'll build no skills or relationships, and you'll be the first to go when cuts happen, but some people are fine with that trade for whatever reason.
Headcount increase means growth which means stock go up which means short term profit at the expense of long term quality of product or service.
Soooo many people doing absolutely nothing and really no one cares.
It is beneficial to have someone doing nothing as oppose to someone pro active, because doing things breaks things.
Think about, companies optimize for inertia. Extraordinary levels of burocracy, governance, quality assurance...at some point it becomes impossible to move. Measures are in place not because they increase quality, but they reduce movement, and then this is perceived as safer. Think about it, less movement == safe.
People doing absolutely fucking nothing while virtue signaling is a perfect fit.
To be fair I've never worked at Amazon, but at this point they have 1.6 million employees worldwide. I don't care what their hiring brochures say, if you think they don't suffer the same ailments as every corporation that size I have a bridge to sell you.
Certain sectors are high performing centers of excellence whose staff write blog posts that get posted to HN, publish papers, get put on the covers of hiring media and give speeches. The majority of the company is somewhere in the middle holding down their relatively uneventful but important functions, and probably a larger chunk than Corporate leadership would like to acknowledge are deadweight hiding in the cracks.
Yeah, if that culture is actually widespread I imagine their deadweight is more the variety that's figured out how to game the system or has connections, rather than the "I'm going to do literally no work and watch youtube all day" varieties that I've witnessed.
Of course it's biased. I'm just saying I find it quite believable that some program was funded 5 years ago under different financial conditions and has remained funded until now despite no longer being viable.
People generally don't like losing their jobs, and will put a positive spin on every report that might be good enough to pass muster with middle management bureaucracy at a large firm. All it takes is for enough people in the chain of command to shrug, sign whatever docs are needed and move onto something they care about more.
Yeah I remember a few projects attempting "grid computing", where the idea was distributing application threads across CPUs over freaking ethernet.
Have to say that would be a fun puzzle to try and optimize for, but network latency would always be a hard physical constraint no matter how fast. Maybe some niche use cases, but then multi-core CPUs and GPU processing really took off and I guess it just got even less useful.
Not to be that guy, but if the majority of sightings coming from nations capable of producing advanced military aircraft... well perhaps the aliens thought the F-15 was badass and wanted a closer look?
US sightings get publicised best due to the nature of international media (wide distribution of US films, TV and books)... But there certainly are other places claiming to see them. There are a lot of supposed sightings in Chile for example, which doesn't have a huge air force.
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