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Joined 9 days ago
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Cake day: February 14th, 2025

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  • Telling an employee how they should speak could potentially be micromanaging, but providing constructive criticism for drafting emails et cetera is not.

    I don’t think that thin skinned is the right word for this. It’s great to take pride in your own writing style and natural to feel somewhat offended when someone is critical of it. However, it can’t hurt to at least listen to criticism in an objective way before deciding whether it’s author is being a toxic micromanaging prick, or may indeed have something useful to say.

    Oddly enough, just 2 days ago I told a team member to make some changes to the tone of an email. He’s a tax consultant, he was emailing an employee of a client who does their bookwork. It was a long email regarding multiple ways they could improve their records in future in order to minimise our fees. My team member didn’t really intend it but he’d drafted something that just made him look like an asshole “I’m better than you” type missive to someone who’s doing their best with no support and no formal training.

    I explained that a good relationship with that person will be far more valuable and helpful to us in future than whatever improvements in their records might arise from the email itself.

    The skills involved in drafting good communication can be continually improved over a lifetime.


  • Plenty of answers here but I don’t think anyone has answered this part:

    Surely they would have a much easier time pushing their rhetoric and establishing their agenda by keeping a purposeful distance from that sort of indefensible imagery and symbolism.

    So here’s my take …

    Musk did the sig heil as a fuck you to everyone that doesn’t like him. That’s it.

    They just won the election by basically lying, ignoring, and playing for time. They can literally do whatever the fuck they like for the next n years with impunity.

    Imagine if Harris had won and in her victory speech said something like “Don’t worry Don, I’ll make sure they give you diapers in jail.” It would’ve been a low blow but we would’ve loved her for it because it’s poking fun at the conservatives for no other reason than to stir them up.

    I think there’s another, longer conversation to be had about why racism (and by extension nazism) resonates with voters in 2025, but I’m too weary for that I think.






  • Sorry chief you might have embarrassed yourself a little here. No big thing. We’ve all done it (especially me).

    Check out huggingface.

    There’s heaps of models you can run locally. Some are hundreds of Gb in size but can be run on desktop level hardware without issue.

    I have no idea about how LLMs work really so this is supposition, but suppose they need to review a gargantuan amount of text in order to compile a statistical model that can look up the likelihood of whatever word appearing next in a sentence.

    So if you read the sentence “a b c d” 12 times you don’t need to store it 12 times to know that “d” is the most likely word to follow “a b c”.

    I suspect I might regret engaging in this supposition because I’m probably about to be inundated with techbro’s telling me how wrong I am. Whatever. Have at me edge lords.





  • For sure there are plenty of people that don’t produce any real value in their work, but that’s been the case since forever and they’re hard to weed out because in some ways their full time job is to ensure their ongoing employment.

    As in most things, it’s a question of extent.

    The most accurate statement you can make is that AI will make “most” office employees “more” efficient.

    The thing is, this has been happening with every technological advance for hundreds of years.





  • My global political history isn’t great, and maybe others can correct me here, but it doesn’t feel like the US has had much of a stabilising effect in the last 30 years.

    There’s plenty of conflicts that just don’t make the news that the US just isn’t interested in. Poor places with no oil or other resources. Presently Burma comes to mind. There always seems to be somewhere in Africa, last decade there was genocide in Congo IIRC.

    Also it’s not really clear whether their involvement in the middle east over the last few decades was positive or negative.

    It’s nice to have them hovering around South China Sea to keep China in check I guess.