scrappyjoe

Here’s my ansible playbook if you want to give it a go.

https://github.com/riazarbi/homephone

I set up a little neighbourhood pbx this year on an oracle cloud always free instance. Took a couple of days.

Any family can buy a WiFi-enabled office phone and I’ll set up an extension for them. It’s working great! My six year old had a 15 minute chat with classmate while we were making dinner today; they have arranged a play date for next Monday.

A couple of weeks ago a 5 year old invented prank calls. Every now and then the phone will ring and we’ll pick up and she’ll sing a a couple of lines out of Frozen before hanging up. It’s made our community much closer.

I’ve had a couple of weeks of downtime at work, so I decided to incorporate agents into my work processes - things like note taking, task tracking, document management.

Your comment EXACTLY mirrors my experience. Week 1 was ever expanding prompts, and degrading performance. Week 2 has been all about actually defining the objects precisely (notes, tasks, projects, people etc) and defining methods for performing well defined operations against these objects. The agent surface has, as you rightly point out, shrunk to a translation layer that converts natural language to commands and args that pass the input validator.

Cool, I'm already digging into your stuff, thanks for posting it.

I went quite far down this approach last year; you're welcome to take what you want from my repo -

https://github.com/riazarbi/way

That's a really interesting perspective.

I've always taken the elite overproduction thing as an _analytical tool_ to help us make sense of why we have experienced the rise of an oppositional anti intellectual position in contemporary culture.

But you make the good point that it can also be a _weapon_, leveraged by those oppositional groups, to justify their oppositional position.

Perhaps this seeming tautology can be resolved with some systems thinking. Maybe there's some insight in the elite overproduction analysis, but that means that, as an argument for further polarising society it's a pretty effective tool. It's actually reinforcing the feedback loop! A fascinating example of a self fulfilling prophecy.

I associate this phrase with losers

Completely separate from the substance of your point, this sort of language does not encourage constructive dialog, it frames the discussion in such a way that you are either going to get

a. People who agree with you, resulting in you not learning anything b. People who are triggered into fighting with you, once again, resulting in you not learning anything c. People ignoring you, resulting in you not learning anything.

My constructive suggestion to you is that you simply don't write that first sentence. I suspect you (and everyone else!) will have a much more fruitful time online as a result!

Edit: Spelling correction

Maybe this is how we get code versioning for Excel.

Git LFS for workbook + the following prompt :

“Create a commit explains what has changed in the workbook since the last commit. Be brief, but explain the change in business terms as well as code change terms.”

I know an Rmarkdown rendered script when I see one!

Jokes aside, I have been aware of System Cards for a while, but found them sort of irrelevant. As the tide of AI has started lapping at my profession, and I have found myself suddenly spending 1/4 of my day trying out Shiny New Stuff, Model Cards suddenly seem immensely interesting and useful.

I hope that the industry keeps publishing them, even if there is a muted response, because they are quite valuable snapshots of the state of the art, as measured against interesting dimensions, at a particular point in time.

Someone is going to collate all these model cards on a timeline and plot some charts into a _killer_ blog post in about 5 years.

Doesn’t renv do that? What need does renv not meet for you?

I've got one of these, and it works great! The core developers behind this work very, very hard on it, and I am amazed that it works to the degree that it does. Like, there are cars on the road running with this VCU.

Two weaknesses of the project are spotty / outdated / unclear documentation and support. This is not because the community doesn't care, it's because keeping the documentation up to date is hard. And support is hard, because you have like 3 core commenters on the forum answering 90% of questions. They know the stuff inside out, but they take strain from having to answer 'my hello world is broken' type questions over and over again.

It's hard to demonstrate this to software people. You know the endless 'works on my machine' swamps people would get stuck in in the bad old days? Imagine that, but you also have no assurance that the machine the person is using has a hard drive connected, or a cooling fan. You have to cover _all_ the hardware related root causes before you can even begin to address and software related issues people run into.

I think the best support this community could get is more resources dedicated to documentation and support. That would also serve to make the learning curve less steep.

EDIT: I think it's also worth saying that once you set one of these once, it becomes very easy. It's just figuring it out the first time that's hard. If anyone buys one and has trouble, hit me up and maybe I can help.

The child comments are a bit all over the place, but I can clarify.

At present, the Zombieverter supports:

Chademo CCS by interfacing with the BMW i3 LIM CCS by interfacing with the open source FOCCCI CCS controller.

The FOCCCI CCS controller is an associated project. See https://openinverter.org/wiki/Foccci

FOCCCI is the newest kid on the block, but it has been successfully integrated into several conversions now.

Well, if you modify a vehicle, generally you need to take it back to your DMV / TUV / MOT for inspection. Those are the bodies responsible for determining that your car is road legal. And if you don't have a proper BMS, emergency cutoff, adequate cooling and engineering, it won't be certified road legal. Not sure why an EV conversion should be treated any differently to an ICE conversion.

The D1 board on the Zombieverter is just a piggyback board to allow web interface access to the VCU. Once you've set everything up, you can remove the board. It makes configuring the Zombieverter significantly easier since you don't have to mess around with serial cables.

If you like, you can leave it on and monitor your EV data via the web interface. But if the D1 flakes out the VCU will be unaffected.

I know I'm just talking to myself at this point, but I _finally_ get the meaning of the linked article title.

The netlify app is a fork, like a code fork, of the original document. Which is to say, they have taken the original work, transcribed it to a digital format, and will now evolve it.

I don't know if that just went way over my head or if it was not clearly communicated, but there you have it.

Well, after all that, it turns out the netlify app linked in the post is a copy of the original PDF! So, if you care about the actual content, just go read that. The PDF does have some cool graphic design though.

I actually asked the author of the original article, which was linked in the article you posted, and got no reply.

But I managed to track it down elsewhere. I've thrown it onto my static site, so that it's easy to get to. My understanding is that it's in the public domain, so this is fine. If I get told otherwise I'll take it down.

https://riazarbi.github.io/files/Work%20simplification%20as%...

This reply is quite late, but I thought I’d answer it anyway. When I was a child, I enjoyed the VoA more than the BBC Africa service, and when I was a teen my preferences swapped. I had never really thought about why before. And I had never really clicked that the VoA was a propaganda tool.

My best answer is that listening to the VoA as a kid was just way more fun than the BBC. And maybe it being propaganda was a big reason for that. Stories were simple, there were good guys and bad guys, science was awesome and we might make it to Mars by the year 2000.

As I got older, I started to see that things weren’t so simple, I wanted unbiased, or at least balanced, reporting about the region I lived in, and then BBC Africa took over.

Yup, that’s what I did next.

Actually, scratch that, the link I posted is to a master thesis.

Frustratingly little actual content in the article, but it links to a new-looking website that is WIP and mentions an original source document that is, frustratingly, only available for download in the US.

Archive.org has a copy, here - https://archive.org/details/worksimplificati00coxj

You have no idea what you are talking about.

Until the mid 2000s, if you good good enough grades at _any_ high school in the country, the government would foot the entire bill (tuition, board, stipend) to send you to a foreign university for the entirety of your degree. The only requirement was that you returned to Botswana to work back your tuition cost. Probably hundreds of thousands (and that's a lot in a country of 2 million people) of people benefited from this program.

Is it perfect? No. Do citizens have the same opportunities as an average person from an OECD country? Not even close. But you have to appreciate the incredibly low base Botswana started from, and how the government has spent the entirety of its existence ploughing resources into improving the human capital of its citizens.

Well, scoped to just Botswana, when my dad was 10, in the 60's, we had just 15km of tar road in the whole country.

In the 80's when we moved to the village I grew up in, we didn't have a phone - we had a telegraph address.

In the 90's, to get fresh fruit and cheese, we would drive for 3 hours across sand roads to another country to shop at a supermarket.

In 1998 my village got its first chain restaurant and it was a big deal.

In 2009 I tried to modernise the family business by getting our managers to use email and very few of them could navigate the internet. In 2012, my family's vegetable farming plot was one of many that were claimed by the government to start the BIUST and I couldn't fathom how they would staff it.

And in 2025, the BIUST launched a satellite.

Lots of problems, but certainly progress.

Just checked back to see if you replied and you did! Thanks for the info, it is very helpful!

So many strong opinions here from commenters who aren’t actually from Botswana. Let me tell you how we actually feel about it here.

We think it’s awesome! The establishment of a university of science and technology in Botswana has been a long hard road, and many mistakes have been made along the way. But the fact that Botswana now has the local skill to deploy a satellite and make use of the data it provides to inform decisions blows my mind.

I grew up in the village that now hosts the university. We were so isolated back then that I’d listen to the Voice of America and marvel at the things that were being done in the developed world, and wonder if we would ever be able to participate in that level. The fact that a smart kid can grow up to attend a local university and end up launching a SATELLITE INTO SPACE is incredible!

What country are you from? Is there a link to the agency that maintains the portal? I worked in local government in a unit that was arguing for in-housing developers rather than hiring contractors. That team could maybe learn from your country's experience.

I'm not sure if you are confirming or rebutting my argument. In the future, no whisking. Gossip better be saucy if you want to stick around.

I approve of this implication

I suppose that house servants performed two functions - menial tasks, and emotional labour. Competence at both was essential. A house servant who was great at making beds but super annoying or had no emotional intelligence probably didn't last very long.

The menial tasks component will probably be automated away. Which leaves the emotional labour. Put another way, our job will be to be liked by the people with power. Liked enough to be kept around.

The only job left in the future is that of the pet.

It is not clear to me how your ‘one level deeper’ reasons are connected to your ‘obvious answers’.