chiggsy

some engineer actually decided

No sane person would flaunt Apple secrecy in such a fashion whilst employed there.

instead of his work quietly improving everyone’s experiBence

Laughable that you feel that Apple engineers have the capacity for this kind of desire in 2025. If they did, Xcode would be way better to use. They cant even quietly improve their own experience.

Having to deal with senior managers has always been the most unsavory part of my job, because when it comes to technology, these managers exist on a whole other level of stupid vanity and narcissistic pursuit of their own selfish agendas.

Whoever sent this dude made a mistake. People who don't share your worldview need to be persuaded, not insulted! Some dude stomps in, thinks all the snaps in the cloud are crap, things the big bosses are stupid for not instantly deleting the pictures they saved into the cloud.... and then what? Download Lisp? Thought we got over this, pal.

WORSE IS BETTER.

P.S. do not erase our porn. WORSE IS BETTER.

You could use your engagement to live a live infused with your values, as a beacon to other like minded people, or people who were unaware they were like minded, until they saw your light in their tunnel.

Those lawyers know all about it, and why it's legal. If you want a lawyer to elp you, hire one.

I don't really see putting important links in the footer as anti-pattern. For my entire internet life, many important links were put into the footer of a webpage. Careers, About Us, Contact Us, Locations, Citations, etc. They are expected to be there.

Yes, because after a century of public relations and marketing you expect fine print to be in these locations because you have been marketed to from infancy, which has made you apparently, forget that today's dark pattern creators stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them, and the fact that you expect that stuff to be there is because your worldview has been successfully engineered. Important links under the fold, aka the first page are there to be overlooked. What they want from YOU is top of the page.

Most emails I get aren't long enough to scroll anyway.

Careful with that kind of thinking, marketing works on everybody. A seed is planted, by appealing to emotional arguments. If it takes root, then your worldview starts to change, via rationalization. The smarter you are, the better and more subtle your rationalizations and better it works.

This project of social engineering was given to a guy named Edwin Bernays, who wrote several very plain and easy to read books on how he was going to do this project. First one was "The Engineering of Consent."

Trust the market.

We do not.

(despite being very higher-educated-Danish which means most employees are very environmentally-everything)

Sounds expensive. These academic purists are happy working in a factory, are they? Good for them! I always thought that housing costs there would be exorbitant, but I think I get it now. Legos must be what they build the houses from!

Solve one problem and you will probably need to solve another one. So I guess they live in the Lego houses, and they used what they learned to make a nice lil family business, selling high quality bricks made of oil to kids worldwide.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm going to be very surprised if the quality is worse from this.

I have some bad news for you fam. "Biodegradable" means that they will dissolve in kid spit, and in landfills and especially when floating in the sea under sunny skies. Right now legos are one of the closest things we have to the One Ring, except that to get them melted down our Frodo would have to swim down to the subduction zones of the earth and deposit them into the mantle.

I know Greta is from Sweden, but surely there are no shortage of Danish 13 year olds who will furiously demand that a more environmentally friendly process for these toys be implemented. After all, you know the old quote right?

God save us from the fury of the Northmen.

Purists be damned, call that presser and learn to compromise!

This reminds me: Stem cells. Whatever happened with that?

I have no faith in this statement. Let's see how it plays out.

Why do you feel it is unreasonable for this person to have human failings? What label would you find suitable?

Those who need a car for longer distance travel should accept living further away from city center

Strongly feel this acceptance will be difficult to actualize sans coercion.

I live in Vancouver, and I find this discussion utterly fascinating. Thank you all for sharing.

Gravitational waves would "wiggle" all of you the same way, so not sure how they would do something different for one part of your body, so you could hear it.

But resources are what you are, hoss. Sounds like the youth of this manager got you messed up. Old head move is to pull him to the side, with the sotto voce, give him a chance to show you he is open to feedback. How can he change now without losing something? This is workplace 101 stuff.

And you are mocking his authentic feelings. Slaves are an abstract kind of human for him. Feelings are not comparable, right? Now this poor dude can't even vent a lil in an online forum?

To the OP: When it sucks a lot, try singing. It really, really helps. Throw your head back and let it out of you on the way home.

For some people what i described is exactly what would bring them joy.

Backbreaking manual labor sucks. The heat. The cold. The shit. The frost. I'll format my fucking code any way you tell me to to avoid farm life. Like I give a shit. A week in and I won't even notice. Ah Christ, the smell of cow pus ...nyaagggggh.

As for woodworking: You will get cut, there is no hope of avoiding it, and no telling how bad it's going to be. The next day, we will see how serious your woodworking gig really is. You gotta be out there, bub. Get it stitched up and keep on cranking out the pieces.

I suddenly became incapable of doing work that I found meaningless.

This attitude will fail you. The meaningless work must be done as carefully and joyfully as the meaningful work. Think of it as building the foundation for serendipity, something very difficult to see from the present moment.

Seem to be forgetting how often these swaggerin dude's got the story wrong. No need for swagger, just tell the goddamn truth, verifiably.

What???? Keep reading buddy. Ridiculous.

Sounds like an argument for C, honestly. After all, that complexity is either in the language, or solved on a case by case basis. Every patch adds complexity, because it reflects changes in the business environment that presents the problem the code is solving.

No, the complexity comes from people, both the taxed, and those who impose them, and those who manipulate the legal process for relief. Computers actually give the sums a chance to be somewhat correct.

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course.

Lot of this kind of stuff. Thesis summarized is that America is going to hell in a handbasket because the Feds are demanding that black people get hired once in a blue moon, a practice which dilutes meritocracy, according to the author.

Heh.

When this was not enough, MIT increased its gender diversity by simply offering jobs to previously rejected female candidates. While no university will admit to letting standards slip for the sake of diversity, no one has offered a serious argument why the new processes produce higher or even equivalent quality faculty as opposed to simply more diverse faculty.

Ah, MIT now pumping out dumb blondes, are they? Having encountered such people as the author of this piece several times before,I have to wonder about the "meritocracy" process in place prior. So "merit" correlates positively with sunscreen purchases, and inversely to tampon expenditure, does it?

This effect was likely seen in a recent paper by McDonald, Keeves, and Westphal. The paper points out that white male senior leaders reduce their engagement following the appointment of a minority CEO. While it is possible that author Ijeoma Oluo is correct, and that white men have so much unconscious bias raging inside of them that the appointment of a diverse CEO sends them into a tailspin of resentment, there is another more plausible explanation. When boards choose diverse CEOs to make a political statement, high performers who see an organization shifting away from valuing honest performance respond by disengaging.

I mean... is there an actual difference here? First, I'm not convinced it's unconscious bias. Second, this "disengagement" certainly seems like the kind of "meritocracy" we have sadly grown quite familiar with.

The problem is that complex systems have not made us more knowledgeable and capable, but instead they have become a crutch.

This article kind of sounds like some people want the old crutch back. There is a non trivial question of your fitness for this, however. In the 50's the rise of psychotherapy made it quite clear that people were cracking under the strain of delivering "merit."

I'm quite delighted that this is such a concern to you people. Excellent.

The actual DK study is far less assertive about it's conclusions, from what I can recall. People who think they don't suffer from it love to prove that they do by raising it almost to the level of physical law.

Octopi are intelligent, but we see them reacting to their environment the vast majority of the time. We do not see them engage in behaviors that result in bad outcomes. They seem to spin up a mental model to assist them in their day to day, which is very different than having a dogmatic belief that harms or even inconveniences them. They seem very direct. I'd want to see some documented behavior such as cyclical motions, or returning to a spot repeatedly, disregarding danger, that kind of thing. Our intelligence models the world imperfectly, via metaphors we encounter in the world itself. We use the mental space we gain from using a portion of our working memory, as well as our exectutive control functions to not react as we create our narratives, which we use to persuade others socially via language. Sociality is baked in.

Quite possbily octopi use their 9 brains in a genetic algorithm for problem solving. The camo they use gives them advanced signalling for free. The redundancy their multiple brains give them might let them just compute solutions who knows?

Finally, it's important to remember that people who never change their mind often propogate their worldview to more malliable people. That constancy is comforting to many, and the emotional machinery is millions of years older than the rational system we cobbled together out of our excecutive control function we got from our cortex. That's why advertising is not just somebody reading the benefits of a product.

After all, smart people get scammed just as easy and dumb ones. In fact, it's better. Once their emotions are subverted, the story they tell themselves will be utterly plausible.

You also don't need to be a genius to sense when somebody is manipulative, and contemptuous of you. So you stick together with your peeps and crowdsource a heuristic of distrust of the eggheads. You can't really trust people smarter than you, right?

I mention Alfred Wegener, the balloonist who proposed that the continents must have drifted, given how clearly their coastlines fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Blinded by scientific precepts, what is now plainly obvious to any child who glances at a map of South America and Africa

Problem: coastline shape is a dependent variable. Amount of water is the independent. Looking at S.America and Africa only makes a jigsaw puzzle in modern times. During the ice ages, will those continents still look like a match?

I say no.

Furthermore, continental drift has pulled these contienents apart. When they eventually collide, there will be mountain building, much like the Pyrenees, or the Himalayas.

Also, South America is on the ring of fire, a subduction zone. Ocean floors are erupted basalts, which are pushed over to the continental trenches where they, being heavy and dense, are pushed down into the mantle. Seawater as well. This seawater reduces the density of the basalts, and as they melt in the mantle, the magma is forced upwards. Pumice is an extreme example of this, but continental granites and anthracites are formed in this fashion. These rocks make up the vast majority of the continental crust.

Diamonds in Africa suggest that the core of the continent is ancient and very hard rock known as kratons. Rock drifts into these structres and sticks there. creating a continent via accumulation. They root deep in the mantle, Im actually unsure if they move via drift. The diamonds are created at their base, and slowly percolate up to the surface. These rocks are on the order of 2-3 billion years old.

Finally, not all continent building happens at subduction zones. Giant blobs of magma called mantle plumes bubble up from the mantle and massively heat the crust that moves over them. Iceland is one such place where this is happening. Hawaii, another. Scotland clearly was wildly volcanic at one point, until it drifted away from the plume.

What's the point here? Well, the shape of these places is a complete fluke. They do not fit like any jigsaw. The proof of continental drift is that we see fossils of giant land animals, as well as flora on both continents. There is no way they could have floated over on some sticks, or whatnot. Creatures living in an arid landlocked area roamed freely over these continents, until most likely a mantle plume pushed began to break up that supercontinent.

Such plumes are more likely to occur when all the landmassses of the earth are together. Regardless, does it count if you looked at those continents because of erroneous deduction, only to find the proof that the same populations of creatures inhabited both distant ( in the present day ) places?

Again, I would say no.

Recent American efforts at regime change have fared poorly in hindsight. Attempted during the fall of the USSR, led directly to the oligarchs, and eventually Putin. Deposing Saddam left destroyed a middle class secular nation, who cheerfully began the ethnic cleansing, so that Iraq is now Kurds, Sunni and majority Shiites, none and turned Iran into a regional power by eliminating Iraq, as well as Afghanistan. Our man Musharraf, a loyal ally? Ditched him too, and the ISI showed its gratitude by rearming the Taliban. We got Gaddafi! Turns out he was burying enough people migrating from Africa to be a firm deterrent. Those people flooded into Europe, and the liberal democracies we allegedly want to nourish in other lands were pushed to the far right. Now Germany is beginning to arm itself, and France is following. Japan also, which will agitate the Koreas and China greatly. So the risk here is replacing the Pax Americana, fantastically lucrative for American by the way, with the spectre of proliferation, which the Pax had blocked fairly successfully.

One wonders where (ugh) Kissinger's Realpolitik would have led us. Regardless, what we do know is that the Norks are hardly pro-american after years of indoctrination.

It's not like theyr'e happy about a dictator running the country doing international crazy stuff and oppressing them.

As are we. It'd be way worse too if not for The Leader's clearsighted vision in acquiring nuclear capability, against our best efforts.

Problem: the Norks actually are starving, have a poor but fairly large standing army, and are sitting on China's border, and are not estranged from South Korea, on a personal level. China would prefer not to have a humanitarian catastrophe on it's borders, starving people looking for food, causing mayhem. Gunning the starvies down antagonizes the South, needlessly, and of course, having an unstable state actor as a loose ally is not the worst thing in the world. Iran has Hezbollah. China has the Norks. America... spends a lot of time vetoing UN resolutions against allies in the Levant, do they not?

Since they are using your money to do this work, is this not what a taxpayer would want? How long are you gonna keep that gig if you are a coin flippin kind of prosecutor, and when your boss runs for whatever office, he gets crucified for wasting taxpayer money on uncertain cases?

State Department will have all the docs one needs to avoid any problems. In your example, the real risk would be that the lithium mining equipment is dual-use, ie: they also use it to mine yellowcake uranium ore, or when your watch business takes off, they struggle to provide enough brine, and bring in specialists from Afghanistan, who streamline the process and who's Dari has a Tehran accent.

They can let you keep making money until it's promotion time, or an example needs to be made for an election campaign or they find out your watches seem to be the chronometer of choice of the latest insurgency.

Not everyone can pass it though, which is the point.

And who evaluates the mentors of these apprentices? What if they are the Weinstein of legal practice? Or they have a tattoo of a bowling ball covering up the swastika they had done when they were 17? Or maybe it's the apprentice who has the tat, and is getting preferential treatment.

Just like utilities written in C, the fact that they have not shown obvious flaws yet is no guarantee those flaws don't exist.

Nah. The more objectivity, the better.