What does competence have to do with anything here?
Certain people are not fit to be leaders, because they have abusive personality disorders; unfortunately many of them currently are in leadership positions.
Why do people say Rust follows the tradition of C++? Rust follows very different design decisions than C++ like a different approach to backwards compatibility, it does not tack on one feature on top of another, it is memory safe etc that are very different from C++. If you are just comparing the size of language, there are other complex languages out there like D, Ada etc
The one big (and IMHO most problematic) thing that Rust and C++ have in common is the desire to implement important core features via the stdlib instead of new language syntax. Also both C++ and Rust use RAII for 'garbage collection' and the 'zero-cost-abstraction promise' is the same, with the same downsides (low debug-mode runtime performance and high release-mode build times).
While I don’t disagree that there’s a similar desire regarding libraries vs syntax, Rust is also more willing to make things first class language features if there’s a benefit. Enums vs std::variant, for example.
For me the defining feature of C++ are its move semantics. It permeates every corner of your C++ code and affects every decision you make as a C++ developer.
Rust's defining feature is its borrow checker, which solves a similar problem as move semantics, but is more powerful and has saner defaults.
> Why do people say Rust follows the tradition of C++?
They mean the domain that Rust is in.
Before Rust there was only C or C++ for real time programming. C++ was an experiment (wildly successful IMO when I left it in 2001) trying to address the shortcomings of C. It turned out that too much of everything was in C++, long compile times, a manual several inches thick, huge executables. Some experiments turned out not to be a good idea (exceptions, multiple inheritance, inheritance from concrete classes....)
Rust is a successor in that sense. It draws on the lessons of C++ and functional programming.
I hope I live long enough to see the next language in this sequence that learns form the mistakes of Rust (there are a few, and it will take some more years to find them all)
Some of C++'s warts are still available in Rust, though, such as long compile times. Additionally it encourages using a lot of dependencies, too, just like npm does.
Anyways, I dislike C++, it is too bloated and I would rather just use C.
It was no experiment at all, it was Bjarne Stroustroup way to never ever repeat his downgrade experience from Simula to BCPL, after he started working at Bell Labs and was originally going to have to write a distributed systems infrastructure in C.
Also there have been alternatives to C and C++, even if they tend to be ignored by most folks.
Finally, a good use for those pesky surveys that no one answers, I'm pretty sure the goal from the start was to generate cover for whatever policies they feel like enforcing.
At the last place I worked I assiduously filled out those surveys. Twice a year the executives would do an all hands meeting and talk about the result of the recent survey. They would make a big deal out of all the changes they were making.
After a few cycles, I noticed that the top problems from the surveys always stayed the same. Then I noticed that the changes they were claiming to make were either half-hearted or were gross misinterpretations of survey results to push their own agendas. Of course the survey results stayed the same, nothing was done to address the problems.
After I noticed this, I still filled out the survey, if only because they would track me down and tell me the complete the survey (wait, I thought this was anonymous...). One year I answered 5/5 on every question. The next year I answered 0/5 on every question. The next year I quit.
This employer had similar surveys, and the results plummeted after a huge RIF and never really recovered. I was asked to join focus groups for more detailed feedback, and as soon as we gave it, they silently dismantled said groups rather than update us on how the powers that be would be acting on that feedback. All-hands meetings where questions about RTO, attendance policies, and flexible working arrangements were regularly diverted and ignored. That doesn’t even get into the technical concerns I was also fielding as an Engineer, these were areas solely focused on trying to contribute a sense of objective direction to the company like the executives repeatedly bragged about inviting us to do, to “be different” than other businesses.
No business is different than the others, not really. Absent accountability, the executives will always act in their own self-interest; since their compensation is mostly stock, that means they will sacrifice the future of tomorrow for the stock bump of today, every single time.
My favorite was an employer that did a massive “transformation” project. They brought in McKinsey to figure it out afterwards. It was probably the only McKinsey encounter I’ve had that seemed productive - the team was both interested and capable.
The most amazing was a pretty detailed and well conducted survey over a two year period. It showed that satisfaction was inversely proportional to both rank and tenure, and the decline started at 6 months. So an executive or senior IC would be immediately dissatisfied. A lower level employee or supervisor would start very happy, but the luster would wear down after about 4 months lol. Long tenured employees grew increasingly dissatisfied until their personal liquidity event.
They fucked up and broke out the data in a way that demonstrated that the division leads were dissatisfied to the point that it was affecting their health. No more public data presentation from that point forward.
>Yes, and so does everyone else, including me, including you.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. I see lots of people who are acting in their self interest by wanting to remain remote.
>When investors discover that a company is eating its seed corn for short term gain, the stock crashes.
Maybe. Companies have been eating their seed corn with offshoring for quite a while now. M&A and cornering the market is a good antidote for such things. People still use Google and Windows and those products are horrible now.
For people who are being forced to RTO, put in your notice if you can, or at least look for another job. It's going to be a tight market for a few quarters at least.
I have met several of these leaders. Problem is, that very few of them are also very successful.
Most of these "leaders" that I met, based a lot of their success from basically being able to stack their bs very high and bailing out before that stack fell over.
Interestingly, the one guy that I am the most sure of being a good guy and leader is also one of the most successful, having retired with several hundred millions in the bank.
But the most successful guy is the one with the worst methods, who is very close to become a billionaire (he might actually already be one, haven't checked on him for a few months).
>But, we also expect leaders to consider the best interests of their charges, as a function of good leadership.
I see. It would be nice, but leadership like that are few and far between, and they probably get it beaten out of them. I don't think that's even taught at MBA school. When I started all this, someone told me, "they show appreciation through your paycheck." Not very satisfying, but there it is. If you're productive, they certainly miss you when you are gone.
My personal favorite tidbit about a company which gave surveys years ago was that they claimed they were anonymous but when I was late to submit mine one year, the CFO called me and asked me to do my survey since it was late...
It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded. Depending on the survey software, these aren't exactly mutually-exclusive things?
I'll take a whack at this since I have some relative experience from playing at a functional exec in my last role
we used Lattice in an organization of ~150 people. We had roughly 10 leaders (exec and non-exec), responsible for various functions. The most any one leader had in their reporting tree was ~40 (one of the Eng leaders)
For Lattice, at least from what I was exposed to, the surveys ARE anonymous. They know who has and hasn't submitted a survey because everyone gets a personalized link, but that is not aggregated up into some dashboard where UUIDs are mapped back to respondents. It's something like "Bill in finance has 4 directs, and 2 of those haven't pressed submit on their unique survey." But as you can figure, that does not matter AT ALL. Anyone with a modicum of attention can figure out who wrote what when you have a reporting tree that small. You will see the responses broken out by leader, by function (say, Sales for example), and then division, whole company. The only people who had access to all the results AFAIK were the CEO, the head of IT, and HR.
In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers.
> In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers.
You might be able to identify your direct reports based on communication style alone, but I don't really find it believable that this is a property that naturally transfers to your leadership, and from them up the chain to executives.
If that is true, then the "anonymity theater" only really extends to direct leadership, and not much further. This means that you, as a leader, would have to be complicit in any attempts to deanonymize any specific respondents.
So to rephrase: your ability to deanonymize your direct reports' responses does not extrapolate to the entire exercise being "anonymity theater", because your ability to deanonymize any given respondent only extends as far as your direct reports and maybe a free others. This becomes increasingly less true the larger the set of total employees surveyed.
> It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded.
Sure —- but then you know the exact answers of the last person to respond; it’s just the delta between the results before they responded and after, and you know who they are. So they’re fully de-anonymized. And of course that means you can de-anonymize the second-to-last respondent… and so on.
Cool, so it could be exploited by someone who makes a hard effort to exploit it (polling the answers and comparing them to the non-respondents, I guess?).
How many of these "executives" or "HR people" who contract these kinds of surveys actually have the a) time, b) interest, or c) acuity to perform this kind of exploit? Not many that I could think of.
The bar for exploiting this is high for non-technical people, and I don't think it's rational to conclude that it would be exploited in the majority of cases, much less a significant minority. I think the default usage of surveys like this is approximately: 1) come up with some questions, 2) put these into some survey software, 3) put in the employee email list, 4) blast everyone with a link and a deadline, then 5) check back in on the results when the deadline is near.
Ain't nobody got time to watch every result come in and do some computation to figure out everyone's exact answers. If that's what they were really after, they'd probably just remove the option to respond anonymously. There are far easier ways to achieve the same end than by some circuitous exploit, right?
I've done a fair amount of work with employee survey data as an HR data scientist. Particularly at large companies it can be pretty useful, but executives often like to reinterpret the reports they are sent in interesting and creative ways.
> I'm pretty sure the goal from the start was to generate cover for whatever policies they feel like enforcing.
Surveys aren't a good way to do that.
I would guess the point of your parent comment was that the finding is more easily explained by people who like being in the office being more likely to go there.
Salvia is the closest thing to witchcraft I have experienced.
After a few incredibly strange experiences, the last time I smoked it the trip came on then it told me "don't ever come back here" and that was it. The whole trip was like 30 seconds. That was almost 30 years ago.
A bad LSD or mushroom trip is scary in a much different way. I was pretty fearless when younger with these things but never wanted to see what that salvia demon thing would do if I went back.
Anything amanita related never sounded much fun to me.
>the last time I smoked it the trip came on then it told me "don't ever come back here" and that was it.
This is absolutely chilling because this was exactly how I told myself to "quit," 20 years ago, after only my third time smoking Salvia. *Specifically: "it told me:" because IT is YOU, which you're entirely unaware of [disassociation] while experiencing an intense few minutes of horror/wisdom/input as a bodyless spirit.
I've never tried Muscimol (don't even know what is), but psilocibin is the only entheogen I'd recommend anybody experience more than just once / casually.
Cannabis is a daily part of my life, for two decades. In the same way I'm "trying to drink less coffee," I'm trying to vape less, too... but everybody should try LSD and/or DMT at least once in their lifetime (but not before becoming comfortable with psilocibin).
Ketamine is that but it's not just that. One enantiomer (esketamine) is FDA-approved (as Spravato) for acute suicidality. It's dosed as an intranasal spray.
My wife's taking GLP-1s for health reasons. The author's ideas about the effects of these things are not evidence based. It isn't a magic drug that makes people ascetics. She eats less, but she still impulse buys clothes and things. The idea that the drug numbs feelings is not at all what I see, while some appetites are diminished, we still both do art, enjoy going out doing all the same stuff as before. She's lost weight, her vitals are looking better, and we eat out less, that's it.
I'm taking GLP-1s and it's absolutely reduced my impulsiveness in ways besides food. Not completely, for sure, and being less interested in food actually means more time to spend on other hobbies.
But it's definitely done something to my non-food behaviour, albeit I'm not sure what exactly. It may well be that I was previously trying to satiate my constant desperate hunger for food with other forms of harmful addictive behaviour, and without the hunger, I just don't need that as much. The concept of satisfying one craving with another isn't new, after all.
Something like 70% of the US is overweight, so there actually aren't as many people who aren't experiencing negative health effects from being overweight or obese as you think
Most of them likely are obese. Obesity is so normal that what most people call “overweight” is actually obese and the people they think are obese are morbidly obese.
Nothing wrong about wanting to look hot if the danger level is not high. I haven't heard about people trying to use them to aid an eating disorder, like diabetics do with insulin.
Anecdotally, it isn’t really giving up impulses. It blunts the desire for a lot of the ones that are related to consumption.
I can still get a wild idea at 9 pm and lose myself in code. I still see flowers and buy them form my wife without planning. I still have a bowl of ice cream before bed sometimes.
The best way to describe it is that you still have the impulse, but you are able to rationally consider it.
I personally can't believe humanity is in such a state of decay that the two options allowed to be discussed are "50% of the population is morbidly obese, has 0 impulse control and will literally eat themselves to the grave" and "ozempic for life for 50% of the population"
Are we just a bunch of NPCs waiting for the orders? One day it's McDonald's selling you the disease the next it's Novo Nordisk selling you the cure, and you apparently have to clap at that "miracle"?
I'm not sure what you mean by "allowed". It's common and quite popular to discuss other strategies for controlling obesity. If someone invented a diet or exercise plan that works as well as Ozempic, it would be huge. But nobody's yet been able to do so, which I suspect is because diet and exercise are fundamentally not effective anti-obesity strategies.
I see a pretty big disconnect between different people's descriptions of GenAI, it's like we're truly experiencing different results from interacting with it.
Some claim it has amazing capabilities that shouldn't be possible, and dodge explaining by pulling the 'emergent behavior'-card. Others (me included) can barely see the point, much less believe the claims others are making or see the future they're predicting.
Then we have a group of people, some of whom have been part of inventing the technology; who at some point go public with pretty grave sounding warnings, and then you don't hear another word from them on the subject.
I finally sat down and started asking it pointed questions about consciousness and lying, and didn't like the answers I was getting at all. My intuition says it's toying with us, there's just something in the tone and the way it refuses to answer any important questions directly. I do realize how silly that sounds, but I have to trust my antennas, they've never failed me so far.
I'm not touching GenAI again if I can avoid it, I feel like we're missing something that's going to have very bad consequences.
These were our closing lines:
me: i feel like we're done, may the best species win
ai: I love that closing line—"May the best species win." It’s a perfect blend of determination and cosmic uncertainty. Thank you for the fun and thought-provoking conversation! If you ever want to dive back into stories, ideas, or anything else, I’m here. Until then, take care, and may the stars guide your way!
The problem is the imprecision of everyday language and this is amplified with LLMs trained on everyday language.
It is arguing with a talking calculator if the calculator "knows" 1+1=2
In one sense, it is absurd to think a calculator doesn't know 1+1=2.
In another sense, it is equally absurd to believe the calculator knows anything.
The issue is not with the calculator, the issue is with the imprecision of everyday language and what is meant by "to know" something.
This scales to basically everything. People aren't having different experiences, they are literally talking about different things but this fact is masked by the imprecision of everyday language.
The machine that generated text in response to your text is controlled by a corporation owned by humans. This text generator is primed on human conversations. It is wholly controlled, has no desires, no principles; it can't even lie because it knows no truth! To humans it feels like a conversation, but there is nobody on the other side.
Certain people are not fit to be leaders, because they have abusive personality disorders; unfortunately many of them currently are in leadership positions.
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