I have been getting a lot of spam lately. Here's what I'm doing
1) Turn on filtered view on iMessage
2) Actually report the abuse to carriers. iOS makes it easy, but it seems pretty ineffective because the abusers can just use another number. But if you complain to the carrier directly, then they can (hopefully) remove you entirely for that shady customer (and possibly kick them off). Here's what I do
I went to a timeshare presentation once, fully with the mindset of saying no. It was scary how, at certain points, I started to actually open up to it. But I just kept to my script, saying no, even when they pressed. At the end of the day I don’t need to convince them they need to convince me.
At some point it was done and I got my discounted theme park tickets or whatever.
But I can easily see how the high pressure sales process works on people. They have a bag full of manipulative tricks.
It’s funny when engineers think they are immune to sales and marketing. Strength is knowing your human weakness and avoiding it, rather than having super will power.
This was probably the influential topic I had in English class in HS (ads work on everyone, perhaps even especially on those who think they have no effect).
I took it to heart and consume extremely little media with ads, because they are so insidious.
I just tell them I have to sleep on all big decisions, which isn't a "no" so they have no recourse. Except the one time where, after multiple levels of sales people whittling down the commitment to around $500, the head sales person came over and said something along the lines of, "you're just here for the tickets, aren't you". That's the only time I even broke my script and said, "yes, and I've been here for 90 minutes, so where do I pick them up".
I went to one of those Disney vacation home pitches and the sale pitch was very convincing.
You've just paid about $10K for your ONE Disney vacation for your family of four. For just a little bit more, you could come to Disney as many times as you'd like, stay in your own modern condo and and have park perks. It essentially "pays for itself" if you take two or more full Disney vacations each year.
The sales pitch for any timeshare is similar. For slightly more than the cost of 1 trip, you could have 2+ trips (just pay for airfare!).
> At some point it was done and I got my discounted theme park tickets or whatever.
My aunt used to do this. Fit the profile of a mark - retired school employee from the northeast visiting Florida. She'd go on the hotel retreat or get a nice meal in return for listening to their pitch. Never budged on the high-pressure sales tactics.
I’m glad that my mind tends to instantly shut down anyone who starts to fast-talk me or pressure me into something. I don’t any big choices without giving it a week to cogitate in my brain. If they can’t wait on that then well it’s of high probability it’s a scam/partial truth/ReallyBadChoice(TM)
Then it’s basically porn. A short term “better” solution that undermines longer term satisfaction. Porn, junk food, etc
The thing about people is they’re people. They’re different. It can be hard. They’re selfish. But there can be joy in our differences, and real meaning when someone actually cares. Vs a chatbot who is centered around you. It might feel good but it’s not a real relationship of give and take.
Funny you should mention porn: ai generated porn is now better than the real thing for images and >5s clips. At current rates for Moore's Law we're going to have 5 minute clips of anything you desire within the next decade on the equivalent of a 4090.
I wonder if we will start having people demand we go back to real human porn like in the good old days because it's just not natural to jack it to photo realistic catgirl dominatrices.
TBH, Porn is very clearly one of those things that there's basically no intrinsic added value to your life by consuming. Think cigarettes or fentanyl. Something, that, if most people could press a button to make themselves never ever use it again, they would.
> I wonder if we will start having people demand we go back to real human porn like in the good old days because it's just not natural to jack it to photo realistic catgirl dominatrices.
All that to say that, in the future, I think the more likely option is that people begin to treat it as a harmful, addictive substance and, that, hopefully, it becomes much more acceptable to seek out public treatment and support for using it.
I can make the case much more convincingly that food gives basically no intrinsic added value to your life and if most people could press a button to make themselves never eat again, they would.
Or to quote someone who said it much better than I:
If only it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly.
-Diogenes on public masturbation.
> I can make the case much more convincingly that food has basically no intrinsic added value to your life and if most people could press a button to make themselves never eat again, they would.
What nonsense is this? Do you only eat beans? Eating good food feels fantastic. Why would you want to give it up? Give me a button that lets me eat unlimited amounts of it without consequences, and I'll press that one instantly.
Good-tasting food is one of the most addictive things we have (also evidenced by the ever increasing percentage of people that are obese...)
> Eating good food feels fantastic. Why would you want to give it up?
That's exactly what self pleasuring mentioned above is though?
One could argue the same thing about food, if it was possible to eat a pill that would give you all the nutrients you need and would take your appetite they probably in theory should want to take that pill if they would press a button to stop wanting to self pleasure.
In fact, I think more people would likely want to get their food habits under control since this makes you gain weight and increases risks of certain illnesses. While self pleasuring can be potentially harmful in excess, I don't think it can be exactly as harmful as being addicted to food can be.
I could make the same argument for every form of entertainment. Sure, we should all be hunter gatherers and only have sex to procreate. It's not realistic.
I think what he says is we should be perfect users of our time, leading to some certain goal. Kind of like what AI could potentially be. So I think maybe we transition progressively from humans to AI to reach that perfectness. I'm sure it's possible to have AI that doesn't fall victim to those vices.
I liked how honest the guide was. There wasn’t anything fake noble here and a lot of his frustrations I have also felt as a people manager - the questions employees ask, making excuses when deadlines slip, etc
the job is to make YouTube videos that people click and watch
What gets them to watch and stick is a few things but notably wow factor, something crazy they haven’t seen before
The bar for wow factor keeps rising
Therefore you need to keep learning driving better and better results. Otherwise you are out
You need to take ownership for results to avoid delays at all costs.
Let's assume today a LLM is perfectly equivalent to a junior software engineer. You connect it to your code base, load in PRDs / designs, ask it to build it, and viola perfect code files
1) Companies are going to integrate this new technology in stages / waves. It will take time for this to really get broad adoption. Maybe you are at the forefront of working with these models
2) OK the company adopts it and fires their junior engineers. They start deploying code. And it breaks Saturday evening. Who is going to fix it? Customers are pissed. So there's lots to work out around support.
3) That problem is solved, we can perfectly trust a LLM to ship perfect code that never causes downstream issues and perfectly predicts all user edge cases.
Never underestimate the power of corporate greediness. There's generally two phases of corporate growth - expansion and extraction. Expansion is when they throw costs out the window to grow. Extraction is when growth stops, and they squeeze customers & themselves.
AI is going to cause at least a decade of expansion. It opens up so many use cases that were simply not possible before, and lots of replacement.
Companies are probably not looking at their engineers looking to cut costs. They're more likely looking at them and saying "FINALLY, we can do MORE!"
You won't be a coder - you'll be a LLM manager / wrangler. You will be the neck the company can choke if code breaks.
Remember if a company can earn 10x money off your salary, it's a good deal to keep paying you.
Maybe some day down the line, they'll look to squeeze engineers and lay some off, but that is so far off.
This is not hopium, this is human nature. There's gold in them hills.
But you sure as shit better be well versed in AI and using in your workflows - the engineers who deny it will be the ones who fall behind
I needed to read the article a few times - the quotes from David are a bit vague.
His presented focus is on great experiences for the customer, which demands high operational excellence from his team. His team found a reasonable way to save time, but his reaction was that's the wrong focus. Focusing on saving time will eventually hurt the customer experience (like advertising models lead to enshittification), even if this particular one doesn't.
So they need to re-orient this - either go back to the hard way, or justify the easy way in terms of the customer. To quote, "they wanted to sandbag it, they needed to figure out how they would make up for the lost energy elsewhere."
The prompts at least for me are very travel heavy with an emphasis on said travel being meaningful / life changing. It’s great to have something like that, but travel can just be fun and that’s great too.
I have other areas I’d rather ask about, and travel id ask more basic questions - where was your favorite trip in past few years? Where do you most want to go? From there can go deeper on why, what they prioritize to do, how they approach traveling, etc.
I’d add a feedback box to the AI. Click random prompt, then I can tell the AI “no travel questions, give me some questions to find what they value in life”, or whatever, then can continue to tweak from there
Catholic Church has no official teaching on the age of earth.
Atheism has always existed, it just may have been more or less visible depending on the political climate.
Even long ago when people worshiped ideas like Thagwag the rain god[0], there were probably non believers - are we so arrogant as to assume they didn’t exist?
“Hm we pray every day, sometime rain sometime not. Maybe no Thagwag?”
Like the Catholic Church Thagwagism also has no official teaching on the age of the earth.
These nuggets have little bearing on the proposition:
> There was an article recently about how it was the discovery of dinosaur bones that really began the shift away from organized religion.
which may or may not be true.
There was a general belief that Biblical interpretations gave a limited age to the earth, famously "calculated" in various ways by Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, James Ussher and John Lightfoot.
Deep geological time ran counter to that common belief.
I have a lot of respect for good detectives. I really enjoyed "Homicide Hunter" - which is a retired detective's recollection of past murder cases. Who knows how much was myth vs fact, but I got the sense he kept good notes because he would speak to exacting detail about decades old cases.
One of my favorite episodes was his first homicide case. A gas station was robbed and the clerk was killed. No video, no prints, etc. However there was a necklace that was dropped. It had some kind of pattern, so he called every. single. jeweler in the area. He called a lot, and eventually got a hit and found his man.
It's this kind of diligence and dedication (plus technology) that can crack cases open, even cold ones. Like the article here, he found 4 untested hairs that cracked it open.
>How did he know that it was dropped by the killer and not some random customer?
As any diligent investigator (not just of the criminal justice type) can tell you, he didn't, but it was something to dig deeper into and then hopefully find the next piece of information that it connects to. In this case that was just the identity of its buyer, but from there he could scrutinize that person to see if anything else about them lines up, or if they were just coincidentally there.
Usually, if you track someone down based on something very circumstantial, but they really were the guilty party, you'll eventually find other information to cement that connection.
It's not as if he would have found the owner of the necklace and arrested them right then.
As a manager I’ve had two employees tell HR that I was racist. The evidence? One I fired for performance, the other I had on a performance improvement plan. Mind you I had other minorities on my team in parallel that had no performance issues and strangely enough did not say I was a racist.
Also one time the HR guy (who also doubled as office manager) ran a large scheme where he claimed employees were expensing things, he did it on their behalf and got reimbursed. I found this out after the fact where I was asked if I ever asked him to order laptops or ran up huge Uber bills.
It does indeed extend all around, and I'm sorry you had to go though that. But you have to keep in mind that there is an extreme power imbalance between an employee and a manager who can have them fired, which means the jerk-factor is very much slanted heavily in one direction. For regular employees having those above you abuse their power over you in various ways is often a daily occurrence.
No idea why you're being down voted. I've had the very same experience once. Employee just sucked, after some nudges that went either ignored or just unnoticed I gave a very clear speech on where they're standing. Three months later I got him fired. He went to HR and claimed I was racist, and threatened with a lawyer. This really stressed me out for a good while, this was dragging along for weeks, with ugly mails and calls.
I won’t assume you or GP were racially motivated but “just sucks” can easily be code for “wrong race/culture”.
“Some nudges” is a red flag to me, regardless of race. You think you communicated a message but aren’t sure if it was understood. That’s your responsibility as the messenger, not theirs as the unknowing recipient.
> “Some nudges” is a red flag to me, regardless of race. You think you communicated a message but aren’t sure if it was understood.
Hence the "gave a very clear speech" part. If you don't get it at that point then I don't care if you're just stupid or it's cultural differences, at some point you have to adapt to the environment you work in. And no, there were no language barriers involved.
Yeah but the “very clear speech” came later, after the decision was made. After redemption was possible. At that point you’re just reinforcing your perceptions. Your job as a manager is to manage that expectation. If you fire someone for it that’s your failure.
> Yeah but the “very clear speech” came later, after the decision was made.
Huh? I clearly stated they had another three months at that point. Nothing changed, so they got the boot three months later. What the heck do you expect? Another two years? At this point I have to assume malice from your side. I guess you're just one of these people yourself. Blame everyone and everything but yourself.
> I clearly stated they had another three months at that point. Nothing changed, so they got the boot three months later.
Yes, and I clearly stated your mind was already made up so that didn’t matter. It was impossible for them to change your mind.
> What the heck do you expect? Another two years?
Your job as a manager is to address these issues before they become fireable. You know, to manage.
> At this point I have to assume malice from your side.
This is an internet forum, relax. What does it even mean to be malicious in an internet comment? I’m not taking away your livelihood.
> I guess you're just one of these people yourself.
“These people”? Is this still a thread about you not being racist?
> Blame everyone and everything but yourself.
Go look in a mirror.
Much like a blameless root cause analysis I believe a firing is a failure of the organization. How did this person get hired in the first place? How did you fail to coach them? What did the organization learn to avoid a repeat?
In my experience “performance” is code for “I don’t like you”. I have never seen a performance metric that isn’t arbitrary and inconsistent. Not just between peers but day to day for an individual.
PIPs are just CYA for HR.
I can’t speak to these specific situations because I wasn’t there but when managers speak about “performance” they’re using a euphemism for their perception. This can easily feel like racism because it comes from a place of discrimination.
“I have friends who are x” is a common refrain of racists so isn’t a defense, especially in an asymmetric power structure. Maybe you aren’t, or maybe your employees feel you are but they tolerate it to keep their jobs.
> If you’re bad enough at your job to get fired you basically are a fraud.
Depends on who thinks you are bad enough and how they came to the conclusion.
If your boss thinks you are bad enough - the question is why do they think so? Is it laziness, incompetence, or merely small nonsense that the boss couldn't accept retroactively? Is this all via stack rank or fake BS quotas? What is it?
Even without stack ranking, if you lead a team large enough, you get people who are struggling more than others. Sometimes it’s clearly situational: they are more junior and are still learning the ropes, the project is going through a rough patch and it’s hard to deliver, they are going through a rough patch and it’s hard to deliver and sometimes it’s just that their skillset is mismatched with what they have to do. In this case, you have to decide if it’s a case where training will solve the issue or if having someone else there would be better for everyone. And yes, not constantly being in conflict with everyone is also a professional skill.
1) Turn on filtered view on iMessage
2) Actually report the abuse to carriers. iOS makes it easy, but it seems pretty ineffective because the abusers can just use another number. But if you complain to the carrier directly, then they can (hopefully) remove you entirely for that shady customer (and possibly kick them off). Here's what I do
a) Go to https://www.ipqualityscore.com/free-carrier-lookup (or whatever site you like, that's just the one I found)
b) Type in the spam number
c) Find the carrier name
d) Google the carrier, go their site, and find "Report abuse" or something similar
e) Fill out the form. Include your contact info so you actually know whether something is done or not.
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