People seem very attached - emotionally, almost morally - to a model of hiring that looks like this:
* The company decides to open a specific position, which it will fill no matter what.
* The position will pay the same amount no matter who fills it.
* There exists a binary condition called "qualified" which people metaphysically are or aren't.
* The job must not go to an unqualified person, but could go to any qualified applicant.
* Society may instruct you to use certain non-merit-based criteria to prefer some qualified applicants over others, but hiring managers and teams must not use their own subjective feelings or relationships to do so.
I can understand how a civil service or other massive bureaucracy full of principal-agent problems arrives at these rules, but they are obviously not the only valid way to assemble a high-performing team or the best one in all circumstances.
People conservative enough to drop the required nuclear bomb on the transit workers union to be able to deploy something like this won't pay for it, and vice versea.
Existing drivers could be moved to customer service roles on the trains (driver+conductor on 1 train -> one coductor on 2 trains), or moved to non-autoamtable roles (buses, trams).
True, but if you read the comment as U.S. specific, it makes perfect sense. The Democrats in the U.S. are very beholden to the unions and refuse to do anything that harms the union even if it would help the vast majority of people much more. Meanwhile, the Republicans hate transit and while they hate unions too, they hate transit even more and so they're going to not do anything that would help transit. If you're a transit advocate, you have neither party that was actually going to serve you. One party actively hates you and the other party gives lip service but they like other things more and will do things that are harmful to transit because they help the other things they like.
I don't know how to solve this problem, but making people aware of it is a good first step. It helps people who are in favor of transit yell at all politicians who are not helping them. Blind party allegiance is never a good thing.
I think the US problem is that unionized transit workers (and a dwindling number of other unionized workers) can do quite well, but if they were to lose that job, they wouldn't be able to get anywhere near the same salary, benefits, etc. in another job with similar duties. I don't think this is as true in other countries with stronger labor protections overall and a more equitable healthcare system.
Also, the culture for whatever reason seems to emphasize enabling gamesmanship around overtime, special duty pay, etc. as opposed to paying a good steady rate for a normal day's work.
>Meanwhile, the Republicans hate transit and while they hate unions too,v
People hate unions too when they're directly affected by them. Case in point, the dock workers strike from a while back. When people realized their Chinese made slop Amazon christmas presents would be delayed because of the dock workers strike, they suddenly stopped empathizing with them and hating them for it.
Inter-class solidarity isn't much of a thing. If one worker class starts breaking things in society/the economy to get a better deal for themselves at the expense of the other classes, even if they're on the same level, the others will hate them for it.
Another example would be if airline workers would go on strike for better pay and working conditions ... during summer. Imagine how many people who paid for holidays would empathize with them. We are an individualist society.
Everyone is saying this about "the factory." I have seen some successful fix and migrate campaigns for well-defined, local transformations such as retroactive fixes for new lint rules, flaky tests, or library migrations. But so far the attempts to do nontrivial new functionality in this manner have made big messes that take more effort to review and correct than simply hand-feeding 1-3 vanilla Claude Code sessions with my full attention.
That's the economy. It's not like all our problems are solved or everything that needs building is finished, even in very AI-forward tech companies. We are busier and working harder and longer hours than ever, and we've been hiring thousands of people in India.
That's true too: AI currently doesn't live up to the promises that were made to the execs, so there's also more pressure for human slop and outsourcing to fill the gaps.
Essentially every high schooler had an active Facebook account and essentially every school paper was written on a word processor by, like, 2010. By 2018 even Instagram is starting to be played out. I would be very surprised to see a material increase in the share of US or western students using social media over the 2018-2022 period.
Feels like a hobbyhorse. The article discusses issues between the educator and the child, like:
> An even bigger problem, though, is muddle-headed thinking among educators. Some have fallen for the leftist canard that tests are harmful and grades are racist. Some have allowed reasonable worries about children’s mental health to warp into an excuse for low expectations. Some unhelpful habits acquired during the pandemic have stuck: children are still missing more lessons than before, and many teachers who relaxed their grading standards have failed to tighten up again.
I think we should look there and focus on what’s actually happening between the educator and the child.
Like so many conservative scare tactics, this is complete bullshit.
I hang out with a lot of teacher. Grade inflation is because if you dare give anything less to an A to a student, their parents complain to administration and administration always gives in and never stands up for the teacher. Same if students aren't turning work in - parents complain, administration says to pass them.
Educators are underwater, overworked, burnt out, and it's getting worse - and none of that is their fault. Every year they're asked to do more with less, which is why many of the best have retired or moved to other work.
I think it can shift rapidly when an addiction or compulsory behaviour becomes a problem.
For example, made-up numbers, but: 1-2 hours of doom-scrolling daily is okay, as it still leaves time for 1-2 hours of schoolwork at home. 3-4 hours of such doom-scrolling, doom-scrolling between classes or during classes will have a measurable negative effect on your academic knowledge and abilities. (I don't have much information on how US schoolkids live today.)
And surely one could never predict the impact of sending kids home for two years and expecting them to manage their own education on their own honor. Surely school aged children are better at paying attention to Zoom meetings than I am as an adult. It's in the computer! Kids are good at computer!
I'd say the main difference is that you couldn't take a device with good media capabilities, good and cheap-ish networking and lasting battery everywhere. Laptops, netbooks, tablets were a tad too bulky, lasted only a few hours unplugged and mainly wifi, and mobile internet was not all that great.
True leading up to 2010. The couple of kids who had the original iPhone or the 3G were unusual. Most of my classmates - including myself - got one between the 4 (2010) and the 5S (2013).
People need to stop believing insane, delusional things like the existence of a human being with a certain name, address, phone number, birthday, SSN being secret or private information.
Downstream of that, people need to stop accepting knowledge of the basic public metadata fields or possession of images containing them as evidence of identity verification. Do actual public key cryptography on the internet or check biometrics and the document’s physical security measures in person.
I do not buy that LLMs and the capability to run them are fundamentally different from other software or general purpose computing infrastructure in this regard. Moves to ban open source software or force OEMs to put little cops in everyone's computers are bad.
The proposal I’m hearing is to make people training models accountable for anything users do with them.
Obviously you’re going to keep the model behind an API and be very selective about the people allowed to call and the queries it’s willing to answer, in that case. As Anthropic has done with Fable. But that is voluntary restraint - mostly in today’s regime we get frontier capabilities in open weight models on a ~year delay.
It’s to keep “the people running it accountable.” The context is agents ran by OpenAI/Anthropic doing damage outside.
There is no user-involved damage. No one is recklessly running agents by the thousands without air-gapped containers, except “the people” than run these labs.
One through eight read as the list of sacrifices you make in having children. But the experiences of loving and being loved back seem at least incomplete without that.
Even startups that beat the incredibly long odds to become successful mostly aren’t successful enough to make up for a long stretch of not earning BigCo RSUs.
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