Kichae

And yet it still has a bunch of ads for PC+ littered throughout it. Despite being grandfathered in, I abandoned it earlier this year for Podcast Republic, which hasn’t spammed me or locked me out of any features I’ve tried to play with despite not having paid them anything.

Honestly, I’d take a woody window to replace the clear glass overlooking the scenic parking lot outside literally any of the apartments I’ve ever lived in.

Self checkouts tend to have a hand scanner too

I’m going to guess that this is regional or vendor specific, because I’ve literally never seen a self-checkout with a hand scanner. And if I ever did, I would expect it to transform into a broken, dangling cable within a few months.

Meanwhile, stores all but stop manning existing checkouts, forcing everyone to line up to check out their own stuff.

In business, all data are vanity metrics. If they make you look good, you slap that shit on everything; if they make you look bad, you “don’t have it”.

It’s just that sometimes you can use negative data to make decisions that look good to those above you, and sometimes you know that you can’t.

Accurate. I’d like to go home now.

just someone using the term to mean “young people”

Rude. How dare they stop using “Millennial” to mean “young people”. They weren’t supposed to recognize that some of us are in our 40s now!

Negative utility is still utility, right?

So, uh, what happens if you clip the mobile antenna?

Maybe it depends on the specific field, but I’ve had no issues mentoring people remotely, and even when I was in the office I was doing it via Teams half the time.

In many contexts it isn’t that hard if you have the tools. The fact that many workplaces skimp on the tools is a them issue, not a mentoring issue.

working in the office is important so that younger/newer employees can recieve mentorship

That has real “I can’t mentor someone unless we’re at the strip club” energy.

Yeah. I doubt they can have debates in person, either. But getting 7 people in a room so that the 2 highest paid ones can ideate all over each other while the other 5 nod along as a paid audience just feels better for those 2 than looking up to see the glassy-eyed stares of people who are trying to get their work done while sitting in on a pointless vanity meeting.

Cube farm? I think you misspelled “open concept indoor concrete field”.

Personally, I really like renting things I used to own.

Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh

* Reads headline again

Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh

I spent the first year of covid working from the couch, and it was more than fine, at least from a work perspective. I was more productive there, I think, than I am in my home office! But it robbed me of my den. I was only able to be productive in that space by it no longer being a relaxation and entertainment space. So, I had to reclaim it.

But still, the idea of working from a comfortable space is something employers see as unprofessional, and a sign you’re not actually working. They’re wrong, but perception always wins out. And in their minds, that’s what we’re doing when working from home - being comfortable, relaxing, and not doing any work.

Employers have publicly accused employees of “time theft” over and over again since lockdowns started, and have brought it up in almost every discussion about RTO. They see people working from their living room as this “time theft”, even as the amount of work that they get done has remained consistent with, or even higher than, what they got done at the office. Simply by being at home, were theives in their minds. Because they can’t be creepy little shits and stand to greet us when we get back from lunch 2 minutes late, or time how long we’re in the bathroom.

Bingo.

They said – out loud, with words, as well as with actions – that they neither trust nor respect us. Many of them installed tracking software on remote hardware so that they could be alerted if employees took their hands off of their mouses long enough to even think, because if we’re not living in their own panopiticons, they think we’re all trying to fuck them over.

Which, to me, is the admission that they’re actively and consciously trying to fuck us over.

They’re not upset today that RTO hampered “productivity”, because they don’t care about that. They were, and are, willing to pay the price in order to physically lord themselves over people. What they regret is that people quit, and they’ve struggled to hire, and those that they have interviewed have made demands of them – like higher wages, or to be able to work remotely.

They regret the feeling that they lost power when attempting to reassert it.

The expectation that things are not private is totally different from the expectation that things are not being harvested for profit, though. Harvesting things for profit is transforming the public into the private.

LLMs create statistical distributions of words and phrases based on ingested data, and then sample those distributions given conditional probabilities.

Why should for-profit companies have the right to create these statistical distributions based on our written works without consent? They’re not publishing these distributions, and the purpose of ingesting these texts is not to report on the distributions.

They’re just bottom-trawling the internet and acting as if they have every right to use other peoples’ written works. While people are having “serious discussions” around it, they’re moving forward, ignoring the discussions entirely, and trying to force the conclusion of those discussions to be “well, it’s too late now, anyway”.

Could somebody explain why this is bad?

Consent.

I don’t consent to my copyrighted material – which is literally everything I write and post online, including this comment – being included in these products. In some cases, I have implicitly consented to allowing this to happen via the EULA of websites I’ve used over the years, but having them actively scraping the web for content means they’re directly bypassing any agreements I may have made with service providers, and that they’re collecting my copyrighted works without my ever having done business of any sort with them.

I haven’t agreed to contribute to their for-profit operation, I’m not being compensated in any way for this participation – whether financially or via the providing of a service – and I don’t believe they have any moral right to decide that I’m going to contribute whether I want to or not.

They can fuck right off.