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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s literally just a document search for their internal employees to use.

    Those employees are fallible humans trying to navigate tens of thousands of byzantine technical and regulatory documents all published on various dinosaur platforms.

    AI hallucination is a very popular thing to get outraged about right now but don’t forget about good old fashioned bureaucratic error.

    My employer implemented AI search/summarization of our docs/wiki/intranet/JIRA systems over a year ago and it has been very effective in my experience. It always links to the source docs, but it permits natural language queries and can do some reasoning about the contents of the documents to pull together information across a sea of text.

    Nothing that is mission critical enough to lead to a reactor meltdown should ever be blindly trusted to these tools.

    But nothing like that should ever be trusted to the whims of one fallible human, either. This is why systems have protocols, checks and balances, quality controls, and failsafes.

    Giving employees a more powerful document search doesn’t somehow sweep all that aside.

    But hey, don’t let a rational, down-to-earth argument stand in the way of freaking out about a sci-fi dystopia.








  • It’s true, but so is retooling aviation around hydrogen. This is just a prediction but I think before that ever happens, EITHER we’ll have light batteries that are safer and more effective that Lithium OR we’ll have carbon-neutral ways to produce hydrocarbon fuels that can be used with conventional aircraft.

    Hydrogen has struck out on personal electronics and ground transportation. Now it’s angling for aviation where its energy density may matter more. But it hasn’t been losing because of energy density.






  • These days I don’t realistically expect my RAM requirements to change over the lifetime of the product. And I’m keeping computers longer than ever: 6+ years where it used to be 1 or 2.

    People have argued millions of times on the internet that Apple’s products don’t meet people’s needs and are massively overpriced. Meanwhile they just keep selling like crazy and people love them. I think the issue comes from having pricing expectations set over the in race-to-the-bottom world of commoditized Windows/Android trash.


  • We are blessed with a small but gorgeous local library that looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright creation, full of natural light. The stacks are lovingly curated and the computer services are great. Wonderful garden out front, friendly staff inside, and modern equipment that makes checkout a breeze. We can reserve books online or check if they are in, etc.

    Anyway, after school, our kid walks to the end of the block with her friends and goes into the library. From there, we pick her up. That place is jumping in the afternoons, let me tell you. All the local regulars and all the kids just out of school: littles and teenagers. It’s busy and alive but not noisy (nor are they oppressive assholes about keeping silence). It’s a moment of civic joy to walk in there and get my daughter.


  • Yeah yeah. You’re saying that corporate leaders don’t care about people, and we all know that. But the company has to offer staff something to come in and work, right? They get paid right? I’m not saying everyone needs to get desk massages and blow jobs. But there has to be something in it for the staff or there is no company. It sucks to work somewhere that the staff get bare minimum. But the best companies in the world offer a lot more than that, because talent is worth it.


  • You’re right that stock price is something.

    Companies serve three groups:

    1. customers
    2. staff
    3. shareholders

    Stock price measures #3. And one out of three is a pretty shitty overall score.

    Before someone tells me that shareholders are everything, and that this is capitalism, I understand your point but if any of 1, 2, or 3 stop participating, the company stops functioning. All three must be served. You just waved aside staff as a bag of feelings, but they literally do everything at the company.