BehindBlueEyes

Maybe this is true if you only look at paid labor, but there are other ways in which elders add value to society, as they do a lot of invisiblized unpaid work. Their pensions play a role in supporting the economy, as much as people seem to only think of pensions as a burden to source and rarely as supporting the economy when it gets spent.

I get this feeling sometimes, like it is so unreliable at referring to context and getting details right it feels like deliberate random rewards to create the equivalent to a gambling addiction. About half my tokens feel wasted on trivial errors that i gave it the context for, on average. And any meta discussions / clarifications result in Claude telling me I did all the right things and there is nothing more I can do and it should have gotten it right from the provided input - which is disempowering but to be fair is at least better than chatGPT gaslighting users about improving prompts over and over to get no better result in the end.

I guess by design since odor can inform health too. Also, a poopshelf may lack odor control, but it offers splash control.

There were already too few people for the tasks before this round of layoffs. The working order has been "do more with less, use AI" for over a year.

Every MS FTE whom I knew enough to have that kind of conversation with was stretched thin to the breaking point. Now half their team is gone, and the show must go on apparently. It does not seem viable to me, not even with AI.

Finally! A friend was an in-house reseacher at some car manufacturer, whose job is to usability tests car prototypes, including in real traffic.

She was telling me about one study in particular to try a new touch screen built behind the handbrake, pretty much at 5 o'clock behind the driver. I'm sure she's not the only one sharing usability reports about how dangerous touchscreens are while driving, but marketing needed to advertise one more screen than the competition... This was 5 years ago. Took them a while to pivot, but i guess better late than never.

anecdata n=1: LLMs lack understanding of context, stakeholder sensitivities and nuance in word usage, to write reports with the required depth and at the quality bar I need. Maybe it is faster at generating BS reports with no substance, but I can still write my reports much better and much faster than LLMs so far, probably because the reports are merely the artefact of solving a complex problem.

Easier said than done these days. We had a coop managing out drinking water with local government support. Being a coop excluded them from grants and eventually the board burnt out and gave up. Local government now operates the thing - you'd think they'd be accountable to voters but they can only get grant money with strings attached. They can repair a few pipes only if they install chlorination that no one wants and will add more maintenance costs because of pressure from health and safety - the provider must guarantee water is safe at the end point so boiling water, which everyone does here, is no longer acceptable apparently. There isn't a big enough population that increasing the cost of water would make a difference.

All that to say, voters here do care about utilities, and the coop solution worked for about 25 years iirc but it can't work in today's "one solution fits all" regulatory context anymore, at least where i live. Things are far from that simple in practice.

The field of AI research has a reputation for disregarding the value of other fields [...] It’s likely that, being unaware of much of the research in psychology on cognitive biases or how a psychic’s con works

Is the reputation warranted? Just a US thing? Or maybe the question is "since when did this change"? because in the mid 2000s in france at least, llm research was led by cognitive psychology professors who dabble in programming or had partnerships with a nearby technical university.

curious: why do alarm clocks run on batteries? Seems counter intuitive for a device that is just going to sit in one place to not be plugged in?

oh interesting, how do you define older here though?

I'm a bit skeptical because i read a similar comment about answering calls immediately vs. letting it go to the answering machine already being such a divide.

Makes me feel old for thinking anyone offended by my taking hours if not days to respond to a non urgent text is welcome to go be someone else's friend.

I don't think I'd handle a wearing a watch anymore, smart or not.

For waking up, something not technological but working 99% of the time for me: pets (or kids) though you'd want other reasons as well to have those beyond waking you up early in the morning...

Most of my life I've had cats or dogs and their internal clock is amazingly on time. They are actually smart and try different things if you don't wake up at first, adapting to their owner. They include waking mechanisms such as sound, touch, light pain, emotional rewards and possibly guilt tripping/punishment to keep you accountable if you fail to wake up. Birds can work too but I wouldn't recommend keeping a rooster in your bedroom for an alarm unless you're blaring-alarms-levels of hard to wake up and don't have neighbours or a partner, these guys don't have an indoor voice.

Point is you're then forced to care for the pet, wether it wakes you to go out, get food or get cuddles and bob's your uncle: your chances of picking up your phone and doomscrolling first thing in the morning are much lowered.

The opposite can also be true, you know it is a bad work situation and you are going to burn out but you can't afford to leave. Not that you want to stay, you don't even want that promotion anymore but that you can't go elsewhere. Besides, if alternative employers are equally bad anyway, you may as well burn out in a familiar place and not take on the extra stress of onboarding in a new role.

I burn out at a 6 figures flexible job, while my friends burn out at minimum wage jobs where they have to report bathroom breaks by the minute. How can I complain about my burnout-inducing work conditions?

Academia is where research happens.

Employers have no incentive to do research that would force them to spend more on employee wellness. I worked on enough team health surveys to know leadership has no interest in collecting feedback about the big known complaints that they aren't interested in addressing. They only want to hear about the small unimportant things that could help morale to cope with the big issues (unless they are forced to investigate serious workplace injuries, unsustainable churn/absenteeism or productivity issues)

That said employers/HR publish a lot of blog spam about how burnout is really due to employe's lack of self care.

Yeah, if I had kids I'd go back to france for studying costs: 175 euros per bachelor year; 250 euros per Master year; 618 euros per (public) engineering school year* ; 391 euros per Doctorate year... Cost of life depends on the city but you can get financial help with it if parents are low income, so there is no reason to burn out to pay for tuition there... it has other downsides mind you but education is still solid in 24-25.

The article says "everyday life is much harder now, and getting harder". That may be, but there's no proof this is causing more burnout.

The definition of burnout is a professional ailment caused by work conditions (inappropriate workload, lack of recognition, lack of support). Whatever happens in everyday life is a different problem. You can struggle in life and not be burnt out by work and vice versa.

I couldn't find a reference to the specific case study but there's definitely human factors/ergonomics research about this - one example was about a factory introduced task rotations which should increase meaning of work and therefor productivity and operator retention, but it resulted in increased absenteeism because operators could no longer let their minds wander like they used to during routine repetitive tasks and burned out quicker. The point of all these case studies was to not randomly change a work situation using generic best practices before understanding it because there's no one size fits all solution.

I think the difference is that knowledge + actively thinking is more akin to sprinting all day, jogging being more akin to just relying on knowledge.

the low thinking work still exists in housekeeping tasks but those are non promotable and seen as wasting time/skill... so people shy away from doing these. Those are also the things managers may tell you to delegate to manage an impossible workload, effectively removing downtime from you and leaving you with 40h of high effort/intensity work.

Avoiding overtime helps but if the work conditions are conducive to burnout it can happen even to part time workers.

How much work it takes to protect the balance to avoid burnout can itself also contribute to burnout, say if you constantly have to fight getting overstaffed or repeatedly having to push back on being on call...

This aligns with my experience. There's this GDC talk that really resinated with me about how side projects can help avoid burnout in the games industry: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zfJ9LLZQ9jo

It is counter intuitive that doing more unpaid work helps cope with doing paid work, but the whole premise iirc is that it is work you are in control of and that helps battle the lack of meaning and agency at work.

Of course this assumes you're not already too burnt out to even think about a side project.

An increasing number of my colleagues are using burnout for entirely inappropriate reason like "I was so burnt out last year from all the travel and vacation planning". It is so disrespectful to those with actual burnout when the term is used to complain about how privileged one's life is.

distancing oneself from work (not caring) is a symptom of burnout, symptoms are a coping mechanism but that doesn't mean they're a cure... sure a fever helps fight illness but a caugh might just spread it. Personnally, I can't not care either but i also don't think it is a solution. For me not caring actually makes things worse because it is disempowering.

The work was harder but people also didn't wash their shirts after wearing it a single day/time. Machines increased expectations, resulting in workload to remain comparable, since more of it needs doing.

I may be cynical but I don't think men flee fields were women manage to enter. I do see this trend though. But I rather see it as men moving to the next cool thing, leaving the leftovers of their no longer prestigious / downward trending field for women to finally enter, who may see it as a victory without realizing the goalpost has yet again shifted on them/carpet has been pulled from under their feet already.

Much like women no longer qualified as gamers for playing the same games that men grew up with (point n click, puzzle games...) because men flocked to newer genres since (actions/shooter) Bit of a dated caricature but fitting imho.

If men wanted to keep women out, it is easily managed, case in point programming was seen as secretarial work until men decided it made good money and they should appropriate it.

(Fully expecting to be downvoted for saying this)

Same experience. My friends and local community posts a lot, but facebook will only show me 1 connection for for every 7 rando reels / recommended / sponsored channels (aka ads), not counting the blocks suggesting new friends and such. Maybe 1 post i care about in 10 cards.

Not only that but the friends posts that do show up are shown several days later, meaning that anything like local event, yard sales etc are long wrapped up by the time facebook decides to make me aware of it. And I can't figure out why facebook prioritizes posts from highschool friends over recently added ones which may be more relevant.

Basically I only look at feeds of friend/group posts directly and ignore the main feed which is just the worst useless garbage i can think of.

Maybe the problem is paid dating aps?

Also enshitification is real there too, I don't think I'd find anyone now on the same dating app I met my spouse on years ago.

25 years ago: Women on the internet?

This kind of reaction is (partly) why the women on the internet that I knew rarely disclosed their gender 25 years ago

I have yet to see an LLM reliably push back against anything firmly, so I don't know how this would work if the first time a user says the LLM is wrong, it apologizes for the confusion and flips its script.

Also, LLM aren't unbiased, all data it trains on is biased one way or another. Ask any HR question and see for yourself how its answers lean to be HR BS that favours employers.

Thanks for sharing this. Somehow it evokes images of travel to me.

Seeing the wonders of the world used to require skill, (sailing, flying, or) hiking/climbing up mountains to see the view. There were few people at the top and likely like-minded.

Since cable cars were installed, there's hordes of tourists at the top that take the place for granted and cable car operators eventually ruin the view by putting up ads billboards all over the landscape.

Some folks set-up their private viewing areas only accessible by hiking (some free, some rented, some purchased), and still hike to the top, but they'll take the cable car for convenience sometimes and there is the looming threat that the hiking path will become inaccessible some day.

Others find new mountains where they try to trailbreak with a few others, knowing they may be laying the groundwork for new cablecars down the line and will need to move on again.

stream 30 minutes of _____ to a friend and unlock an avatar for your profile!

Sounds like enshitifications has begun already