My office just ditched it’s Wednesday work from home policy. I mentioned to a co-worker that we could start a petition and vocalize our displeasure as an office wide unit.
She shot it down, because so many of her co-workers were insisting “actually this is great, we love being in the office” in front of management. And the more unreliable folks were consistently the biggest kiss-asses.
Office politics is a bitch.
What I’m hearing is that there’s 100s of GW of solar power trading at below-market rates.
What becomes epidemic can often be assumed as normal.
A Cautionary Tale: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome And The “enlarged” Thymus Gland
In the first half of the 19th century, physicians were becoming alarmed by sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Healthy infants would be put to bed and found dead in the morning. In 1830, pathologists noted that SIDS-affected infants had enlarged thymus glands compared with “normal” autopsy specimens. It seemed logical to conclude that these “enlarged” glands were in some way responsible for the deaths.
…
If an enlarged thymus was leading to sudden infant death, removal of the thymus might be of preventive value. Radiology had advanced to the point at which physicians began making the diagnosis of thymic enlargement from x-ray films. After radiographic diagnosis, thymectomy was initially recommended, but the mortality rate was unacceptably high. Thymus irradiation became the treatment of choice.
The first “successful” use of irradiation to shrink the thymus was reported by Friedländer in 1907. Thousands of children eventually received radiation to prevent status thymicolymphaticus. Some physicians advocated prophylactic irradiation for all neonates.
There was only one slight problem. It turned out to be deadly
The cadavers used by anatomists to determine the “normal” thymus size were from the poor, most having died of highly stressful chronic illnesses such as tuberculosis, infectious diarrhea, and malnutrition. What was not appreciated at the time was that chronic stress shrinks the thymus gland. The “normal” thymus glands of the poor were abnormally small. Here is where the fatal mistake occurred: because the autopsied thymus glands of the poor were regarded as normal in size, the SIDS-affected infants were erroneously believed to have thymic enlargement
In a household or community where large numbers of people express the same symptoms, it is very possible for people to assume this condition to be the normal one and good health to be the abnormality. They may even conclude healthy people are in need of treatment to bring them back to “normal” patterns of behavior.
You can see this error repeated historically, from abusive parents assuming “being beaten by my parents toughed me up so I should do the same” to anti-vaxxers who think measles and whooping cough build character.
~ Rachael Bloom, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
“We’re a startup”
“What’s your plan?”
“Giant mirrors in space to control the sunlight that hits the earth’s surface.”
“Wow, sounds incredibly expensive and of dubious technical merit. What are you asking to make this happen?”
“We need whatever money you have in your wallet right now.”
“And the return on investment?”
“Infinity zillion dollars.”
“I guess I’d be a fool not to hand you all my money.”
“Absolutely. Now… that’s a really nice watch. And shoes. We could get you an amazing return if you gave us those, too.”
What are they supposed to do?
My grandparents spent a lot of time playing tennis and bridge, knitting, and fishing.
Really raises the question of how profitable these scam ads have become.
Also speaks to the addictive quality of social media (or perhaps the grim state of offline society). People keep coming back to these obviously booby-trapped websites to claw at a thin veneer of simulated friendship because they’ve got nothing better to do with their lives.
They’re just gonna lay them off.
And hire other people with the excess budget. Hell, depending on how badly these systems are implemented, you can end up with more staff supporting the testing system than you had doing the testing.
Ugh. QA. Quality Assurance. Reflexively jamming that & because I am a bad AI.
Regardless, digital simulated users are going to be able to test faster, more exhaustively, and with more detailed diagnostics, than manual end users.
I mean, as a branding exercise, every form of sophisticated automation is getting the “AI” label.
Past that, advanced pathing algorithms are what Q&A systems need to validate all possible actions within a space. That’s the bread-and-butter of AI. Its also generally how you’d describe simulated end-users on a test system.
You don’t let AI check your work
From a game dev perspective, user Q&A QA is often annoying and repetitive labor. Endlessly criss-crossing terran hitting different buttons to make sure you don’t snag a corner or click objects in a sequence that triggers a state freeze. Hooking a PS controller to Roomba logic and having a digital tool rapidly rerun routes and explore button combos over and over, looking for failed states, is significantly better for you than hoping an overworked team of dummy players can recreate the failed state by tripping into it manually.
I wouldn’t be shy about getting into Remake or Rebirth now. They both stand up as their own games (concise start/ending, somewhat distinct mechanics, each one is easily 40+ hours of gameplay). And with Part 3 targeted for 2027 release, I suspect this kind of overhaul would be outside their dev cycle to implement.
Part 2 is already using the engine from Part 1 with minor adjustments. I suspect most of Part 3 development is cinematics and world building.
I would initially tap the breaks on this, if for no other reason than “AI doing Q&A” reads more like corporate buzzwords than material policy. Big software developers should already have much of their Q&A automated, at least at the base layer. Further automating Q&A is generally a better business practice, as it helps catch more bugs in the Dev/Test cycle sooner.
Then consider that Q&A work by end users is historically a miserable and soul-sucking job. Converting those roles to debuggers and active devs does a lot for both the business and the workforce. When compared to “AI is doing the art” this is night-and-day, the very definition of the “Getting rid of the jobs people hate so they can do the work they love” that AI was supposed to deliver.
Finally, I’m forced to drag out the old “95% of AI implementations fail” statistic. Far more worried that they’re going to implement a model that costs a fortune and delivers mediocre results than that they’ll implement an AI driven round of end-user testing.
Turning Q&A over to the Roomba AI to find corners of the setting that snag the user would be Gud Aktuly.
You’d need someone with access to a large body of accurate data to survey it and tell us.
One more reason why a guy like Mamdani in the mayorship is useful. He’s invested in identifying real estate bottlenecks and unclogging them, whereas an Eric Adams simply doesn’t care and a Cuomo would only do the work if he got some kind of kickback.
Out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I was absolutely hooked on softdrinks through my teenage years. Then I had a couple of really painful root canals. Scared me to the point that I simply couldn’t touch soda without thinking about it.
Easiest thing in the world to not drink the stuff when you simply don’t have any of it in the house.
The flip side to this is “oh, snacks are in easy reach? Time to eat”
Also, the procrasta-snack. Where you go into the kitchen to look for food because it beats doing whatever it was you are trying to avoid.
Half the joke in the Mamdani rent-freeze is that it doesn’t do more than limit the rate of growth of landlord incomes.
If anything, it encourages landlords to start releasing more units that have been withhold from the market as an excuse to raise rents as there’s less incentive to constrict supply under a price cap. That’s going to mean more cashflow, even if it threatens lower profits per unit.
With this series, we aim to present not just the most complete picture yet of the GFW, but a roadmap for pushing back against the machinery of state censorship.
It’s definitely a deep technical dive into the underlying infrastructure of Chinese internet services. But I’m not seeing any of this in the guts of the article.
Definitely stems the tide, but it’s a long way from “never seen an ad in 25 years”
Companies need clients. That’s sort of the secret sauce in business. If you don’t have good relationships with the management at your client firms, you can’t win the contracts that give your work recognizable monetary value.
:-/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat