And here I didn’t think I could hate this guy any more. Truly a vile piece of shit. I’m glad I never bought one of his cars and well he’s at that company, I never will.

This isn’t what they want to happen. They know it will happen, but this isn’t the goal or objective.

Amazon is a big boy company, if they want to cut staff, they’ll cut staff. The problem with cutting staff this way, is that they don’t get to decide who they’re cutting. They don’t want to cut talented employees at random, they want to pick the low performers and let them go. This is kind of the opposite of that.

The higher skilled the employee is, the more likely they are to have been hired remote, and to feel they can find another job also. That means they’re effectively shooting themselves in the foot and getting rid of some of their talented employees for the benefit of bringing people into the office.

There has been a swing in the business opinion that work from home isn’t as efficient. This is basically the higher-ups falling in line with that opinion.

If you made it, you’re welcome to do that if you want. If someone else made it then you’re an asshole of assholes and this is grounds for execution or exile to the farthest reaches of the globe.

Honestly, the real question to me is how many innocent people were maimed, injured, or killed in this attack. This is incredibly indiscriminate, even though the idea is that only the bad guys are holding the pages or walkie-talkies, but if they’re in a cafe they’re not the only ones getting hurt. Think of it as attaching an explosive to a thousand Hezbollah people, and then exploding them as they wander through a city. That’s the true crime, the potentially disproportionate massacre of innocent civilians.

“Yup, and it seems like more and more that it wasn’t explosives, but regular pagers tampered with to explode using parts they already contain as to not arouse suspicion.”

There’s no way this can be the case. Regular pager batteries do not explode. At most they can catch fire, but they don’t explode. There’s no way there wasn’t a high-grade explosive in each of the pages. The electronics may have been normal and triggered with regular software, but there had to be an explosive and a detonator in the pager.

That sucks man. Religion ruins childhoods.

I’m sorry, but let’s be realistic… if she came out in support of trump she would get a lot of negative responses also. We’re a pretty divided country.

That’s another way to say metric. Fuck the English system. Especially when cooking.

Wow… Maybe for you, but it was everything and more for me. Fuck childhood. Give me freedom, independence, and not having to follow the rules of my parents.

No curfew, no bedtime… You can figure out what you want and do it. Living with a girlfriend. Making and spending money. Driving your own car. I get that maybe adulthood may not be for everyone, but I’ll take it any day over childhood!

Technology has moved from nitch nerdy thing to general public usage and as it did so it became usable without knowing what’s going on. Gen Z doesn’t know shit about technology, they just know how to use it.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to get a computer working you had to screw with the RAM settings or build the computer yourself from components. If you didn’t know how to do this you talked with someone who did. I’ve forced my kids to learn at least some of this, but the idea that they’re more tech savvy is ridiculous. They’re users of tech, but it’s become too complicated (and more user friendly), so they don’t know what’s happening behind their screen.

I would make the written English language 100% phonetic.

I would make SI mandatory in the US.

I would make one night a week a “have dinner with the neighbors” day.

Edit: I would make bidet toilets mandatory. Dry toilets would be phased out like cars without back-up cameras or asbestos insulation.

It’s like living in Minnesota, except the months of the year where you don’t go outside are swapped. Winter is very nice, in summer you don’t go outside. In the colder places, it’s the opposite.

This is the first comment in the thread that I 100% agree with. (I can’t believe how many of the other ones I don’t.)

This just in: “CEOs work for money… JUST LIKE THE REST OF US!”

About 15 years ago I was giving a presentation at a technical conference. This was me giving a presentation in front of a room full of about 50 other engineers. At this point in my career this was still pretty new to me, so I was nervous. It was getting time for my presentation and I needed to do a last minute nervous pee before I did my presentation.

I went to the bathroom, peed in a urinal, and then went to wash my hands. I pushed down the bathroom faucet and it exploded sending up a geyser of water about air a foot or two into the air. Now had I really been on a TV show, my pants would have been soaked in the crotch area, but luckily in real life I stepped back and didn’t get wet. However, this was the perfect setup for a young nervous engineer giving a technical presentation to be thoroughly embarrassed. Luckily I’m either not on a TV show, or I’m not the main character.

The script doesn’t go away when you replace a helpdesk operator with ChatGPT. You just get a script-reading interface without empathy and a severally hindered ability to process novel issues outside it’s protocol.

The humans you speak to could do exactly what you’re asking for, if the business did not handcuff them to a script.

But they do handcuff them to a script… at least 1st and 2nd level tech support. That’s the point. It’s so fucking awful. It’s a barrier to keep you from the more highly paid tech support people who may actually be able to answer your questions. First you have to wait on hold to make sure you think it’s worth wasting their time on your annoying problem, THEN it’s a maze you have to navigate, and then whoops you just got hung up on… so sorry, start all over! LLMs are (can be) so much better at this!

I understand their limitations, but you’re overselling the negative. They’re fucking awesome for what they can do, but they have drawbacks that you must be aware of. Just as it’s lame to be an AI fanboi, it’s equally lame to be an AI luddite.

That’s 99% of what I’m looking for. If I’m figuring something out by myself, I’m not looking it up on the internet.

I’m an engineer and I’ve found LLMs great for helping me understand an issue. When you read something online, you have to translate from what the author is saying into your thinking and I’ve found LLMs are much better at re-framing information to match my inner dialog. I often find them much more useful than google searches in trying to find information.

I already use LLMs to problem solve issues that I’m having and they’re typically better than me punching questions into Google. I admit that I’ve once had an llm hallucinate while it was trying to solve a problem for me, but the vast majority of the time it has been quite helpful. That’s been my experience at least. YMMV.

If you think LLMs suck, I’m guessing you haven’t actually used telephone tech support in the past 10 years. That’s a version of hell I wish on very few people.

Spent $800k on a house remodel. We gutted it and rebuilt it.

I did all the plans myself, I got them approved by the city, I made all the interior design decisions (my wife had veto power but left 90% of it all to me). In theory, in my area, the house has gone up in value by equal to or more than what we spent… but realistically I overspent. The amount I pay for loans is enough to make my very hefty salary seem low, but I don’t regret spending the money (It didn’t help that interest rates went up right before we pulled a $500k loan!). The house is awesome and it’s MY/OUR house since I did the design myself and I worked with the contractors throughout the entire process. I know every trade off we made and I can tell you why we made every decision. Doing this was a bucket-list item… but yeah… I overspent.