vundercind

We import a lot of material that goes into paper products from Canada.

There’s talk of high tariffs on Canada starting, potentially, only a few weeks from now.

So. I mean, maybe do.

Bribing foreign officials is illegal in the US. It prevents our country from becoming a haven and hot-spot for activity that harms the rule of law overseas and destabilizes foreign states, because we generally prefer that other countries not worry about that when setting their trade policies with us.

Yuuuup. They launder both corporate espionage and collusion as “best practices” (where’d they learn those? Your company! And your competitors!)

That’s great—my experience is years out of date, so my gripes may well be obsolete :-)

Thanks for the work on a project that I got good use out of, and happen to personally like more than I do most software.

Ditto for other use cases, like writer and editor. There are a ton of people doing that work whom I don’t think are ever going to figure out how to use LLMs well. Like, 90% of them. And LLMs are nowhere near making the rest so much better that they can make up for that.

They’re ok for Tom the Section Manager to hack together a department newsletter nobody reads, though, even if Tom is bad at using LLMs. They’re decent at things that don’t need to be any good because they didn’t need to exist in the first place, lol.

Ah, different “action”, then? The presence of “reducer” had me assuming the action was also analogous.

FWIW I liked Redux enough that I once half-reimplemented it for Brightscript so the UI guys would have something familiar to work with when they had to touch Roku apps. I always taught Redux initially using different terminology, though, because I found that most of my time learning it (which, mercifully, still wasn’t that long, because it’s small and pretty sensible) was figuring out the vocabulary (“do… do they just mean ‘event’? Well if so surely they’d write ‘event’, so I must be wrong…”)

Yeah, to be fair, there exist employees (some of whom are managers) who could not be replaced and their absence would improve productivity. So the bar for “can this replace any employees at all?” is potentially so low that, technically, cat’ing from /dev/null can clear it, if you must have a computerized solution.

Companies won’t be able to figure those cases out, though, because if they could they’d already have gotten rid of those folks and replaced them with nothing.

I liked redux, but its vocabulary was the last thing core React should have adopted from it.

No lessons will be learned, but it’ll provide for some sweet, if unpleasant, contract gigs.

Scams and other antisocial use cases are basically the only ones for which the damn things are actually the kind of productivity rocket-fuel people want them to be, so far.

We better hope that changes sharply, or these things will be a net-negative development.

I mean, yes, that is in practice what I’m seeing so far. A lot of spending, and if they’re lucky productivity doesn’t drop. Best case I’ve seen so far is that it’s a useful tool that gives a small boost, but even for that a lot of folks are so bad at using them that it’s not helping.

The situation now is kinda like back when it was possible to be “good at Google” and lots of people, including in tech, weren’t. It’s possible to be good at LLMs, and not a lot of people are.

I’m watching some of this happening first and second hand, and have seen a lot of evidence of companies spending a ton of money on these, spinning up departments, buying companies, pivoting their entire company’s strategy to AI, et c, and zero of its meaningfully replacing employees. It takes very skilled people to use LLMs well, and the companies trying to turn 5 positions into 2 aren’t paying enough to reliably get and keep two people who are good at it.

I’ve seen it be a minor productivity boost, and not much more.

It’s eye-opening to watch management ignore incredibly obvious methodological errors that clearly render the entire PowerPoint they’re looking at so suspect that it’s worthless. And it happens just about constantly.

They’re either dumber than a slightly-bright 8th grade science student, or simply don’t care about the substance of trying to make decisions based on good data, but just the appearance, the theater, of doing so. Either way, outcome’s the same.

Whatever you do, don’t point it out. They will not listen, because they don’t care.

Literally pick any half-organized activity. They’ll be posted all over the Web (sorry, you will probably need a Facebook account), your city’s website may have lists of organizations, and there are probably some fliers posted at the library (and the library may run a few gatherings themselves!)

And I feel like this could all come to no good

The kids who populate these cul-de-sacs will never know what stood

Beneath their cookie-cutter houses, fields and streams and woods

They'll sit in cars and wait for mom to drive them out of this boring neighborhood

- Defiance, Ohio; “Oh! Susquehanna”

It’d be nice to have at least one actual day off every week instead of a day of catching up on all the must-do personal and family work that you had to defer during the work week and then another day that’s half more of that and half fretting that the work week is about to start again and you haven’t gotten any relaxation in.

I do both. If I don’t shower in the morning, my pits and other parts smell in ways that will make my clothes smellier faster even with deodorant. And going to bed with a whole day of sweat and body oils on you makes your bedding gross faster (it’s there, even if you weren’t active). I can’t really imagine skipping either aside from occasionally, all my stuff would smell and I’d have to run like 50% more loads of laundry.

A important confounder is that immigrants—especially from somewhere across an ocean—are heavily selection-biased.

The Boston Tea Party was because the British made tea cheaper which undercut tea smugglers.

If anything, product dumping (which happened to improve the lives of tea consumers, but hurt smugglers) was the motivation, not taxation. In that case.

I sometimes go most of a week without checking any email address. I’ve gone a month without looking at my personal one. It’s basically just for transactional mail, I don’t get things from people there.

> but outside of confidence, grammar and vocabulary

Just those, huh?

Right, there are lots of them and they have more resources and options than a CEO's bodyguards, and still aren't (and again, I don't think this is, at least in general if not in every specific case, exactly their fault) super effective at preventing people from taking a shot, if they really want to and if their plot isn't discovered beforehand.

They do discourage "casual" attempts pretty well, and raising the difficulty constrains and pressures even the dedicated who succeed at striking (if not at achieving their ends) in ways that surely matter, but I think most of that has more to do with the shutting-down-whole-blocks and cordoning-off-entire-areas stuff. The strictly body-guard activity they do mostly just prevents sustained attempts—which isn't nothing, but CEOs aren't gonna keep those first couple bullets at bay with bodyguards. Broader behavior modification? Now that might work.

Homicides are useful because if you use anything else the "nuh uh, it's impossible that (for example) NYC is safer than lots of other places" contingent will just point out (correctly!) that there are massive problems with crime stat collection and so the ones in the statistically-not-that-bad big cities must be faked [EDIT: or, at least, very inaccurate for other reasons] and the ones in the statistically-worse smaller cities and towns are simply not, or are less, faked (this part doesn't necessarily follow, but they're not wrong that it might be true)

Homicides are harder to hide, and are far less likely to go unreported, than other crimes.

The other useful route is victimization surveys. They introduce other issues, but the trade-off is well worth it for evading stats-juking or underreporting. Not a cure-all depending on the topic[1] but pretty good. I believe you'll also find NYC and some other perceived-by-many as especially-risky cities fall off the higher part of top-crime-city lists with this metric applied, when we lower the bar of what we're calling a "city" to include small and mid-sized ones.

Here's a fun one (check the study linked near the top if you want the source—the article's kinda ass, but the charts are handy) that attempts to use per-capita cost of crime to sort of normalize for overall severity of crime ("is double the overall crime rate really worse if 100% of those are pickpocketing and 100% of the 'lower'-crime city crimes are murder?", to illustrate the problem by exaggerated example) and does include smaller cities (broken out from the 300ish ones the study classifies as "large"):

https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/4366668-thes...

(Some large cities are very dangerous and have crime problems! This source confirms that and I do not deny it! The goofy part is that, if you live in certain places and around certain sorts of people, they'll get super-worried about you when travel to ones that simply aren't that bad, and these same folks would never think to worry if you tell them you're visiting, say, Saginaw, MI, or Pine Bluff, AR, but, apparently, they should worry—hell, this whole illustrative exercise probably plays out in Saginaw regularly, I guarantee there are people there who tell their families "hey, cool news, I'm going to NYC for a week" and many of their family members get really worried about their safety)

[1] Picking up on sexual assaults with victimization surveys can be especially tricky. There are two main factors at play, one of which is simply that people are a less likely to report a sexual assault even in an anonymous poll than they are other crimes, and the other is that you'll get super-different results if you ask people whether they've been the victim of a sexual assault or rape, versus asking them whether they've experienced something that, as described, definitely legally qualifies as a sexual assault or rape—that is, a lot more people have factually experienced something that qualifies as SA or rape, than regard themselves as having been victims of those crimes, so... which thing are you trying to capture? Incidence rate of behavior that qualifies, or rate at which people regard themselves as being victims of that behavior? You need a different approach for each.

Yeah, the inherent problems of video hosting are real and highly-devolved decentralized hosting (e.g. IPFS) is nowhere near a satisfactory solution in a world where most end user devices sleep much of the time and need to conserve battery power, but these are separate from the reasons that Google finds humane moderation too difficult to even credibly attempt—the reasons video hosting is necessarily hard, aren't the reasons YouTube moderation is hard. I do agree that discovery would be a problem to solve, but I don't think it's insurmountable. After all, I hear running a search engine can be profitable...

I think at least separating hosting and the not-necessarily-connected role of curation and promotion (plus, maybe, separating distribution from hosting) would go a long way to solving a lot of problems. That'd basically require regulation for it to actually happen, though, because there's too much value in capturing that entire vertical, effectively "dumping" on parts of that potential-market to feed network effects and build a moat around for whichever part of it (the ad-laden curation and promotion interface, in YouTube's case) you're making money on.

This is how a lot of Google's—among others'—properties work. It's frustrating because dumping "free" products for the purpose of marketshare-capture in adjacent markets stifles not just interest in other commercial efforts with different funding models, but also FOSS or truly-free hobbyist efforts. I think this kind of thing is also why we basically don't develop new open Internet protocols anymore, or if we do, they don't take off, even when the need is there—they compete with free but deliberately closed and non-interoperable services funded by ads or propped up by other wildly profitable services, so are DOA even if you can convince anyone that trying to develop them in such an environment is worth their time in the first place.

> will typically seek the services of a lawyer when buying land

I've seen a state where this is required by law, and I've seen a state where it wasn't. Very few people retained a lawyer when buying or selling land, in the latter.

I've bought property in both, and my state-required redistributional tax paid to a lawyer added zero to my confidence level. The extra middleman actually made me a tad more wary.

(I take your broader point, but reject the idea that lawyers are an especially useful element of a normal real estate transaction, for most people, at least in the US—I mean, on some level a lawyer drafted some form-documents and maybe some institution involved had a lawyer quickly glance at something at some point even in the rarely-using-lawyers state, but as a buyer or seller, directly interacting with a lawyer? IDK, maybe if you're involved in a FSBO transaction with no agents involved and also no financing)

I will believe this if you show me the stats. You can use homicide rates, since they're hard to fake or badly under-report, and since many of the other stats crime stats also look pretty good for NYC and I expect you'll dismiss them as extremely incorrect—and it's not unreasonable to worry that they might be, so, you can just use the homicide rates.

Maybe one "scary" big city is managing to do hide far-worse homicide rates than they actually have. Are a bunch of them? Maybe, I guess, I doubt it but maybe. If a bunch of them are successfully hiding a lot of murders, though—are towns and small or mid-sized cities in poorer states just unable to hide theirs as effectively, since they are often really high?

Of course, you do see more crime with higher density and with a higher proportion of travel on foot rather than by highway. That doesn't necessarily equate to higher risk.

Not every small town or small/midsize city or suburb is notably dangerous. Some are safe. Some are even safe and arguably also poor—poor-small-town Vermont, to take an example, tends to be more than a tad statistically different from poor-small-town Arkansas, say, if you want to carve out a whole category of poorish-small-town that may be relatively safe. And anywhere, exceptions may exist.

A whole shitload of them have much higher murder rates than NYC and several other "bad" big cities, though, and it's just about never the rich places of that sort that are high-crime (go figure). Yet, for folks who live in those demonstrably-dangerous places and travel, local members of their family commonly freak out about their visiting big cities that are, statistically, a lot safer than the place they're leaving to make the visit. This is due to wild misperceptions of where the dangerous parts of the US are—some are in big cities, but a lot aren't, and many of the "bad" big cities are actually relatively safe, if you compare them to smaller cities and towns.

What I meant is that if you want to look at small towns and suburbs and consistently find ones that are safe, you're going to want to limit your search to the relatively rich ones. That's a category that largely does fit the assumptions of safety that people have for small towns and suburbs in general (which assumption holds... less well, with a wider net cast)

I think detecting or even being aware of register in writing is an also lot harder for some folks than the same thing is in speech, which can lead to problems similar and related to misreading tone. I'd classify that, and difficulty dealing with tone per se in writing, as at least in part also a reading comprehension problem, but ultimately it doesn't much matter the cause when your immediate task is to communicate with the person: your options are to write better for your audience of that person, or, yeah, switch medium to speech.

I've come to think that a good chunk of the resistance to written-word-heavy remote work, and to the phenomenon of "let's just hop on a quick call" where the alternative was pretty likely to be a much quicker IM exchange, is due to this exact thing—not just that a lot of people can't read at that level-3 proficiency, but that another cohort can, but finds that the absolute limit of their ability and quite taxing, leaving well more than half of the population uncomfortable in a professional reading- and writing-heavy environment, if not wholly incapable of working in it at all.

My ex-home red state has double the murder rate of NYC. Not New York State, the city. DOUBLE. The stats where I actually lived were even worse (and I lived in one of the better counties in my area).

Nonetheless, always the tedious ritual of warnings and concern when I traveled to any "real" city. Like, guys, save that shit for when I'm coming back. I should be warning you, I'm leaving danger. And please stop watching cable news and listening to AM radio.