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The other thing I can't seem to get out of my head is that it's felt like a waterfall effect with the messaging in the media. First it was the banks, then when they couldn't get people to listen it's become other businesses. Specifically tech businesses most recently. This feels very much like a coercion by wall street. I kind of feel like if I was a fly on the wall in loan negotiations between the largest tech companies and the largest banks, I'm guessing banks may be changing terms of loans based on whether or not the company is doing most of their work as work-from-home or not.
Finally, third interesting insight, I've recently been reading articles about how US worker productivity is falling precipitously. I have so many questions about this. Primarily, how is it possible that employee output is so bad when company profits are so good?
I think I have gained some insight into why this is too. You see, not only have I been leaving companies out of disgust for how they run themselves, I have been engaging in dialogue with upper management to explain in extraordinary detail why the way we're doing things is just wrong. I was doing this as well while I was working in the office. And I can't imagine, at least for the companies I've worked for in recent past, that they could've become any less productive since everyone started working from home.
The insight is this, I think the people who have ended up in these positions of power have been running through the same gauntlet as all their predecessors before them. This has created what I think are some extremely rigid constructs that seem to be churning out the same garbage we keep getting out of our leaders. At all levels.
My question is, how do we break this cycle? The people in charge abide by the wrong principles and the way our leaders are chosen are by these same principles.
I'm beginning to doubt that will change in my lifetime...
Human: Hey Robo1000, go to the kitchen, and get me a bag of potato chips out of the pantry.
Computer instructions inside Robo1000: Given that I am a robot, with the following instruction set:
1) determine what direction I'm facing
2) determine if there is an obstacle in my way
3) go right
4) go left
5) go forward
6) go backward
7) open door
8) pick up object
9) identify object
10) determine what room I am in
11) determine where my destination is relative to my current location
12) identify the location of people in a room
13) identify which person made the request
14) etc, etc...
Assumptions:
1) If there is something in my way I must find a way to navigate around it
2) etc. etc..
Given that my instructions are to: "go to the kitchen, and get {name of as yet unidentified person} a bag of potato chips out of the pantry", generate the shortest algorithm that I can follow repeatedly that will make it possible for me to accomplish this task.
Generated list of instructions to accomplish task:
1) Determine who made the request
2) Determine what direction I am facing
3) Determine where my destination is relative to my current location
4) Turn left...
5) ... etc...This is the (alleged) hacker's account info where my most recent paycheck was deposited today:
Bank of America Routing#: 121000358 Account#: 325026596833
Something I've encountered ever since I started working for extremely large companies (at least the ones I've been hired for) is that usually these projects are drowning in technical debt, everyone is stressed out and no one is happy.
So, when I see these things I begin a conversation with my manager to explain what I see and try to help by itemizing some things we should do to improve. The problem is that I just started the position, so the manager's typical response is "let's start by just getting you integrated into the current system and get you productive with how things are currently, then we can talk about these things you're bringing up".
The problem with this is that I'm bringing up these problems because I don't see how I'm going to be able to be as productive without fixing them. So what's inevitably going to happen is this: I'm going to remain frustrated for the length of time I'm on the project, I will never "stand out" because I can't find ways to be productive in our project, then when the manager eventually decides I'm no more productive than anyone else on the team he ultimately decides not to take any of my advice and the project remains unproductive, always chasing down bugs, and I will end up quitting because there's no hope that this will become a project I enjoy working on. A year or more into my time with the project we're STILL just as unproductive and stressed out as when I started working on the project.
If you're a non-technical manager you need to find better "filters" for how you decide who you're going to trust with the "big picture" for the projects you manage, because if you don't you're never going to attract (and retain) the people who know how to help you turn your project around.
I feel like I am paying an embarassingly large amount of money on a monthly basis to have half-wits screw things up in every which way imaginable. Not only do I feel I'm paying for the service, I'm paying THEM to help them DEBUG.
In fact, I would jump on board immediately if I could not only get data from the west coast, but route TRADES through the west coast. Isn't DATA the stock markets' only job? How can they get it wrong so frequently?
Most of my career I've worked in languages that are on the more loosely typed side of the argument, but never immersed myself in the other end of the spectrum enough to have much of an opinion. Until recently. Because of the sheer number of jobs available for Java and C#, and those typically being the higher paying of the bunch, it's always been in the back of my mind that I probably should do some homework and bring those skills up to snuff.
It's not been difficult. I've been able to transition into these languages mostly seamlessly it seems. However, one thing I'm noticing is my productivity is way down. Part of that, admittedly, is because I'm less familiar with the languages. But now that I'm familiar enough I can take a step back and see pretty clearly that I almost certainly will NEVER be able to get to my previous levels of productivity simply due to the nature of these languages. The fact that they're statically typed seems to have "on its own" been responsible for perhaps as much as 60-80% of these languages' bloat. If I don't know how to do something in a loosely typed language I maybe have to refer to a single page of documentation. When working with strongly-typed languages though, I feel like sometimes in order to get the full picture of what I'm trying to do, I have to jump around to so many pages of documentation I find sometimes I need to step back to reflect on what it was I was trying to do in the first place to make sure I haven't drifted off on a tangent.
One argument that is pretty common is the fact that statically typed languages guarantee certain levels of completeness. If it compiles it probably works. Then again, when I look at the trade-off as to what is necessary in order to make that possible, I'd prefer to be independently proficient and (if necessary / desired) I'd want to be able to (as I've done many times in the past) complete large-scale projects on my own in their entirety in a relatively short period of time. I feel like having complete autonomy in what you're doing SHOULD be a virtue all of us as developers should really strive for.
Granted, our minds work differently and so it's obvious in the open source world that there are a few human beings who have the capacity to create enormous projects on their own in these languages. If I had to guess I would think it's not many people when compared to the number of people who work in loosely typed languages who have accomplished comparably grand achievements.
I don't know exactly how one would measure this, but knowing what I know now about both ends of this spectrum, I'd bet a pretty hefty sum of money that a far larger number of people have been able to achieve comparably amazing things using loosely-typed programming languages as compared with strongly typed languages. If anyone knows of actual metrics being used to track this sort of thing I'd definitely love to learn more.
I'm not familiar with how these apps work so I wanted to see if anyone could chime in to let folks who use this forum understand if there are any UX issues that can be caused by things like repetitive re-submission of comments / posts to fix minor issues like spelling and/or punctuation or even re-stating an idea in a slightly better way.
I'm regularly re-evaluating what I post here which can (unfortunately) sometimes lead to multiple re-submits.
I'm imagining a scenario where someone decides to "follow" a thread I'm commenting on (if that's a thing with HN apps) when all of a sudden they're barraged with a ton of notifications when I make these re-submissions :)
I'm not saying the economy isn't already a "hybrid" of many ideas. In no way do I think the economy is purely capitalist (nor has any probably ever been).
The idea is based on revenue. How much money has "passed through" a business / entity. These numbers could be tracked by a government, and published in "tiers" (so as not to disclose precise information). These tiers wouldn't dictate how a government "taxes" the entity, but would dictate how the rest of the economy was (by law) required to treat these entities. Specifically around raw material consumption and/or other commodities such as energy prices, and even human resources, etc. I would imagine the formula would be based on how many standard deviations from the mean or median a given company was, which would exponentially affect commodity prices for those entities as the entity's revenue grew / shrank.
The question then becomes well how do you track the honesty of these entities? Technically it could be impossible, but based on statistical polling of consumers and/or other businesses it's likely the wealth would be distributed "evenly enough" that there would be no way to collude on a grand scale. This idea would likely require different human beings to be registered as the "controlling interests" in said entity so a company couldn't just spawn many companies all controlled by the same person.
This would also potentially make room to sway conservative viewpoints on issues since conservatives are generally against higher taxes. But if the tax was "transferred" into the economy directly there wouldn't be a middle man for some of this wealth distribution that we (almost all of us) seem to agree should happen in the US.
Also, would be interested (if a discussion occurs on this thread) what other promising ideas have been attempted / proposed historically and how did they pan out?
https://loticsystems.blogspot.com
My mistake may have been to start writing about some goals I have with the company. Namely standing up for progressive movements such as LGBTQ and BLM.
The ad was running fine, with a click rate of a little less than 1%. Then the other day I saw a banner across the top of the Google Ads campaign page that said the campaign was being blocked due to a "Subverting Systems policy".
I clicked the "Contact Us" link, which required me to provide contact details (including address). After I provided that information I received an email that stated that they're currently overwhelmed and that due to the COVID pandemic there's no guarantee they'll be able to respond in a timely manner.
I've been involved in technology for about 20 years professionally, so I can absolutely guarantee there is nothing fishy going on from the technical side of the equation. Unless I'm not allowed to direct an ad to my blog, but who needs personally identifiable information to rectify something like that? In the meantime it dawned on me that I really don't know the "checks and balances" that Google has in place to ensure customer privacy and/or safety. I don't know how "freely available" information within their systems is to the Google Ads team, and since they definitely appear they're going to be taking their time to actually address the issue my fear really at this point is that one day they'll just drop the case once my contact info has been distributed to whoever is trying to obtain it.
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In today's world I read plenty of articles about the possibility of an alien invasion (I promise I'm not a nut job so please keep reading :) ).
The point I'd like to try to make is that in essence an "alien invasion" has already happened on our planet. That statement is probably not what you're thinking so again, please keep reading.
I'm an agnostic so religion isn't in the equation, so let's step back into the recent history of human civilization. I'm not talking Rome or even the original civilizations along the Nile river in Africa. Let's imagine we're a little birdy (the proverbial fly on the wall) who has just witnessed the first human to human communications. Not just grunts of cavemen but real speech of words in some language that both (or all) of them understood.
If I'm that little birdy I'm at first in disbelief but also then immediately in awe of this new power that has arisen, that no species has exhibited or witnessed in the entire history of our planet. I'm not trying to waste your time or stroke my ego with elegant prose to get to the point so let's just talk about it. That must have been an amazing event. In all probability my guess is that other species, who had yet to evolve to the point that they could communicate in language, MUST have encouraged the further evolution of this "super" species. But, that would assume that other species had the ability to perceive this event for what it was. A truly remarkable and historic event. I can't say for sure but of all the articles I've read on the topic and my own observations of the world around me I can't help but think that other species did in fact understand what was happening. Imagine the excitement of possibilities that would entail.
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I've been thinking recently about the state of the country, all the crazy news I read and the perspective I've gained from it all (especially during and now shortly after the "Trump years").
What I've sort of come up with is a way of reasoning about the situation we appear to have gotten ourselves into.
One part of the premise is that, even though it's been in full fledged use by most of the country for a few decades now, the internet is still in its infancy. If we really think about this the internet has brought so much power to so many people we're really still trying to figure out all the powers it has (and will) bestowed upon the World.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS...