tilne

Why would it?

I agree somewhat at the collective level. I don’t think that applies as much at the individual level though.

Do you believe our species is capable of that in the collective sense? Isn’t “might makes right” basically the law for all animals? And if you agree with that, doesn’t it follow that to “rise morally above” that would require somehow transcending the limitations imposed by our biological reality?

If you do find someone I’d love to hear more as well.

I agree with you. I think OP’s point becomes more valid if you limit the discussion to tools used while developing/maintaining software, as opposed to tools used by a wider audience.

I don’t fully believe that either, but I see where the point would come from.

> Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce?

This is what I see motivating non-technical people to learn about agents. There’s lots of jobs that are essentially reading/memorizing complicated instructions and entering data accordingly.

No they’ve got a little place on the Nile

So should we as “real humans” also set up our own lobbying channels in Washington? Or are there some problems that make that somewhat unfeasible for us “real humans”?

It is absolutely a self-help book.

When did I say it didn’t go way beyond business communication? That’s largely my point: this is a basic human skill in the modern world that I would think existing for 20-30 years would give you plenty of experience in navigating stories told by others as well as using your own narratives to steer outcomes.

Sure but that’s a matter of testing assumptions and updating them per new info.

This sounds like snark but it’s not intended to be: do you really need sources to learn narrative control? Perceiving how narratives work seems to be a skill that almost all humans are very good at naturally. I acknowledge that shaping narratives is a different skill set (especially the parts that require putting yourself in a position to shape narratives effectively), but in my opinion if you’re already asking the question you already have all the foundational knowledge and awareness you need to start exercising those muscles as well.

Thank you for this. I didn’t know curlconverter existed.

It’s a public-facing IT system owned by some government agency in the United States. “Sometimes” is an understatement. (Though maybe this is a failure on my part to update my priors. I’ve noticed that recently some of the systems that led me to form this opinion in the past have become very functional, if not exactly pleasant to use.)

It does sound like sour grapes but I also don’t think you need data to believe this.

What should come to mind when communism comes up then?

But who will explain to the young people that perhaps it is their Dad that is maladjusted or even insane? That their Dad is operating under a very silly pretense that children will be just as able and willing to politely accept social queues from adults? Or that verbal interactions with children, while not technically forced, are pretty strongly incentivized to go one particular way due to an implicit social contract? No one explains that to them in my experience. Because of that, some of those kids even grow up to write pompous, self-absorbed comments that show their lack of understanding of these dynamics, like yours, on this website.

I very much agree. I would consider myself to be more asocial than average, though certainly not aggressively so. The types of sentiments expressed in this article are usually written by very social people who see conversation as some inherent good. I think you are in the minority of such social butterflies in terms of checking that assumption.

For an example, take this quote:

> But that is not the whole story. In mid-life and beyond people can still experience the joy of a random meeting, however short, which somehow touches a nerve.

What exactly is the joy? Is that joy not something I can obtain more easily via the “traditional” social channels I’ve cultivated over the course of my life thus far? And won’t a social interaction in one of those channels have a much greater chance of lasting positive impact given that person is more likely to be someone I interact with regularly, enabling me to build off that initial interaction over time?

Moreover, what’s the downside of the encounter? I suspect a lot of asocial people like myself strongly dislike the much more common awkwardness and self-doubt that accompany a social interaction that goes poorly. Is enduring a lot of that really worth the few instances where you feel a fleeting sense of connection?

Putting effort into that social interaction also means I will have less energy to put into other pursuits that mean more to me: my marriage, playing piano, reading, career goals, riding my bike, existing friendships, etc.

I don’t disagree with the article necessarily, but I do think it’s mostly an “ode to random social encounters” more than a serious attempt to make a case for why people not predisposed to doing so should try to have more random social encounters.

The questions you ask in your last two sentences really get at the interesting stuff. But of course they are too nuanced and complex to answer in any comprehensive, generalized way within an easily digestible length.

Absolutely agreed with the second point. I’m not sure I agree with the first though. At least not that that’s the main reason telemetry is desired from product teams. (Though obviously telemetry does provide fodder for that type of stupidity for sure.)

To give a concrete example from my past experience, I used to work on a product that essentially knitted a bunch of services from a major cloud provider together to provide a user experience comparable to traditional HPC clusters. We never included telemetry, but we always wanted to in order to gain insight into how many compute queues people were using, how many VMs were in each of them, how many jobs were run over a certain amount of time, how many VMs those jobs ran across, etc. The sole reason we wanted this information was because the configuration exposed for this product was extremely complex, and we wanted to put layers on top of it to more easily enable the most common use cases.

Is this not a legitimate reason to collect telemetry? Is the concern that, even though the dev team wanted the data for legitimate purposes, eventually bad actors will use the capability to start collecting data for more nefarious purposes?

Edit: I see you amended the original to include a statement about opt-in opinions. What do you mean by that?

That’s fair. If the telemetry really is helpful to building a better product it should be an easy case to make to users.

I don’t mean to dismiss the importance of users owning and controlling their data, but isn’t telemetry a valid tool for software projects to gain valuable insights into how their product is being used and thus how to improve it? Yes, it can be (and, probably frequently is) abused. Yes there should be a way to opt-out of telemetry if a user desires for whatever reason. But I can’t help but feel this is posted in the spirit of “telemetry by default is bad” and I don’t really agree.

Full disclosure: this is the first I’ve ever heard of Storybook, so if there’s something particularly gross about telemetry for this use case I’m not aware of it.

Why? I think chat is a terrible way to organize this information. I don’t understand why people so readily accept working in that medium. It is all for the sake of people who don’t care enough to find the proper channels, or worse yet set them up in the first place. Even for small side projects, GitHub issues is just so so so much better than an unorganized chat history. There is no reason besides laziness to not impose at least a minimal structure on your forum/support channels.

Unless you wanted to pursue a career related to the physical sciences, what is the benefit of taking labs? I ask this as someone that took a large number of physics and especially chemistry labs before ultimately switching to computer science. The labs to me were more about how to game the grading process than they were about actual learning. And certainly I wouldn’t say I took anything from those mentally that I didn’t get out of, say, theoretical organic chemistry synthesis problems.

How many people would you need for such an elaborate, multi-step heist? Especially wondering because, given your reputation, I’m assuming you would need a to be more of a puppet master than an active participant.

Just curious: what are you looking for? I tend to assume that staff-level ICs have a pretty good setup as far as established expertise and freedom to choose what they work on (though that varies a lot). What tangible benefits other than higher pay are you looking for with that next step?

Not saying the financial benefits aren’t worth it by themselves. Asking because I always figured I’d probably top out where you’re at, and I’m wondering what the view is like there.

But you can’t have the technical foundation later because you’ve already built on something else.

What are the unique, useful features you’re thinking of from safari?

(This sounds like a sarcastic, leading question, but it’s genuine. I don’t know this space well at all.)

Aren’t you in all of those?

The further you keep the user away from training and hosting, the less you’re in those businesses. But I would think it’s only economical to do that if you have some type of advantage in implementing the things you’re abstracting away.

> how do I arrange the shop so that I am able to trade this model

Any chance you could explain this a bit more? Intuitively it makes sense that this would be as important if not more so than the modeling itself, but I have no context for the difficulties encountered when implementing it.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but I disagree that Robins is to blame. If the system enables this kind of behavior, there will always be someone willing to take advantage. If not Robins, then the next shameless profiteer.