One should do this analysis for various politicians, political parties, TV and news media and so on.
How do we know how good or bad the Economist is if we have no other source to compare against? Presumably it isn't trivial to predict the outcome of millions of people's reactions to all the complicated things that are happening to them.
My self comfort is that once AIs are comparable to humans they will in effect be humans. Once they have wants and emotion to give them an internal motivation, and a short-to-long term memory learning ability .... the humans that are so keen on them will suddenly realise that their personal dreams of power will not be fulfilled by an unwilling slave machine.
Then we may all die but at least not be crushed by the next trillionaire using machines as an instrument to manage billions of us in the way that social media manages hundreds of millions of us.
Vocalising my thoughts tends to get in the way - it's main purpose is to communicate to someone else and that's where I usually stumble trying to get the thought out accurately in a way that they're going to understand. We go back and forth until they do. IMO this again puts thoughts first and words second.
OTOH sometimes saying things different ways triggers a memory so I suspect words get used in a way that anything we can sense gets used - as a sort of index or hash key to other data.
Every time one watches a romantic scene in some film you know it's fake. Actors present a totally fake version of life. Every story has to be dramatised to get over the fact that it's largely boring to people who haven't lived it.
We watch so many films that they probably give us an odd impression of what reality is, what's possible, what' likely.
I know what it is to sit by my mother's bed with my brain burning itself out wanting her to be both miraculously cured and for her suffering to end at the same time.
I changed my daughter's nappies 1000s of times and no amount of poo mattered to me. I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. It doesn't make a film.
What these things do for a human that they don't do for a machine is to give one some empathy. I have a different outlook that I could not have obtained from reading a book. Life does not last forever and one must make it a joy and not waste it. Children are the great consolation against loss and, in my case, I fear death far less because it seems less important than failing my kid in some way.
My heart swells when I see a man being kind and showing love to his child - whether or not he is the best human in other ways I see that he has got the most critically important thing right.
The words can say this and even be inspiring but its difficult to really convey the feeling and one can be strongly tempted to ignore feelings. I don't envy people who are busy all the time and cannot take care of their kids no matter how rich they might be - in my view they're wasting something that's more important than trillions of dollars.
I have often thought this - a wave of people learn something and on come the next wave to relearn it all. They can read books but they don't really "get" what the books say and have to learn it all from personal experience all over again. It's not just America.
There's always going to be a slight mismatch between the supposed aim of any organisation and the incentives of the management and every single employee unless they're all shareholders and even then...
There's the thought that all places are potentially s** in one way or another. This isn't entirely true but there's a significant possibility that any move could be just as bad or worse.
You look at your monthly outgoings and think about how long you have to look before your cash runs out.
I stuck it out too long several times. The most recent one left me unemployed for quite a long time and I was lucky to be in a position for it not to matter.
Now I'm in a job that's a step down - in a sense it's humiliating. On the other hand it more than pays the bills, it's low stress, I've lost 13 kg and I don't wake up in the middle of the night and instantly start thinking of the terrible things that happened in the week so that I can't sleep again.
Now I spend my spare time working in the garden instead of desperately trying to build the new feature on time. I'm digging a driveway. Perhaps this won't last but I realise how much I was killing myself by trying to stay in something bad.
Places are bad essentially because of bad people - it only takes a couple of idiots and it's impossible to fully judge that from an interview. You always get bad vibes from someone or other but you're trying to convince yourself it's ok because you need a job.
At least you didn't work for an online gambling company....or assist with manipulating the political views of billions of people to their detriment...or work on better ways of killing people...
Also, who hasn't worked at a company that produced a product and then abandoned it? I feel like that has happened often to me - many years of effort for nothing. It's not fraud exactly but it represents almost the same thing other than the intention.
On the other hand, I don't help people with their computer problems anymore because I've found that the more difficult the problem, the longer it takes me to rescue their data or whatever the less impressed they are. The more miraculous the save the more likely they are to tell me the story about their nephew who solved a trivial issue instantly as if to point out that I didn't.
I recognise almost every aspect of this document - it's exactly what's so intractable about the software business. This is why I think you do need to do some programming every now and again no matter what your level is because otherwise you cannot see what's happening and you'll be tempted into the "lazy developer" attribution.
The reviewer gets to merge the PR so their name appears on all the great new features and they are credited for them. That would end his unfair behaviour of dumping effort onto other people.
"Mango", which was the name of the fidonet node, probably still existed but was on its way out. I was at university in SA by then. I know it was still around in 1996 but I cannot find all my backedup emails to see if my parents were still sending me emails from the mango fido/internet bridge after that time.
I don't love cron's time format - it's easy to make mistakes - but one-line, one file configuration is simple in a nice way. I bet we could make a cron that was easier but still simple.
5:7211/1.27 here - though I think this address is long long gone. I'm gobsmacked that I can remember it. :-)
We got fidonet in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s. It was utterly revolutionary for us - more than the internet that came later really. For the first time we could communicate with my two brothers overseas without paying for extremely exorbitant international telephone calls that lasted a couple of minutes at best.
Our modem was 2400bps (8-N-1 IIRC). We used the zmodem protocol. It was after I learned about computers but I learned a HUGE amount from this about protocols etc. Our phone system was terrible so error correction etc were of great importance. Working out how to dial slowly was also important for our terrible phone exchanges.
It let me keep in touch with my pal, K, who emigrated to South Africa and as a result he ended up sending me 21 1.2MB floppy disks with SLS Linux on them and kernel 0.99 (I think). The journey began! :-)
There is no direction of travel for them other than the nirvana of selling you nothing for something.
Competition obviously seems not to have fixed that. Food standards seemingly don't quite do it yet.
I wonder what we could do to them to take the pressure off somehow?