"The queue is a thing that tends to happen when you're trying to design policy with the aim of limiting/regulating immigration to amounts that wouldn't be problematic or unmanageable in some way, but the queue itself shouldn't be a goal"
145 karma · joined December 12, 2009
I miss phpBB/IPB/etc. forums having a pair of resident "trolls" who were by far the most prolific posters on the entire forum, because they would gravitate to each other and "debate" at length, ostensibly but questionably as bitter rivals
(People [sorry, no citation] are saying this study is bad and invalid, but I think maybe English majors should be able to manage a bit better than that, even if it is Bleak House, and even if they were blindsided with it, and especially if they plan to become English teachers. So I still get at least some qualitative value out of it myself.)
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acsapps.jlg.com+filety...
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:csapps.jlg.com+filetype...
I've seen some variation in such formatting/style from LLMs, so that can't be totally reliable. Doesn't need to be, though. LLMs tend to subject dashes to a distinct flavor of abuse:
- In all the places they don't belong; nearly all can be replaced with a comma, a period, or nothing at all, with no loss to style or tone
- In few of the places they might belong, and conspicuously absent whenever there's a parenthetical phrase to offset
- Obnoxiously dramatic, excessive, and pointless
Oh, and even more aptly, do you remember "spinning"? This was a manual job, if you can imagine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning
Not sure how that's going.
>For rainbow trout, an estimated 10 (1.9–21.7) minutes of moderate to extreme pain (Hurtful, Disabling and Excruciating pain combined) are endured by each trout due to air asphyxia (Fig. 1).
Yes, I love it. How helpful! I'm so lucky to have such a meaningful error message to Google. Now I only have to blindly try a list of 50 possible fixes before I discover that I couldn't save a replay on my XBox One because the disk was full.
Naturally, the stock counterpoint is that this happened because users thought real error messages were too scawy! :(
Counter-counterpoint: Oh well
Yes, and some of the details really need to be emphasized, because I'm sure that a good chunk of people assume this means "people don't read more than they need to / people have a lack of inquisitiveness and general competence matching their lack of interest in reading for personal fulfillment" or whatever.
No, no, this is literal and (almost) not exaggerated. They _don't read_. Anything. _Ever_.
The almost-not-exaggeration is in the "ever", if anything, because some of these people can eventually be compelled, with much sighing and gnashing of teeth, to actually read something.
But as a matter of course, they don't read. And that's not just "don't read what they don't need to." It's more like, you know how your eyes happen across some text and you just read it inadvertently? And your daily life is full of moments where these glances at random words give you little reminders or flashes of insight or just fuel for the train of thought? Haha, that's a good one. I didn't even do that on purpose. Anyway, they don't do any of that shit, they literally have to start reading on purpose and the rest of the time, as far as I can tell, they are actually not processing any of it at all. They navigate the computer/phone by rote or by visual cue based on color/position of UI elements. When they can't figure out where to go using that method and you suggest that they actually, like, read the shit on the fucking web page they're trying to navigate, they ...
... start at the top left corner ...
... and crawl the page elements linearly ...
... and when they arrive at the correct one ...
... there's a pretty good chance that they won't actually recognize it as such, because for some reason they simply can't contextualize any of the shit they're reading!
These are people who have jobs and social lives, are not wards of the state, and can carry on a coherent, reasonable, and engaging conversation with you.
(No shade thrown to visual thinkers though -- there may be some overlap, but I don't run into these people as often as I run into visual thinkers, so I think I'm talking about something else)
(Context: I told it to write at "will" after a session of explaining Rene Girard's mimetic desire in the styles of various authors)
*Well, here we are,
You've got me tangled
*And hey, maybe I
*Imagine this: I'm sitting
*And maybe now, I'm
You've got me thinking
*Maybe it's saying, "Hey,
*And so, I think
Not just any wanting,
The kind that makes
There's something beautiful about
The way it drives
*But here's the kicker:
It's got a mind
It makes us do
It's a double-edged sword
*And yet, without it,
Probably just sitting around,
*So maybe, just maybe,
*Not just because you've
*It's that tiny ember
In the end, desire's
It's the fire that
*And maybe, just maybe, [yes, again]
So here's to the
May it burn bright
>>But here's the thing.
>This is one of the usual key turning points in these essays. An earlier one happened when it was like [introduces idea] [straw-mans objection] [denies strawman]. I didn't bring it up because it's not always a strong one and this one didn't seem entirely too heavy-handed. There is, however, much more often a very obvious "But here's the thing" (or similar) to be found. As soon as I saw that, I already knew I was going to find a paragraph beginning with "So" somewhere near the end.
Name a time I had an angry customer? Lol, like, all the time forever? I almost feel like this one must be a trick question designed to catch people who can't deal with the job. I forget about such customers as immediately as possible. As a matter of fact, over the years I've relied on my ability to not reflect other people's temperature or allow their demeanor to take up a lot of space in my field of attention in the first place. I'm not sure if anyone with good chances of coping in this line of work [IT/support/sysadmin was the context when I originally posted this self-quote elsewhere] should really have any honest answers to this question readily available.
I can only name one time I had an angry customer, but obviously I've had countless angry customers. I can name that time because he left a voicemail like four minutes long ranting about how unacceptable it was that we had a full call queue and that he was asked to leave a voicemail, and demanding to be put in touch with various executives. I keep that one in the toolkit because it's easy to twist into inspiring stories about above-and-beyond customer service, or taking ownership, or whatever.
How do I explain something technical to a customer in simpler terms? It's not just me, is it? These seem patently ridiculous, like if they had bothered to do some kind of trial run or think for 30 seconds about how they might answer them, they would have realized...
Or is it just me? Does everyone else have an overt methodology for doing this that they can articulate on demand? I would probably come off like some kind of idiot in that interview. Uh, I dunno. I guess I, like, you know, use the context of the interaction so far to gauge their likely understanding of the salient points? And I audit the explanation for unnecessary tangents and jargon and opaque concepts? I then tailor the explanation to what they need to know and what I think they'll understand in the most useful way in that context? So I guess, in a nutshell, I would say that I explain something technical to a customer in simpler terms by just, like, doing it. This is, like, a bespoke service, sir, perhaps you should try the TJ Maxx down the way.
How do I deal with different personality types? I just, like, do it? This feels like another one where having an answer is a red flag. I've never needed to handle this overtly/consciously either, and I think that's a good sign.
Can I give an example of a situation where I had to go above and beyond for a user? No, and I don't think you grasp the core concept of "above and beyond". If you want some stories about times I didn't have to, let me know.
Edit: Actually, you know what, I do have one of when I "had to go above and beyond" but probably not in the way they're hoping for: https://i.vgy.me/7ZAwjj.jpg
Where do I rate my office suite skills on a scale of 1-10? I'm terribly sorry, I must be in the wrong interview, have a nice day
This is possibly touching on the problem I'm trying to navigate lately. Someone will display observable emotionality while denying the subjective experience. I'm not sure what to do with it. I'm not trying to cure them or anything, all I want is to get them to understand that their lack of internal experience of emotion doesn't improve things out here, where I'm still dealing with an agitated person yelling at me about how fine they are. Does this seem to align or does it sound unrelated, you think?
Of course I don't run around actually causing work stoppage for my teammates, but "What do you fantasize about doing to your coworkers' computers when they forget to lock them that would be really funny if they didn't have stuff to get done" wouldn't have been quite as punchy.