In large companies, these pointless mandates come down from higher-ups who are completely divorced from individual contributor reality - and are initially completely ignored by everyone below a certain level in the org chart. Ground-level HR doesn't want to enforce these orders, because they're measured on (inter alia) employee satisfaction. If the higher-ups don't go investigate, they won't find that their whims are being ignored, and life will go on - everyone remote, but the top brass in blissful ignorance.

What can upset this apple cart is either a nosy higher-up who actually follows up on his diktat "just because I want to see my monkeys dancing", or a surprise event that reveals that no warm bodies are, in fact, sitting in cubicles. For example (and this is not a theoretical example) a site might get a surprise visit from a third-party inspection team, and nobody is there to answer the door. This typically leads to a progressive tightening of rules after each incident. Again, basically everyone below a certain level in the company recognizes that this is meaningless nonsense, and complies to the absolute minimum degree possible, with a strong element of "don't ask, don't tell". I've observed this at multiple organizations.

The only case where followup/investigation is guaranteed from the get-go is where RTO is explicitly put in place to cause attrition. Attrition numbers are easy to see on a single slide of a PPT, and they're watched closely. If not enough people quit, there will be an investigation as to why not enough people have been made sufficiently unhappy to leave the company.

That was _EXACTLY_ the vibe I was channeling there. Or in other words: https://www.mikeleake.net/2023...

My point is strictly technical. Fossil fuel _production_, even if the product is never used, releases greenhouse gases. Yes, production is driven by demand. But that's not what I was talking about.

Fossil fuel production involves significant CO2 and CH4 release, inter alia. Natgas extraction and transport involves significant leakage. Petroleum refining almost always involves flaring off unwanted hydrocarbons.

They were body parts picked at random. Left ear and right eye? Regardless, to the troll-file with you.

There is nothing remotely racist about saying "If you cut off your left arm, you cannot expect your right foot to take over its functions".

Post-breakup, Russia continued to make the Kurs antenna array while - VERY reluctantly - buying the rest of the system from Ukraine. The fact that they couldn't just grab the blueprints, tool up and make the guts in the Russian Federation makes Kurs as Ukrainian as it needs to be to deserve the name. In any case, a significant slice of Russia's scientists and engineers originated in Ukraine.

... they crashed a Progress M-34 into Mir, permanently decommissioning the Spektr module. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - they tried to replace the expensive partly-Ukrainian Kurs rendezvous system with an all-Russian equivalent, and it didn't turn out so well.

To continue your analogy, most managers either failed that class or are constrained by corporate policy that prevents them from achieving it. There is a real close correlation between "companies that are forcing RTO" and "companies that stack-rank", "companies that RIF regularly based on nonsensical metrics", "companies that are operating on very old policy playbooks" (my previous employer actually had instructions about 8" floppy disks in some of their document control policy docs), etc.

This is just grandstanding, seeking influencer status by opining on a current controversy (of sorts). Sure, there are companies implementing RTO policies to go with the TPS reports, corporate "rah" events and other drivel of a bygone era. And there _are_ people who are either more comfortable being a honeybee in a cell, or are in some other kind of position that makes them put up with it even if they're not comfortable. But the genie is permanently out of the bottle on this; companies that do not offer remote work will not attract first-tier talent. In 2025, that isn't even up for debate (unless you're trying to extend the length of a YouTube video to get more ad impressions).

That's Tizen, and it was explicitly not Android - it was its own Linux-based OS. The reason Samsung developed it was, at its root, because Google won't let a vendor sell both AOSP and GMS devices; if you are going to sell Google-certified GMS devices, you have to agree not to sell non-Google-certified Android devices. What Samsung was trying to do with all their bullshit parallel app store universe was this: Sell GMS devices (which are the only devices people in primary markets will buy) with Samsung's music store and app store and home automation and intelligent assistant (if you can call Bixby intelligent) and so forth, loaded alongside the compulsory Google apps. Get people into the Samsung app ecosystem. Then sell them a Tizen phone (with Android emulation) that has only the Samsung ecosystem, not Google's. Then, stop paying Google license fees, and also start rolling around in the ad revenue from their own network. PROFIT! It didn't work because nobody cared, or has ever cared, or ever will care, about the Samsung app store, music store, video store, various other canceled stores, or Bixby.

But this is either circular logic, or "you just have to BELIEEEEEEVE". Huge amounts have been spent on placing AI in various positions. If AI salespeople are making 95% of their money selling into places where AI won't work... then the only thing that is provable is "AI can successfully handle only 5% of the paid jobs that it's receiving". It could mean the sustainably addressable market is only 5% of the current snake oil hype market.

This. And for a corporation, the whole point is that the AI's output has to be used without having humans look at it, because humans cost [more] money. This is a fundamental, well-discussed issue with many LLM use cases that live in important spaces - to act on the output, you need human invigilators, and once you add enough of those to restore safety to the system, the AI becomes irrelevant.

Why? Whose "success" are we talking about here? I would argue that if you're an entrepreneur and you build a hallucination, and it sells to someone so you, personally, make out like a bandit - that's success.

Gee, that sounds an awful lot like what I said about "using memorized magic incantations to operate", n'est-ce pas?

To be fair, git evolved to solve a problem I don't really encounter - lots of people working on the same exact file at the same exact time. In my world, each programmer has responsibility for a module(s) that are pretty isolated - the only shared things being global header files and the like, and the process to change those global header files is long.