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Genuine question: is there a big inherent difference between "I don't understand this thing but I think this other human does," and "I don't understand this but I think this other AI does"?

If your answer is "yes," do you think that's inherent to the (metaphysical?) fact of it being AI or to specific limitations to current AI? If the latter, what changes to AI would let you trust it?


I don't know. AI has an understand of some really complex things, but it also does some really stupid things. Depending on which it did most recently for me I change my answer.

The question is does AI understand well enough to maintain that thing for whatever maintenance I need to do in the future?


People also do some really stupid things, I'll just throw out.

But it also kind of sounds like you're just saying that there's a scalar of "get a little better" before you'd trust AI with something.


Also I'm reserving the right to discover other areas of concern. But yes overall I'm waiting to see if it gets better by enough.

Quick heuristic for someone who claims that their AI is conscious: do they claim it's "a gender that they are not attracted to"?

These just aren't the relevant concerns behind Amazon's stock performance in the last month. It's the capex.


Markets can’t see the product quality of a monopoly. It won’t be reflected in the metrics because there’s no competition to anchor the earnings to the real consumer value. But that doesn’t mean quality isn’t a factor- it makes them vulnerable to disruption.

Warren Buffett is known to trade on product quality (he buys what he uses). So his sale could be based on that.


Amazon isn't a monopoly, it has 8% of retail in the US.

There's no real evidence that this trade was made by Buffet himself, and it's part of a general major sell-off of Amazon that transparently did not temporally align with the idea that Amazon's retail business has suffered a decline in quality.

This is the market making a (reasonable!) judgment that it lacks confidence that Amazon's capital expenditures will pay off.


No?

Like, I'd think that was a bad policy for murder in particular, but "we don't allow things but we give you a lot of chances to correct your behavior" is ordinary.


Three strikes is a "get your shit together" policy.

Seventeen is a "yeah sure it's not allowed wink wink" policy. Especially when they'll just go make another account afterwards.


Nonsense. There are lots of things that you need more than three strikes for, especially on a platform that you expect to use for decades.

I'm not here to say that Facebook's enforcement behavior is optimal, and I don't know that a "17 strike policy" is a full description of their enforcement behavior. But there are plenty of behaviors that you want to discourage but not go nuclear about.


Native population is declining (and prime-age workforce is retiring), and the Trump admin has been extensively working to reduce the size of the immigrant workforce.

So the unemployment rate is staying low, but the absolute number of workers is flat or declining.


The in-industry terms for these are "brand marketing" and "performance marketing," FWIW. Brand marketing is the first thing, performance marketing is what you're calling sales.


Price discrimination is bad. It's worth trying to ban. You'll never stop 100% of it (and trying to go too over-the-top in terms of stopping it would not be worthwhile), but this is a useful area for regulation.


On some level the headline is like "yeah, no shit," but the surprising thing is the claimed strength of the effect. 50% absenteeism increase for missing a birthday congratulations? Really?


I'm now somewhat interested in the study to see how they accounted for possible hidden factors.

If a team lead or manager spent the time to track birthdays and took time out of their day to have a 10 minute chat with someone on their birthday, they probably exhibit a number of other behaviors that could be summarized as "treating their employees as humans". That's the boss people tend to like to work with and possibly go another mile for them.

If tolerating your boss during a normal day takes 9 of your 12 spoons of energy for the day, it takes very little further push to be spiteful. At worst, they may force you to find another workplace with a better boss.


This is a study from an elite institution published in a respectable journal in the social sciences. Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects.

[Reads abstract]

They didn't? It's a pure observational study that one measure of sloppiness in the organisation correlates with another? What do we pay these guys for?


Per abstract it's a "a dynamic difference-in-differences" analysis, which means likely that they see whether the employee behavior changes after the event. But establishing causation with it still requires quite a few assumptions.

PNAS is kinda known for headline grabbing research with at times a bit less rigorous methodology.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/10/04/breaking-p...

> Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects.

If the results are true, it would be actually quite expensive because of the drop in productivity. It could also be a bit of a nightmare to push through ethical review.


They could start by observing the rate at which birthday cards are delivered on time, and not vary too much from that.

I suppose the impact on productivity isn't known in advance, and it might be that failing to receive a birthday card from a normally diligent manager costs the company more in productivity than it gains from a sloppy manager unexpectedly giving one on time.


However, if at some point somehow it shines through, that this is just another checklist being ticked off, without actual sincerity behind it, this all goes down the drain, and the time would be better spent on actual work environment improvements, rather than wet handshakes and pseudo "we are a family".


Agreed. 3 things are interesting.

How small the slight is.

How big the effect is.

Meta thing: how the slight is not the kind of thing most managers or executives, or even knowledge workers generally, would care about. (As evidenced by the software people here questioning if a birthday wish is a big deal.)

Lesson: your employees think differently than you. Get curious.


I don't really mind but I take a slight objection to supposedly confidential data (like birthday) being widely shared even with good intentions.


Birthdays are hardly confidential.


They're not really for many people (and, personally, I don't go to any extremes to keep it a secret). But sharing info like that from an HR record without permission feels a bit wrong even if others here obviously disagree.


It depends on the culture/religion. Not everyone celebrates birthdays.

I had multiple ICs ask me not to say public birthday wishes, as they didn’t celebrate their birthday and/or did not want the rest of the team to know.


They should be unless you want to publish one of the things that too many (eg sites) regard as a reasonable secondary security verifier.


Get a single speeding ticket in most jurisdictions in the U.S. and your birthdate is never confidential ever again.


And health records, e.g. prescriptions, as well.


Base rate is likely quite low.


Apropos of nothing besides the mention of Disco Elysium, I present to you the best item in a CRPG: https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Volumetric_Shit_Compres...


I mean, if your argument is, "Bending Spoons made a bad investment," then sure, okay. That's not implausible! Companies make bad investments.

But I don't really see what overall lessons there are here.


>But I don't really see what overall lessons there are here.

So many chains to keep up with. There wasn't really a lesson here. Just "Vimeo is not Evernote"?

My wider lesson unrelated to this chain is that US at will employnent sucks and we need to overhaul it. You don't create a trusting career by treating employees like toys to discard.


The US has enriched a vastly larger number of software engineers through at will employment that Europe has through making it very hard to fire people who aren't adding value.


1. I don't know how that's relevant to my argument at all. This is just "you criticize society, yet you participate in it" dismissal.

2. This is like saying "Asia has better rice because it employs more rice makers than the US". Besides being dubious in truth, that also isn't a good measurement for "enrichment" nor "quality". It's just saying that there's more money being put into the industry in this country than another counry's industry.

3. Even if I took this as truth, this didnt happen overnight. I worry about how Gen Z will be "enriched" in this model, and saying "but millenials/Gen X had great careers" is condescending to Gen Z at best. The rules changed over their careers, and we're still using the old rules to talk about how good we have it. Or had it. Gen Z doesn't know what those rules are anymore, so there's nothing to fall in love with.


The point for me is that "a trusting career" costs far more than it's worth. I would much rather make 3x as much in America with less job security.


That's fine, but different people have different risk tolerances and preferences. There's many people who would never want to emigrate to the USA, and many Americans who emigrate abroad. There's no one country that fits all personalities.


Agreed, I’m responding to someone who is criticizing the American way of doing it, so I’m explaining the tradeoffs as I see them.


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