I read a little more on this, and I honestly don't see how corporate manager is going to manage to do anything helpful with "feedforward" other than maybe a bit of a perspective shift (which might be all the advocates for this are after, to be fair).

At best it will prompt them to give more advice, like "you fucked up, try it this way next time" instead of just "you fucked up". That's not really "feedfoward", but it's something.

That could be helpful, I guess. It just doesn't seem to have the same kind of application that it does in more technical fields.

I don't know about "feed up", but "feed forward" is actually a term coined in the 70's, and is not quite the same as feedback. Where feedback is responsive, feedforward is preemptory.

In cognitive science, "feed forward" is a signal sent to prepare a system for future motor activity or expected sensory input.

Feedback, of course, is a signal sent in response to some sensory input or activity, and is used to make adjustments to some process based on said signal.

Feed forward signals are used in certain kinds of neural networks as well, where most use a feedback mechanism.

Based on the article I read, the guy who is advocating "feed forward" in a corporate setting, Marshall Goldsmith, actually means it more in the cognitive science sense, where feedback tells you how you've done, and feedforward tells you how you can improve in the future.

A less buzzword prone person would probably simply call feedforward "advice" or "instruction". But how do you sell books without a new buzzword?

Actually the "Start" button makes a certain kind of sense from the right perspective (the perspective I believe it was originally intended):

It was essentially a "Start here for anything you need to do" button. Instead of having 12 different places to look for things, it was all under the Start button.

You COULD make a separate "Power Off" button, but why, when you already know where to Start? If you wanted to find where the Power Off button was, of course you'd start with the Start button. ;)

I believe this new Gen-X trend that has been around for hundreds of years will be called "Quiet Working".

Microplastics ending the world as we know it within 12 years is a much more likely claim than this meteor that might have come from outside our solar system is actually some sort of alien technology.

We have convincing evidence that microplastics exist. We have convincing evidence that microplastics pose problems for people and the environment in general. It's still an insanely massive jump to say they will cause so much damage we could consider the world has "ended" within 12 years, but it's at least several steps along the evidentiary chain to such a conclusion.

With the "alien meteor" literally the only evidence we have for anything is that it's an unusual combination of elements in the leftover pieces of the meteor. That's it. It's not even definitive evidence that they were extra-solar meteors. They simply don't match any currently known combinations of elements found in "local" meteors. It could be they are extra solar, or it could be there's some local mechanism that formed them that we are unaware of. There is literally zero evidence of any sort that they were created by some sort of intelligence. None.

Do you see the difference between these two? As unlikely as it is that microplastics will end the world in 12 years, we have a million times more evidence for that than that these meteors were machines made by aliens. Yet that is what Avi Loeb is pushing.

This is why nobody here takes Avi Loeb seriously.

The person you replied to is definitely cracked in the head and guilty of all the things you said, but I actually found the blog post he referenced to be very insightful, and not at all a climate denial argument. It's more about PHDs being essentially forced into an exclusively climate change focused lens for research into subjects that have minor to moderate climate related components (e.g. the wildfire research the blog author conducted, or heat deaths and crop yields from another study mentioned), intentionally excluding more impactful elements of the subject (forest management and human started fires in the wildfire research, or the fact that heat deaths have been declining while crop yields are increasing in the other) so that the research paper can have a more eye catching title and conclusion.

He's saying the research is plenty accurate, but the actual picture is muddled because they are encouraged to conduct the most flamboyant studies possible by the simple nature of the high number of PHDs competing for research funds and journal acceptance. It's pointing out a systemic problem that may lead to research causing more harm than good.

That doesn't have much bearing on THIS article, but it does speak to the field as a whole and the direction our peer review system is heading as well. A number of other relatively high profile instances of similar issues have come up in the medical and pharmacology fields as well, and others have noted the general lack of effort given into researching null hypotheses in science as a whole.

Capitalism is like a car: with a competent driver behind the wheel it can take you almost anywhere quickly and efficiently. However if appropriate care isn't taken to keep the car on the road it will happily run itself into a tree, or another car, or a pedestrian, etc. I don't know of a better economic system than well regulated capitalism. Unregulated capitalism, however, is a danger to itself and everyone around it.

Despite their horrible reputation on the end user front, Oracle is still a major player in the data infrastructure industry.

They don't stop being good at what they've always been good at just because they're bad at certain other things.

On some level it is. It also enables a lot of projects that wouldn't otherwise exist.

Most of the analysis I've seen is overly simplistic and one-sided.

Still, charging a dev for installs regardless of how those installs occurred seems pretty over the top to me.

You can trust a person, but you can't trust people.

Also corporations are literally made of people. If you can't trust corporations, you clearly can't trust people. And you definitely can't trust corporations.

Not when they're secured with a tertiary Authenticator app. That's the whole point of MFA. If they're secured with an authenticator, it doesn't matter if you've got the email address and password, because you can't get the OTP. Those OTPs are supposed to be locked away on the user's device.

Unless, of course, Google makes an incredibly stupid move and syncs those OTPs to the cloud in a way that makes a single OTP match for dozens of accounts when they should be exclusive to a single account.

It sounds like this was a very well executed attack as well.

No doubt all that the employee had to miss was a little bit funky email address and/or a little bit funky enrollment website and the hard part is done. And benefits enrollment emails and websites are often wacky, so I completely understand how a non-expert could fall for exactly this angle of attack.

On top of that, regular users are trained to just enter the codes whenever they see them these days. It's pretty much the same problem we've always had. MFA is better than passwords for protecting against password leaks and brute force attacks, but it isn't really any better against phishing and other more psychologically based attacks. Once a certain level of trust in an individual or process are established, it's game over.

I was hoping someone would have some good ideas for how the company SHOULD be handling the sensitive information, but all I've seen are dumb arguments about who's dumb for asking the only people they have access to about what they're doing to keep said PCI secure.

My naive approach would be to keep a record of the individuals who have access to the information (clerks, supervisors, etc), like a chain of custody document, and store the information itself in a locked cabinet (as secure as possible, obviously you work with what you have), labeled in some way to coincide with who had access at each stage. This puts the onus on each person in the chain if something happens to the sensitive, providing both a strong incentive to protect the information and a narrow starting point to investigate if sensitive information is leaked.

Can anybody do better?

Is that why the current record survival time for a spacecraft lander on Venus is 2 hours? Because it's so manageable?

My dude, you're insane. We have better tech, yes, but our tech isn't so much better that we'll have rovers on Venus running about for years on end like we get with Mars rovers. The Soviets ran missions into the 80's (and so did we, but we didn't really do landers), and our materials aren't significantly more heat and pressure resistant than they were then. The research data you get per dollar spent is many orders of magnitude higher for Mars than it is for Venus.

In fact, the DAVINCI probe, which was planned to fly on the same mission as VERITAS, is only expected to last for less than 20 minutes after it reaches the surface. The surface is so harsh they plan to do all their data collection in the air, any surface data is just a bonus.

"Could" is the key word there.

You have to be careful how you implement these programs, as the law of unintended consequences rears its ugly head.

Case in point, current independent carbon offset programs have largely been shown to be abject failures at actually reducing total carbon consumption. These are programs of the sort where a company buys credits in some charitable activity meant to reduce carbon production in another part of the world, in order to offset their own production which would be much more difficult or expensive to reduce.

The classic example of this is a charity that sold carbon credits to fund higher efficiency stoves in a region where 3-stone fires are still used. For reference, a 3-stone fire is literally 3 equal sized stones with a fire between them and a pot on top of the stones to cook meals, like you'd make if you were camping. This is basically the least efficient type of fire possible, with something like 70-80% of the heat going into the open air rather than the pot. This requires a huge pile of wood to burn daily just to meet the cooking needs of a small family.

So the charity comes in and introduces these cheap but efficient stoves that put more like 50-60% of the heat into the pot rather than 20-30%. The idea is obviously with the higher efficiency stove the family will need to burn far less wood. This reduces carbon emissions overall, and frees up some time spent gathering wood that can be put to more productive activities. Sounds like a great strategy right?

But that's not what actually happens! No, what happens is the family doesn't reduce their wood consumption at all! They KEEP the 3-stone fire and run it along side the high-efficiency stove! Their daily output trebles, only now their producing enough cooked goods that they can sell some on the side, or they can better support extended family members who may have been struggling, etc. Great for that family and community that is receiving these stoves en-masse, no doubt, but little to no carbon reduction!

These credits end up being sold as worth say 10lbs of carbon offset each, when the reality is that they are worth maybe 0.5lbs of carbon offset each, if that.

This has happened to pretty much all of these carbon offset charities, because they totally fail to accurately predict human behavior.