strgcmc

This is probably stupid, but at the hope of helping others through exposing my own ignorance -- I'm having trouble actually installing and running the preview... I've downloaded the preview release duckdb binary itself, then when I try to run "duckdb -ui", I'm getting this error:

Extension Autoloading Error: An error occurred while trying to automatically install the required extension 'ui': Failed to download extension "ui" at URL "http://extensions.duckdb.org/0069af20ab/osx_arm64/ui.duckdb_..." (HTTP 403) Extension "ui" is an existing extension.

Is it looking to download the preview version of the extension, but getting blocked/unauthorized (hence the 403 forbidden response)? Or is there something about the auto-loading behavior that I'm supposed to disable maybe?

Years ago back when there was no AI biasing your interactions with other children... The entire argument is that the new generations don't have the same opportunity to form friendships in an unfettered way like you did in your childhood, because of the pervasive influence of AI that didn't exist during your own childhood.

That's very naive. AI replaces any and all "less fun" forms of interaction, for children who are too undeveloped to appreciate any goal/metric besides "fun". Meeting new unfamiliar kids is not fun, ergo kids will fallback to the known-safe, comfortable, fun companion that is AI.

If you believe the argument makes enough sense to justify replacing adults, then why do you think children will still want to play with each other, instead of just playing with AI? If anything, other children are MORE likely to display shitty behaviors than adults, given that you know, they're fucking children who don't know any better.

Have you spent any time around children?

I'm sorry but your take is just too stupid to ignore, and I apologize in advance because ad hominem is not my goal.

I'll boil this down to the simplest possible explanation of why your statement is idiotic -- children who are trained to prefer AI, will never learn how to form friendships with their peers (aka other children, who won't always give perfectly timed emotional responses or always be calm or always answer what they need to hear). Other children are not able to "rethink their behavior" yet because they are children still.

A world in which, I ask my child "do you want to play with Timmy next door, or stay inside and play with Alexa/Siri/etc." and my child always prefers to pick Alexa, is one of the most dystopian outcomes I could possibly imagine for childrearing.

Forming friendships and human connections is a skill. Learning new skills is hard and not always fun. A soothing AI companion that always says what you want to hear, is going to trap children in a dopamine loop that prevents that kind of social skill development from ever happening.

Perhaps this is closer to Vanguard's ownership model, i.e. that Vanguard is an investment management company that is owned by its funds' shareholders?

I definitely think there is a way to make this viable at small scale in a tech/SaaS context. But to survive and grow to larger scale, I think you basically have to ensure your business following this model is not "too profitable" or else someone will want to crush and replace you, and hoard the profits for themselves.

It's kind of forgotten about now, but it's a bit of a minor miracle that Vanguard's unusual structure survived the early days, then grew to become an investing behemoth. I suppose the reason nobody tried to kill Vanguard to steal their customers is because the business model was pretty boring and profits were unsexy enough that others just let them do their thing (I mean, low cost index funds, and the boring type of customers attracted to them? Talk about a ceiling on profits, compared to what a more adventurous fund manager could make elsewhere selling a typical 2-and-20 deal to greedier customers...).

I mean, let's go further than that even... Imagine if somebody invented commercially viable nuclear fusion and achieved effectively free and infinite electricity, then by your logic, either of two things could happen:

- Bitcoin becomes immediately worthless, because suddenly many actors could afford to tap infinite energy to mount a 51% attack and destroy the security of the network

- Or, self-interested miners would try to "corner" the market, nearly infinite though it may be... Industrial players might try to outrace each other in terms of bringing more fusion power plants online that are dedicated towards mining -- "white hats" trying to preserve Bitcoin, vs "black hats" trying to destroy, and it's just an arms race... Maybe the end result is actually that, humanity only has productive need for 5% of the total energy that fusion generates (hey it's my thought experiment, just go with it), so what do you do with the other 95% that is otherwise pure excess? ... Maybe it all goes back into Bitcoin mining anyways, because maybe God loves a recursive joke

I wouldn't argue about usefulness, but certainly Bitcoin mining is more directly economically rewarding than an indirect contribution towards protein folding progress for the field at large.

Every 1 hr of mining at X hash rate will yield a fairly predictable (though fluctuating) $Y of output, but every 1 hr of protein folding will not necessarily yield any direct or predictable income. From the perspective of profit-maximizing energy producers, I suspect they will prefer the former, unless someone can quantify or monetize the latter more easily and directly.

Comments in other threads explained why there will always be a gap between generation vs storage capacity, or why it's economically unwise to build so much storage as to cover peak generation.

For my purposes, I assumed a reasonable allocation towards storage was already going to happen, and that there would still be excess unused capacity beyond that level.

There seems to be a blindingly obvious solution, to capture some economic value from the otherwise excess solar power generated -- Bitcoin mining. In theory, it's very similar to this application, using otherwise wasted gas flares from oil drilling: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/12/23-year-old-texans-made-4-mi...

Please note, I am not advocating for Bitcoin mining as a productive means of consuming electricity that could have gone to something else (either industrial or commercial or residential) -- I'm specially talking about what the article is covering, aka EXCESS generation that truly has nowhere else to go... Might as well convert that electricity into Bitcoin, to capture something (better than nothing) from the generated electricity.

You probably would enjoy this book "Subtract", about the science of less: https://leidyklotz.com/media/

I dunno, this seems like a pretty good understanding to me. What more would you ask for, to represent "understanding" that satisfies you?

---

(I posed the Wikipedia version of this puzzle, to Claude Sonnet 3.5 free tier)

"A farmer with a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage must cross a river by boat. The boat can carry only the farmer and a single item. If left unattended together, the wolf would eat the goat, or the goat would eat the cabbage. How can they cross the river without anything being eaten? "

Let me think through this step by step, analyzing the constraints from your message:

1. Items to transport: wolf, goat, cabbage 2. Constraints:

   - The boat can only carry the farmer plus one item
   - Wolf will eat goat if left alone together
   - Goat will eat cabbage if left alone together
   - The farmer must control the boat

Let me solve this:

1. Initial state: Everyone on starting bank (wolf, goat, cabbage, farmer)

2. First crossing:

   - The farmer must take the goat first
   - (If they took the wolf, the goat would eat the cabbage)
   - (If they took the cabbage, the wolf would eat the goat)
   - Result: Goat is on far bank; wolf and cabbage on starting bank

3. Second crossing:

   - Farmer returns alone
   - Takes the wolf across
   - Returns with the goat
   - Result: Wolf on far bank; goat and cabbage on starting bank

4. Third crossing:

   - Leaves goat, takes cabbage across
   - Result: Wolf and cabbage on far bank; goat on starting bank

5. Final crossing:

   - Returns empty to get goat
   - Takes goat across
   - Done! All items safely across

This solution ensures nothing gets eaten because the wolf and goat, or goat and cabbage, are never left alone together.

Would you like me to explain any part of the solution in more detail?

And all I'm saying is that, you probably need a different example of what "reasoning" is, because the one you gave is something that Claude is seemingly able to do.

I think you need to re-calibrate your expectations... I'm not saying this is a solved problem by any means, but I just tried this out with Claude Sonnet 3.5, and these instructions seem quite reasonable and detailed to me (about what I might expect if I spoke to a human expert and they tried to explain the steps to me over the telephone, for example). Does this mean this LLM is able to "reason"? I don't know that I would make THAT bold of a claim, but I think your example is not sufficient to demonstrate something that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of... in other words, the distance between "normal LLM statistical tricks" vs "reasoning" keeps getting smaller and smaller.

---

My base prompt:

> Here is a hypothetical scenario, that I would like your help with: imagine you are trying to help a person create a bicycle frame, using their home workshop which includes a CNC machine, commonly available tools, a reasonable supply of raw metal and hardware, etc. Please provide a written set of instructions, that you would give to this person so that they can complete this task.

First answer: https://claude.site/artifacts/f8af03ba-3f2c-497d-b564-a19baf...

My follow-up, pressing for actual measurements:

> Can you suggest some standard options for bike geometry, assuming an average sized human male?

Answer including specific dimensions: https://claude.site/artifacts/2f5ea2f3-69d8-4a1b-a563-15d334...

Look, you asked for advice, I gave some advice and suggested you do some introspection, and just based on the evidence of this comment chain alone, we can see the answers to some of my earlier-suggested questions:

- You aren't willing to accept feedback or alternative challenges to your base worldview. You like to twist conversations so that they happen on your terms only.

- You are unlikely to revisit a previously-held belief, or you rarely change your mind based on new information or new perspectives, or you are unlikely to admit mistakes or acknowledging that the viewpoints of others can also be valid (in fact, specifically you seem unable to comprehend that, admitting that someone else's perspective is valid != admitting yours must be wrong... it's not a zero-sum game, but you seem to think it is).

- When you try to ask for help (again, you were the one who asked for advice in the first place...), some people may try once, but they won't want to continue talking to you, because there is no mutual benefit here. Nobody gets anything positive out of talking to you in this manner, if you bring nothing to the table besides negativity and appeal to surface-level pedantry (e.g. definitions from the dictionary? simple acknowledgement that power structures exist?). If you actually learn how to have constructive conversations, where both parties get something positive out of it (aka make it non-zero-sum), then I promise you, you will find more traction with relationship-building, AND it won't feel like "sucking up". But if you can't learn how to do this, then I fear that people will rightfully avoid talking to you, because they get nothing from it except the misery you inflict on them.

---

I'm sure you'll want to get a last-word in, so feel free to do that (and likewise, I will exercise my freedom to not respond and just go about my own life). But if you ever have a change of heart, perhaps when you gain a little more maturity or perspective and you somehow revisit this thread, then you may realize that:

- I already agreed with you that power structures exist esp. under capitalism, that essentially yes, "superior" or "inferior" are necessary-but-not-sufficient factually true labels. Nonetheless, these labels fail to capture the complete spectrum of human relationships, and you offered nothing substantive to refute this point either, so I assume you either don't understand it, or are incapable of acknowledging new information or alternative perspectives.

- I tried to suggest, in various ways with a few leading questions, that you lack humility and an inability to accept feedback. IMHO, this along with your reductive stubbornness about reducing working relationships into simple "boss vs underling" power structures, are the most direct reasons for your professional struggles. In other words, you don't need to learn "how to suck up". You need to reframe your entire approach to human relationships, and recast it in terms other than the one-dimensional interpretation of power structures... We live in a multi-dimensional world, but your "mental model" is too simple, because you reduce everyone to a one-dimensional vector embedding with a single boolean flag: "is_superior (T/F)".

- If you think I am over-focusing on one particular phrase like "sucking up", then you were free to offer alternative angles for discourse, if you wanted to steer the conversation in a more productive direction. But what you ended up doing was basically trying to suck me into the same pit of misery that you inhabit, where superiors are evil and holding your livelihood at threat... maybe that's a fun way to pass the time for you, but frankly there's nothing productive about going down that path, so I won't join you there (and I sincerely hope you find a way to climb out of it yourself).

---

As a parting gift, here are some random resources for career growth (I don't know if you are an engineer or a manager or what, but perspectives about other people can still be helpful). I hope if you are sincerely trying to grow and overcome personal limitations, that you are willing to engage with curiosity and humility, to learn something new that might challenge your preconceived ways of interpreting the world:

- https://staffeng.com/guides/

- https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineering-caree...

- https://github.com/keyvanakbary/learning-notes/blob/master/b...

- https://www.learninpublic.org/

Well, if this is how you think, then I am afraid no useful advice is going to penetrate your preconceived notions of inferiority. It is actually possible, and happens every day at every company, that meaningful relationships exist across managerial lines or levels of seniority; it is simply an existence proof because it exists all around you. But if you are someone who rejects the evidence in front of your eyes, or feels like you are too unique/special that "normal advice" doesn't apply to you somehow, then I am sorry but you are stuck until you address these deep-seated issues about inferiority and viewing everything through a lens of enmity.

FWIW, I actually personally hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time: I distrust capitalism and dislike the distribution of power between the capital-owning class and the working class in society, but I also understand and appreciate and respect the amoral ruthless effectiveness of capitalism. So, I can emphasize to some degree about the moral unfairness of an amoral corporation holding your livelihood over your head, but I can also build real relationships based on human connection, while compartmentalizing the human part away from the structural imbalance of capitalism part.

Well, are you an executive, or one step from becoming one? Then it's entirely possible that spending more time socializing recreationally can directly help your career. Golf happens to be a common choice, but maybe your exec team likes rock climbing or playing video games... just depends on the company or the social group.

Also, whether you are an executive or middle-manager or an IC, overall I don't doubt that socializing and networking and investing in good relationships, is helpful to one's career, but to differing degrees (i.e. for execs = a lot, for middle-managers = a medium amount, for line-level tech ICs = a much lesser amount). And building relationships or earning trust by spending time together != "sucking up".

Just the implication that you associate "golf" with "sucking up" apparently, shows that you likely have an inherently antagonistic view of personal relationships. For any given group of people, either they truly like playing golf, or golf just happens to be a convenient activity that allows for lots of downtime, and therefore encourages discussion/communication to happen, either way it's very likely that they are getting together for reasons other than "sucking up".

Why do you assume that what happens on the golf course is inherently or inevitably about "sucking up"? Have you never encountered a group of people, getting together for some event (recreational or otherwise), where they just communicate on equal footing, or debate ideas together, but with no one being fawned over or worshipped?

I would actually encourage you to zoom out 1 or 2 levels, and instead of focusing on the "how to get better at 'sucking up'" problem, I would instead coach you to think about why you chose to apply this specific mental model to your career, and why this form of "black-and-white" thinking might be hurting you even more (as a general theme, where "suck up" is just one specific example).

I am 99.9% certain that, the overall trajectory of your career is not hinging on something as specific as "if only I learned how to 'suck up' then everything would be great". This is actually a form of magical thinking, of making excuses to avoid engaging with the real problems, and instead just lumping everything into a single excuse as to why ____ didn't work out.

The fact that you mention "too much pride, introversion, embarrassment" is also a clue to me that you might be someone with very rigid patterns of thought, and therefore likely to fall victim to black-and-white thinking (that something is all-good or all-bad, that something can ascribed to 1 single root cause to blame, etc.).

Some off-the-cuff ideas/questions, not all of them may be applicable to you, but hopefully it triggers some introspection on your part:

- Do you often think thoughts like, "I know I am right, everyone else is wrong, why can't they just appreciate my genius"?

- Is there anyone that you actually respect in your team/your org? Have you ever tried to ask them, "how did you get to where you are?" Do they mention "sucking up" as a big ingredient?

- When was the last time you asked someone to help you with something? Did you phrase it as a demand or threat? Or did you seek some kind of mutually beneficial win-win outcome?

- When was the last time you admitted to making a mistake?

- When was the last time you let someone else convince you to change your mind about something?

> But it’s not a good reason to call the senior manager who doesn’t understand the situation “competent”.

I'm not so sure that this is actually true... It certainly seems like a certain flavor/kind of "competency", for a manager to wander into unfamiliar territory, or come across an unfamiliar topic, and to have the wherewithal to then say, "well I don't understand why we have a $10M budget, and I don't understand what will happen if we reduce it to a $6M, gee my rationality is extremely bounded... but I know enough about management in general, to know that making big changes is risky, and all my underlings keep telling me that cutting budget to $6M is a terrible idea --> therefore, despite my too-bounded rationality, I will be competent enough to realize that not changing anything is the safer path (even if I don't fully understand why, and even if I have no crystal ball to predict next year's budget process)"

Maybe you would just call that having "self-awareness of their own bounds"? And if you have self-awareness than maybe that automatically disqualifies you from being "too bounded"? But absent arbitrary semantic rules like that, the ability to make wise choices with imperfect understanding or large gaps in knowledge, is itself a demonstrable and valuable skill that some people have, others can learn, and also some that will utterly fail to ever grok.

Leonardo da Vinci imagined flying machines. When most people may have believed it to be a priori impossible during his time, instead da Vinci probably believed it to be simply another (solvable) engineering problem.

That being said, even if da Vinci had absolute certainty that his viewpoint was correct, that heavier-than-air flying machines were a factual inevitability... what could da Vinci have done to capitalize on this knowledge? Other than draw some diagrams and hope future generations pick it up, but in his own contemporary timeframe, this knowledge of the inevitable future would still be generally useless to him. It would not affect his daily life, it likely would not change a single decision that he would make otherwise.

Likewise, let's say you're right, that conquering death is an inevitably solvable engineering problem. So what would you do with that knowledge, right now? Of the cases called out in the article, of people who could not live off of ECMO, how does having this knowledge of inevitable immortality that's coming 100s of years later, how would that change the decision-making rubric today for those patients or whether those ECMO machines are better used on someone else?

I venture to say that, even if you knew with absolute certainty that engineered-immortality would be achieved by a known future date, say 200 years from now (though it took ~400 years between da Vinci and heavier-than-air flight)... IMHO it shouldn't make any difference at all to the present-day decisions of how those ECMO patients should be treated today. Only if you knew the date of pending immortality was let's say, <10 years away, would you make some kind of drastic push to try and keep everyone alive barely long enough to benefit from that breakthrough.

... In fact, I vaguely remember reading a short story about this very conceit, of generations of humans in a fictional setting, working towards immortality, and how at a certain point, they reached a stage of awareness that, achieving immortality was likely going to happen soon in the next generation, so what would they do with that "last generation" of humans to ever need to face death? How would people feel, how would they react, if they knew that they were just a little bit too early to benefit from the breakthrough that might come 20 years from now? Sadly can't recall what that story was called or any more details that would make it easier to search for.

> And all for slightly faster shopping.

Wanted to comment on this part -- Prime itself was nothing more than faster shipping, though yes the difference between 4-6 weeks standard vs 2-days was massive (not just slightly faster). But the point is, Amazon excels at identifying friction points that others have just accepted as industry norms, but which, if unblocked, could actually meaningfully shift consumer behaviors.

Go might be a failed experiment, but "slightly faster shopping" is probably an unfair trivialization of what the experiment hypothesis was really about. A core thesis of Amazon in general is basically, to fanatically remove any unnecessary extra steps/friction/bureaucracy/etc., between a consumer and their act of purchasing.

For another example, think back to why Amazon cared so much about the 1-click patent -- legal validity aside, the idea that you can have 1-click checkout, was pretty revolutionarily customer-obsessed, compared to the average online shopping experience of the early 2000s.

And in fact, the natural progression from 1-click, is of course going down to "0 clicks", which is what things like, subscribe-and-save, memberships/subscriptions, or Alexa/Echo styling clothes for you, are meant to do -- they are meant to shift the consumer's mental model of shopping away from emphasizing the build-up from browsing into the climax moment of then clicking to purchase, to instead make the actual purchase decision more of a hidden-in-the-background/automatic thing, instead of a foreground conscious choice.

There is a simple but undeniable element of genius to the idea of, instrumenting the number of validations triggered. I would hazard a guess that 90+% of teams would focus on an "order success rate" type of metric and call it a day, instead of a "# of times bad data was handled" metric, which is exactly how you escape this trap of good work going unnoticed.

Thanks for sharing! Shamelessly stealing and applying this concept at work next week!

That's... not actually how that 30/70 statement is meant to be read.

Imagine as a simplified analogy, applying to get into Harvard. Imagine Harvard has 1000 spots to fill, and that there are 10,000 applicants with roughly equivalent credentials (because they all have: near perfect test scores, high GPAs, strong extracurriculars, etc.).

In that environment, one might conclude that, for people who successfully get into Harvard, it was 30% their own skill, and 70% "luck" that the they happen to be semi-randomly picked by the admissions committee who could've easily gone with a nearly-equivalent alternative.

So sure, in that environment, "luck" is a factor, but this is by no means a "free lottery ticket" because the near-equivalent applicants had to work hard and be smart to reach the point of being near-equivalents of each other... So it is with promotions in competitive tech companies at least, where good talent is the norm.

Those types of questions are likely to engage "problem solvers", aka people who don't just wait to be told what to do, but who actually demonstrated proactive critical thinking by reacting to a challenge. Those types of people are more likely to put extra neurons in for future problems (contrary to stock markets, past performance is actually a strong indicator of future success, when it comes to hiring).

If you don't have any scenarios from your work experience where you can demonstrate being a "problem solver" who reacts to stuff, then you probably aren't someone to likes to fire up the extra neurons, and hence wouldn't be a fit for the parent comment's desired team/org profile.

Incentives operate on a slow time-scale. Let's say you have a decent team as a baseline, but starting to fall into this "just tell me what to build" apathetic failure mode. How would you turn this ship around?

As a manger, you could go as far as saying explicitly -- "hey, any engineer who demonstrates customer obsession and shows attention to impact, will receive their choice of project to work on, will get promoted faster and higher than those who don't, etc.", but this is unlikely to create a positive outcome. At best, 1-2 people may rise up, but the rest of the team will resent them for "try-harding" probably; crabs-in-a-bucket mentality is a very natural human group phenomenon. And now you've got 1-2 "stars" who won't want to stick around to deal with the rest of the shitty team members, so once they leave, you're back at square one.

Reorging is a reasonable step to take, but it's risky and you could just as well end up "infecting" other orgs or team members, by carrying the contagion of bad culture with you.

Firing and hiring again more carefully, is honestly both faster and more direct, and shouldn't be seen as a "last resort" option IF the culture is truly too far gone AND the culprits are readily identifiable. First step is probably to make sure you have a firm and accurate diagnosis of the problem, then if you're 99% sure you can identify the right people to fire -- go ahead and fire them.

Such structures exist, i.e. worker owned co-ops. They're obviously just not the norm under capitalist systems.

So in a similar vein as, data engineers being people who USE things like Redshift/Snowflake/Spark/etc., but are distinct from the category of people who actually build those underlying frameworks or databases?

In some sense, the expansion of the role of data engineering as a discipline unto itself is largely enabled by the commoditization of cloud data warehouses and open source tooling supporting the function of data engineering. Likewise, the more foundational AI that gets created and eventually commoditized, the more an additional layer of "AI engineers" can build on top of those tools and apply them to real world business problems (many of which are unsexy... I wonder what the "AI engineer" equivalent unit of work will be, compared to the standard "load these CSVa into a data warehouse" base unit task of data engineers).

This is kind of a meaningless question to raise in a vacuum.

For most people who get the chance to talk with "tech CEOs", the basic context of the conversation is usually built on a profit-seeking foundation -- Should I invest in you? Should I sign a commercial deal with you? Should I work with you as an employee? On that basis, morality is often orthogonal to profit (sometimes opposed, and rarely aligned with).

Most people, most of the time, if they are evaluating tech CEOs for any semblance of "morality" or ethics, it is usually most pertinent to consider business ethics -- Will you uphold the terms of a contract? Will you sincerely work to create shareholder value (above personal goals or benefits)? Will you be a good leader for your employees, treat them fairly according to professional standards and company policies? This level of ethics is necessary in order to conduct good business; trust is currency and if you cannot trust a CEO to uphold standard business and professional ethics, then the cost of doing business in an environment of mistrust usually becomes exceedingly high.

Anything beyond that, like is this CEO a "good person", are they working for the betterment of mankind, etc., is usually not worth evaluating for 95% of people -- not because it's unimportant, but because (a) capitalism is amoral and grafting morality on to it is kind of an exercise in futility, and (b) most people are not equipped to evaluate the answers in any kind of serious or logically rigorous way.

Essentially this same sentiment, applies to any number of things:

- Why would anyone buy the Framework laptop, they don't have nearly the support/pedigree that Dell, HP, etc. has?

- Why would anyone use iPhones in the enterprise/IT world, they don't have nearly the support/pedigree that Blackberry, Microsoft, etc. has?

- Why would anyone use Google Fiber, they don't have nearly the network or support that AT&T, Spectrum, etc. has?

- Why would anyone ever use Linux (in enterprise, let's say), compared to the support and adoption that Microsoft/Windows offers?

- ...

I'm purposely picking different examples with varying degrees of success or adoption. I am not claiming that Oxide will be an instant category-dominating success. I don't think Oxide expects to replace HP/Cisco/Dell/etc. overnight, and I don't think a business has to launch with that ambition from the start, to prove that it's worth launching.

But this take is so repetitive as to be bordering on cliche -- I don't know if you're self-aware enough to realize, you are literally just a living embodiment of the "Innovator's Dilemma" right now...

I think that's reading too much into, what is fundamentally a very normal and common way of dealing with CEO turnover -- appoint a safe, business-friendly steward of a CEO, while you stabilize the crisis and decide who the real long-term leader should be.

The word "interim" was clearly used, and there's no hint in the PR statement about this being a permanent appointment. So I don't think it's reasonable to equate this to a clear doubling down of anything.

At the same time, a guy like Whitehurst is a safe, relatively unimpeachable medium term choice, not like someone you'd use for a truly short interim 30-90 days while you execute an executive search quickly. If you need him for 1-2 years of just don't rock the boat leadership, it'll probably work out fine for the company and the board would be satisfied.

There's a lot of good feedback to chew through, but I'll refrain from diving in too deep, and just mention that, as important as the HVA/DSI methodology is, there's been a comparatively lower amount of research done in "negative HVAs". In theory, one can do the same type of analysis to compare "twins" and pick out the NEGATIVE value of having repeat payment problems or repeat unsuccessful customer service interactions. Optimizing for growing the positive HVAs, is fundamentally different from optimizing to reduce the negative ones, but Amazon has the tools to get there or to do both, if it wants/needs to.

And yes, 12 months is arbitrary and doesn't capture everything, and longer windows of analysis are possible, but waiting even longer just throws the signal-to-noise ratio too far in the direction of noise.

FWIW, I no longer at Amazon, but I've yet to see a company of significant scale apply this level of econometrics so rigorously in day to day business decisions, or that they would evaluate 12 months as a baseline (most companies and most A/B tests are much shorter, obviously). I'm sorry you've had bad experiences, and anyways I think it's overall good for society to cultivate strong alternatives to Amazon, but as invisible as it may be to you as a consumer, your data and your lost value as a customer are definitely accounted for within these methodologies, even if no visible changes are happening or they're not winning you back.