Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@futurebird I knew how to do a mail merge in the late ‘90s. I tried it in 2018 and none of the flows that used to work still did.

@futurebird

The thing that bugs me about the TV model is that the first step of the chain works how I want the whole thing to work. A studio creates a pilot (cheaply, missing effects and so on), which they then shop to networks. If networks think they can make money from it, they commission the whole thing. If they're a bit unsure they may pay for the pilot to be finished, show it, and use the viewer feedback to make the decision on whether to fund the whole series.

They then decide whether to renew the series for another season based on how well it does.

I would love to see the pilots made public and the series funded directly by potential viewers, to be made available for free distribution. When you release the first episodes, announce how much you need to make season 2 (including your profit), and start making it if you raise that much. Fans are incentuvised to share the show as widely as possible because it increases the chance people will pay for the next episodes.

Instead, we get two or more layers of indirection between fans and studios, and popular shows get cancelled because advertisers don't think its viewers will buy things.

@futurebird I watch videos in the Fediverse that are hosted elsewhere. Normally I don't pay attention to where they are, YouTube is noticeable because you have to click through a bunch of 'Did you really want to opt out of all of the data have sting we do?' and then they show ads every few minutes. It's such an utterly wretched experience I avoid it. I also subscribe to a few streaming services.

@futurebird I didn’t see the poll, but I will not click on a YouTube link unless there is absolutely no other option (i.e. the video is the only source of the information).

@futurebird Fillings in the teeth or false teeth are a common trope in science fiction for spotting time travellers. So are other surgical things like replacement hip joints.

@futurebird @billiglarper

At small and medium organizations “hiring” is extra work pawned off on already busy people

Often this pressure works the other way around. At a small organisation, the person who is going to be responsible for the work that the person does is also responsible for all steps in hiring. This can cause issues with bias, but at least the incentives are aligned.

In a larger organisation, CVs are typically filtered by HR / recruiters. At Microsoft, they had an annoying habit of filtering out the most qualified candidates because they lacked a traditional educational background (because they'd spent their time doing exactly the thing you were hiring for instead). You had to work quite closely with them to avoid this.

The problem is that you get a lot of applicants for some posts, but you get very few good ones. Someone has to do a deselection pass so that the selection pass isn't overwhelmed.

LinkedIn now has an AI thing that does this. For an LLVM compiler rôle, it filtered out 80% of applicants who had worked on LLVM previously and hid them in the default view. Utterly useless. And, at the same time, their one-button-apply thing meant that I was flooded with unqualified people.

@billiglarper @futurebird

Yup, a lot of people I've hired have gone through a process, submitted a CV, been interviewed, and so on. It's just that I've never done that from a cold start. I've applied for two jobs like that, I was rejected for one and declined the other (both with the same employer).

@futurebird

I always feel like a bit of a fraud giving CV help to students. I've reviewed a lot of CVs in my professional life, but I've never once applied for a job where the CV was a major factor. Even when I was doing freelance work, all of my clients were people who knew my work before I worked for them.

@futurebird C has at least four kinds of zero. I’m sure there’s space for at least one more.

@futurebird

I’ve taught programming like this, but I’m an increasingly huge fan of the debugging-first approach that a few people have been trying more recently. In this model, you don’t teach people to write code first, you teach them to fix code first.

I’ve seen a bunch of variations of this. If you have some kind of IDE (Smalltalk is beautiful for this, but other languages usually have the minimum requirements) then you can start with some working code and have them single-step through it and inspect variables to see if the behaviour reflects their intuition. Then you can give them nearly correct code and have them use that tool to fix the issues.

Only once they’re comfortable with that do you have them start writing code.

Otherwise it’s like teaching them to write an essay without first teaching them how to erase and redraft. If you teach people to get stuck before teaching them how to unstick themselves, it’s not surprising that they stop and give up at that point.

@Fishercat @futurebird

Isn’t that where you find children?

@futurebird

The phrase boy aquarium may be about to enter your vocabulary.

@futurebird @imp3tuz

They start by making the bonuses if MS sales droids entirely dependent on their AI upsells. Get someone to increase their number of M365 seats by 20%? No bonus. Get them to move to a Copilot++ subscription? Big bonus. Need to almost 100% discount the product to shift it? No problem, lock people in now and exploit them later.

To get their bonuses, the sales droids need a narrative that makes people move to the AI thing. All of your competitors are buying it and seeing a 10% reduction in costs! They're shipping twice as fast! Oh, sorry, I can't give you details, they're covered by NDA (and you wouldn't want me to give your competitors details about you, would you?) but trust me bro, they're all seeing huge productivity wins.

So now some decision maker had been persuaded to buy this nonsense. Now their reputation is on the line. If it improves things, yay! They're a visionary! They led the AI transition at the organisation! Leadership! But what if it doesn't work? Not possible, they're a leader. If you're not seeing a productivity boost, it can't possibly because some snake-oil salesdroid sold them a lemon it must be because you are using it wrong.

And, helpfully, Microsoft added dashboard things so you can see who is using Copilot and his much. Not seeing a big productivity win? Just go to the dashboard and see who isn't using it. It must be their fault. Pressure them to use it more. You'll see big wins! And you must see them, because otherwise you have to admit that you were scammed.

@futurebird @rep_movsd @GossiTheDog

One way to think of these models (note: this is useful but not entirely accurate and contains some important oversimplifications) is that they are modelling an n-dimensional space of possible images. The training defines a bunch of points in that space and they interpolate into the gaps. It’s possible the there are points in the space that come from the training data and contain adults in sexually explicit activities, and others that show children. Interpolating between them would give CSAM, assuming the latent space is set up that way.

@futurebird @mina @EricLawton @clarablackink @DoomsdaysCW @Dianora

To me, it reflect’s both Carroll’s view that all of his books were about mathematics and philosophy, his sense of humour (you did get what you asked for!) and his slight insecurity about being remembered for the works he regarded as more trivial rather than his serious academic publications. Of his non-fiction, I have only read his book on symbolic logic and I found the writing style quite engaging (though a lot more dry than in his fiction), and maybe he felt a monarch should have a stronger grounding in mathematics.

@futurebird @mina @EricLawton @clarablackink @DoomsdaysCW @Dianora

My favourite story about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is that Queen Victoria liked it and asked Lewis Carroll for a copy of his next book. His next book was The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically, and he dutifully sent her a signed copy. I am not sure if she read it.