So let’s say you work at a company, and they have an OKR “use AI to improve productivity”. If you aren’t familiar with OKRs, they are something that your manager tells you to do, and the more of them you do the more likely you are to get a raise, or bonus, or at least keep your job. Sometimes they are flat out assigned to you, sometimes you get to pick off a list, sometimes you and your manager come up with them together. You manager likely has an OKR handed down to them to get their employees to use more AI, so this isn’t a pure blue sky thought experiment. It is a realistic situation.

So you end up with this OKR. You can ignore it and at the end of performance cycle you can either fess up “I didn’t even try”, or you can say “I gave it a shot and AI didn’t help”, or you can flat out lie “AI helped some”, or “AI helped a lot”. Which do you do? Which do you do if you were also pretty lazy on the other OKRs and really have almost nothing good to report? If you aren’t lazy yourself you already know any OKR with no real way to double check is something you report having achieved because you were too lazy to do any of ‘em.

If you aren’t lazy you have a bunch of OKRs that you actually managed to do (get 90% of TPS reports in on time, screen all your bugs at least twice a week, whatever). You also likely have a few you didn’t, and you have this one here. Maybe you didn’t bother with AI which gives you the chouces up above in “lazy”, or maybe you gave it a shot and it didn’t help, so you can report a failure, but you worked so hard on the other OKRs, do you really want to jeopardize your bonus because you have this AI OKR?

If you are super honest maybe you will report the AI OKR as a bust. Maybe your company actually has a “if you aren’t failing at least 20% of your OKRs you didn’t set high enough expectations” policy, and sure you can pass or fail some number of the unverifiable OKRs as needed to hit that magic success rate...but that is rare, it is far more common for a company to treat OKRs as “more is better!”.

Plus even if you are fundamentally an honest person, I’m sure you used AI once or twice to summarize someone else’s long emails into something shorter and maybe inaccurate, but surly that saved time, right? At least as long as they weren’t too inaccurate! Or maybe you used it to fluff up a short email/report into something longer, even if you then spent just as long double checking that it isn’t now inaccurate as you would have fluffing it up yourself (plus now everyone else ends up with longer emails they use AI to summarize...). Or you write code for a living, and you AI’ed up some code, and that saved you like 10 hours of coding, I mean it cost 45 hours of extra debugging, but you saved 10 hours somewhere, so you can report meeting your OKR without a lie!

If you are asked by someone outside your management chain, and outside your company the honest answer is somewhere between “I didn’t try”, to “it didn't help”, to “it saved me time in one place, but maybe cost me more in another place”, and occasionally “yeah it was helpful somewhere"

So workers are reporting “yeah, AI makes me more productive” up the management chain because that makes rewards flow back down the management chain. Which makes CEO’s think “this shit works!”, I mean it is exacerbates the problem of upper management job being the kind of thing AI can do anyway, of taking in a ton of data and making choices without understanding what the fuck is really going on anyway, so CEO’s already see AI “working” and they are inclined to believe it, especially when their whole management chain reports it as working...

Well it makes better music then I do. I can’t sing worth shit, and I’m not much better with instruments.

However band camp banning genAI can mean a lot of things, like genAI bothers band camp’s customers and they want customers to be happy. Or worse yet genAI is better at saturating the recommendation engines, but bad at closing sales so now Bandcamp is recommending stuff people don’t like, and won’t buy and that is crowding out stuff they would have bought.

If people actually like genAI it is foolish for Bandcamp to ban it because they would be making money selling it and would make less money selling only human created music.

Of corse this is actually dealing with huge numbers of people, so “nobody” like genAI produced music really means “most people”, maybe you love it. I mean some people like Phillip Glass, but most people do not. Whatever slice of people actually liked genAI music are not going to enjoy the results of a ban, but most people will.

Right, from the rental companies point of view your local bank is more reliable, but that isn’t the entity that cares about the risk. The risk is being evaluated by (or at least on the behalf of) the card the transaction is placed on. So your local card might care more about fraud, or has some actual experience with that company (and it is shady), or otherwise thinks it is a more risky transaction then the card from another country. Again this isn’t about the actual risk because it is the same either way, it is about how the different banks estimate the risks.

The clerk in this case I’m theorizing knows the “happy path” of credit card is swiped and the transaction is authorized, and all the other things the terminal does are a giant miss-mash of “the bad thing happened, that card will never work”. They should know the red CI light means “check ID and press the right combination of six buttons to indicate what kind of ID was checked” and the red D is “this deadbeat ain’t gonna pay, kick ‘em out”, and red CA is “tell them to call their credit card company and sort it out”, and CE is “communications error, reset the internet connection and try again”, and CP is “act casual, go in the back & call the police, give them the product if you can afford it, delay them a bit if you feel brave”, and so on. However they don’t know any of that. Maybe they don’t read well, or they were never given the book just a 5 minute tutorial that only covered one or two of the errors so they treat them all alike. Or they just don’t remember which are which. I mean maybe they don’t get two letter codes maybe they are all numeric.

Or maybe my theory is crap, I mean it has some strengths, but also holes. Maybe it ain’t the real deal, or maybe it is. I think it is plausible but hey, if you don’t like it, keep looking for an explanation.

Easier to tip in advance assuming serve will be good enough to justify the tip and reduce after the fact if it isn’t.

Clearly many people have a different opinion, however Clicks has a MagSafe physical keyboard that is intended to be used with an iPhone, and like many BT keyboards lets you switch between multiple paired devices (sadly “only” 3). I would say that is about as close as anyone who isn’t Apple will get to being able to make an iPhone with a physical keyboard.

Last month they had a pre-order price of I think $80, which I decided was may foolishly expensive, but also maybe a great deal and I bought one for myself as a delayed Christmas gift (maybe it will show up in time to be a birthday gift to myself). So if you actually are interested in a physical keyboard and were only not interested “because Android isn’t iPhone” you might want to take an actual look. If you were not interested because you like the on screen keyboard, fair enough, $80 is a lot of money for “maybe a nice keyboard, maybe crap” plus a “under 300Mah battery” (or maybe it isn’t, have you seen how much MagSafe kickstands sell for?)

Wind and solar tend to produce at different times, as in wind production tends to be higher when solar is lower. So if you have a lot of solar built out but not enough storage to bridge the gaps wind will make the most of what storage you do have by providing power mostly when solar doesn’t. (not so much “at night”, but other then night time either solar or wind produces well around 90% of the time in many areas while solar or wind alone is much closer to 50% of the time)

I’m not saying wind is better, but if you have a lot of solar already wind can be more useful in getting closer to uniform generation, which vastly reduces the cost of energy storage.

I can’t say why integrating them would be better, but I can say not integrating them has real advantages. For example adding a large storage facility could take excess power from wind and solar at different times. As an independent unit it could also retroactively add storage capacity for prior projects, or if this project turns out to have issues the storage could be useful for other projects. If the wind generation is a huge success but the storage system is a dud replacing it with a different storage system is simpler if it doesn’t also involve messing with the generation systems.

Depends. Storage is good if you fall short of generating enough power to meet demand, but you don’t need it if you are able to meet demand. So if for example you have some sort of LPG power generation that is meeting demand but also stupefyingly expensive, or polluting more then you want adding wind so you can cut back on the other generation is fine. If you aren’t otherwise able to meet demand more intermittent generation without more storage can still be valuable, if the existing intermittent generation and the new one tend to be low at different times. For example if you have a lot of solar adding a lot of wind just looking at uncorrelated percentages looks dumb, but in the real world wind tends to generate well at times that solar does not (stormy weather) so the two are much more complimentary then you might think.

To be fair this is mostly my experience from doing small off grid systems, and a utility scale system does have different dynamics (more consistent usage patterns, and less ability to change usage patterns to match supply, and much much higher cost of building out anything that handles peak load).

(replying to just the subject line)

Never agree to be bought by Meta/FB, I mean that is good advice in a narrow context. It is also similar advice with “google” as the acquiring company. A little less so with “Apple” as the acquiring company. I mean being acquired by anyone takes control of the destiny out of your hands, and it also takes most of the control out of your hands. In exchange for losing control over the fate of the company it places in your hands either or both a large pile of cash or stock in the profitable new owner.

So your advice is basically “if someone wants to give you a half billion dollars for your game studio, don’t”.

The more nuanced and more true bit of advice is: “When you sign your company over for life changing money, maybe generational wealth, you lose the company. They will promise you will still run it (as a division inside the parent), and that may even be true for a while, but they have control not you. Just expect to lose it. If that feels like a good trade, take it, if not, well, stay scrappy!”. Of all the companies I’ve ever built I would trade any of them for a few million bucks. After all I can always start a new one. Worst case I’m prevented form starting a new one for a decade or so while I still get paid. (non-competes in CA can be enforced but only while the other party keeps paying you a “reasonable” salary, so if you are making say $300k in cash and $500k in stock a year and you quit and they want to enforce a decade long non-compete they have to continue roughly that level of payment, not sure if they need to keep paying your healthcare, but at that salary level that is mostly irrelevant anyway...)

Not surprising, big companies make choices about what divisions to keep/shutter based on all sorts of things invisible to the outside world all the time.

Adoption of internal systems, how many OKRs are meet as opposed to goals like sales. So “current products form X sell well” is only one factor next to “X’s goals of doing 12 big deal things had only one accomplished; Y’s low sales are accompanied by Y acomplishing 16 “low bar” goals. Most importantly though how well do the directors of X and Y get along with the CEO.

Big companies also tend to think of programmers as interchangeable cogs, so department X with 20 employees and Y with 20 employees are pretty much the same. I mean clearly the only important person is the divisions director who forces his will on the team, and keeps them in line. So if they downsize those 20 people and put the director elsewhere he can achieve great things with some other 20 people, right? Who cares about the programmers...it is management that is important!

In the US people have basically zero rights to use of their image if the image was of them in a public place and taken with a “normal” lens (“normal” was not given a legal definition). I believe it is legal if the person in the image was in a non-public place but the person was taking a picture from a public place. I expect “normal” was intended to mean “you can’t stand in a public street and take a picture with an extreme telephoto through a bedroom window half a block away, it has to capture roughly what a human would be able to see with bare eyeballs”, but that wasn’t clear in the case law we looked at in my photo journalist classes.

For example a gentleman in NY had a picture taken as he walked near a park. That photo ended up in some stock photo library. The NY Times had an editorial about some reasonably controversial topic (“should black people be allowed to exist” or something), the editorial came down hard on the side of “maybe black people don’t have rights” and the photo of the gentleman was run alongside the editorial. The editorial didn’t claim the gentleman had a particular opinion. The dude claimed he suffered social repercussions from people thinking he supported “that shit”, and maybe some professional ones as well. The courts declared that because the photo was taken from a public location with a normal sense (and was of a public location, not sure if that mattered in this case) that the gentleman had no rights over his image.

So that isn’t a good source of legal ability to control use of an image.

Maybe try it from a slander or libel angle? That might work better.

If they are already harmful, for example damaging reputations would they not already be something you can sue for like slander?

If you can’t make a case already that they are false, damaging, and intended to damage should you be able to sue?

Does this expand the useable cases from “intent to harm” to “happened to harm”? Or even remove the burden to show any harm? Extending it directly to “it involves a picture of me, was made using a computer, and I don't like it!”? So I could in theory sue if someone had a picture of me making a “yuck face” and they slapped it on an article about “Linux in the datacenter” and as long as I can prove something about the picture was altered (and it’ll have been cropped and color corrected at the very least) bingo, viable lawsuit!

Yep, they had your ID and had a deposit, but when they run the card the credit card clearing company still does a risk assessment and decided “dude is far from his home area, could be sketchy, tell the vender to double check ID and stuff”, and the terminal doesn’t process the transaction it lights up a red light and gives some sort of check ID code, and in theory the vender should check the ID and poke some buttons that say “I checked, they look OK”.

The credit card terminal doesn’t know you already presented ID, nor does the credit card card cleaning house know (although they should probably be able to understand if told, but it wasn’t worth it for them to find out in advance).

In theory a book that came with the thermal shows what that code looks like, and how to make it go away and get the transaction to really process.

The account having money is one thing, but if the card is stolen the bank wants to decline the transaction so they are doing their best to flag questionable transactions. If they ok a questionable transaction then when the real owner of the account disputes it they have to cough up the money not (in many cases) the merchant.

People do care that the billing run crashes if that crash is relatable, as in getting to NOT crash doesn’t happen. So if “something” in the January filing run triggers the crash and you can’t generate bills people care very very very deeply and strongly about that.

People also care that the bills are right.

I’ve written a ton of code in duck typed languages (ObjC), and have some experience in transitioning that to more strongly typed languages (Swift). They don’t really get in the way of unit testing. Now the might be because in both ObjC and Swift if you want good coverage with unit tests you adopt dependency injection, and the objects you inject in Swift actually end up being protocols, and while protocols are not at all the same as duck typing they are similar. You declare some data type implements a protocol and that obligates you to implement various function signatures and if you don’t the type system stops you at compile time, if you do then nothing really prevents you from passing that object around to things that require that protocol.

I’ve also used a lot of ObjC code that has lots of unit tests, and still falls over at runtime because someone got confused about types and passes something that doesn’t implement the right methods. Are they good enough unit tests? I mean they missed testing that case, so it is easy to argue “no”, but at the same time it is also easy to argue that the coverage is well above industry standards and it seems like it would have been useful for the compiler to tell you about the type mismatch..

That is something that type systems can help with, but type systems are also built to help reason about code and check that the “shape” of data is correct. That you don’t mitkenly pass a key rather then the data item you are talking about, or the index into an array rather then the actual answer (which falls apart a bit if the “actual answer” is an integer, and the language uses plain integers for indices). Type systems are indeed built to help people avoid mistakes like passing a view into something that needs a viewController or vice-versa, not because the type system wants you to make them match, but because you have made a mistake about what is going on if you do so.

Unit tests help catch some kinds of errors, type systems help catch errors as well, and something like Rust’s borrow checker helps catch another kind of error. All of them have value, and they tend to be better at detecting different classes of error, so they have value in conjunction with each other, it isn’t that “oh I have unit tests, so I don’t need a type system” and it is definitely not “I have a type system, who needs unit tests”

It isn’t? Viol8 was talking about map/dictionary and other STL data structures in C++, some of which are the kinds of things you would want in a library interface, like say vectors and sets. A map is C++’s red/black tree but people sometimes say map and mean to be inclusive of hash_map...or at least I think so. I mean it has been a while since I’ve used C++ in anger...