I worked at LinkedIn (briefly, before retirement) and the product had been useful to me for years before that, so I used it a fair bit but not much anymore since it doesn't serve any of my current needs. There were always awful million-view posts written by humans, useless influencers promoted by the algorithm. That was always garbage, but to an LLM those posts look like success, because engagement, so the LLM tries to replicate that garbage, does a mediocre job, and the result is this sort of weird garbage. Basically the LLM appears to be high on its own supply. Problem is the viral stuff was always what made me want to run out of the room and lock the door, so even if the LLMs did a better job of replicating that garbage, it would still be garbage, just a little less weird.
For decades after my WorldCom experience, I cashed out all equity grants immediately and invested the money elsewhere. Even if the company appears solid and is not run by criminals, it's still sound risk management. Bad things can happen to good companies as well.
I worked for Advanced Network and Services, which operated the NSFNET and was later acquired by America Online. Then one day the company was acquired by WorldCom. A few years later the CEO was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a ~$10 billion fraud. As a systems administrator I knew nothing about any of that, but I could tell that the new management included a lot of players and empire builders. That's the signal that told me to quit a few months after the acquisition. Employees were invited to invest their retirement savings in a mutual fund that contained only WorldCom stock. Many of them lost everything. Pay attention to those signals.
I've been juggling for almost 50 years and there's a lot of good stuff in this post. I just want to add a few things from my own approach to juggling and teaching others.
I often tell beginners two things: (1) a big part of learning to juggle is training yourself to suppress the panic reflex, so simply mindless practice solves a lot of problems, and (2) you have much more time to react than you think (yes this is related to #1).
Joining a juggling club is one of the top suggestions I can offer. I juggled 3 balls and practiced various tricks for years before I joined the motley collection of engineering, physics, and math students juggling in the chemistry building at the University of Michigan, and my progress accelerated massively after I had a chance to see what people were doing and get advice from people who could see me. They also pushed me to try things that I wasn't particularly interested in, and that helped a lot even though I don't do most of those things regularly anymore.
Personally I juggle as self-entertainment more than performance, so as time went on I gravitated toward turning errors into repeatable tricks that look good from behind the balls, with no concern about how they look to observers. If you want to look good to observers then you have to approach it differently. I practice controlling ball collisions (hit them intentionally and make them go where you want!) as well as ball slaps and other really fast recoveries that are honestly too fast moving for an observer to grasp but they make my hair stand on end and that's the point. Do something wrong, then do it intentionally, then do it controllably, then repeat it. Occasionally these look cool but mostly it is more like a fidget spinner than a performance.
My ongoing practice for the panic reflex is things like hitting myself in the face with the balls repeatedly. You have to escalate that to keep gaining benefits. I'm winning if I can smash balls in my face repeatedly without blinking. It can be done!
Thanks for your answer. I get it, you're people, it's a mistake, it's not the most horrible thing ever, but a simple "oops my bad" would have been a shorter blog post. Would you really have been in the same boat if the tweet shown mentioned in the phishing effort had never been posted, or did the phisher fabricate that entirely?
The part I found surprising: 'Twitter fell outside the “things we take seriously” boundary'
Sure Twitter is rubbish, but it's still a huge platform, still tied to your brand, you're still using it, so it can still hurt you. Either take it seriously or stop using it.
I stumbled into this because I volunteer at three food shelves around Burlington, Vermont doing food distribution. At the largest one there is a day shelter with outreach workers and a kitchen serving hot meals. I gave a few phones to the outreach workers that I got from family members, and found that there was high demand so I just started posting on community forums asking people for their old phones. In a few cases I have replaced batteries or screens but if the phone is usable I distribute it as-is after erasing it and applying any software updates. I buy cables and chargers in bulk so I can deliver a complete kit. Almost all the work is sitting down with the donor and erasing it.
So far I have never handled a stolen phone as far as I know so I don't know much about that angle. What I get are peoples old iPhone 7's that have been sitting in a drawer for a few years. They are eager to donate them but have no idea how to get their personal data off them, so the work I do is sitting down with them and walking them through the process. I would say that's about 1 hour per phone including getting to and from the donor, teaching them how to reset their iCloud account password (or Samsung account, whatever) to erase the phone. When I get a carrier locked phone I sell it on eBay and buy an unlocked phone or a bunch of chargers and cables. I'm always happy when the phone is from Verizon or was bought unlocked, but AT&T is better than most.
None of the carriers care if the phone is stolen, unless it's reported as stolen. They only care if it stays on their network. As a practical matter I have to work with the phone's previous owner to erase it (eg, an Apple phone that's been associated with an iCloud account, or a Samsung phone associated with a Samsung account). The carrier lock only matters after I've gone to the trouble of erasing it since I won't distribute a phone that hasn't been erased.
Just adding a little bit of context about AT&T: I collect used cell phones, erase them, unlock when possible, and distribute them to unhoused people through several local food shelves, which allows those people to access benefits, housing, health care, jobs, etc which would otherwise be out of reach. With AT&T I can go to their website and unlock an old phone in minutes, allowing them to use a no-cost carrier like QLink Wireless. With T-Mobile or Consumer Cellular (or many others) they just give you the finger. The phone could be e-waste for all they care.
Worldcom acquired the company I worked for. I saw their culture featured all manner of players, hustlers, empire builders, untouchable princes, etc. battling for turf. Lords and serfs. The stock was supposed to always go up. "Genius" businessmen somehow figured out how to print money where others had not. The company had a mutual fund that only held Worldcom stock in the 401(k) retirement plan. That was a huge red flag for me and it resulted in many of my colleagues losing their retirement savings. I was far from the levers of power but I had a really bad feeling about the leadership and left before the crash. Since then I have always instantly liquidated all options and stock grants and put them in safer investments. That can be a hard decision to make when you see many people getting rich (perhaps temporarily, perhaps not) betting on the equity to keep improving. But I kept expenses low, saved a lot, and still retired at 49 so I'm happy with how it turned out even if I passed on some big gains.
My YouTube addiction is scrolling the home screen looking for the viral garbage they promote to pollute my recommendations with things I would never want to see. I frequently don't watch any videos - I just play Whac-A-Mole on the recommendations.
Fastidious care for tires, and brakes. Best available tires for local conditions. Perfect windscreen hygiene. Possibly LED lights or replacement lenses.
This diet falls into the same trap that all temporary diets do: assuming a brief change followed by a return to SOP will result in meaningful change. Your diet is properly understood as what you eat regularly for long periods, or forever. Change that and you may get somewhere. After your 30s, eat less total calories each year.
I had great experiences in the tech industry for over 25 years with very little overwork, great pay, and though I have some skills, really nothing special. My way to win was getting along in teams, and being vigilant on behalf of customers/company. I have a high school diploma. This was easy money for me.
If anyone looking for a career in the tech industry says they love games and game development, please tell them not to work for a gaming company. I suppose they're not all horrible, but the percentage of horrible companies in the gaming industry is too damn high.
"our analysis shows that misinformation about COVID-19 was disseminated overtly on both Twitter and Facebook by verified, high-profile accounts."
My view: bots make a lot of noise, but they are usually not very persuasive. Authentic accounts spreading misinformation are much more influential than bots. This problem would worsen if Musk buys twitter, because fewer authentic accounts spreading misinformation would be sanctioned. Real people are a bigger problem than bots.
I loved it when Facebook released the Messenger app, because I could occasionally install Facebook to post vacation pics without ever installing Messenger. I've still never used Messenger.