jj4211
@jj4211@lemmy.world
- Comment on Is it okay for a teenager to suck their thumb in public? 3 days ago:
Depends, are they biting their thumb at me? Might have to pull out my rapier.
- Comment on Won't you come? 3 days ago:
Ooooh… exotic
- Comment on Won't you come? 4 days ago:
- Comment on It's The VIDEO GAMES! 6 days ago:
Not everyone’s school time was shitty.
Especially those of us who had school before “A Nation at Risk” incited changes in education.
Reagan’s department of education concluded that falling scores meant kids were slacking and needed to be pushed harder on standardized testing. The result was culling of recess, gym, arts, and things like home economics/shop class. To make more room to hammer in “important” stuff. So the experience became razor focused on some of the most soul crushing material without much reprieve. Note that there’s a thought that making people take the tests they didn’t used to take caused scores to go down, rather than some soft laziness of the system, so we might have ‘fixed’ the wrong things.
Then COVID happened and schools dramatically cut back on social events and interactions. Even as the critical threat of COVID subsided, I think administration found it easier to manage the students this way, so students did not access to lockers back (because that would encourage congregation in hallways) and on top of everything else, they have to lug all their school stuff around. Somewhat a mixed bag as most of the 'textbook’s are digital now, but still have a few big ones.
For me, school had carved out time to socialize pretty freely, to be vaguely active in a gym class, to just do some woodworking stuff, to do some cooking and sewing. Recess until like 13 years old. Current kids stop getting recess about 10 or so and unless they join a sports team likely never see physical activity from school again, and while there are still electives, much more rare. I don’t think I even saw an option for a ‘home ec’ class in my kid’s elective options, everything seemed to be more ‘substantial’ than those sorts of classes I had growing up.
- Comment on How hard could it be? 1 week ago:
Of course the good human will hopefully comes to not knowing.
GenAI has an unfortunate tendency to output consistent sounding stuff with high apparent confidence that means nothing at all. Which still can be useful in a context where the “correctness” can be objectively validated like certain software development tasks, but terrible for anything where the output cannot be automatically verified. Have to decide if it helps you research more concretely, the output doesn’t actually matter if it is wrong
- Comment on Wait, you mean workers *don't* love the automatic dumbass machines that constantly threaten their jobs? 2 weeks ago:
Sadly, at least for as long as I can tell, the horseshit is simply the language of the executives. They feel like they are being smart and insightful while saying nothing. So of course we are going to be stuck with it in any work that has room for bureaucracy to exist.
- Comment on Wait, you mean workers *don't* love the automatic dumbass machines that constantly threaten their jobs? 2 weeks ago:
It’s peculiar as a thing that acts the same whether it’s right or wrong. That is a pretty big drawback when trying to use it for anything vaguely fact based. The fact that if you don’t know yourself, it sounds credible either way, is super tricky. Particularly when managers that are used to gauging credibility without knowing the material come along. They are complete suckers for AI output since they don’t have good ways to know better.
- Comment on Wait, you mean workers *don't* love the automatic dumbass machines that constantly threaten their jobs? 2 weeks ago:
Yep, used it on my year-end self assessment. Told it what I would have written and it bullshitted it up to the appropriate length. I reviewed it and fixed where it invented some accomplishments out of nowhere that would have been awkward if I ever got called on it. Knowing that my performance assessment would only be glanced at and never read.
Similarly, a design document owed to management for something they have no actual interest in. No one honors the design doc, no one expects it to be informative that actually uses the tech, but non-technical management feels ‘included’. Didn’t even need to be reviewed, because all the ones it concretely matters know not to bother with it.
Stuff I always hated and was pointless, but someone wanted to check some boxes.
Though just had someone clearly just feed my email into a prompt and told the AI to use my points to agree with me, and that was annoying to see someone using AI to try to be a sycophant to me. If you are going to be a suck-up, at least suck-up in your own words. I won’t do it to something someone will read in earnest.
- Comment on Wait, you mean workers *don't* love the automatic dumbass machines that constantly threaten their jobs? 2 weeks ago:
If I ignore the datacenter buildout implications and the copyright implications, access to AI facilities might be somewhat useful sometimes. But having it crammed down my throat with management second guessing my assessments of what it does makes it just insufferable.
Also, other people’s AI slop is a huge workload burden too. Even if I am measured and don’t use it much, that doesn’t spare me from the flood of crap from my colleagues…
- Comment on Wait, you mean workers *don't* love the automatic dumbass machines that constantly threaten their jobs? 2 weeks ago:
Management is sometimes ‘true believer’, and only after the bill comes do they decide that maybe their employees shouldn’t burn as many tokens as possible anymore.
They all picture it like AI is a great things and their employees are just not tech savvy enough to appreciate it, so all they have to do is make everyone have a taste and obviously everyone will both love it and become amazingly effective. Turns out that people generally do have a decent impression, for better or for worse, and forced micro management of it doesn’t boost morale nor productivity.
- Comment on Wait, you mean workers *don't* love the automatic dumbass machines that constantly threaten their jobs? 2 weeks ago:
They generally have a hook into the accounts the employees use to access the provider. So you can burn tokens and look ‘productive’ and have it have nothing to do with your work.
A lot of the early adopters have already figured out that measuring employee usage just ends with big AI bills and essentially zero assurance that the AI provider was used productively. Those folks discontinued things like leaderboards and review based on tokens consumed.
- Comment on Wait, you mean workers *don't* love the automatic dumbass machines that constantly threaten their jobs? 2 weeks ago:
Sounds like this could have easily been done without AI, and if the doctor likes things going that well, emailing a questionaire ahead of the appointment would have been even better. Then instead of ‘typical questions the doctor will ask’ being close to what you get asked, you get exactly what that doctor wanted to ask.
- Comment on Min wage in most states is so sad 2 weeks ago:
Think the rough analogy is Jury duty. After going through that, I was frankly surprised how generally decent the folks were that were being vetted. Sure a couple were a bit off, but on the whole the folks seemed pretty reasonable. I didn’t agree with some of them, but at least they seemed to be roughly rational and open to thinking about things.
- Comment on Min wage in most states is so sad 2 weeks ago:
Think this assumes those selected have no friends or family. You can’t uproot a whole family, and it would be unreasonable to break up a family for the extended period of time you imagine.
In practice, it does become making them miserable, because it’s literally forced relocation and isolation from their friends, family, and financial resources.
- Comment on Min wage in most states is so sad 2 weeks ago:
Yes, and thus we should endeavor to find and close the loopholes as they come up.
- Comment on Min wage in most states is so sad 2 weeks ago:
In fact, it’s pretty much already that. While a representative makes a decent salary at $174k/year, that’s not really that much in the scheme of things. Most folks who could swing that job could swing a higher paying one, depending on the location.
So already you kind of either must want to do the job for the sake of doing the job, or (the more usual), the position has a lot of room for various ‘extracurricular’ income, whether it’s bribery or bribery adjacent in the now, promises of future cushy private sector jobs in exchange for favors now, or ability to cash in on the fame with book deals and speaking engagements in the closest to innocuous ulterior motives associated with the position.
- Comment on How do industries that provide goods like lumber or livestock maintain output when their goods take a long time to develop but get used/processed in a short period of time? 2 weeks ago:
Correction that they are also farming lumber, but the cycle is just much much longer.
I know a family that does it as one of a few things they do. Their timber land is relatively small so they have it harvested all at once. Every couple of decades a company pays them a healthy sum to get the timber and then nothing is done with the land for the next couple of decades while trees grow. In addition to the cash payment, they get to own the land tax free as it counts for agricultural exemptions.
Others in the thread are deeper into it and speak of staggered logging so there is annual logging off like 1/25th of the trees at a time.
Not to say there isn’t cutting of totally natural forest, but there is farming too.
- Comment on Minimum wage isn't survivable anymore 2 weeks ago:
This is a reason I feel like public health care should be a bipartisan issue. Business people should love not having to do health insurance for employees.
- Comment on Posted by a school district's official Facebook page in response to a shooting 2 weeks ago:
Once they have that much care and thought, then they probably would have the thought of asking the art teacher or art students to do something vaguely meaningful.
- Comment on Posted by a school district's official Facebook page in response to a shooting 2 weeks ago:
They would presumably have an art teacher. Or a student that wanted to express their feelings via art.
- Comment on New American Food Pyramid 2 weeks ago:
Where’s the roadkill?
- Comment on “Tf???” 2 weeks ago:
Oh the tech wasn’t allowed to discuss medically relevant stuff.
The doctor followed up and I have an essentially benign heart anomaly. Growing up first doctors didn’t think it was worth exploring, then doctors said it went away, that was my first visit to a doctor after moving to a bigger city and those doctors were shocked a doctor would say it went away and not even bother to image it before dismissing it.
- Comment on “Tf???” 2 weeks ago:
A little better, at least then it’s something the doctor likely understands, but thinks it is at least a bit of a teachable situation.
If they call in a peer or superior, then it means something was over their depth and then you really worry.
- Comment on “Tf???” 2 weeks ago:
Back in school went to the school clinic for strep throat, and upon listening to my heart, he said “just a moment”, then pulled in the med student and quizzed them on what they were hearing and how it was abnormal.
Which led to a follow up echocardiogram where the technician was explaining everything we were looking at and what it was, until a very specific view then she shut up, tapped a bunch of things on the device, printed out something, then moved to another view and resumed describing everything except what she just saw.
- Comment on Walmart actually teaches their employees how to get food stamps 2 weeks ago:
Or perhaps the “benefits” should be from government and not employer.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 3 weeks ago:
Obviously, we aren’t giving billionaires enough wealth to create jobs.
- Comment on Back to the future 3 weeks ago:
Looks like it is genuinely rotary dial design. Those aren’t buttons, they are holes. The text is on the black background, the clear plastic above it has holes cut out. There’s quite a bit of thickness to that plastic and it’s some distance from the black backing. Looks very much like a rotary phone looked, though understandable that most folks haven’t seen one up close.
- Comment on Almost 38 & This Is Where I'm At Now 3 weeks ago:
I’ll second the volunteering, though I never really feel comfortable socializing among the volunteers, it still feels good actually doing something I think matters, but at the same time know I’m utterly replacable and no one would specifically need me to do any of it.
- Comment on Almost 38 & This Is Where I'm At Now 3 weeks ago:
Have a colleague who went from over $300k/year to like a $50k/year job. Basically something to vaguely keep the lights on while his savings took care of itself. Way too young to retire, but he figures he can be ok with his savings and bonuses he had over his high paying career.
- Comment on Almost 38 & This Is Where I'm At Now 3 weeks ago:
Never wanted to climb the ladder, but it was the only way I could really get better pay.
The higher I go, the more I can’t stand the conversations. Being straightforward is a career killer. Competing with folks that talk big without knowledge, knowing I need to carefully balance working with them while making sure my ass is documented and covered for any blame when they screw up and want to throw someone under the bus.
I have generally still loved talking to the “grunts” and customers. People who have real problems and doing real stuff without so much office politic crap going on. Not people trying to write blog posts to try to sound smart without actually doing anything or actually knowing the material.