Posts by Charles Calthrop 305 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jun 2007
wouldn't you have a validation step before the full fat chatgpt engine is invoked? Surely they can have 20 canned responses to 'thanks' and just pick one from that. Even if you wanted to bind the response to the previous sentiment of the user input, you could do that outside an LLM trivially. Is it this validation step which is costing millions?
"Hey so yeah, I worked 90 hours a week, destroyed my marriage and didn't watch my kids grow up but hey we shipped an important product"
"Ah well, at least you're rich now"
"No, no, oh no. But I have the satisfaction of making other people rich".
Crazy way to live IMO. I can see that hiding in work is a comfort, but in the long term its a dreadful way to live.
Interesting post, and I agree with almost all of it. One interesting thing about the mobility, though, was that the german logisticians knew that every yard of Russian train track would have to be relaid because the German wagons were set up for a differnt gauge. So, the soviet mobility would have been hindered but the germans not necessarily bostered (unless there were huge amounts of soviet wagons in moscow)
Loads of ww2 what ifs are nonsense. 'what if they'd not been as harsh to the Ukrainians', uh, they wouldn't have been nazis etc etc etc, but the moscow one is fascinating. Personally I think USSR would have fallen had moscow fallen. The myth of Stalin would have crumbled and one of his generals would have offed him, I recodon./
I've got a book recommendation the thesis of which, at first glance, will make you will recoil in disbelief.
The book is: How the war was won, by Phillips Payson O’Brien
Its tenet is this: Where were the most decisive battles of ww2? Got to be Stalingrad, right? Or the battle for Moscow, or Kusk, or even El Alamein
Nope.
But the war was lost by the Germans in the East, right? Where the Wehrmacht was swallowed up by the distance of the USSR and then ground down by the Red Army. It was basically the USSR who won the war, with our contribution a sideshow?
Nope. All of those are distractions, to what O'Brien says were the descisive factors, which was war in the air and in the sea. Sounds like either a brexiteers wet dream, or else the history we were taught in the 1980s but I have to say, having read the book, his arguments are really compelling
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/how-the-war-was-won-air-sea-power-and-allied-victory-in-world-war-ii-by-phillips-payson-obrien/2019592.article
A world which is not 1996
I remember stripping spaces out of my xhtml so they would load faster, and fretting about image sizes for days
That world has long gone. You may argue for better or worse, but it's irrlevant. It's gone and it is not coming back. Neither is the world where we use floppys, or worry about 200mb install files.
Voluntary redundancy, no
Forced reduncancy is not necessarily a bad thing but you only figure that out afterards.
I've been made redundant twice and the second time was the most stressful time of my life, by an absolute country mile. I got a better job 50% more salary etc but if I could I would still go back to that job and not go through it. It's mentally scarred me for life.
It's an odd statement without more context. A bit like saying "companies that give employees free biscuits are outperforming those that don't."
I bet companies which give free biscuits DO outperform
-care about their staff more which is probably reciprocated
-care about small details
-willing to spend money on things beancounters may say are unnecessary
why someone would let these huge tech companies into their homes is totally beyond me.
sadly my teenage children see absolutely no issue with this or have any care about privacy
will we just accept privacy died on, say, Feb 4 2004? My fear is the generations younger than me are lost to the rights so hard won, but my hope is their children will try to regain the rights we once took for granted
i heard an awesome story about a guy in the dell factory at limerick. He was working on the production line when he pressed the emergency stop button by accident, and caused the entire line to shut down. It caused a huge rumpus as it cost $$$, so much so that someone from Dell HQ flew over to see what had happened, to try to see if there were workarounds they could implement. So this big shot was talking to the operative
'Walk me through exactly what you did' the big shot guy said
'I accidentally pressed the emergency stop button, like this', the guy said. Pressing it again to show him
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