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mortify

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There's truth to the ScrumFall design process which is inevitable for most development processes. It's not just that a tool needs to be marketed, but that it needs to be integrated with work from multiple teams and other processes. What ScrumFall does is provide some level of feedback prior to delivery. In the age of Waterfall, devs would develop until they said they were done, we'd get to delivery and UAT only to find that key features work differently than expected and continually extend the release date by months or years until it finally goes out the door more from frustration than actual completion. That stress level would be pegged at 10 for months until it was completed.

Although not truly the point... we do know that people don't seen red and green flipped because color's don't work in isolation. It's also how they work together. If a person with flipped red/green mixed what they saw as red (actually green) with blue, they wouldn't get purple.

We could suppose that someone could see the entire spectrum inverted, but that causes other problems that we could test for. There are more hues between red and blue than there are between green and yellow. Instead of seeing brown (really dark yellow), they'd see dark blue.

The same reason we don't have a race or sex limit on the Presidency. We should only have competency limits regardless of any other factors. My grandfather died at 101. He was extremely sharp until he was 98 and on no medication. I'd vote for that 95 year-old over either of our current choices without hesitation.

Feynman's Garden 2 years ago

some people truly are stupid.

This is a difficult fact to accept. We have all been told that people are generally equal, especially in intelligence, if given the same opportunities, but it becomes more clear in time that some problems are intractable to some people and no amount of training or exposure can change that. However, it's a better answer to the problem of why some people like Cleese's example do not absorb information. The alternative is to apply malice and laziness to them when it just isn't so.

We all have these intelligence holes that gives some insight into the mechanism. Eg. I'm bad at remembering names. As in the example, if you tell me someone's name, I'm likely to forget it 5 minutes later. I just spent 3 years reading Douglas Hofstadter's book and had to look up his name to type it here. This seems to happen because I don't see an application to remembering the name. I'm never going to meet Doug and rarely will anyone need to be told about the book, so why remember it? There's definitely a parallel to state capitals in that example.

Feynman's Garden 2 years ago

While thinking is somewhat of a background process, our brains don't just solve the mysteries of the universe while we eat a ham sandwich. We tell our brains which problems are of high importance and it focuses on them. If you've ever laid down to go to sleep and told yourself to wake up at 6:30 and it worked, you've witnessed an obvious application of this.

The problem comes when we fail to point out the importance of a problem, or when we do so reflexively which means that we tell our brain that everything is important and it simply cannot process all of the requests.

Setting your thinking requests before doing a non-thinking activity is a good way to start. Think about the problem consciously and then specifically ask for an answer to a question. Then go do something physical or mechanical: take a walk, sleep, mow the lawn, watch a non-challenging movie, etc. Be prepared to accept whatever result you get. A common response is: non enough information, but it should point you toward what that additional info looks like.

Feynman's Garden 2 years ago

There are parallels. You feed an LLM context data and then tell it what to focus on so it can pull relevant data.

Maybe the entire process isn't like feeding an LLM, but that step is. Relevance identification is an interesting part of the process. The LLM can do a decent job of making connections, but it doesn't know what is relevant. In the longer time frame of the thinking process, we constantly throw out data as irrelevant or identify previously unknown relevant data that needs to be added. It's a part of the process completely outside of the LLM.

Although I've looked at the original report, it isn't clear if this $1M in annual income that they're comparing to the 1950's is inflation adjusted. The only comment I can find on this point appears to say that it isn't which makes it an unfair comparison because that's the equivalent of more than $13M today.

The article avoids a bigger concern which is the size of government spending. In 1960 (I couldn't find older data) federal government spending was $144B. If we adjust for inflation, today's spending would be $1.6T. It's $9.7T.

Perhaps the rich are paying less, but a government that increases spending by 6x is certainly contributing to the problem.

Population has doubled size 1950 explaining some of the spending increases and spreading out some of the costs, but not all. It would be interesting to see if the number of "millionaires" has rise proportionally.

This is a teenager 2 years ago

making it harder for people to fail at adulting

That has been the direction school has gone and, at least from my perspective, it seems worse. It has lead to a loss of agency among now so-called adults who expect to always be in a situation which guides them toward success. They struggle without a guidebook.

Learning to fail, and crucially, how to handle failure and recover are better approaches.

This is a teenager 2 years ago

The idea that we're collectively responsible is abjectly untrue. The only people with responsibility are the parents because they are the only ones who are allowed to make decisions. That is unless the government wants to take their children away because they're "uninvolved." Not that a government employee or paid foster family is likely to be better.

The fact is that people with positive influences and role models will do better. It would be great if we could maximize that, but who chooses who is "better," one of the majority who didn't have those role models themselves?

The market chose what it could based on the conditions that exist. Make is easier to people to open new businesses and expand existing ones, and people will do so. Creating hostile environments and then choosing who gets free money to overcome those difficulties is not much of a market.

I used to live in a major city in the US. My commute by public transit was 45 minutes and I lived close to a major hub. I now live outside of that city. I can drive into that same job in 60 minutes. Public transit from here is over 2 hours.

Outside of Boston and NYC (well, maybe not NYC right now), I hear of no one happy with public transit in the US. We need to stop pretending that if we just move into cities, the problems will address themselves. Make public transit attractive and more people will want to live there.

I hope we can be better about addressing issues like this. Taxing empty houses, like most negative incentives, fails to address the existing incentives that cause the problem in the first place which will lead to different market imbalances.

The biggest challenge we face is that the best way to protect wealth is to own assets and properties are assets we can live in. If wealth didn't naturally sublimate this would be less of an issue. Likewise if it were easier to protect wealth by doing something productive, it would happen.

I love using my calendar as a data store. The "notes" section of the calendar is often full of info. E.g. for travel it includes my itinerary, confirmation codes, links to my boarding pass, etc. One stop shopping for an event.

However it's limiting for detailed lists of things to do (e.g. great for travel, lousy for packing list), and it's terrible for time-independent data: notes from talking to my heating contractor, screenshots of setting for my media player, etc.

No one needed to do much with the news. Maybe the weather needed to be semi-accurate so I knew what to wear tomorrow, but my actions rarely hinged on the 3 car pileup that happened 8 hours ago or the money embezzled from a bank that I don't do business with.

People do use the Easterweb to accomplish things: find out how to fix your car, code a mobile app, or buy parts for your refrigerator. If people cannot accomplish these things, traffic and the number of useful sites will drop.

The mindless fear-inducing echo chambers will always be there.

The copyright issue seems unchanged. Anyone taking wholesale quotes from another entity is likely in violation of copyright law. If someone uses AI, and posts the output from it as their own work, and that work contains copyrighted material, the person who posted it is in violation of copyright. AI is just a tool they chose to use and they remain responsible for remaining in compliance with copyright law.

What we need is a reasonable way for people using AI to determine which parts of the text or images they have are subject to copyright.

It's also a balance between having new companies that can start up with lower overheard and fewer jobs concentrated among larger companies that can afford it.

The only companies that treat their employees poorly are those that have people lined up to work for them. The employees must think the tradeoff is worth it.

Employees should be able to choose a company with stability and lower pay or higher pay and less stability. The other option is to take the high pay job and pay for additional private insurance to cover what your employer will not. The people who want stability shouldn't force it on the people who are comfortable without it.