How I Ruined Office Productivity with a Face-Replacing Slack Bot
blog.zikes.me
blog.zikes.me
Let me draw a parallel with a story of my grandfather, whom I never knew: Apparently a great hobby of his used to be to collect sayings from people. Whenever he'd meet anyone, let it be new or already known, he'd ask them if they knew any new sayings. He wrote all of them down in his little book of sayings. My father started picking up the hobby and they'd get excited when they had learned a saying the other didn't know yet. They'd do this at diner, around the fire place, you name it.
Then came my grandfather's birthday and one of the 'gifts' he received was an encyclopedia of sayings, within it were almost all the sayings in existence.
Suffice to say the fun of collecting new sayings was gone, the interest in sayings was gone and a great hobby got ruined.
So all I can see is that you took something that was a culture thing in your team and you took a nice fat automated dump on it.
The tech is very cool nonetheless :)
I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on.
That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.
The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist".
How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!"
i suppose that is part of the reason for the appeal in the seemingly recent interest in bar trivia nights. i think we are still working out the kinks in the things we lost due to the internet.
I have tried to do a lot of the online video games (even with friends), but to me, it doesn't have nearly the appeal of having friends over and we all play a game together For me, the Nintendo 64 was one of the best consoles to do this.
Will gatherings be less fun when Alexa becomes the life of the party, cracking jokes and proposing toasts? Will Siri join in the dinner conversation (parent, friend or good-listener mode, with wit, personality and intelligence sliders).
Will fans be turned off when self-driving cars start winning the Indy 500? How about when the Boston Dynamics Red Sox win the World Series?
First, honest question: is there some secret lease that needs to be signed before posting on HN that requires that every real-world phenomenon be framed using 1337 h4x0r terminology? For some reason, it really rubs me the wrong way, people trying to shoebox anything and everything into a faux-technological perspective.
Also, the reason Vinyls still sell is that there is a sense of occassion about taking a record out of it's cover, carefully placing the needle on it, sitting back to focus on the music and nothing else. Same reason the physical joy of playing a piano will always have a place despite being able to get nearly the same sounds out of a computer. I'd hate to watch two self driving cars competing against each other to see which has the best code. That sounds tedious as all hell. I'm not sure about the others, but fuck yeah I categorically do NOT want an AI cracking jokes at a party.
Somethings are better when they are lower tech.
From the article:
As explained earlier, due to the physical limitations of vinyl, there are limits as to how loud you can press a record, and because vinyl is “for audiophiles” – there is less incentive for record companies to compromise the quality of vinyl releases. As a result, many vinyl records are mastered differently to the CD release with more dynamic range and at lower volumes.
[1]: http://www.soundmattersblog.com/vinyl-vs-cd-in-the-loudness-...
Vinyls do have a characteristic compressed warmth that subjectively a lot of people enjoy. The pops and crackles that come with vinyl are pleasing to many also.
This is something technologists and scientists largely don't get. People are always 'look at how many material comforts and and entertainment options you have now, are you not entertained?' Likewise scientists are often 'I spent years of my life and a small fortune learning to be expert about this obscure thing that you'll never be able to experience directly, isn't it awesome?' And people are entertained and they are awed - to an extent.
But they're also sad because the more the world is codified and quantified and parceled out for ownership. there are no new countries to discover, no more large exotic fauna to find, we're constantly reminded that religion and magic are illusory and that the economics of capitalism are inevitable, so there's nothing to look forward to in life beyond being ground up in the gears of the consumerist machine.
That's why there are so many movies about superheroes and rebellious people with psychic powers and so on. People need something to believe in other than the ultimately extremely boring prospect of working, raising a family, and retiring. They want 'adventure and excitement and really wild things.' This is why we now have an administration whose stated Big Idea is the construction of a giant wall* because at least that sounds like a project you could get absorbed in for its own sake, whereas preserving the earth for future generations feels nice but is never really done and so can't deliver any sense of adventure or accomplishment for more than a few people with the resources to get a PhD.
It's also why countries (soo to include the US) are apprehensive of war but develop tremendous enthusiasm for it once it's declared, because it provides a massive uncertainty that offers the possibility for drastic change, heroism, betrayal, defeat, victory and so on. I don't know how to articulate this better than by saying that capitalism is boring for most people, in the same way that if you are playing Monopoly there's a point at which you realize who's going to win and all the fun goes out of the game for everyone else in direct proportion to their declining odds of success.
* If you don't mind losing 2 hours on a bad movie. go watch Pacific Rim, a stupid science-fiction romp about giant robots vs giant aliens. It's stupid in the sense of not really caring about the science at all to the point o making jokes about how stupid it is - at one critical moment, someone 'solves' the problem of The System collapsing due to 3v1l h4x0rs but remembering that they have a nuclear-powered robot and exclaiming 'It's not digital! It's nuclear- it's analog!!'. The very badness of this movie makes it worth studying because the psychological symbolism is so thinly disguised. Almost all alien invasion movies are vehicles for conservative ideology, and it's not an accident that a political campaign for building a giant wall was anticipated by various movies involving the construction of giant walls.
That's why I'm voting for Siri over Alexa in 2024.
People have ALWAYS told stories of humans / Gods / Demigods with super powers. I agree that a lot of modern cinema / entertainment is VERY lame, but this is not a sign of the end times. I'm sure a few people rolled their eyes at stories of Zeus. People have told these stories for centuries.
if you think capitalism is boring, try going back to pre-1990s russia. I bet you'd have an absolute ball! well they did have bears playing hockey, thats actually pretty exciting. but i digress, usually the quickest way to lose is to start comparing your odds because you'll quit before you begin. life is far too complex, dynamic, and full of resources to declare game over as if you were in a 4 sided monopoly game.
It's kinda like the way all zombie movies explore a basically similar political question about the relationship between small groups of resourceful individuals vs a hostile unthinking mob that threatens their survival.
Re capitalism, don't you think people have heard that argument already many times and that many of them have decided it's not going to work out that way? It's not lack of awareness that things are materially far better than under the alternatives, it's the disillusionment that sets in at the lack of a credible alternative. You're essentially arguing that people should forget the odds and play the game as if they didn't know them, which is absurd.
I think the problem isn't so much that we're running out of things to turn into consumables (that don't quickly bore us), but as you said, the parceling and abstraction of everything in the first place, that we turn things into consumables instead of ourselves into creators/gardeners of our lives and the world around us. I mean, there is still a lot of fauna to discover, and what's more, there's still a lot of living in peace with and appreciation of a lot of fauna we already know about to do. Heck, if we just let up a "little", new exciting things and interactions can occur. And one lifetime is not enough to learn about even just a small section of animals. It is possible for "humans knowing everything about lions", and me not ever even having seen a photo of one, if you know what I mean.
And then there are other people. Who could be fascinating mysteries, friends and enemies, instead of boring potential threats of resources. Of course, when the only way we relate to each other is "so what 'are' you?" (what are you mostly earning your money with at the moment), "do you know $reference, too?", "do you also dis/like $food/$music/$actor/$politician", having more billions of people with those knobs at various positions can not really help the boredom.
"All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room."There is something to this, on many levels. We can hardly look each other and ourselves in the face: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1J6TFHCevg <-- that's just the tip of the ice berg, as we all know. The price of our "functioning" is to not think of these things. But when you think of them, really think of them, I say there is hardly anything as "exciting" as the idea that this is still going on, it doesn't need to, and it shouldn't.
> preserving the earth for future generations feels nice but is never really done and so can't deliver any sense of adventure or accomplishment
I still firmly believe that we for the most part actually do want to be able to look into the mirror and the eyes of our children and be more than fools telling hysterical lies, in hiding for fear of someone calling them out. Just look at the mental gymnastics of people either rationalizing their complacency as being actually the decent thing to do, or as them having no choice. It's not because they want to defend their being "bad", it's because they really don't want to be bad, and even just getting up in the morning and living the day as themselves is a struggle/achievement for some.
But you know, both many great scientists and philosophers and psychologists and so on, sometimes just "authors", have written and talked about alienation for decades if not centuries. Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but what is even worse is the people who think a fat salary and the fact that they are alive, while those greats are dead, somehow means they don't have to understand any of it. Calling them "technologists" is just about right. To what I would call thinkers and scientists they're like someone who realizes they can catch rain in a barrel instead of just holding their head back and mouth open, to drink at will -- and shows up in a Poseidon costume the next day. That's how little they know about how little they know. End rant :)
The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.
Are we standing on the shoulders of giants, climbing even; or sliding down their backs?
But when I'm trying to focus on programming, it is like being in an all day long meeting without an agenda.
Has anyone else gotten a good way to merge things like slack/email with Pomodoro or other focus hacks?
If anyone else had to Google it.
This alone makes Slack far more useful for me than HipChat.
Sometimes I'll exit it entirely for an hour or two, but I don't want to look like I'm unavailable to help teammates.
By far the best summary of the "slack effect" that I've come across.
I turned down the offer, thinking I had little use for such things.
Fast forward 10 years and I end up going back to school for programming and slapping myself for not getting into it back then.
Can definitely see the difference that experience makes.
+1 would hire
So you turned your Python program into a single, statically linked executable? May I ask how you did that?
I think the author's application was written in Go which as I understand it does static linking by default.
However, creating standalone executables from python is called freezing and can be done using various tools[0].
0: http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/shipping/freezing/
That aside, great article!
Sorry about the scroll problems, I really hate scrolljacking so I don't have any JS for that on there, but I imagine that fixed background image could be causing some problems. Would you mind sharing your OS/browser info so I can investigate?
Instead, it seems to be preferred that you simply upvote the post without replying.
Now i'm going to make a telegram bot of this!
It used to be only on threads discussing an accomplishment of a space agency of a poorer country, and a popular sentiment was if a fraction of their GDP should be spent on science and technology till poverty is eradicated. Same thing here, why one person should spend time on a personal project until we resolve climate change. I understand prioritizing bigger problems with more time, effort and money. But, ridiculing others for spending time and effort on making/discussing something you think is not the most important is something else.
That said, credit where credit isdue: this is a nice hack from the submitter. Facefinder looks fun.