shalmanese

The pedagogical process is whatever it says on the tin, same as how a sport is whatever the rules of the sport say it is. If the assignment is to use AI to do an X, then obviously AI is fine. Absent that, AI is cheating.

> If you want someone to produce a piece of writing about something, how they produced it is less important than the result. If it is correct, clear, and gets the job done, then good.

No, this fundamentally misunderstands the difference between work and pedagogy. With a work product, the end result is all that matters because it is a fundamentally new contribution for which the contribution is prized. If a marketer can get a 0.1% better conversion rate using ChatGPT, then that's the best course of action.

Pedagogy is a deliberate simulacrum of work under artificial conditions where learning is done via the process. Nobody cares that you've built the 10 millionth version of tetris, the work product at the end of it is fundamentally uninteresting. The work product is solely there to force you to engage in the process and deliberately useless so it can be shaped towards maximal learning.

Nobody mistakes, for example, that someone who uses a forklift to lift a 300lb bar or pays a friend to do it for them is getting their reps in at the gym because it's intrinsically obvious that the work of moving metal has no value but is instead, meant to induce an internal change in the athlete. Using ChatGPT on an assignment is no different from hiring a forklift to do your workout but people seem to want to get confused about it.

> Human time is one of the most expensive resources in farming.

Not any more. A combine costs around a million bucks and has a total useful lifespan of about 10,000 hours which is $100 an hour (not counting maintenance and fuel costs which approx doubles this rate) which far exceeds the cost of a human operator. Capital costs exceed labor costs for almost all types of farming these days.

You have enough of these interviews with people across a range of experience levels and you kind of get calibrated to what to expect at however many years into a career. Usually you get a small group of people who are operating far and above the level of their peers and it's pretty obvious.

The number opens up the conversation to:

* Why this metric and not another? How was this number related to the overall goals of your company?

* What was the initial benchmark for how much you wanted this number to change? Did you meet, exceed or fall short of this benchmark? What do you think was the reason for that? In particular, what did you learn about your org's benchmarking process from meeting, exceeding or falling short of the benchmark?

* What resources were required to make this number change? Who were all the people involved? Why was it logical for their involvement to be a part of this number changing? More crucially, were there any people not involved that, in retrospect, you wish could have been involved and why?

* Knowing what you did now, if we were to put you on a similar effort within our company, what do you think you would do differently and how much do you think that would have an impact on that number?

The bullshitters will quickly wilt under the pressure of not knowing enough details to give well thought out answers while the people who drove real impact will get excited to talk it through and lay out both what went well and poorly.

edit: A big part of what I'm looking for with "Impact is King" conversations is the ability to take ownership of impact even in the face of dysfunctional organizations because, surprise, all organizations are dysfunctional!

I don't care about the actual impact you made because that's driven much more by the environment you were placed in than your individual performance. I care that you have a good mental model on how to drive impact and that you can perform at a reasonable baseline where you're significantly above average vs peers at your experience level.

"And we think you're going to love it... or else!"

I think it's video game logic imported into films. Pills are a common health pack symbol so more pills = more health regained = more return to normal stats.

It’s not about the speed, it’s about data limits. LTE had fairly restrictive data caps due to congestion constraints whereas more mature 5G deployment will allow for reasonable data caps and still acceptable service for enough people.

No, from a carbon perspective, how you get your food home from the store overwhelms how the food got to the store because the last mile is using 5000lb vehicles to transport 10lbs of groceries whereas all previous steps use 1:1 or less ratios.

Really? I feel like every time I'm in another part of the country for more than a few days, one of my friends will invite me to their weekly hang and I get to meet a bunch of other cool folk.

One thing I found strange about SF is that I never found a group that would do the weekly hang.

The weekly hang is a socially porous experience, it has a fixed location and fixed start time but everything else is improvised. Different people could dip in and out, people felt free to bring new friends, people they just started dating, friends from out of town etc. Some people came once and never again, others become regulars. The hallmark of a great weekly hang is that the entire initial cohort gets replaced but the weekly hang still persists.

It's a commitment in time that "busy professionals" ostensibly had no time for which is why I think it was so unpopular in SF but it really killed a big part of the vibe of the city for me.

OP looked back on his 15 year career and discovered the one thing he was uniquely bad at was negotiating fair and equitable compensation for his efforts and decided to switch into making that his full time job.

If you have a business which pays fortnightly and the average employee makes $250K, then just payroll for 26 employees will reach your limit.

> How could this be 3x the price per square foot of private office space?

It was designed by Frank Gehry and built by Gensler for a client that had an open pocket book. You'd be surprised at how much a pane of glass can cost when it's glass that has to go into a Frank Gehry building.

Facebook's open plan set up didn't come cheap. A Facebook insider once gave me a ballpark figure of how much their giant aircraft hanger cost and I recall it being 3x the price per square foot of private office space which means about 1 - 1.5x the price per employee.

I don't think antagonistic data obfuscation is the primary problem to be solved since, as you noted, it's extremely hard and not valid in most circumstances. Antagonism should be filtered out at the client selection stage, most clients have no incentive to pierce the veil and it's relatively easy to vet and make sure that a client has no benefit in deanonymization.

What obfuscation mainly does is remove the PII that neither side wants to handle before the data gets transferred over so the data is "safe" and the receiver of the data no longer has the burden of stewardship over PII.

Contrary to a lot of handwringing on the internet, almost everyone that handles your data couldn't care less about you as a person. Their overwhelming interest in you is as a bag of attributes that they can statistically correlate with other bags of attributes. It's a relief for them if they can scrub all the PII from their databases while retaining all of the other bag of attribute qualities that they care about. Of course, the few entities that do care about deanonymization are the ones that make this entire process so difficult.

We wish that's what a crypto exchange blowing up was like! Every exchange crisis is either a liquidity crisis or a solvency crisis, we keep on wishing crypto exchange crises are liquidity crises but they inevitably get revealed as solvency crises where crime or incompetence means the money everyone thought was there is just flat out gone.

I can only hope this new push for the G+ization of ChatGPT will result in a repeat of the most inceliest ad of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRxKUXJj1WU

At the end of the day, I find that there are only ever two problems:

* Building the right thing

* Building the thing right

At every company, one of these two questions will be harder than the other and that has a big determination on the relative power/impact of the PM/EM. You have companies like Github for example where the early days customer empathy came almost for free so it was a very EM driven culture. And you have very emotionally designed products like Instagram where PM pre-eminence came from the top.

Every PM/EM relationship is divvying these two tasks with a bias of BTRT going to the PM and BTTR going to the EM but it's never a clean dividing line between the two.

In general, just do what makes sense for the team and know each other's strengths and weaknesses and especially where there are areas of mutual weakness as an area to be careful and invest more effort in.

I think this is an overly cynical take on a promise that either was never made or made cynically without an expectation that sophisticated employees would take it seriously.

If you draw the 2x2 of Good for Employers & Good for Employees, ERGs can be helpful in pushing incremental changes that are both Good for Employers & Employees and reducing stuff that is Bad of Employers and Employees. It probably can't nor ever really promised to work on issues that are Good for Employees & Bad for Employers and that's rightfully where unions play a role and of course executives are already hired to work on the segment of Good for Employers but Bad for Employees.

As long as you approach ERGs with this understanding and also the additional understanding that, at most companies, when dealing with marginalized groups, there are plenty of Good/Good and Bad/Bad issues that deserve work on. ERG groups are pretty forceful in pushing employees away from Good/Bad issues, even if they are more important issues to work on because the purpose of ERGs is a channeling force to focus on the Good/Good problems.

There are plenty of dishwashers faster than 20 minutes, they're all in restaurant kitchens which do have a speed requirement. Several bleeding edge people have installed restaurant style dishwashers in their private homes but the requirements (in terms of energy use, danger of the chemicals involved, noise, temperatures reached) make them not a good fit for almost all homes.

> I have 4k streaming from Netflix, Disney, Prime.

No you don't. Disney and Prime both only stream in HD in the browser/Windows App and Netflix requires Edge or Safari to stream in 4K and is limited to 720p in Chrome.

Can anyone explain why eSIM was the stopgap solution and we didn't go straight from physical SIM to iSIM? What special requirements does a SIM card have that it was easier to put it on a seperate chip? Now that we've moved to iSIM, does this remove the artificial limitation on the number of SIMs a phone can support? Can I buy a phone in 2030 and load it up with 50 different PAYG SIM cards?

There are 8 remaining children who still use Facebook and Mark has a dedicated team of a dozen PMs intensively following each one trying to crack the code.

You need to be talking to Users, Customers and Stakeholders and be clear about which is which.

And if you just build what a user tells you to build, then you’re not a very good PM. Users are not designers, you go to users to get an understanding of what the problems are but users communicate problems in terms of solutions so a good PM uses the proposed solution to understand the problem and then creates a solution that actually solves that problem.

Trust, but verify. Start off in a position of default trust, give people clear goals with a understood metric for success. If someone is not meeting expectations, then start more intensively managing for development with the explicit goal that you want to return to a place of trust.

Start with small wins to build trust that you can increasingly delegate larger and larger areas of responsibility.

They're not goodreputation.com

He sure yadda yadda yaddaed his way between 2004 and today.

Office rentals are quoted at dollars per square foot per year so divide that number by 12 and you realize it's not that large after all.