My company requires everyone in the company to meet our customers in person once a year. Everyone from the CEO on down to tech nerd button pushers like myself.
There are at least tens of Twitter links that I see daily which make it to the first couple of pages of the site. A lot of them are AI-related content, which seems to be popular there.
Which takes us back to the original point being made...
> it [the US] is the biggest organizer of violence, arms dealing, murder, corruption and every single one of your leaders has been a scourge inflicted on the world
These aren't independent events. Every time we impose our imperial will on other countries, the echoes winds up being worse, with a very, very limited number of exceptions.
We don't have to relearn the concept, we just have a bunch of dumb idiots who we have to fight off every couple years and we often lose because a critical segment of people cannot remember what happened last time, don't understand anything, or are evil.
Natrium has an interesting design for a 345MW reactor that has thermal storage that can boost output to 500MW for 5.5 hours. This lets it increase output during peak prices.
Sure I agree they have no incentive to promote them. But your claim wasn’t that they don’t promote them. You claimed that they’re making them exceedingly difficult to install. Apparently because they put the command for that in a consistent menu position for decades and removing the functionality temporarily in a single jurisdiction.
If they wanted to make it “exceedingly difficult” they could be disabling it in all jurisdictions, or hide it behind layers of developer mode dialogs and warnings. They could remove the instructions for how to do so from the on device help. They could require you to re-pin it every 3 days like they do for self loaded apps. They could stop adding support for newer PWA APIs as new ones get standardized and they could deprecate and remove APIs that already exist. We all know Apple isn’t precious about backwards compatibility.
If the goal is to make using a PWA “exceedingly difficult” Apple is failing miserably despite being very successful at making side-loading apps “exceedingly difficult”
> But, isn’t it our job to impress upon the managers the importance, in a certain regard?
I think it is. But this appears to be an unpopular opinion and I'm not sure why. The question I'm still unsure about is if managers realize they are surrounding themselves with "yes men". The other question I'm still unsure about is if people realizing that not saying "no" (or "yes, but") is not meaningfully different from being a "yes man".
Our job is to engineer. Our job is to build (good) products. Information can't just flow top down, it has to go the other way too.
What seems weird to me is that during "the good times" in our field, that happened more frequently. A strong employee market (as opposed to an /employeer/ market) seemed to be good for employee, employeer, and the people buying everything. But myopia is quick to set in.
> Alternatively, what about just doing the right thing?
That's the main motivation of why I speak up. There are consequences to our actions. Our choices may have small or little influence, but unfortunately the problem is that the world is complicated. The problems we face are mainly composed of many small issues that add up. I am surprised this is more contentious in places like HN as we deal with this every day. The way we solve big problems is we break them down into many different small and manageable problems. The only difference here is that we're viewing things bottom up rather than explicitly breaking them down. Though that is harder to figure out which small problems add up to the big problem. But we deal with this type of problem solving in programming all the time too.
If you haven't heard it before, allow me to introduce you to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy[0]. I think one of the important things it states is that the second group is actually bad for business. I think there's a common misconception. People are often saying "well it is good for business", pointing to all kinds of messed up shit. I don't buy that. It is myopically good for business, but not in any meaningful length of time. Though then again, as Buffet says "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Michael Burry famous learned this first hand.
In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
- First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
- Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
The article addresses that. This is about the recent controversy where plugging an LG display into a Windows machine caused unwanted software to be installed as a "driver update". Disconnecting the TV from the Internet is completely irrelevant to the article.
It’s really a great conference, the OSM community is great and strongest in Europe. I’ve been to many and always come away inspired.
Sadly (or, really, amazingly as it’s good to have so many options), another great, major geospatial conference is also happening essentially at the same time: FOSS4G in Hiroshima. They are certainly different conferences but a lot of overlap.
So, in other words it’s a great week to be in geospatial software working on open source and open data.
While we're sharing anecdotes, people regularly total their cars hitting deer breeding out of control in my area, as they have no natural predators left.
They're likely using this copyright tool as it's cheaper than paying lawyers to scour the internet for infringing content. They're probably right, as long as the externalities of the AI tool's false positives fall on others, like the Allumeria and Luanti devs. There really should be a system to push the burden back on Microsoft - they can save the lawyer costs, but then they are as responsible for the AI decisions as they are for a human employee's actions.
