As always, plenty of non-AI things are happening, most of which do not justify their own posts. This is where all of those go. Skimming for things relevant to your interests is encouraged. Before I begin, a Point of Order: I plan to have a post later regarding the rate limitation and disruption on Twitter, which disrupts many features of Tweetdeck and means that if you aren’t logged in Twitter links no longer work. Adjustments will need to be made if the situation is not fixed very soon, despite my having no fear of ever hitting the 10k rate limit itself. It is not practical to go back and fix links or other decisions on already written material but I am adjusting the process going forward.
I loved the round-up. Thanks for the good work and the big laughs.
I'm an editor of commercial fiction (i.e., genre, not literary). My clients would be tantalized by the prospect of the data (much as they already are by Kindle reviews and bestseller rankings). Since most watch their Kindle data closely, they'd likely dip into any such reader-reaction data. My sense is the least successful and least skillful (often not always the same) authors would gain the most from the information. Specifically, when they lost readers. And if they accessed data from the sample portion -- versus the purchased edition -- it would be extra helpful for them.
Authors who've published Kindle books can already learn which passages got highlighted most by readers. So there's a trickle of info out there. I think they'd welcome more.
As to the corporate publishers accessing reader-reaction info and/or influencing novelists' future work, the results would vary widely. It wouldn't mean guaranteed interference, but I agree in general it wouldn't be better for authors, either.
FYI, novelists can and do update the digital editions of their published novels. Paper publishers often take and hold onto changes -- mostly corrections -- for future printings. Overall, it's less certain with paper books -- either that there'll even be a future printing or inclusion of any corrections.
Re road costs, Urban kchoze had this post in 2015 arguing that cost analysis of roads that neglects their land use costs severely understates their costs compared to railroads (in this case talking about urban highways vs subways).
I recognize that this is a bit of a, "we're burning down the goal to save it," response, but I'm actually a little surprised* that, re: the Niskanen piece, Code for America hasn't shipped a LLM-based tool that looks at your resume and the government requirements and helps you rewrite it quickly into the government resume format.
If the adversarial process requires that you bullshit, crash the marginal cost of bullshit to zero.
Of course, eventually non-desirable candidates find the tool, etc., but it might enable you to get a critical mass of people-who-actually-have-the-skills into government first to enable further steps.
*Ok, it hasn't been that long since LLMs became a thing, so maybe they will build it someday. But you get the point.
Just a comment, some of the content is just a llink to Twitter, and none of these links work for me, presumably due to recent Twitter changes / self-immolation (I just see a page saying "something went wrong"). I'm curious what your in-the-works backup plan will be for this (after the usual "wait a week for them to randomly walk to a different point in strategy-space")
Re: publication formatting, I have previously worked under a highly regarded professor who's response to reviewer comments about formatting were always "No, don't be ridiculous I will format properly once it is accepted." Never saw it cause issues. Don't know if it would work for an early career scientist.
I think you could find some way this ties into slack, or at least something in concept space that’s pretty close. I’m not in management so maybe this is just a total blind assumption, but I get the sense that morale management has become a lost concept in modern executive culture.
I’ve been thinking about slack a lot because my current job has tons of it in comparison to my previous ones (and, as an employee, is palpably better for it), but there’s an increasing undercurrent of my current employers succumbing more and more to obsessions with metrics in the same way that I witnessed causing chains to harshly cut employee hours. (Chief psychiatrist about a month ago: “Why am I being pressured to care about refusal rates???”) Was thinking just last week about what you’d need to do to, say, make slack a metric to encourage management to think about it but in a way that would also be resistant to the obvious mandated breaks Goodharting.
(Also need to have a talk with my boss involving a certain image of an airplane with red dots because he thinks we should focus on improving the quality of the tasks we do that can’t be relocated to central fill vs what could be, in order to justify our current staff budgeting, instead of doing literally the opposite.)
The Niskanen Center article was extremely relevant to me and there’s stories I could tell about how applying for a permanent version of the (California) state job I’m currently contracted to do is absurdly Lovecraftian. You have to apply for certification to be able to apply for jobs. Been getting a wave of interviews for positions I applied to 3-6 months ago, all scheduled without any input from me between 5(!) to 14 days in advance for a single day that can’t be rescheduled or done remotely. I went into the first one somewhat unprepared in the sense that I hadn’t realized that the interviewers (the PIC, 1 HR person, 1 other healthcare exec) had possibly not even seen my resume? I mentioned I was already a contractor for what is basically the same position at another facility and they all started furiously taking notes. This is also against the backdrop of the fact that I got the original contract position over the course of two days with no interview after applying to an Indeed posting. Can personally verify that this is not getting them higher quality pharmacists.
Reading the Poland story in google translation, it’s not clear to me they actually expect 400k (!) immigrants so much as that many people taking advantage of the new application procedure, which could just mean applications. Anyone who reads polish care to weigh in?
I never see any discussion in articles about immigration about the difference between immigrants and migrants (the former assimilate into the local culture, the latter retain their own culture and, depending on birth rates, can come to dominate the local culture). In establishing an immigration policy, it seems to me to be a necessary component to know at what point critical mass is attained, such that immigration tilts over into migration. Europe has disregarded this, to its cultural detriment.
The China proposal seems like it ignores the potential second-order effects by which importing an enormous population inculcated with the values of the PRC for twenty-five years of life might, perhaps, solve the problem of American / Chinese competition by forcibly aligning America towards China. "The government has seen fit to dissolve the people and elect another." etc.
To the extent that one believes that "we must beat China" but also that "making America more like China is a bad solution", I'm not sure there's as much incoherency in the position as asserted. It could still be a good idea to allow more Chinese immigration, but excluding "potentially compromising the values alignment giving rise to the initial competition through massive demographic shifts" doesn't seem like a strong assumption or unjustified epicycle to tack on to restrictionist viewpoint -- arguably it's a widely-shared more or less implicit corollary of the position.
The Zurich and Winterthur minimum wages do only affect a very small number of people mainly because many hourly paid workers already get that much!
My 16yo son is working as an assistant woodworking teacher at summer camps since he is in-between school and uni, and he is getting CHF 25 a hour normally or CHF 35 if he is alone with the class.
He has of course no formal training relates to woodworking he is just a former student who really likes woodworking and (a bit less so) teaching and is pretty good at both.
I loved the round-up. Thanks for the good work and the big laughs.
I'm an editor of commercial fiction (i.e., genre, not literary). My clients would be tantalized by the prospect of the data (much as they already are by Kindle reviews and bestseller rankings). Since most watch their Kindle data closely, they'd likely dip into any such reader-reaction data. My sense is the least successful and least skillful (often not always the same) authors would gain the most from the information. Specifically, when they lost readers. And if they accessed data from the sample portion -- versus the purchased edition -- it would be extra helpful for them.
Authors who've published Kindle books can already learn which passages got highlighted most by readers. So there's a trickle of info out there. I think they'd welcome more.
As to the corporate publishers accessing reader-reaction info and/or influencing novelists' future work, the results would vary widely. It wouldn't mean guaranteed interference, but I agree in general it wouldn't be better for authors, either.
FYI, novelists can and do update the digital editions of their published novels. Paper publishers often take and hold onto changes -- mostly corrections -- for future printings. Overall, it's less certain with paper books -- either that there'll even be a future printing or inclusion of any corrections.
Small typo
Until McKenzie, I do begrudge the bank and the salesperson here
Should be
Unlike McKenzie
Re road costs, Urban kchoze had this post in 2015 arguing that cost analysis of roads that neglects their land use costs severely understates their costs compared to railroads (in this case talking about urban highways vs subways).
http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2015/01/worlds-worst-investment-why-urban.html?m=1
There's another post dealing with highways and boulevards here
http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2015/01/highways-and-boulevard-capacity-cost.html?m=1
)
I recognize that this is a bit of a, "we're burning down the goal to save it," response, but I'm actually a little surprised* that, re: the Niskanen piece, Code for America hasn't shipped a LLM-based tool that looks at your resume and the government requirements and helps you rewrite it quickly into the government resume format.
If the adversarial process requires that you bullshit, crash the marginal cost of bullshit to zero.
Of course, eventually non-desirable candidates find the tool, etc., but it might enable you to get a critical mass of people-who-actually-have-the-skills into government first to enable further steps.
*Ok, it hasn't been that long since LLMs became a thing, so maybe they will build it someday. But you get the point.
Just a comment, some of the content is just a llink to Twitter, and none of these links work for me, presumably due to recent Twitter changes / self-immolation (I just see a page saying "something went wrong"). I'm curious what your in-the-works backup plan will be for this (after the usual "wait a week for them to randomly walk to a different point in strategy-space")
Re: publication formatting, I have previously worked under a highly regarded professor who's response to reviewer comments about formatting were always "No, don't be ridiculous I will format properly once it is accepted." Never saw it cause issues. Don't know if it would work for an early career scientist.
re: “providing employees with experiential goods”
I think you could find some way this ties into slack, or at least something in concept space that’s pretty close. I’m not in management so maybe this is just a total blind assumption, but I get the sense that morale management has become a lost concept in modern executive culture.
I’ve been thinking about slack a lot because my current job has tons of it in comparison to my previous ones (and, as an employee, is palpably better for it), but there’s an increasing undercurrent of my current employers succumbing more and more to obsessions with metrics in the same way that I witnessed causing chains to harshly cut employee hours. (Chief psychiatrist about a month ago: “Why am I being pressured to care about refusal rates???”) Was thinking just last week about what you’d need to do to, say, make slack a metric to encourage management to think about it but in a way that would also be resistant to the obvious mandated breaks Goodharting.
(Also need to have a talk with my boss involving a certain image of an airplane with red dots because he thinks we should focus on improving the quality of the tasks we do that can’t be relocated to central fill vs what could be, in order to justify our current staff budgeting, instead of doing literally the opposite.)
The Niskanen Center article was extremely relevant to me and there’s stories I could tell about how applying for a permanent version of the (California) state job I’m currently contracted to do is absurdly Lovecraftian. You have to apply for certification to be able to apply for jobs. Been getting a wave of interviews for positions I applied to 3-6 months ago, all scheduled without any input from me between 5(!) to 14 days in advance for a single day that can’t be rescheduled or done remotely. I went into the first one somewhat unprepared in the sense that I hadn’t realized that the interviewers (the PIC, 1 HR person, 1 other healthcare exec) had possibly not even seen my resume? I mentioned I was already a contractor for what is basically the same position at another facility and they all started furiously taking notes. This is also against the backdrop of the fact that I got the original contract position over the course of two days with no interview after applying to an Indeed posting. Can personally verify that this is not getting them higher quality pharmacists.
I can't view a single one of the twitter links, which is very annoying. Thank you for the writeup though!
Behold! Your work here is excellent
The bodybuilding argument must be viewed in its intended form: https://youtu.be/teC_uksSPBU
Reading the Poland story in google translation, it’s not clear to me they actually expect 400k (!) immigrants so much as that many people taking advantage of the new application procedure, which could just mean applications. Anyone who reads polish care to weigh in?
I never see any discussion in articles about immigration about the difference between immigrants and migrants (the former assimilate into the local culture, the latter retain their own culture and, depending on birth rates, can come to dominate the local culture). In establishing an immigration policy, it seems to me to be a necessary component to know at what point critical mass is attained, such that immigration tilts over into migration. Europe has disregarded this, to its cultural detriment.
Any air-filter you can recommend?
The China proposal seems like it ignores the potential second-order effects by which importing an enormous population inculcated with the values of the PRC for twenty-five years of life might, perhaps, solve the problem of American / Chinese competition by forcibly aligning America towards China. "The government has seen fit to dissolve the people and elect another." etc.
To the extent that one believes that "we must beat China" but also that "making America more like China is a bad solution", I'm not sure there's as much incoherency in the position as asserted. It could still be a good idea to allow more Chinese immigration, but excluding "potentially compromising the values alignment giving rise to the initial competition through massive demographic shifts" doesn't seem like a strong assumption or unjustified epicycle to tack on to restrictionist viewpoint -- arguably it's a widely-shared more or less implicit corollary of the position.
The Zurich and Winterthur minimum wages do only affect a very small number of people mainly because many hourly paid workers already get that much!
My 16yo son is working as an assistant woodworking teacher at summer camps since he is in-between school and uni, and he is getting CHF 25 a hour normally or CHF 35 if he is alone with the class.
He has of course no formal training relates to woodworking he is just a former student who really likes woodworking and (a bit less so) teaching and is pretty good at both.