What bugs me about the editing in the movie is they gave only a couple of seconds of screen time for key plot elements like the nitrogen resistance breeding and how/why this would cause issues for Rocky. It made the last 20% of the movie less coherent for anyone who hasn’t read the book.
Many large organisations put people into a position where there is zero personal upside to action, but some non-zero upside to inaction. Risk avoidance, less work, lower stress, no need to learn anything new, etc.
Government bureaucracies do this most often, but you also see it in thankless software maintenance where the people empowered to merge PRs simply… don’t. It’s easier to do nothing.
I also notice this behavior at large corporations when dealing with something small that they do, where even huge improvements won’t “move the needle” for the corporation as a whole so they just can’t be bothered. No bonus, no work!
As a random example: I found a one-line fix that improved the performance of a flagship enterprise software product by a factor of five and was told that nobody would lift a finger unless I could prove that this change would directly increase sales by at least $5 million!
I have often heard this story. To my ears, inexperienced in the tech industry, but experienced in others, it sounds absurd. If a modification improves performance even in the slightest perceptible way (of course it needs to be perceptible by the user), it is the job of the sales team to hype it up to the heavens.
To me, these stories sound like a ridiculous failure of the sales team or of the executive team to communicate the change to the sales team.
If this was a self-funded startup where performance directly translates to less of an impact on the hip pocket of the founder, then yes, absolutely, you'll traction with even the smallest improvement.
Similarly, I love watching CppCon talks by Andrei Alexandrescu where he describes a 1-2% improvement across a huge fleet of servers that probably got him a nice bonus and/or a promotion. That's because he directly reduced the costs to the corporation itself, making his manager look good, or his manager's manager, or whatever.
Nobody gives the slightest f%&# about their customer's experience. They really don't.
I say this with confidence because I just looked up Andrei's video on YouTube and the page froze for a solid 30 seconds while it loaded 200 bytes of text and a few thumbnails.
Google doesn't care in the slightest what my experience is.
Nobody does!
That's because in any larger organisation, only your superior's opinion matters. Customers are not superiors.
> What "tooling" do you use to let AIs work unattended for long periods?
Claude and Kagi Assistant. I tried tooling up a multi-model environment in Ollama and it was annoying. It's just searching the web, building models and then running a test suite against the model to refine it.
My favourite variant of this merrygoround is when they ask you to demonstrate the issue live in a Teams session, you do so, and there's this moment of silence followed by an "Oh... I see".
Then you assume, naively, that this means that they've recognised that there really is a product problem and will go off and fix it. However, then in turn the support tech needs to reproduce the the issue to the development team.
They invariably fail to do so for any number of reasons, such as: This only happens in my region, not others. Or the support tech's lab environment doesn't actually allow them to spin up the high-spec thing that's broken. Or whatever.
Then the ticket gets rejected with "can't reproduce" after you've reproduced the issue, with a recorded video and everything as evidence.
If you then navigate that gauntlet, the ticket is most typically rejected with "It is broken like that by design, closed."
what still is important though, is to look into who is meeting with them, lobbying them, and how they profit from what they're doing personally.
this last part may just be my own bias in observing politicians, but I rarely feel like the top politicians in the EU (or any of their member states really) push for things they themselves actually care about or believe is right "for the people".
It's simply not possible. EU law has no provisions for kicking a malignant country out. It was simply not foreseen. They can only decide to leave themselves. Which orban will never do because his oligarchs make billions off EU subsidies.
They cannot make them leave the EU, no. But Hungary can be:
- kicked out of the Schengen Treaty
- kicked out of the NATO
- fined under EU breach of contract proceedings
- withheld financial support as long as they do not pay these fines
- forced through customs policy, which is sole EU competence, to stop compensating lost EU support with Chinese money
Honestly, I'd be in full support of some above listed actions if the elections in April show the current will of the Hungarian people misaligned with shared EU values.
They do regularly withhold financial support for them, but it doesn't seem to be too effective, usually they just get it back in return for not crossing the EU on some other topic.
I do think we should make work of kicking them out somehow if Peter Magyar does not win the next elections indeed.
Sure, I never said anything against offline root cert authorities. But did you do it literally exactly how this guy was saying to do it with a laptop that you load via CD-ROM for a signing key that’s being used for active transactions?
It’s as if one of the things your root certificate authority signed got compromised. It doesn’t help that your root key is safe if attackers still managed to impersonate you before you revoked that cert.
> privileged private key to sign off on how much USR could be created. Unfortunately, the smart contract itself did not enforce any maximum limit on minting – it only checked that a valid signature existed.
The offline idea simply doesn’t work because this particular key has to be online
> It’s weird to say in the same comment “it happens but as far as I know it’s rare” and “this isn’t an actual risk to anybody.”
Orders of magnitude more people are maimed, disfigured, or outright killed by:
1. Guns.
2. Vehicles.
3. Alcohol.
Weirdly, suspiciously weirdly, the people that are vehemently for age-verification to protect potential trans-indoctrination victims from any risk of bodily harm are the very same people that are very much in favour of those three things. Or at least, show zero apparent interest in using age verification to block 2nd amendment nuts spreading their propaganda -- and I use the word very literally -- because the NRA is funded by Russia[1], or blocking young impressionable kids watching Nascar and being influenced to engage in dangerous speeding, or blocking alcohol advertising from ever being seen by a minor.
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