Posts by fajensen 1382 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2008
There will come a time when one will accept those jobs because it pays the bills and one needs to pay the bills - or else. A skill for when that time comes, is learning to interpret / lawyer the requirements into something that better match time and ressources. Another skill is separating concerns into "things I can do something about, me-problems, and things i cannot do anything about, you-problems".
Silly project going tits-up -> that's a "you-problem".
... Only on Iceland!
Most other places you can get a puny and pathetic geothermal heat flux at about 65 mW/m2.
The problem becomes: First, you have to capture the heat from a very large area. Then you have to go really deep, kilometers deep, to get that heat at the kind of temperature that will allow the thermodymamics to work decently. If you want any electricity from it all. If you just want to heat some houses, then you can use a heat pump at the surface level and save yourself millions in stranded investment.
PS:
The sun gives about 700 W/m2 up here in the Nordics. About 20% percent of that flux can be converted to electriclty directly with no fuss.
We already are doing more or less what you say: Pretty much all the renewable technology deployment and improvement being deployed right now are coming from private companies productising and commercialising the research that was done years ago by publicly funded research teams!
The same with the commercial fusion "research" outfits. The are using the plasma models, control algorithms, numerical models, material science ... yada ... yada ... that researchers at universities prepared for them.
This is the compromise we made: Commercial entities are Crap at research, and Public entities are Useless at productisation.
If we drop fusion research, the "knowledge pipeline" feeding the commercial companies will dry up and they will croak / run off with investors money about 5 years later.
Maybe "supposed to" but, nah. FAQ's run out of steam quickly.
Using ChatGPT, one can instruct ChatGPT to read a pile of documents carefully and then one can ask question about specific things covered by the bumf. Those can be boring documents,like HR-policies and user manuals. ChatGPT doesn't care.
In My Opinion, It does that kind of task very well.
Same with source code that it has "read". One needs to know which exceptions "datetime.datetime.fromisoformat()" can raise, ChatGPT will give a very solid answer, a lot better than the snot-rollers and navel-defluffers faffing around on StackOverflow will do because most of that lot for sure hasn't read the docs before answering! ChatGPT will provide code examples too.
I don't think that is what will happen.
First off, I belive Recall is such a thoroughly bad idea, with such enormous risks and liabilities baked right into it, that it could only have come from ono person at the very top of Microsoft*. A person that nobody dares go against.
That CEO-like person gets this idea that: "Maybe if we have AI capture all of the data going through a PC and also all the users responsed to that data, we can create a robot that can at least simulate users well enough to perform their daily tasks. Great!".
Then they set about getting The Organisation to buy this Fantastic, World Beating, Idea.
This is when they will encounter two things that are working well at Microsoft. Their smart developers, their talented product managers, and their legal team all piles in and explains why this is likely to end badly, what the possible risks are, and what the consequences could be. The other thing they encounter, is the balkanisation. There is no way, ever, that any department will build a working API that allows "The Competition" to leverage "Their Product" for their nefarious workings. If one makes them do it, they will totally half-ass it, and we get stuff like Microsoft Projectflow. This affects everyone at once so the CEO with the Bright Idea cannot on-board anyone to commit to this.
The CEO-like Solution becomes: "Fuck all of you guys! I'll have my very own team dump the screen buffer into a database and have the AI figure out stuff from the picures!!!. That's easy enough!"
Now, The "Microsoft Viva Experience"-team are probably the slime comitted to this idea: For them, it is just another sales feature to be able to better track the employees activities and to get more KPI's for the managers, also some illegal ones like sexual orientation, one suspects.
So, it will be sold as "Helping with automation". In reality it is Surveillance for Everyone.
*) Or a subversive consultant group, intent on destroying capitalism, that deliberaty only provides bad ideas and sell them to CEO's.
I think it strongly depends on the license.
I worked a bit at a trade school. Knowing their budget, I know that they would have procured the most pathetic and cheap option that it was still possible to install Office 365 on. I belive that is why my corprat-IT-installed Windows 11 was positively riddled with adds and "feeds" and "Microsoft VIva Insights" blabbing about my colleagues Teams activity (to remind people that it is Right Now compiling a dossier to the boss So You Better Watch It, Boy) as well as sniffing around in the GDPR-regulated data we worked on!
Total piece of thrash that was!
Well, yes, but, even if sounds like it's kinda hard and it might take a while, wouldn't someone attempt to write a tool that does a brute-force or maybe even distributed search for S3 buckets - just to deliberately mess with this "feature"? And once your bucket is on an "existing" list, then those l33t script-kiddies are going to stomp it.
I think Amazon will need to stop charging for unsolicited PUT requests
Right there I got a vivid picture of an AWS-excecutive vomiting blood right onto the conference desk, he is surrounded by his accolytes rending their clothes and throwing used cat-litter over themselves.
It speaks volumes that some open source lists offered free itanium systems to people willing to develop and no-one was bothered.
An outfit I worked for disposed of a bunch of AMD Athlon space-heaters by putting them on a pallet in the street.
It's an university town and the students her are like ants: Someone finds a crumb somewhere and they all show up.
I think you are underestimating.
The ChatGPT / Grimoire of today is smart enough to read the PDF-datasheet for a part, like an ADC converter, and from that it can produce Python (or C) code to set up the part's registers so that the part is configured. The typical mistakes is that sometimes it will get the lsb/msb-order wrong and sometimes it will miss that there is a specific ordering of the steps to be performed. This means that instead of spending hours reading a PDF, one can get something going well enough to begin debugging on it in one session, with time for coffee,
I think AI is at the "Widely Affordable Tools Turning Rooms Full of Drafters and Tools Into a Couple of People in a Converted Barn"-stage. There will be tonnes of projects getting done because now the niches, and small-scale, becomes possible.
Eventually "capital" will slurp it all up and turn it beige, because "capital" always wins.
Been There, Done That. Your former boss has more guts than mine, though.
In my case it was that Management wanted me, a lowly project manager 3-4 layers "below" His Lordship, to relinguish the scope of "my" project and sign over 12 MEUR to "Our Favorite Contractor" instead of going through EU procurement, like, the law says. On top of all that, the procurement paperwork were prepared and approved by Procurement so we would waste about 1 years of tedious work.
I told him that it was much better that he did this transfer on his own authority because it was his budget and his scope. He didn't like that very much. Pehaps because the person signing this could be going to jail or at the very least end up in front of an inquest.
He especially didn't like that both Procurement and "Our Favorite Contractor" disagreed and sided with me. In the end, it went for procurement and "Our Favorite Contractor's Minion" got the contract with the proper process. I believe the Minion was pushed in as a shim because "Our Favorite Contractor" had become suspicios of the leadership. They know that working too closely with morons is how your project ends up in arbitration.
The consequences for me were that no work arrived at my desk ever after, which was nice for a while. I ended up leaving.
People will always say the appropriate thing on surveys. The interesting information I think, are the dosage and the content, "How Much Gossip is Damaging?", "What Kind of Topics are Toxic/Good?"
We all know, or we should damn well know by now, that "being social", to be somebody that people wants to be around and talk to, roundly beats any business and technical skills (which beginners think matters) in the career game. Therefore, if one never chats at the water cooler, never engage in chit-chat outside of Work Related Discussions, one is seen as boring, not very social, and since nobody wants to be around "work" all day, one is simply not going anywhere beyond Project Manager - which is another kind of oily-rag techie (aka: not magement material)!
I.O.W. It's the "hard" skills that gets one hired, It's the social skills that gets one fired or mired!
From Microsofts perspective, it doesn't affect anyone important at all. The developers just picked the most cost efficient way to implement an important feature (and created a selling point for "bigger" licenses :). We got to remember that the 2-3 corporates who probably asked for this feature, and were big enough to get it, they are also very likely to have their policies tuned up and bummed into perfection. So, it works for them.
They can. It's just Market Segmentation Rulez making it appear that they can't. Most people will run some "consumer thrash" Windows, where nothing of the good stuff really works.
Enforcing known repositories, signed applications and keeping a curated set of "Bad Boys" out, is being sold as a premium Windows feature, reserved for "enterprise" licenses.
One can install "Applocker" on any windows >= 10 and hack the configuration locally, but, it really needs quite a bit of Windows Server infrastructure to manage it in practice). Another possibility is using "Windows Defender", which seems to be more geared towards Windows 365 (To keep things balkanised as they should be :). It is not an easy job, these tools are not for the eyes of average PC-users, but they do work.
I initially researched this while trying to find a proper way to keep "snap.do" off my teenagers computers.
Why do we use our technological prowess to automate away the pointless rituals we invented to busy ourselves, instead of doing away with the rituals, and use the compute powering our AIs to do something more productive?
Because, the point is, that the rituals must be performed. Indeed, any large organisation can be said to exist primarily to provide the funding and set the schene for the performance of the rituals.
The problem we have with people is that they can manifest things. Humans, left all on their own, they will manifest distracting, maybe dangerous, even terrible things. Like the Golden Jesus* running for President and then Righfully slaying all the Impure and Improper starting with the gays. So, a network of distractions is created, keeping the human mind busy with insignificant trivia and white noise so Bad Things does not happen too much.
This network of distractions we call "Real Life (tm)" or "A Career". It got damaged during Covid 19 and we lost containment somewhat, allowing lots of people too much freedom to manifest their inner nuttines - and set their creations lose on the world. This is obviously not good so ... everything will be wound back and tightened down harder, with better distractions and more elaborate rituals to perform. AI will be a critical part of that work.
I.O.W. We will have less free time, more distractions, and more performances in the future!
*) I just see a fat-ass fuckhead loser, but, the phenomen no different from the happenings in Project Blue Book, where a bunch of people see a flying saucer with 3 beings in it waving at them, while the radar sensors and the Air Force sees a rocket stage de-orbiting.
Well, would we be any worse off than now? Internet companies like Google, LinkedIn one cannot really contact at all, most others are using some call center somewhere with zero authority serving canned responses in poor English to not solve your problem.
Having an AI giving us the run-around would be the expected base-level denial of service, but, that AI could have a sexy voice, adapted to the user, which would be a vast improvement.
In other news Tesla Sweden apparently owes a local vendor more than 4 million SEK. Tesla has refused to pay the invoice which has been sent to a collection agency.
Tesla will discover that the Swedish legal system prefers the swift and summary way of dealing with dead-beats. The Swedes like their auctions, its a culture thing for the community to go to the bankrupt neighbours place on a sunday and strip it of anything of value, while having coffee and cakes :).
And, to emphasise the vindictiveness and attention to details: When something goes to collection, "Kronofogden" will shamelessly sell everything, even your most pathetic tupperware collection! Just look at it: https://auktion.kronofogden.se/auk/w.ObjectList?inC=KFM&inA=WEB
Is it so inconceiveable that government employees actually do their job and deliver the plates themselves?
Their job is to manufacture and deliver the plates to Postnord, who has been awarded the contract for distribution of the plates. Which, they are doing.
So, you don't know, but have "ideas"?!
I can't help feeling that might just backfire.
Oh, It will. When a Swedish bureaucracy is pushed, a circle of monkeys will form, each pointing at the next one to be "doing something". Nothing will be moving, and nobody will be responsible because everyone are just following the rules. This configuration will stay up until man-baby Musk decides to do it the Swedish Way. Then everything suddenly runs like a clockwork and nobody understands what the problem was.
In this case: The transport agency will respond to the court that this is not the process that they have been instructed to follow (by law), probably adding that deviating for the sake of Tesla is discriminating against other manufacturers, concluding that if they have to do something different, the government has to issue new laws / instructions. The government will do its very best to stay the hell out if the thing. Unions are the core of the Swedish "system" and the "Swedish Public Management Tradition" is to leave the Civil Service alone to do their duties as they see them. It will eventually go to a higher court and then get thrown out.
I'm better and faster at what I'm doing than if I were working only these 40h a week. Maybe you should try and test it.
Sure, you do bub, suure you do. But, only because you follow the UK "way of working": Do the absolute minimim possible for the first 40 hours, then proceed to work normally once the overtime pay is approved! On average you are just wasting your own time and other peoples money.
I have seen that particular song & dance for 10 years in contruction. Whenever overtime is possible, nothing happens onsite until conditions for overtime is reached! One might as well cut the performative crap and start there, except, its a sacred tradition.
Ah, but, one solid takeaway from "What we learned from Covid-19"-class is that about 50% of the population experiences reality as "something that happens or is done to them". Definitely not something they could have any control over whatsoever. The mere suggestion that they can change some outcome or that some degree of responsibility might land on their heads will kick off screeching tantrums.
There is "A Market", and a buck to be made, in pandering to that demographic, so lawsuits like this will keep happening.
Hahahaha - The way these jobs actually goes is that "Management" and different "stakeholder" comitees will prove their importance by interfering every 1-2 weeks so The Project never finishes until the budget runs out. The skilled developer will be delivering 3 months of incomplete work, in about 14 months of project time, then "Management" and "stakeholder" comittees will agree that, "that guy was not very good at all", and then they will give the job to Boss's nephew who can do something in Excel.
I am just wrapping up a job like that!
I'm sure it's a pipe dream, but just once, I'd like to work at a place where they actually did the SAP setup correctly.
The Gulfs have seen your light and they have created a Path for your acension, IOW: You would do a lot better, financially and emotionally, by joining the opposition and start working as a SAP consultant :p
It is a long time since I used ACCESS, but, I think it has a similar behaviour to Excel: It doesn't care much about what kind of data actually gets stored in which row. One can have things that presents as numbers but they are chars, bytes or even nulls, depending on the context and how the tables were once defined.
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