The line between "tolerates abuse" and "persevered through legitimately hard challenges at work" is quite blurry, and the latter is a good signal on your resume.
Then there's the whole principal-agent problem and whatever is the equivalent of that for "corporation" (or team) as an entity vs. "corporation" (or team) as people at its helm. Outsourcing could look good financially, but be disastrous long-term because of quality and reliability issues; some decision makers benefit from the short-term outcomes, but many care about long-term too - but then, corporation as an entity sees "shit but profitable" as a long-term gain, so its own incentives are structurally misaligned with that of humans that make it. Etc.
What GP says - it's interesting to know specifically which ones, out of "a bunch of other health conditions", can get exacerbated by work stress to the point of killing you. It's interesting to try and gleam, across many such stories, which conditions are likely to get you first. It's interesting then to backtrack this to warning signs. Etc.
> Stress has a direct effect on gut metabolism. There's a reason they call it second brain and whatnot.
That reason is just a recent meme, best I can tell.
> it's interesting to know specifically which ones, out of "a bunch of other health conditions", can get exacerbated by work stress to the point of killing you
Too many variables affect this, including lifestyle, working hours, working conditions, etc. It's easy to control for them at large, but not combat one of them specifically.
For me, it's ulcers, caused by lack of a strict eating schedule and growing acidity levels due to not eating properly. Although in incidentally, during my PE days, what could've killed me was not that, but massive depression from a lack of socialization and not having someone to talk to.
For some folks I knew, it was a lifestyle of smoking and/or poor dietary habits, which led to a heart attack and an early death. For another, it was a heart attack too, caused by drinking too much energy drinks to stay awake. For still another, it was due to taking controlled medication on a slightly higher dose that landed them in the ER.
And then there's the story of that guy behind the "Impossible is Nothing" meme who suffered from massive depression after his video resume was leaked and made viral across Wall Street banks. Ended up dying from a medication overdose, although it's also alleged that it was an intentional suicide.
It's easy to figure out the warning signs early on - they stand out extremely obvious to anyone with a couple of braincells. The point is that most places, especially many Indian companies (although all of my examples were in London and NY), glorify this culture of excessive slaving for some mediocre return.
In general case, won't it eventually hit the liability diffusers, i.e. insurance? Kid gets paid from an accident insurance, building owner will cover their costs from civil liability insurance, and the elevator designers or installers will get shielded by professional liability insurance.
yall nerd spniping the example and missing the point that ofered it.
the elevator example, the poster was giving chatbots the same excuse for mistakes as a person.
imagine if elevators could just make mistakes and damage people, because well, a human would too, never minda that its very much trivial to design elevators with sensors in the correct place once and then they are accident free! this is the ridiculous world ai apologists must rely on...
I'm playing a bit of both sides here. I do think it's interesting that we so automatically feel like the cases are different. I used something old because I think we understand it well and I do think in the elevator case our instincts are pretty justified. The fact that we can add sensors and get near 100% reliability is a big part of why in that case it isn't very reasonable, but ML is statistical. It's not the kind of thing that you fix by adding one more sensor or one more if statement. I think some anti ML people use that to mean it's unworkable, but I'd hate to hold off on replacing drivers for example just because the kind of errors that a robo taxi makes feel more like in theory they would have been avoidable with better training while we just go and forgive drivers for letting their mind wander for a second
Everything is statistical. The explicitly defined systems are understandable and understood, but can also be brittle[0]; they do make it easier to put probabilities on failure scenarios, but those probabilities are never 0. ML systems are more like real people. They're unpredictable and prone to failures, fixing any one of which often creating a problem elsewhere - but with enough fixing, you can push the probability of failure down to a number low enough that you no longer care.
Compare: probabilistic methods of primality checking (which is where I first understood this idea). Theoretically, they can give you the wrong result sometimes; in practice, they're constructed in such a way that you can push the probability of error to arbitrarily low levels.
See also: random UUIDs, hashing algorithms - all are prone to collisions, but have knobs you can turn to push the probability of collision to somewhere around "not before heat death of the universe" or thereabouts.
This is the kind of approach we'll need with ML methods: accepting they can be randomly wrong, but developing them in ways that allow us to control the probability of error.
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[0] - In theory, you can ensure your operating envelope is large enough to cover pretty much anything that could reasonably go wrong; in practice, having a clear-cut operating envelope also creates a pressure to shrink it to save money (it can be a lot of money), which involves eroding what "reasonably" means.
Except Dropbox always kept their users tied to their platform, which allowed them to gradually enshittify their offering, starting with removal of directly addressable content in "Public" folder, and continuing through various changes and side products that all had very little to do with "a folder that syncs". Mistral can't successfully enshittify if they can't keep users captive.
> Pharmacies can only give out what people are prescribed, the only things they can push are OTC products. They can't get and sell scheduled drugs without being explicitly tracked.
I think they can - specifically, the pharmacies that mix drugs locally can mix and sell a drug that's declared in shortage. IIRC Ozempic was in that situation recently.
You mean compounding? They are allowed to dilute to create a specific strength or combine constituents, but they can't actually create stuff from scratch on site any more than you or I can. That would be a laboratory. It's not like you can just buy semaglutide or the derivatives anywhere. It would have to come from the pharmaceutical company.
I looked it up, and I believe what you've heard about ended up just being people offering fake Ozempic.
You're right, I was thinking about compounding pharmacies.
> It's not like you can just buy semaglutide or the derivatives anywhere. It would have to come from the pharmaceutical company.
Pharmaceutical companies don't make those on their own either, they're contracting it off to drug manufacturing plants. The thing I read the other day said that compounding pharmacies order the same stuff from the same factories directly.
I know people who are slim and have roughly similar sentiment about the drug.
Then again I also know people who'd happily deny stimulant medication to people with ADHD, because "it's not fair".
Crabs in a bucket, I'd say. It doesn't help that in general, our culture still operates on the assumption that being fat is one's own fault and entirely under control of an average person, except for "legitimate medical excuses" like type 1 diabetes, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. We've made progress on getting rid of such notions in case of depression, autism and ADHD, so maybe we'll do that with obesity too, in some distant future. Until then, people on Ozempic will hear plenty of "that's not fair", and "if you were a better person, you wouldn't need this".
EDIT: Maybe we'll get obesity to be seen more like smoking: something that's easy to walk into, but beyond average person's ability to walk out of without help.
>> I know people who are slim and have roughly similar sentiment about the drug.
It reveals that for some trim people, their underlying feelings all along have been a sense of personal value and positivity around the fact that they are trim and others fat.
They feel unhappy that other might be admitted to the trim club.
My attitude has nothing to do with your consumption. I have a negative opinion of the drug. I don't have a negative opinion of people who feel desperate enough to use it.
I mean, turn your thinking around, why is being thin so important to them that they would take a very powerful class of drug just to achieve it? Why then would they waste a minute of their time afterwards being worried about external opinions of how they achieved it?
What's actually important here? Their health and appearance or the opinions of their peers? Are they altering their appearance solely for the opinion of their peers?
> and "if you were a better person, you wouldn't need this".
I think you've accidentally encoded that precise understanding here.
Is this really standard management advice? Half-way through the PDF I already felt like I'm reading some insane drivel of a sweatshop boss / wannabe cult leader. Whatever illusion I had that Mr Beast videos are worth watching, I lost it entirely, having learned that they're just a factory product with Mr Beast brand on it, a corporation pretending to be a person, optimized to waste people time[0], and made by people bullied into extremely unhealthy and antisocial behaviors.
Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?
This source is pure gold: techniques to manipulate people into consuming your product - which they otherwise wouldn't be. All so you can make money on poisoning their minds (advertising, which is how you convert views to money). You can easily imagine this came out from a drug cartel boss, I'd expect the best and most ruthless one to operate just like that, with same level of cultishness.
And if that's who Mr Beast is, and that's how he thinks of other people - because believe it or not, viewers are other people too, not some cattle to be milked and slaughtered - then I'm glad I don't watch his videos. Not going to, and I'm happy to pass this document around to dissuade others from viewing his channel.
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[0] - I mean, that's kind of obvious in anything social media, but rarely do you get it spelled out without any qualms.
> Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial.
See I didn’t read it that way at all. I read that as a statement of a concept I’ve always heard about when coordinating between groups. Effectively “pick a person in the other group to be your liaison and your counterpart and coordinate directly, don’t just throw stuff over the wall and hope someone picks it up”. It’s the same basic psychological concept as “in an emergency situation pick one person in the crowd, point them out and tell them personally to go call 911”. Diffusion of responsibility means people will delay or stuff will get dropped. To make things happen you have to make sure things are assigned. Surely this isn’t particularly surprising or controversial right? It’s why large teams often appoint “interrupt” workers who are appointed to specifically answer out of band requests coming in. It’s why you have an on call rotation instead of just paging the entire company if something goes down. It’s why agile appoints a “scrum master” whose singular mission is to clear up blocking issues for the team. It’s why if you don’t assign people to work on maintenance, maintenance won’t get done.
I read that part of the document as saying “if you’re in charge of producing a video due in 45 days, don’t just send a general request for someone to make a script to the writing department, pick a person and get on the same page about what needs to be done and when”
> Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?
I think you're misunderstanding that part. The goal isn't to accuse the coworker. The goal is to explain to the coworker that what they need to do for the project is important to the point where any delays is going to cause a delay for the entire project. This isn't intended to be a negative statement; many projects do rely heavily on certain members getting things in by a particular timeline, and if that isn't communicated and followed up on, projects will fail. The dudebro speech in the document lacks tact, but the underlying principal is sound. The excerpt:
> DO NOT just go to them and say “I need creative, let me know when it’s done” and “I need a thumbnail, let me know when it’s done”. This is what most people do and it’s one of the reasons why we fail so much. I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” Now this person who also has tons of shit going on is aware of how important this discussion is and you guys can prio it accordingly. Now let’s say Tyler and you agree it will be done in 5 days. YOU DON’T GET TO SET A REMINDER FOR 5 DAYS AND NOT TALK TO HIM FOR 5 DAYS! Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date. I want less excuses in this company. Take ownership and don’t give your project a chance to fail. Dumping your bottleneck on someone and then just walking away until it’s done is lazy and it gives room for error and I want you to have a mindset that God himself couldn’t stop you from making this video on time. Check. In. Daily. Leave. No. Room. For. Error.
What else can they do? Check out from life? Or bankrupt themselves on principle?
Honestly, fuck on-line platforms and their arbitrary bans. In meatspace, you can't be just banned from a store, or a store chain, not without a criminal record at least. Sure, user accounts are governed by vendors' ToS, and any store can ban you from their loyalty card program for any reason, but off-line, those are all incidentals not required for completing a purchase. On-line, identity, security, and optional marketing crap got bundled together into a single "account". It's a historical accident that needs to get corrected, possibly by regulatory means, to harmonize it with the general expectation that the store can't refuse you service for extra-legal reasons.
I'd get this sentiment if it was some super critical piece of living a fulfilling life, but amazon is a junk store which makes the whole situation absurd to begin with
There are only so many places you can order stuff on-line locally, to save on non-food products more expensive or downright unavailable locally. Interfacing with individual vendor and their bespoke system for each purchase gets cognitively exhausting quickly - a major reason why people prefer those large marketplaces. And then, it's not just Amazon. Adopting such policies is becoming a trend parallel to centralization. Amazon alone may not be "super critical piece of living a fulfilling life", but getting banned by it and a few more large companies (Google, in particular), and you may lose some critical things (at least critical in immediate term).
A single one, no. Two dozen different ones - I can do it, but it gets so annoying that I'll happily pay premium to buy the same things on a single site.
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