bsenftner

Going one at a time, in small apparently myopic focus is how a politician shakes the lobbyist money tree. "You could be next!"

Early 90's, I was checking out a dive bar in LA's Koreatown over lunch and noticed him at the bar. I happened to be reading one of his books a few night earlier, or I'd never have recognized the guy. It was one of those "welp, now or never" moments, and I got up and set next to him at the bar. After a glance and a "who the fuck are you?" I replied I was the idiot fan that was going to buy him drinks. His waving two fingers at the bartender was him indicating "okay" and we slowly started chatting. I ditched work for the afternoon, and had to call in sick the next, claiming my lunch was bad and made me sick. We smoked, this being when people could smoke indoors, and drank at that bar for hours. I think I slept in my car for a few hours too. He was a curmudgeon with a royal tongue. A life time memory, that afternoon. I think I was 25 then.

I met and drank with him once. Brutal punk poet of a guy.

Actually, the family size Cheez-its is one of the worst offenders, they are not 1/3rd less, more like 50% less product.

I did a little research study back in 2003 where I went to various grocers and purchased the same product at these grocers and compared.

Walmart has larger boxes, and less contents, universally, for pretty much everything in a box, and they charge 1/3 more for their 2/3rds of what you get everywhere else. They make nearly 50% more profit from that little slight of hand. And try discussing this with any shoppers and they will say "but the box is bigger", <- actual statement from a CS PhD, demonstrating how it does not matter your education, once outside of that specialization you're an idiot.

The scale of a radio station, versus the scale of one promoter today is night and day. The ownership of distribution of information is a curious thing; when it was more controlled we had community, and when that control relaxed the previous "controllers" did everything in their power to pollute the new communications channels with bad actors, essentially destroying the potential for community to form again. If someone cannot control the entire apparatus, those that cannot make sure the medium is non-commercially useful. Part of their protection of their medium, no others can be allowed to become viable as a replacement.

I was a 'classic 70's latch key kid', that somehow discovered underground radio during elementary. Starting with "Dr. Demento" somewhere in my youth, by 6th grade it was "no commercial potential radio", mimeographed fanzines from everywhere on earth kids liked music + comics, and the punk rock + art music underground with shows at Unitarian Churches and abandoned buildings.

Radio also was your connection to your city and the city's youth communities. Which are now fragmented, subcultures, and frequently dominated by someone trying to make the scene into their living. As far as I know, nothing has filled that community void, and community itself is dying.

Come on now: we translate vague ambitions into communications for non-living entities to do human bidding. Until we have recreated humanity as mythic gawds, there is a ton of work to do.

Conveying understanding to the users that succeeding with AI is a communications problem, not a technology problem. Sure, AI is great with technology, that is helping to create it, but the success of that as well as everything else with AI is dependant on your ability to communicate what you want AI to do, and I do not mean using casual language. Which is the worst advice for AI use they could have used.

We seem to have this drive to abstract people and teams and processes, we call it Taylorism, Scientific Management, with an end result of being able to declare with scientific assurance this person, this group is not carrying their expected load. Now, this is a lot of work, and this is not really necessary if these groups actually had open and trusted communications. But we rare to never have trust, real trust between work teams and work peers. So, rather than expend the effort to create such trust and do the hard work of creating high functioning teams, we create a tracking surveillance environment where your hamster wheel must spin as fast as everyone else, or you are fired. And that is why so many companies have so much busy work while never really going anywhere.

Rich Veitch, he and Alan Moore. As Moore would later write:

    "The One ... is a kind of landmark; a pulling together of obsessions and ingenious storytelling ideas into a coherent whole ... Its revisionist superheroics, while conceived at roughly the same time, predate Watchmen and Dark Knight in terms of publication, as does its packaging. Its political and humanist preoccupations were voiced before such sentiments became chic. Its deranged, culture-conscious humor offers an alternative and an antidote to today's rather gloomy trend of pessimistic, post-modern ultra-humans... Whatever it is that the comic books of the 1980s turn out to be remembered for, The One was right there in the thick of it, carving out a niche in the mainstream for dangerous ideas long before dangerous ideas became box-office certainties."

Careful, because some of those you overlook are probably favorites of management. For who knows what reason, but it surprises me how many times a seemingly deadweight team member just happens to be the owner's kid or some such nepo-baby.

I've been working for far too freaking long, so I've had a series of pointy haired bosses (referencing Dilbert here). I once had a boss that really fought for the technical reasons every time, exhausing upper management until they gave in. Years later, socially chatting with one of the upper managers from that company, which I'd long left, about that manager and how much his team loved him. The manager's response was "that was the last on-spectrum manager we hired. never again!" and my opinion dimmed.

I realize this may sounds like a lot of effort, but I find telling stories of how a person would use the system, with theatrics of confusion and failure, tend to penetrate the dull unwilling to think participants I must engage to get my work completed. I'm not an actor or a good speaker, I grew up with a severe stutter, and I find I have to "put on a show" to generate the dawn of comprehension in others.

I had research lab exposure to what the US military had in the 80's, the groups I saw were hyper focused on 3D visualizations in support of in-the-field strategy. Think wireframes superimposed over a live camera feed, with those wireframes being the horizon line and what are the items beyond their current range of view. A building wall is simply a wireframe, and the floors and every type of sensor they could get to feed into visualizations to see inside and past buildings, hills, any navigable area.

I think it is exposing how weakly people grasp communications. The amount of implied everything in most people's communications is extremely high, and those same people do not understand they are using implied information that a non-human construct really struggles to figure out what the human is talking about. I help a lot of non-technical people use AI, and asking them not to imply and to explain what they mean... many cannot parse, the implied version is all they have ever held in their head, and my telling them that they are using implied information confuses them, they don't know or never realized the full meaning of their usage of language.

That's not the same at all. Folding "luxury political beliefs" into this is politicizing the idea when that is not necessary. It's a slur.

The essay is not a trivial projection, its an astute observation of people in systems that no longer have to work to maintain their status quo. All those wealthy people ruining Western Culture have it far too easy to understand what they are doing to the rest of all they set upon.

Sounds like some people are trying to develop Snow Crash.

Now apply this to entire industries and entire countries, and we begin to see what is happening to all of Western Culture.

It creates the context of the request without including language or terms that activate additional areas of knowledge not necessary for an accurate reply.

Well, that's the other side of incompetence: they know how to spin their tools, but they don't know when to stop, or how to stop the change requests, the balance between shippable, maintainable, and what the market wants at that time.

Come on people, it is a drug. Exercise, cardio, eat well, sleep well, it's your choice the risks you take, but try to balance the good with the bad, if you partake in "bad".

Although I do meditate, I do not think this is the answer to our career's stress. That answer lies in learning how to generate a climate, a culture of open communications. Communications that include asking why, without triggering expectation that the questions are a lead up to blame, or anything other than understanding. Programmers need to learn communications, because BELIEVE IT OR NOT a software engineer's career is almost entirely some communications situation one after another. That is literally what we do: we translate communications between systems that cannot communicate on their own. That is literally the purpose of software. But this is probably news to a lot of you, and many of you will argue that it is not. That's why this career is in such stress, it does not even realize what it does. Sure we write software, which is an act of translating actions and behaviors into another language and environment which we understand and others outside of our field do not. We're communications professionals with a non-human entity.

It's an ad for people, for staff capable of that type of work. Very few can do that type of work these days.

One of the largest, uncomprehendingly huge, omissions in AI video models is the lack of anyone from film, film production, animation, 3D graphics, or VFX on their video AI teams. Why would that be needed? Well, so the freaking models understand when anyone from any of these backgrounds prompts them with their industry standard language and terminology to describe a set, a camera move, an type of environmental lights, or any of the thousands of production terms used globally for the creation of media. The latest models are just now starting to understand basic terms, but describing a sequence with a motion camera moving for a narrative reason with action and dialogue in front is like describing calculus to a toddler. That's not to mention how much optimization knowledge anyone from a digital production developer background brings to the table...

The proposal needs to be larger, to education itself in all subjects. We are manufacturing too many specialist parrots without critical analysis. We need to teach how to discuss controversy and manage disagreements, and then we can start making progress.

The last 24 hours Codex 5.5 high has been a fucking idiot.

This kills me, it is correct, but misses the forest for the trees. Yes, mathematics is a discipline of understanding, but an insular one. The entire field is about trying to understand, but the discipline does not try to be understood. No, that is "your job, not theirs" and that is why this discipline is struggling, struggling in a culture that can barely communicate without emotional morons destroying any constructive communications.