It should be possible for some recipients to donate plasma after they recover. So if pfas levels are a real concern, there’s an easy solution for at least some of the recipients.
I can only imagine how upsetting this must be for you and your family. I just hope that after you’ve had some time to process, that your son finds a way forward that brings him closer to the future he wants for himself. Just a bit of unsolicited advice from an internet stranger, but describing the situation as a “complete disaster for his future”, even if not expressed directly to your son, runs the risk of becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. Transfers, grad school, good job placements/pivots, a gap year, are all options.
Thanks for the thoughtful suggestions. We're mainly pissed and disgusted. Appreciate your comment though. He's an optimistic person by nature so he's already moved on.
I don’t know, we’ve had staged content presented as reality for a long time(ie almost all “reality” tv) and we seem to be doing ok. The TikTok content you’re describing doesn’t feel terribly different from that.
I've always felt a connection to this story in my professional life. I've been in enough rooms full of "ideas people" who will spend an entire meeting talking about tools that should exist or processes that need to be changed, if only "someone" would implement it. It's about work that everyone agrees someone else should do. Everyone wants the cat belled, no one wants to do the belling.
... I've sort of had a different experience. I've been in roomfuls of "ideas people" and I've been in roomfuls of "execution people" and in roomfuls of "tell me what to do people."
None are effective in isolation. If your CEO / tech lead is an idea people, your COO / project manager an "execution people," and the team "tell me what to do people" things work pretty amazingly.
I think the problem is that people like to hire people like themselves, so a balance is hard to find. Each group is self-perpetuating.
I'll mention: I stated my career in roomfuls of idea people, and was deeply surprised the first time I ran into a "tell me what to do" person. That person worked hard, and was possibly the best software engineer I've worked with, but:
(1) Deeply didn't care about much beyond coding.
(2) Valued having people around him who can structure his work so it has meaningful impact.
Personally, I really benefit from having a watchful project manager to keep me on track. Once I gave up on doing that myself, my productivity skyrocketed. I tend to empower project managers (and admins and similar roles) to boss me around much more than the job description entails.
This comment actually suggests a useful question to ask when you find yourself in a situation where a group has decided on something but nobody is acting. Is the task to do:
a) Impossible, like for a mouse to put a bell around a cats neck, or
b) Possible but just not something people want to do.
In scenario (a) you need to move on from the idea, or fundamentally change it. In scenario (b) you can deploy organizational tools to get someone to do it (provide an incentive, force someone, draw straws, share the work etc).
reminds me of High Output Management by Andy Grove: (paraphrasing from memory) if someone isn't doing their job they are either not capable or not motivated
And the problem is most of these "ideas" people have no skin in the game. Their own bonus or career doesnt depend on the idea, which is why they are so excited about pushing it onto others
Outside of gaslighting's original context in a relationship, I often see it used to refer to a form of strawman argument. I read the gaslighting comment as saying that the person knows that virtualization in the form before Kubernetes was not sufficient, but tries to make people who express that thought feel like they're wrong at a fundamental level. So the implication is that the author knowingly constructs a strawman argument and then tries to make it sound like anyone who recognizes it for what it is, is "crazy".
I think the RPA is way overhyped, especially the "ML" features of the big players. But from what I've seen, it does have it's place in the enterprise.
There are two primary types of RPA, attended and unattended. Unattended automations make for good candidates for replacement with systems that have proper API's. The issue I've seen is that most of the underlying back office systems have a weird division of business logic between the view layer, the server and the database such that no one wants to risk trying to detangle the systems. In theory RPA can act as a bridging technology that lets you first create something closer to a proper API. Then if new apps built on top of those API's provide value, it becomes easier to justify a re-write of the underlying systems. So it kind of helps build the political will in larger organizations by making the value of the future state of sunsetting the legacy systems more real to those outside of the tech org.
Attended automations, when done right, function as a window orchestration tool for multivendor workflows where the end user needs to be in the loop, maybe for compliance reasons, or because they need to use some professional judgement like underwriters. Even when platforms have solid API's, they rarely have deep linking with enough sophistication to take the user to the proper screen for a multi-application flow. In a perfect world you'd map out relevant workflows, and write some simple glue apps that are built on top of multiple APIs, which is what Power apps is kind of trying to do. The reality is that SME's can be really attached to certain systems and ways of doing things, that the cost of retraining on a new flow is often not politically viable. So it becomes easier to augment the workflows, pulling up SharePoint docs when certain conditions are met, partially filling out forms in some webapps, etc... than search for a global maximum.
I guess in short, I think there are pragmatic ways to use RPA without resigning yourself to never doing the necessary work of rearchitecting the systems that made RPA necessary in the first place.
We used Casbin at my previous company where we needed to implement RBAC on top of our API that was written in Go. What we liked about it was that it could be embedded directly in our main application without needing to administer an external system. It also helped that we were using Postgres and redis as part of our stack as the casbin plugins for those tools made policy storage and enforcer updates dead simple across our API nodes.
Yeah and those numbers seem in line with what others have reported in HN meta threads on the topic, and at least an n of 1 personal experience. I totally get it when it’s a game or some other server intensive thing. Guess caching is an afterthought for a lot of smaller sites.
