I didn't mean to make it sound that bleak. The first 8 hours are ok. They're productive. I don't sit here tearing my hair out doing nothing waiting for everyone to leave so I can type. I actually don't mind the open office plan very much. A private office would be *much* better, but this is ok.
But when I do work over for an hour or two I like it a whole lot more. I'm not terribly social (yeah I know, a computer programmer that's not terribly social go figure). I like to code in the dark and with a perfect quiet around me. It's much more pleasant and I seem to get a lot more done. Or maybe not - maybe I just enjoy it so much it feels like I get more done.
My two cents - we have an open office plan where I work. So I like to stay after hours and work. Why? Because the lights are off, I don't have to listen to people milling around me all the time having conversations about the weather or last Sunday's game. Just me and the work I have to do. No distractions. It's blissful.
I can get more done in 2 hours like that than the previous 8.
For all the good it will do for you. Republicans own the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and about 2/3rds of the Governors currently. What they want they are going to get.
Oh man! Good times. I had an experience very similar to your #4.
I was a consultant for a securities group, doing PC maintenance for college money on the side. Owner was a know-it-all type. He had a Novell 3.11 server holding all his corporate data. Ran out of room, so he had me span a second disk onto his virtual volume. I wasn't a Novell expert but I gave it a go. It was my first time on this particular system. I explained to him how this created another point of failure, you need to do backups, and so on. And soon, because the other drive was "singing". You know the sound, the sound of a platter drive that's getting ready to die.
I talked him into buying a tape drive. Did they ever use it? No. I made a script to make it easy. One command. Still no.
His PC had a tape drive. I set that to automatically back up the Novell server after hours. He figured it out and disabled it.
One day they get a card in the mail. It was the local power company. "We will be performing line maintenance for your block at 10am a week from now. Please turn off all of your electronic equipment while we perform our maintenance."
Yup, afraid so. A large-ish company with about 3-400 employees making a popular product you probably have heard of if you're into cars.
It was right after the dot-com bubble burst. If you were in IT you were lucky to be working at all, at least in my neck of the woods anyways. I was laid off when they hired me in and considered myself lucky. It's also the only job I ever quit without giving a two week notice.
When I quit HR called me in to lecture me about how unprofessional that was. A few months later she also quit without putting in a two week notice. Her and the company's CFO went out drinking margaritas at lunch...and just never came back.
Everyone has one stain on their resume, that place is mine.
My first day, Monday. I'm being brought around to the other programmers and board designers and introduced. "Hey this is X, he's our new guy in software." Almost every person I met looked up and said "Hi." In the tone of voice you usually use when you find your car has a flat tire. Some didn't even try to shake my hand. Some didn't even look up at me.
Took me 3 months to find out why everyone was like that. I made some friends there and they finally told me what was up one day while we were at lunch.
Our manager had a meeting the Friday morning, previous. He told the entire IT staff that he was having some work done on his house over the weekend, and that he would like the entire team to move shingles up to his roof. Right now. And oh yeah, did I forget to mention that all vacation requests have to pass my desk for approval? See you all at my house.
Your engineers already have a job, doing electrical design or mechanical engineering. To me, your question sounds a lot like, "We have a team of highly talented airline pilots. What can I do to make them all brain surgeons?"
Software design is its own discipline. And doing it well is a full-time commitment. If you push your engineers through some software classes or workshops, all you're going to get from them is - at best - half-assed stuff you'll need an actual software engineer to fix later on.
Do it the right way. Hire a professional, spec out the software you need, and have your professional write it for you. It will save you time and it will save you money. Consider how much your engineers are making. Now think about how many hours they'll lose in productivity trying to be software engineers and writing lousy code. Now think about how much time the software engineer you'll eventually have to hire anyways will take fixing it all. Budget that against what it would cost to simply hire the software guy in the first place and do it correctly the first time. You'll see why your idea is the wrong one.
Hollywood can't help but do this now. It's all that's left to them.
Every film nowadays has a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly thanks to Hollywood accounting practices. To invest that kind of money you have to be able to show the principals an expected return on that investment. You need to do market analysis and show that you have an audience large enough to get that return.
The only way to do that is to copy older blockbusters and assume the returns will be in the ballpark. Hence, reboots.
Look at Deadpool if you want to know about risk aversion. The studio did NOT want to make that movie. It was "risky". Imagine living in a world where you would think that a Deadpool movie was too risky. That's why they're going for The Matrix. The two sequels were garbage but still made bank. So they know that this reboot will too.
It's the beginning of the end for Hollywood, IMO. Their model can only support smash blockbusters, and now they're out of them.
It is the job of the CIA to collect intelligence. Central Intelligence Agency, right there in the name. It's not their job to post software patches.
I think what Cindy Cohn meant was "it would sure be nice if the CIA had let us know about the problems rather than keep them secret", and I agree that would have been awfully nice of them - but wanting the CIA to reveal tactical information that helps it do its job is silly.
They're a spy agency, folks. This is what spies do.
What would happen? Why worry about it? It never will happen so it's not worth taking your time to think about.
And the answer why is right there in the article blurb. I want you to really consider what it would be like trying to control a complex 3D cad program with a Playstation controller. Or a dinky touchscreen-only interface on your phone. Picture how bad that would be.
It will never happen because nobody sane would ever want this.
The Keystone pipeline takes oil from Alberta, Canada and moves it to Port Arthur for sale and shipment. Apart from building the thing, how would this make jobs here?
Global warming is a far more pressing problem. We don't need more oil, we need less. Any money put to this pipeline would pay far greater dividends in renewable energy sources. Wind, solar, tidal, hydroelectric. Oil was great in its day, but just like coal - it's rapidly becoming unnecessary.
Even if all electricity were to come directly from coal, which do you think would add more pollutants to the atmosphere? A million cars, each with a little dinky catalytic converter on them, or a few coal plants with gigantic industrial scrubbers that are not limited by size/space/weight constraints?
I am not against progress, but there is a social cost that partially offsets the gains. We seem to regard this a collateral damage and want to ignore the people that are hurt in the name of progress.
This. This is exactly what I was trying to say, thank you.
I think the future is going to be wonderful, I really do. I agree with that fellow upstream who thinks that jobs steal your life from you. When we figure out a way to automate everything so that's not the case it will be wonderful. But we have to get there. It won't happen all at once, and some of the intermediate steps will be painful. When trucks become automatic and 3.5 million workers are suddenly unemployed, what then? We won't have a safety net in place yet. What are these poor people going to do in the meanwhile?
When we solve the scarcity problem - and we will - we will need to rethink the entire concept of work and income. I don't think anyone has really done that yet. What happens when the amount of work society needs from you permits you to retire at 25 instead of 68? We need to start planning for that.
I got into a debate with someone on this exact point. I would not be surprised if in the future, fleet vehicles are all there are.
We've seen how successful Uber is, the whole concept of distributed travel. The next logical step with self-driving cars would be a fleet of them maintained by a single corporation similar to Uber. Imagine a phone app that summons a car and a monthly fee like Netflix. Tell me that wouldn't be a smash hit! A monthly fee, about the same price as a car lease payment. No car maintenance, no insurance payments, no stopping at gas stations. No tickets, no parking fees. You can watch Netflix while it drives you to the store, then to your friend's house, then home. Stop by the pub and have a drink, why not? Drunk driving is a thing of the past - you're not driving! And the computer driving is safer than a person could ever be. Humans don't have 360 degree vision or radar.
Press a button and take me anywhere. I'd be the first in line for that.
Could not agree more. You're talking about the step-after-the-step, though. In the short term people are going to suffer. Greatly. We don't have an Elon Musk style universal income just yet. But eventually we will. We'll have to - there won't be any other options to keep everyone alive. If you buy food with money, and there aren't jobs to give you money, what other choice would we have? And what good would all those factories be in that case? Nobody would be able to buy all those goods.
From a certain point of view, an economy and it's attendant government is simply a method of distributing goods. I'm not saying anything new there. Everyone from Smith to Marx says pretty much the same thing, they just disagree on how to proceed. But there is an underlying given in all their proofs though - scarcity. They all assume scarcity. We only have so much food, how best to distribute it? Communism? Capitalism? Something in-between?
All of those arguments though are outdated. Automation is about to eliminate scarcity. The old arguments will go along with it, since a foundational principle of them will suddenly be invalid.
Slashdot Mirror
Striking Thoughts, Bruce Lee. So far it's pretty great.
I had a get-together at my house last weekend, family and friends of family.
We decided on some music. I turned on my windows machine which has some decent speakers on it. Loaded up Youtube and told everyone to have at it.
A person somewhat younger than me said "Ooo! A mouse. I haven't used one of these in years."
That's just crazy talk, man. :)
I didn't mean to make it sound that bleak. The first 8 hours are ok. They're productive. I don't sit here tearing my hair out doing nothing waiting for everyone to leave so I can type. I actually don't mind the open office plan very much. A private office would be *much* better, but this is ok.
But when I do work over for an hour or two I like it a whole lot more. I'm not terribly social (yeah I know, a computer programmer that's not terribly social go figure). I like to code in the dark and with a perfect quiet around me. It's much more pleasant and I seem to get a lot more done. Or maybe not - maybe I just enjoy it so much it feels like I get more done.
Yup. No work from home policy and we have set hours.
I'm out of mod points or I'd mod you up.
My two cents - we have an open office plan where I work. So I like to stay after hours and work. Why? Because the lights are off, I don't have to listen to people milling around me all the time having conversations about the weather or last Sunday's game. Just me and the work I have to do. No distractions. It's blissful.
I can get more done in 2 hours like that than the previous 8.
I think this would pair nicely with your SpaceX business, don't you?
Not true,but I do give you bonus points for posting like Dr. Seuss.
For all the good it will do for you. Republicans own the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and about 2/3rds of the Governors currently. What they want they are going to get.
One of my very most favorite old-timey sins! Hubris.
"The DRM is supposed to thwart copyright infringement by stopping people from ripping video and other content from encrypted high-quality streams."
Sounds an awful lot like "The Titanic is Unsinkable" doesn't it?
Well, the "whims" are all spelled-out for you and known before you pay for it, maybe it is not so bad...
When is the last time you read an EULA?
Oh man! Good times. I had an experience very similar to your #4.
I was a consultant for a securities group, doing PC maintenance for college money on the side. Owner was a know-it-all type. He had a Novell 3.11 server holding all his corporate data. Ran out of room, so he had me span a second disk onto his virtual volume. I wasn't a Novell expert but I gave it a go. It was my first time on this particular system. I explained to him how this created another point of failure, you need to do backups, and so on. And soon, because the other drive was "singing". You know the sound, the sound of a platter drive that's getting ready to die.
I talked him into buying a tape drive. Did they ever use it? No. I made a script to make it easy. One command. Still no.
His PC had a tape drive. I set that to automatically back up the Novell server after hours. He figured it out and disabled it.
One day they get a card in the mail. It was the local power company. "We will be performing line maintenance for your block at 10am a week from now. Please turn off all of your electronic equipment while we perform our maintenance."
I'm sure you know how this story ends. =)
Yup, afraid so. A large-ish company with about 3-400 employees making a popular product you probably have heard of if you're into cars.
It was right after the dot-com bubble burst. If you were in IT you were lucky to be working at all, at least in my neck of the woods anyways. I was laid off when they hired me in and considered myself lucky. It's also the only job I ever quit without giving a two week notice.
When I quit HR called me in to lecture me about how unprofessional that was. A few months later she also quit without putting in a two week notice. Her and the company's CFO went out drinking margaritas at lunch...and just never came back.
Everyone has one stain on their resume, that place is mine.
My first day, Monday. I'm being brought around to the other programmers and board designers and introduced. "Hey this is X, he's our new guy in software." Almost every person I met looked up and said "Hi." In the tone of voice you usually use when you find your car has a flat tire. Some didn't even try to shake my hand. Some didn't even look up at me.
Took me 3 months to find out why everyone was like that. I made some friends there and they finally told me what was up one day while we were at lunch.
Our manager had a meeting the Friday morning, previous. He told the entire IT staff that he was having some work done on his house over the weekend, and that he would like the entire team to move shingles up to his roof. Right now. And oh yeah, did I forget to mention that all vacation requests have to pass my desk for approval? See you all at my house.
It gets better, or should I say worse.
He made them all take a vacation day to do it.
Your engineers already have a job, doing electrical design or mechanical engineering. To me, your question sounds a lot like, "We have a team of highly talented airline pilots. What can I do to make them all brain surgeons?"
Software design is its own discipline. And doing it well is a full-time commitment. If you push your engineers through some software classes or workshops, all you're going to get from them is - at best - half-assed stuff you'll need an actual software engineer to fix later on.
Do it the right way. Hire a professional, spec out the software you need, and have your professional write it for you. It will save you time and it will save you money. Consider how much your engineers are making. Now think about how many hours they'll lose in productivity trying to be software engineers and writing lousy code. Now think about how much time the software engineer you'll eventually have to hire anyways will take fixing it all. Budget that against what it would cost to simply hire the software guy in the first place and do it correctly the first time. You'll see why your idea is the wrong one.
Hollywood can't help but do this now. It's all that's left to them.
Every film nowadays has a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly thanks to Hollywood accounting practices. To invest that kind of money you have to be able to show the principals an expected return on that investment. You need to do market analysis and show that you have an audience large enough to get that return.
The only way to do that is to copy older blockbusters and assume the returns will be in the ballpark. Hence, reboots.
Look at Deadpool if you want to know about risk aversion. The studio did NOT want to make that movie. It was "risky". Imagine living in a world where you would think that a Deadpool movie was too risky. That's why they're going for The Matrix. The two sequels were garbage but still made bank. So they know that this reboot will too.
It's the beginning of the end for Hollywood, IMO. Their model can only support smash blockbusters, and now they're out of them.
Someone had to say it.
It is the job of the CIA to collect intelligence. Central Intelligence Agency, right there in the name. It's not their job to post software patches.
I think what Cindy Cohn meant was "it would sure be nice if the CIA had let us know about the problems rather than keep them secret", and I agree that would have been awfully nice of them - but wanting the CIA to reveal tactical information that helps it do its job is silly.
They're a spy agency, folks. This is what spies do.
What would happen? Why worry about it? It never will happen so it's not worth taking your time to think about.
And the answer why is right there in the article blurb. I want you to really consider what it would be like trying to control a complex 3D cad program with a Playstation controller. Or a dinky touchscreen-only interface on your phone. Picture how bad that would be.
It will never happen because nobody sane would ever want this.
We need carbon based fuel in the now.
Don't know about you, but gas is under $2/gallon where I'm at. Natural gas is holding steady over the last 5 years. Hard to justify any desperate we-need-it-right-now measure.
Let's produce it here. Make jobs here.
The Keystone pipeline takes oil from Alberta, Canada and moves it to Port Arthur for sale and shipment. Apart from building the thing, how would this make jobs here?
Global warming is a far more pressing problem. We don't need more oil, we need less. Any money put to this pipeline would pay far greater dividends in renewable energy sources. Wind, solar, tidal, hydroelectric. Oil was great in its day, but just like coal - it's rapidly becoming unnecessary.
Even if all electricity were to come directly from coal, which do you think would add more pollutants to the atmosphere? A million cars, each with a little dinky catalytic converter on them, or a few coal plants with gigantic industrial scrubbers that are not limited by size/space/weight constraints?
The game being played was online poker, so nobody was reading anybody's face making it an equal contest. Check the source article.
I am not against progress, but there is a social cost that partially offsets the gains. We seem to regard this a collateral damage and want to ignore the people that are hurt in the name of progress.
This. This is exactly what I was trying to say, thank you.
I think the future is going to be wonderful, I really do. I agree with that fellow upstream who thinks that jobs steal your life from you. When we figure out a way to automate everything so that's not the case it will be wonderful. But we have to get there. It won't happen all at once, and some of the intermediate steps will be painful. When trucks become automatic and 3.5 million workers are suddenly unemployed, what then? We won't have a safety net in place yet. What are these poor people going to do in the meanwhile?
When we solve the scarcity problem - and we will - we will need to rethink the entire concept of work and income. I don't think anyone has really done that yet. What happens when the amount of work society needs from you permits you to retire at 25 instead of 68? We need to start planning for that.
I got into a debate with someone on this exact point. I would not be surprised if in the future, fleet vehicles are all there are.
We've seen how successful Uber is, the whole concept of distributed travel. The next logical step with self-driving cars would be a fleet of them maintained by a single corporation similar to Uber. Imagine a phone app that summons a car and a monthly fee like Netflix. Tell me that wouldn't be a smash hit! A monthly fee, about the same price as a car lease payment. No car maintenance, no insurance payments, no stopping at gas stations. No tickets, no parking fees. You can watch Netflix while it drives you to the store, then to your friend's house, then home. Stop by the pub and have a drink, why not? Drunk driving is a thing of the past - you're not driving! And the computer driving is safer than a person could ever be. Humans don't have 360 degree vision or radar.
Press a button and take me anywhere. I'd be the first in line for that.
Could not agree more. You're talking about the step-after-the-step, though. In the short term people are going to suffer. Greatly. We don't have an Elon Musk style universal income just yet. But eventually we will. We'll have to - there won't be any other options to keep everyone alive. If you buy food with money, and there aren't jobs to give you money, what other choice would we have? And what good would all those factories be in that case? Nobody would be able to buy all those goods.
From a certain point of view, an economy and it's attendant government is simply a method of distributing goods. I'm not saying anything new there. Everyone from Smith to Marx says pretty much the same thing, they just disagree on how to proceed. But there is an underlying given in all their proofs though - scarcity. They all assume scarcity. We only have so much food, how best to distribute it? Communism? Capitalism? Something in-between?
All of those arguments though are outdated. Automation is about to eliminate scarcity. The old arguments will go along with it, since a foundational principle of them will suddenly be invalid.