Exactly - And there is the interesting part. The typical angry response does not allow for any deviation from the idea that people who work from home are the most competent, most productive employees who will have the world beating a path to their door.

Yes this is true. There are of course some good remote jobs, but not enough. The first part is obviously true. So why not the second part? Well it must be an army of incompetents and quislings like you and I not just standing in their way but actively fighting them.

Certainly some people do work better alone.

It's certainly true that some people can work better alone. And it's also true that some people can figure out what the right thing to work on better alone. The intersection isn't close to 100% though, and I think quite a lot of people can end up working effectively on a task that's not especially important. It's the useless interruptions which can let you know what the important problems are.

Another thing is despite what appears to be the norm on Slashdot, most people need a bit of actual humanity around them. Or perhaps most people are cowed into silence by their histrionics if some dares to disagree. But humans are by and large social creatures. Introversion is not the norm. Nothing wrong with introversion, but there seems to be a conscious effort to force on others these days.

Also introversion isn't absolute in most people.

Finally, a person who wants to slack off ie, a lazy person - will have a marked tendency to love WFH. Just sayin'!

Yeah, and not just that. I've noticed a tendency among a certain sort of programmer to also convince themselves that say upgrading from yesterday's must have web framework to today's must have web framework (while incidentally learning all about today's must have web framework) is really really really important actually so guess what gets done on the WFH days? The big boss is in an idiot you see and doesn't understand the pressing need to update a working, relatively bug free and lightly used end point. So they might be working effectively in as much as writing company code, but not usefully.

Also slackers. Slackers love WFH.

Yes, some people have the need to make shit up

This comes back to your first point about the presumed superiority. Providing counterexamples attacks their presumed superiority so it is equivalent ot a deeply personal attack. So you get the kind of response as if you've insulted their mum or whatever.

That hasn't been my experience

No one EVER replies as quickly by text (I'm guilty too). The in person-ness does some effective filtering. Person not there? Well, wait. Person busy? You may be able to judge if your needs are higher priority and they better be if you interrupt. Every text system I've had always gets a high proportion of near spam which necessitates mental filtering which stop instant responses often.

What you describe sounds a little like that.

Yeah could be. I wouldn't class myself as either introvert or extrovert. I can do and enjoy people stuff but it does completely knacker me after a while.

Observing that some people aren't responsible enough to work without someone breathing down their neck is a wildly different claim than saying the work itself couldn't be done remotely.

I don't think it's that simple. Sure, if you're talking about physical possibilities for single instances. But those aren't anything other than a bound because you have to have people to do the tasks. Once you've got low to mid skill people in a dull, dead end job, you have a problem. For certain kinds of job, I reckon it becomes more or less impossible to motivate the majority of people who will actually do the job.

At that point what does it matter if someone could in theory do it remotely?

My original statement, just a statement without anything incendiary in it, has ignited a firestorm of profanity, personal insults and general anger. Because people disagree with me, their rage is somehow appropriate.

I have encountered much the same. I think on a previous thread I stated that I tried WFH, hated it and even though I was a solo contractor, paid for a desk in a co-working office so I could be out of the house and have other people to talk to, and that actually proved incredibly and let to me doing a startup (didn't work out but that's another story).

Yo wouldn't believe (well hyperbole, obviously you would) the batshit insane things people here were saying to me, such as I'm a shit manager and a worthless employee who leans on other people's work and steals credit because what other possible reason could there be to be in work?

I am honestly not sure what part of "independent contractor in a co-working space" they didn't understand.

But it's this incredibly blinkered view that WFH is GOOD and RIGHT and anyone who has any alternative experience or opinion is (a) out to get them (b) stupid and (c) evil. All for the crime of being a human with only very mild introversion (I like and need socialising, but too much is draining and I need quiet focus time too).

But maybe it's this too:

Maybe it makes them feel better living in a world where competence is inversely proportional to ones place on the food chain.

but we now know virtually all white collar work can effectively be done remotely;

Do we know that? I sometimes have to interact with some particular people in a non IT white collar profession. They ain't good at replying to emails and so I phone them yet "lunch break" now seem to extend from about 11 to 3. Those fuckers need to be back in an office with someone actually watching over their shoulder so that they are actually at their desk and actually answer the phone if it rings. Oh and I only ever have to call because of paperwork that hasn't been done for too long.

I have a friend who's pet theory was HR's main goal was to tune compensation to keep the attrition level where the company wanted it.

Your friend's pet theory is predicated on HR being both really smart and working in complete lock step with management.

You'll argue "If I'm doing my job, I don't need managers." A good manager should be taking care of the sh*t you don't need or want to be doing. Either doing it themselves or seeing that someone else is taking care of it and not blocking you.

And also ensuring that what you're working on is the right thing to be working on. A good manager should have some idea of what direction product development is going in the short, medium and long term and what other teams and projects are doing that may effect the manager's team.

Well also that and that valuation i predicated on growth that' physically impossible.

AI companies have started talking about "GW" of installations which makes it simpler to analyze. The electricity capacity doesn't exist to meet the growth predictions. The manufacturing capacity doesn't exist to manufacture the generation capacity required to meet growth predictions. The capacity to build manufacturing facilities to match predictions doesn't exit.

The market has gone irrational because there's no way growth can match predictions. I ain't shorting though because Keynes isn't wrong.

I expect any other irrationality will also bite hard. Claude is pretty good, really. Not, like, perfect and AI will destroy the world and programmers, but the genie is out of the bottle here, something like it is here to stay. It's too useful. But let's say OpenAI stumble and suddenly their terrifying outgoings slightly tip over and they go very broke very fast, well, the market will panic and go omgomgomgomgAIisbadactually!!!111onelelevne and the entire thing, Anthropic included, will crash through the floor, even though people will, for example, still be spending a lot on Anthropic.

Where's the part of small government, freedom, free market, don't tread on me now?

Right there in power, it was all lies and a branding exercise. The right have never held to those beliefs, but it turns out that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth for enough people that they can get into power.

But you know "both ides" so I voted for the worst. How come on one ever says "both sides" so I voted for Harris?

HP 4%, etc.

Well HP had the genius idea of putting a 8723409821E+27% markup on printer ink while selling the printers at a loss to bring in customers. Unfortunately they also forgot to not make their printers so shit that they self destruct before HP make enough back on the ludicrously overpriced ink.

It's like the shittines doubles for the customer, but somehow cancels out on HP's end.

Fuck HP. Also Apple, can't stand those fuckers (shame their CPU is so good), but also and especially and for ever fuck HP.

Either you posted AI slop or you've been reading so much that you've tarted to ape chat GPT's style.

Anyone who doesn't think it's impressive can go hand in their engineer card at the door.

This feels a bit like a distinction without a difference?

Development feeds into distribution however you do it, so, at some point you have to deal with that.

Besides, pypi is more of a package distribution system than a software development system.

So you agree you are being an idiot?

No I'm agreeing that you're a moron.

Do you need a working EUV mahine in order to build your first EUV machine?

Yes or No. Simple question. The GGGGP was saying you do not.

That is what you appear to be disputing and I agree with you that you are being an idiot for disputing it.

All you have is someone saying it is true.

Is that what you think? You really fail at reading. He's talking about making 2nm fabs not making 2nm chips.

What does "drive better than humans" mean? Drive better in all possible scenarios? That's likely impossible now and probably forever. Maybe driver better in a majority of scenarios weighted by occurrence probability? Maybe, but we don't currently have the technology to validate this requirement.

Indeed it's interesting!

There are obviously mistakes that SDCs will make that humans never will (ignoring sci-fi shit, I'm talking about the current state of the art), and things they'll be worse at.

There's also mistakes they won't make: they never get tired, impatient or angry. They never turn around to yell at (or beat, yep I've seen that) their kids while driving. Being more widely trained they won't lack experience driving with a find misting of unexpected liquid on the roads (hi LA you suck at driving in the rain) etc. They won't text. Won't try to punish other road users. Won't get drunk or high. And so on. Well they shouldn't. If SDC companies think they can skirt or edge over the law to get a competitive advantage they will, and now you'll have law breaking at scale (well kinda like regular drivers!).

And they can (Waymo, not Tesla) have superhuman senses, e.g. lidar and radar.

But... well it can be measured to an extent: you can measure deaths per billion km, and see if SDCs do better or worse. Though that can hide a lot of things. For example if they are utterly unable to cope with unexpected situations and stall blocking the roads, then deaths caused by blocked emergency services won't be attributed correctly to them.

Certainly any comparison to the worst drivers is useless.

Depends: I would assume (though common sense often isn't so YMMV) that the worst drivers are responsible for a much higher proportion of problems than the best. So let's say the SDC apocalypse eliminate the worst X% of drivers, but also flatten the best 100-X% down to X. I'd imagine that there is some value of X where this is a net improvement.

Question is what is X. Probably middleish I'd imagine since the worst X% do the most damage.

But of course also SDCs will always make different mistakes which makes it hard to evaluate because the X% level SDC won't really be like an X% level human.

I don't think the cherry picked examples of "SDC does something dumbass" because (e.g. in the UK, where we have some of the safest roads in the world) 1600 people die per year due to motor vehicle collisions a substantial number of those are due to utterly fucking stupid people (nearly 50% are alcohol related).

It's an interesting question. That of course centres around the mechanics of SDCs driving compared to humans. There are likely to be other damaging failure modes when you have 3 companies controlling almost all cars, where for example certain kinds of traffic management become impossible because getting google to agree to code for it is impossible and they somehow won't pay fines. Or you might have the "cruise forever if you can't find a parking spot" button which will will make traffic even worse because the roads are free to use and there'll be a mechanism to abuse free resources for personal gain even further.

This seems like essentially a variant of the Waluigi effect hypothesized here https://www.lesswrong.com/post... which had the advantage of a pretty fun name for the situation, and is worth reading

I've not seen that before. It was an interesting read.

Huh I agree with you, pretty strongly, about something!

Personally I think the right to privacy stuff is a little broken. It was fine to have no particular expectation of privacy in a public place because when those laws were written the only practical way to violate it was to have 1 person essentially stalking one other, and that doesn't scale. It's really expensive, so a few people might have their privacy violated in an unreasonable way but as a population it was fine.

We now have the tech to scale cheaply, so a well funded organisation can follow huge numbers of people all the time.

Depending on your views of private corporations, that may or may not be acceptable.

However, the temptation for the government is always too great here, and if that data is available they will use it legally or not. I think the only way to stop them is to make it much harder for companies to do panopticon surveillance in the first place.