Simon_ORourke

> We spent a whole week learning about all the clever tricks Harrah's data scientists found to keep people in the gambling halls.

What sort of stuff are they pulling? Like sending down a five dollar cocktail to keep someone spending 20 bucks a hand at the craps table?

These look like those corrective glasses the doctor gave Bart Simpson - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cgi8WqjU1U

The key verb here is "plead" - they've absolutely zero power in the decision making process beyond deciding to leave or stay. Andy Jassy is a smart guy, all this smoke he's blowing about enhanced communications and cooperation in an office environment is probably underlying some move to drastically reduce headcount. However, I've got a feeling that the folks this will impact the most, and hence those most likely to leave, will be those with more senior tenure and experience.

* Headcount reduction - check. * Payroll reduction - check. * Loss of institutional knowledge about how systems actually work - check

Endeavour to listen to this later, but if it's like the blog it'll be quality.

> Attempt no landing there.

And what did folks try and do in the sequel? Attempt to do a s*t-ton of moon landings!! Best commentary on the nature of humanity in any work of fiction since the Bible.

I've always wondered that myself, especially why all the focus and acclaim for the violinists over and above the other musicians. I'm sure it's pretty difficult to play the French horn or the clarinet, so why is it always a bozo with a violin that takes the bow with the conductor?

This may have the answer though - pure musical chauvinism - "The board of the Philadelphia Orchestra allegedly said the winds "weren't busy enough to put on a good show."

It does indeed, if you could squirrel away a few million from nosey prosecutors, do your two years and come out "clean" the other side (assuming it's a federal rap with no possibility of remission for his behavior).

A few, but in my defence I never claim to be all-knowing or otherwise omnipotent.

If we're God's plan, she mustn't have put too much thought into it.

Same here - and I'm always left wondering what manner of trivial/cosmetic cases are taking up these bookings and leaving more urgent medical cases to wait.

> leader in the find long lost relative space/your "roots" space.

Acknowledging Ancestry.com are well ahead of the market here, but I never got their appeal of finding some long-lost second cousins... basically strangers, and saying, "hey, isn't it fascinating that we share some arbitrary level of common genetic makeup". If some randomer reached out via email to me doing this big reveal I'd be "thanks, but into the spam folder with you".

> 1. Are you or others in immediate danger? If so, get out and help others get out.

Wanting to help folks out is great, but if there's one role going in some related company, and there's a few on your team who are going to be out of work, then I don't think there's going to be too many advertising the job posting to others.

Absolutely this - management will do whatever it takes to help management get through whatever problem they currently have, and if that's outright lying to IC's, or stringing them along for a few months they will do that, and not even regret it for an instant.

A really solid engineer I know was working with a failing mobile payments company, got an offer somewhere else and like a fool took it to his manager, who matched the new offer and the guy accepted... for 2 months until the company went bankrupt and he was back at square one looking for a job.

In fairness, anyone trying to convince me of any given fact of authorship could do well by leaving the bright red shirt and braces combo in the wardrobe.

Absolute nonsense, you would use a tablespoon for a criminal purpose if you wanted to.

It's a cultural thing, I know of one Russian guy recently who went for an interview for a principal dev in a FAANG company, and didn't get the role because he was too serious, no smiles, no little ice-breaking smirks, no chortles - but a deadpan response to each interview question. Sometimes, it does matter how you appear to be saying something as well as what you say.

> Muilenberg and McNerney “had personal reasons to emphasize productivity and cost-cutting” because their compensation was tied to share performance. Together they took $209 million in total pay over seven years.

Absolutely stunning - those guys will walk away from this mess with more money than God and American aviation will take a backwards step that may take decades to fix if at all... fuming here.

So what happens with these costs - surely the failed litigant should shoulder some if not all of the costs of defending this defamation claim?

This is nonsense, bordering on tripe.

Where I work, we've got a public-facing chatbot on the product page to, you know, help out possible customers with product information. As part of a chatbot refresh, I got to look at some of the chats, and boy howdy, some of them were just obviously other bots.

So typically, when the product chatbot comes on first and says "Hi, I'm a chatbot here to help you with these products", the average human chatter will give it a terse command, e.g., "More info on XYZ". The bots engages in all the manners suggested in this substack blog, but for the life of me I can't figure out why? What benefits, except merely mildly DDOSing the chat server, will repeating the same prompt a hundred times do? Ditto the nonsense or insulting chats - what are you idiot bot-creators trying to achieve?

My pop's uncle was one of those Atlantic dots, he got off the SS Santore in 1942 after it stuck a mine coming out of Chesapeake Bay, and I remember growing up with his stories of how the merchant marine took greater casualties than any of the armed services.

Pupil size maybe, but those poor unfortunate folks with eyes spaced too closely together unfairly appear to be cognitively challenged. Like my former CEO, looked dumb, folks instinctively underestimated him and he always came out on top in deals.

Yes, but look at it from the other perspective, if they state things clearly they're not puffing themselves up to their fullest extent for academic peers and funding bodies.

In full respect, this guy validated his first point about lack of trust in his opening remark "I am a chemical engineer". If he'd have said something about being an expert marketer I'd have stopped reading there and then.

Bah, they're fighting a losing game, no different from trying to grab water.

For an overtly authoritarian institution it actually surprises me they do the old delete and pretend it never happened approach to basic security.

The guy was right, but as a donor surely someone there could have just instructed the architect not to add them in.

Here on one side of the argument is a rich guy who's giving you millions, and on the other a glorified hired hand who's looking to be expressive or whatever. Money talks, usually, I'm surprised how the architect got away with this one back in the day.

I remember being blown away by something similar on the venerable Commodore Amiga in the early 90s. Can't remember the name of the app, but you'd adjust a few parameters and line by line a terrain may would appear.

> It doesn’t really solve enough of a “real” problem to justify the current cost

Exactly this, for now the minimal use cases for these kinds of high-end VR headsets leave them firmly in the "gimmick" category. I'm pretty sure some mass-market use case will be found for them, maybe even outside of gaming, but the fact that some pretty smart people haven't found this one already is a teensey-tiny bit worrying too.

Meetings without an agenda and a published list of minutes and actions are effectively theft. You're stealing people's time and with that company resources.

However, having said that I've found these kind of "Hi can we chat" meetings are great ways of flagging corporate sociopaths and general losers. They make it their career to schedule as many of these as possible to get out of doing other work.