I really love your post, but I do think (and I come from an artistic background) that some skills have their own beauty, like work of art. Some love for creativity and what we create has a meaning of its own. Certainly worthy of an epitaph.
It’s why overuse of AI is a bad call imo. You skip a part of the journey. Like Guy Kawasaki says “make something meaningful”. If we are all AIs talking to eachother, everything becomes meaningless, we will become a simulation of surrogates.
That said, human compassion, relating to others and everything you mentioned trumps everything else.
Sure thing, but at the same time, there's creativity and then there's work; I could creatively write things in C or assembly for the art of it, but that isn't what my employer pays me to do. I could do my job in notepad or `ed` and type every character myself, but that's inefficient.
Same goes for art (which is often what it's compared to), some part of art is creative, but the vast majority of art that people get paid salaries for is "just work"; designing a website, doing graphics work for a video game or TV production, that kinda thing.
tl;dr, AI won't replace artisans but it's a tool that can help increase productivity / reduce costs. Emphasis on can, because it's a lot more complex than "same output in less time".
This is a usual pattern, a tech savvy hacker creates this great tool, but if you don’t put in the interface work to make it easy, frictionless, it might as well not exist for the general public to consume. Grandma will never use this. Or not even a slightly technical person will. (And it’s fine if that isn’t your audience ofc)
My call to any devs reading this: get an interface designer, put in the usability effort before adding new features.
That was a fun read, and it might even explain why a lot of Gen-z is opting out of any sort of career building, wanting values instead (or next to) a paycheck. They saw their parents do The Office in real life.
Interesting is also that Michael does make a really good arc from season one to when he leaves. He remains clueless, or rather he it dawns on him he does not want to become like Ryan or David (the articles sociopath). Like he says in a later season “Business is about people.”
The smartest thing they did with the US version of The Office after season 1 was to make Michael highly competent in sales and its longterm relationships. S1 and the UK version of the show viewed the boss as incompetent at every level, it was much more cynical. Making Michael marginally competent gives him an empathetic leg to stand on for the audience. Had they kept Michael exactly like David Brent it probably would have still been hilarious but flamed out around season 2 or 3.
I agree, it made his character arc more interesting. Also, the entire show is centered around Michael. The later seasons really suffer without him.
It is also useful because it shows an old adage: people get promoted to their level of incompetence. Michael is actually an excellent salesman. He's a bad manager. He was promoted to branch manager because he was good at a different job.
This is just like when a really good engineer is promoted and becomes a bad manager.
> That was a fun read, and it might even explain why a lot of Gen-z is opting out of any sort of career building, wanting values instead (or next to) a paycheck.
Wouldn't that make them even bigger ~losers~ Clueless?
The ~losers~ Clueless are strictly those who put in more effort than they get in return but who cannot see it!
Putting in +25% extra into their job for a 5% promotion, for example.
Putting in effort for anything other than money is in the companies interest - they want people to be happy with vibes-as-compensation instead of money-as-compensation!
> The losers are strictly those who put in more effort than they get in return but who cannot see it!
I think those would be the losers who get promoted to clueless, at least in this metaphor. The losers who aren't clueless are putting in the bare minimum work that doesn't get them fired. If they overperform, they (according to the theory) get promoted.
I fully agree this nasty "vibes-as-compensation" bullshit, "we're all a family", etc, is in the interest of the top leadership. The sociopaths, if you will.
My mention of Gen-Z wanting values is exactly them seeing the bullshit of the sociopaths at the top (and the crap like “we are a family”. Gen-Z sees through that fluff.
The values I mentioned in the top comment are exactly about having people at the top who actually give a damn, that guide or lead with empathy. That doesn’t mean they don’t have to make shitty decisions, it just means they give a damn.
Gen Y was supposed to be values-driven too, Gen X invented slackers and grunge who were all about authenticity, boomers were children of hippies, beatniks preceded hippies…
The malaise afflicting Gen Z is more- secular- than cultural, I fear. The endpoint of economic trends.
I also feel that digital companies get away with “no human representatives”. I should always have access to a human. It should be law. It will screw over a lot of companies and I am all for it since they don’t know what service looks like if it looked them in the eyes.
I heard this being described as an "accountability sink." A system designed in such way that when something bad happens, there is nobody to be held accountable. It feels pervasive in the modern world.
The rule for not replying to GDPR requests (e.g. sent by registered letter) holds within a month: the maximum fine for this is 4% of last years total revenue or 20 mio €, whichever is the larger number.
For US companies use their (typically Dublin) European HQs.
> the maximum fine for this is 4% of last years total revenue or 20 mio €, whichever is the larger number.
The maximum fine wasn't even achieved by Facebook, after years and many blatant GDPR cases. Do you really think someone is getting a fine for not replying to a subject access request in due time? If so I have a very good bridge to sell you, and that bridge has more probability to exist than Amazon getting any kind of GDPR fine for not acknowledging a SAR.
Yes, Microsoft shows up a lot. Some of these bots are running on Azure.
My favorite ISP to spot occasionally is SpaceX / Starlink. That can’t be the most economical ISP for bot traffic, but machines can be infected, even on Starlink.
Afaik, there's a difference between classical philosophy (which opines on the divide between an objective world and the perceived word) and more modern philosophy (which generally does away with that distinction while expanding on the idea that human perception can be fallible).
The idea that there's an objective but imperceivable world (except by philosophers) is... a slippery slope to philosophical excess.
It's easy to spin whatever fancy you want when nobody can falsify it.
In my amateur opinion, it's almost the opposite. For Plato, the material world, while "real" enough, is less important and in some sense less True than the higher immaterial world of Forms or Ideas. The highest, truest, realest world is "above" this one, related to cognition, and (more or less) accessible by reason. We may be in a cave, but all we have to do is walk up into the sunlight — which, by the way, is nothing but a higher and truer form of light than our current firelight. (This idea that material objects partake of their corresponding higher-level Ideas leads to the Third Man paradox: if it is the Form of Man that compasses similar material instances such as Socrates and Achilles, is there then a third... thing... that compasses Socrates, Achilles, and Man itself?)
For Kant, and therefore for Schopenhauer, the visible world is composed merely of objects, which are by definition only mental representations: a world of objects "exists" only in the mind of a subject. If there is a Thing-in-Itself (which even Kant does not doubt, if I recall correctly), it certainly cannot be a mental representation: the nature of the Thing-in-Itself is unknowable (says Kant) but certainly in no way at all like the mere object that appears to our mental processes. (Schopenhauer says the Thing-in-Itself is composed of pure Will, whatever that means.) The realest world is "behind" or "below" the visible one, completely divorced from human reason, and by definition completely inaccessible to any form of cognition (which includes the sensory perception we share with the animals, as well as the reason that belongs to humans alone). The Third Man paradox makes no sense at all for Kant, first because whatever the ineffable Thing-in-Itself is, it certainly won't literally "partake" of any mental concept we might come up with, and secondly because it would be a category error to suppose that any property could be true of both a mental object and a thing-in-itself, which are nothing alike. (The Thing-in-Itself doesn't even exist in time or space, nor does it have a cause. Time, space, and causality are all purely human frameworks imposed by our cognitive processes: to suppose that space has any real existence simply because you perceive it is, again, a category error, akin to supposing that the world is really yellow-tinged just because you happen to be wearing yellow goggles.)
"Subtle energy" and "vibrational frequency" are dead giveaways of metaphysics instead of science.
I'm not adverse to that, as I do believe that much of metaphysics does have real physical backing that we haven't uncovered yet.
But I also asked a strong scientific question. First, with the human electric field, how far does it extend outside the body and at what strength? Secondly, can drugs or practices modify this, and how so?
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