notacop31337

That sounds awfully like a call to violence.

Please don't call him Australian, we don't want him.

Serious question but why did someone down vote this lol?

Yes, Solar Breeder Factories, I believe they're called.

Can't wait for the Black Metal scene to hear about this, good albums coming!

Climate models might not be civilisation models, but climate has a very large role in the disruption of civilisation models, look at the Sumerians for evidence of climate/regional degradation and the impact that had on their civilisation. And mitigation is only one part of it, when shortages start, it's not just the climate you have to deal with, it's the humans, who are arguably far more vicious and erratic than any weather or climate.

To be honest I don't believe this to be isolated to just modelling and production code, I feel as though this issue presents itself in most of the job ads I see today, Backend roles with requirements for React, Python roles with requirements for Javascript, Backend roles with requirements for DevOps/SRE.

I don't necessarily have an issue with widely skilled engineers, but I would prefer it's for the right reasons, and I largely believe that it's an exercise in laziness on most companies behalf. They just want to hire less people and have more of their workers do tasks that are outside of their remit.

I have zero interest in writing Javascript, absolutely none, I don't want to do it, and I have pushed my career in directions that mean that for the most part, I don't have too. I'm happy with this decision and have made it willingly.

It's the same with a lot of "DevOps" tasks, having previously been a DevOps Engineer, I now just want to write code, real code, but it feels as though most places now are just not hiring DevOps/Infra people, and just telling their other engineers to do it, which I understand, but it results in a far worse experience for both sides of it. I have to regularly force my hand down from volunteering for things that I have the technical experience to do, and do properly, versus colleagues that don't have the experience, because I'm tired of being shoehorned back into a role that I intentionally left. All of this is because the idea of "cross functional teams" no longer means hiring specialised engineers to do specialised roles, and just getting everyone to do everything, and then being surprised when the context switch penalty actually exists, and it's done to a worse standard than someone who is skilled in that role.

I experienced this in the form of a conversation with a member of University PMC not too long ago, they bragged about how they'd recently eliminated the function of bin emptying from the cleaning staff, and were now forcing all faculty to empty their own bins, they bragged about the cost savings whilst all I could think of was the absolute joke that is asking a highly credentialed person to spend their, quite expensive time, emptying bins. Even funnier when you consider that this just take even more time off the very likely zero hour contracted cleaner that was previously doing the bins. They even told me some faculty members in pretty well respected positions got mad (the fucking audacity) about the changes and how they so quickly put them in their place.

"Because they see universities as stages on which they are destined to display their own professional and moral superiority, they hold in low esteem the matters that preoccupy professors—sound pedagogy, academic rigor, publishing in one’s discipline, even reading books."

In amongst all of this, I have a neighbour who is a member of teaching staff at a local University, and the stories I'm told about digitisation, low salaries, bullshit job requirements and unpaid overtime, have all contributed to me deciding that University in my country is all in all, a massive ponzi scheme, and when it all goes to shit, the Universities themselves will be the only ones to blame.

I understand what you're saying but NYC isn't exactly the only city in the world with large apartment buildings.

Wait what are you on about? Are you serious that you just stick bin bags on the street full? Where are the bins? What?

I'm not from NYC or even the US, why wouldn't you just use bins that the bags go in? I don't understand, please help me understand this. I'm thoroughly confused.

If you did a comedy show with zingers like this, I'd turn up.

The idea that socialisation with unsocialised cretins is important, is one of the biggest pieces of marketing spin that I feel keeps schools operating, children and teenagers when allowed to form groups and cliques are fucking animals, they will engage in the worst kind of behaviour. There is a big difference between socialising your child, which can be done through a whole host of methods, and throwing them into a shark tank filled with animals.

As someone who was bullied at school, let me assure you, the only socialisation I received from the experience, was an appreciation for how fucking horrible humans can be.

A generally applicable rule of thumb to apply is as soon as you need to generate heat, you're spending a lot of energy on the process, which is far more damaging and requiring of an overhaul than packaging.

> comparing planetary extinction to shipping widgets

Unfortunately, not the Craft I was hoping for :(

https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Craft/1154

Cheers for the comment outlining more about the book, picked it up, I'm planning on having a big christmas break of reading!

Cheers for the comment, what do you suggest I do with this information?

A+

I believe so as well given the structure of the offices, they clearly described that the layout was designed in a way to allow for maximum quiet and concentration whilst enabling collaboration via the shared walk ways and common areas. It's a shame to see they've turned it into a glass walled hellscape.

I recently read "Lost Connections", recommended to me after a long few years with depression.

I suspect if you're commenting in this thread, you'd probably enjoy it.

Anyway, the one thing that seems to always be a consistent theme in discussions of burnout, is work. I've not yet seem a conversation on burnout where an employment scenario is not brought up.

One of the chapters in Lost Connections talks about meaningful work, and how a reduction or elimination of personally fulfilling work, can lead to a depression, as can a few other things.

I can't help but feel at this stage after dealing with a long running depression, that our relationships with work are probably broken, and we've all been sold a lie.

My issue with the term "burnout" is that it feels like it's loading the topic to be a personal issue (which it technically is), when in reality, it's a reaction to a bad external stimuli.

I'd write more, but I feel like I'm waffling, I'm happy to discuss more if people want to chat about it.

I love Taleb, but given that the majority of his wealth was made from derivatives markets, I'm not entirely sure if his moral pontificating is always the best or most accurate commentary available to quote.

To be 100% honest it's been a while since I looked into libraries for it, so I couldn't say.

Your second comment rings true, and in my opinion, we are there. Highly recommend throwing some PDFs at AWS Textract and checking out the quality, it wasn't there a few years ago, can safely state it's there now though. I threw stuff at it that previously would just spit out trash, and it handled it fairly well, specifically for table data extraction (I was looking at public stock market quarterly reports).

Cost is the kicker for me, 1000 pages for $15, adds up fairly quickly at any sort of scale!

My understanding is that this is largely because you're fighting an adversarial format provider in Adobe, I've read a few papers and journal entries on file format polyglotting, with some focus on PDF and approaches are constantly shifting in nature due to Adobe mooting pathways to success, I think it's partly for security and also IMO partly for obscurity as PDF is a horrific format in all reality except for human visual interpretation. Many organisations and industries ONLY produce public data via PDF and it makes the parsing of that information a far more difficult task (again, I suspect by design). After trying a few parsing options for PDF, I've come to hate it as a format. Luckily though, some options from a few cloud providers seem to be really hammering the problems complexity down, but the cost of the solutions can be very steep.

I find it curious that you point out regular social interaction as a major culprit of lost time here but not the 4 different communication mediums that every workplace uses, or the egregious levels of ritualistic meetings, or the expectation of travel being on employee time, or the lessening of the value of our dollar resulting in multiple people having to work full time jobs in a single household to provide the same as generations ago.

If you don't want people to interact in normal ways, why have a business, would business outcomes not be improved by humans interacting and forming social bonds within their workplace, a place that by current standards, we spend 50% of our awake hours?

Can you explain more what you mean? I'm unsure where you're making your point from.

I'm at the stage now where if a company required me in the office, the surcharge I'd be asking on top of my wage (30% would do it) would be so hilarious that it would be insulting, but in my mind, that's kinda the point.

I made this comment to a friend recently that I don't think enough people are considering that he might actually be mad enough to have spent $44B to destroy a toxic business.

Whilst mild, a much too vulgar display of power.

Not nit picking, just informing, population currently stated to peak around 2080-2100 at around 10.2-11.4b, depending on the estimate!

Decarbonising means moving away from sources of energy with extreme levels of CO2 output.

I like your thought on this, but it really is not that simple, however great it would be if it was. You get into issues of energy density very quickly, and hard industries requires lots of heat, which the conversion rate for electricity is very inefficient, necessitating other forms of energy source. It's nowhere near as simple as just "switching provider", you can't smelt steel with solar power.

For the big 5 products, steel, plastic, cement, ammonia and icantrememberthelastone, you have a bunch of processes that require energy densities that are fundamentally different to residential tier appliances etc that can be provided by solar, wind etc. And for some of these products, which are integral to worldwide economies, there really aren't feasible replacements.