People also tan before going on sunny vacations to get a “base” and prevent extreme burns. See: flights back to the Midwest from Miami after Spring Break.
This was an amazing presentation! In one of the earliest screens, it is demonstrated that there are more or less 8 different shades of gray from just different patterns of black/white pixel arrangement. Is it possible to use the “blow up” view to classify the different shades of gray in an image to determine what the pattern should be for a given pixel grouping should be? Maybe this would be accomplishing the same thing the threshold filter accomplishes and have the same end result or possibly a different dithering method. Just trying to integrate this into my brain.
I’m an American living in the US. Worked at a startup acquired by a very large enterprise and I very much appreciate your attitude over the parent’s comments. I find it incredibly demoralizing that so many people feel the way they do and appreciate those who work for more than a paycheck. I quit my job (thankfully I was in a position that I was able to) because of this attitude being so prevalent.
You want to provide value to your customers and anything getting in the way of that should be a frustration, not something we just accept. Stagnation will lead to decline that is very difficult to reverse. I don’t know what you do, but thank you for your perspective and disposition and for admonishing the above attitude.
I do not disregard it, but I have no idea what to do about it and it gives me an existential concern about the future of the world with which I am familiar (America? The West?). I don’t think it is a healthy society if the people responsible for systems (critical, luxury, or otherwise) do not care about succession or improvement of the systems they build or maintain. Best case scenario, the problem the systems solve fail and someone else sees value in solving the problem, so they solve it again and re-discover the “why”. My guess is that the longer it takes for the failures to happen, the longer it will take to re-learn the “why”.
I don’t like that people just work for a paycheck. I understand why and it’s very hard to argue against people doing it and not caring when their managers or the companies they work for don’t care about them in return. The Cambrian Explosion of solved problems will lead to an deluge of catastrophes when a large percentage of those systems fail unless people take care to transmit the “why” to the future stewards of these systems.
That's a great point. I can be less diligant in my documentation than i'd like to be at times. This means somethimes the "why" of something isnt discussed. I need to stop doing that and find a way to add all the "whys" without overwhelming readers who just want answers. Maybe footnotes or appendicies.
While I appreciate the effort and strive to do so myself, I’m not sure this is entirely a matter of you trying harder/doing better. You can often explain the context well enough to a degree that is practical enough to solve the narrow case, but communication is lossy by nature, so descriptions of systems become impoverished. It is so hard not to make bad assumptions about the reader, especially if you look forward even 1 or 2 generations from now. It seems this is a large part of the role of the US Supreme Court and I’m certain that is not perfect even with days of deliberation. For technically enforced systems with faster feedback loops, higher volumes, and lower tolerances, there are necessarily more errors.
Stepping down vs mass layoffs reduces headcount by 1/20th, so the only other solution is to continue floundering until everybody loses their job. These people complaining about layoffs would prefer the whole plant to rot versus pruning a few wilting stems.
Agreed on the pay cut - even if temporary - and aligning incentives. Resignation frees them from a chance to correct their missteps. Just making a guess here, but I would think that, in general, good people who actually hold themselves accountable for screwing up understand the situation better than a replacement. Unless there is a pattern, it is probably in the org’s best interest to give that manager a shot at redemption, especially considering the glut of incompetent managers, the learning curve for competent managers, and the likelihood that a replacement would do a better job.
If an engineer screws up hugely, do you want get rid of them immediately and find a replacement, or evaluate whether or not they learned a very important and expensive lesson that may happen again with a replacement?
The em dash usage conundrum is likely temporary. If I were you, I’d continue using them however you previously used them and someday soon, you’ll be ignored the same way everybody else is once AI mimics innumerable punctuation and grammatical patterns.
If they wanted to watermark (I always felt it is irresponsible not to, if someone wants to circumvent it that's on them) - they could use strategically placed whitespace characters like zero-width spaces, maybe spelling something out in Morse code the way genius.com did to catch google crawling lyric (I believe in that case it was left and right handed aposterofes)
Just replace them with a single "-" or a double "--". That's what many people do in casual writing, even if there are prescriptive theories of grammar that call this incorrect.
I suspect it's a spandrel of some other feature of their training. Presumably em dashes occur disproportionately often in high-quality human-written text, so training LLMs to imitate high-quality human-written text instead of random IRC logs and 4chan trolls results in them also imitating high-quality typography.
Because people don’t respect that which they feel they have no connections to or shared community with. The Kumbaya of multiculturalism only goes so far. Assimilation is a requirement, not just a nice thing.
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