> It is very interesting that since the AI climber is trained on actual climbers, it could, in principle, provide beta to climb consistent with your own style. If you train the bot exclusively on footage of yourself, it would return movement based on your style. If your style is finessy-all-backstep-all-the-time (aka The Edlinger), it can provide beta consistent with that. If your style is to square up and pull (otherwise known as The American), it can provide beta consistent with that instead.
I would think this is actually a Bad Thing. It's very easy to get stuck trying to make a sequence fit your style of climbing. The better approach (especially for long term skill acquisition) is a willingness to learn new styles. That's to say that every sequence is only solvable via one particular style, but I think long term development is hindered if you approach every crux with the one thing you are good at.
> So, in terms of solving complicated beta faster, I see real utility to this.
I can agree with this. But, to the point that others have made, I do wonder what this and the availability of beta videos for many, many routes and blocs does to climbing skill overall. Perhaps I'm just a grumpy old man, but, particularly when bouldering, sorting out the beta should be part of the journey toward eventually sending. Last fall, I visited Hueco Tanks after a six year absence. I suppose I was a bit disappointed to see so many people watching YouTube beta videos of nearly every problem they tried.
>I can agree with this. But, to the point that others have made, I do wonder what this and the availability of beta videos for many, many routes and blocs does to climbing skill overall.
That's a fair concern. That said, there are certain sequences that I'm physically incapable of doing without a dedicated multi-month program of stretching beforehand. Turns out falling on a thumbs-down jam is close enough to a shoulder dislocation that I maybe should've done some PT about it. The extreme is, obviously, the Edlinger vs. American example, but I think the middle ground actually addresses people's peculiar body geometry and/or range of motion. Alex Honnold's exact hip or elbow position might not be as meaningful for Ashima, even if they're on the exact same route.
Such nuances have made a difference in some cases (the one that springs to mind is Todd Skinner's observation that Steve Petro's hips sagged just a little mid-crux on Fiddler on the Roof, which, until corrected, had prevented Petro from nabbing the first ascent of one of the hardest cracks ever climbed to that point). Probably a net-bad for folks projecting Midnight Lightning or similar, but definitely useful for somebody looking to repeat Silence or whatever.
>I went through those stages too: when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes
Oh, boy, I can relate. Every three months, I think our program increment planning meetings can't get more ridiculous and, yet, they do. Most recently, we were told that we should just treat story points as days of effort.
I don't think t-shirt sizes is absurd. It's one of the few good ways that really conveys "we have only a very vague idea how long this will take".
Story points are dumb because they always are just a bad proxy for time.
Really though, the right solution is time plus confidence. Instead of "4 days" it should be "1-8 days" or whatever.
Unfortunately a large number of people simply can't comprehend this, and also no tools support it, so I've never seen it actually done. I imagine management wouldn't like it either because then they can't pretend they have a perfect plan with no uncertainty.
> Really though, the right solution is time plus confidence. Instead of "4 days" it should be "1-8 days" or whatever.
It's a half-assed reimplementation of PERT charts, which were invented in the 1950s and used successfully for many decades, until everyone decided that everything old is terrible.
I never understood this sentiment. It seems to me that the communication is broken, when a developer has problems with delays. It’s not their decision, and it’s not their risk. If developers report uncertainties properly, even during development, when a previously unknown unknown appears, or a known unknown takes longer than it was estimated, it’s not their fault. If this doesn’t happen, it’s obviously difficult to explain. Otherwise, I never had problems with even delays 4x the original estimation, because every party knew even from the start, that we had no idea how the end result would look like.
The fact you even had to say that part points to the management problem at hand. Not only are you trying to keep idle time low, you're trying to estimate essentially unknown timelines, and you have to think about whether people are even telling the truth or padding hours where they feel they can.
I just think the range is too wide. Sure anything can be a 1 day task (potentially just an easy solution to add in, or some variables/settings to change, etc). And any 1 day task could be turned into an 8 day task (anything from refactoring unnecessarily, all the way to just walking the dog too frequently). I'm left wondering, how long should this task have taken?
> you're trying to estimate essentially unknown timeline
Yes. The exact amount of time the task will take is unknown. That doesn't mean I have no idea how long it will take. The point of the estimate is to tell other people my idea of how long it will take. Even if I only have a rough idea it is probably a better idea than a lot of people.
Incidentally I've found that a lot of people don't understand that, and I have a hack! If you find yourself in a situation where you're waiting for something... let's say roadworks, and you say "any idea how long it will take?" and they refuse to give an estimate, even though they clearly have a better idea than you... What you can do is suggest an outlandish number, and then they'll say "oh no no not that long. More like x".
At least there is some honesty there. Everywhere that does estimates, even if they make the devs think its complexity or some other nonsense, is translating that to days somewhere down the line.
I dove pretty deeply into wood case pencils for a few years (then I got tired of carrying around a good sharpener). Musgrave [https://musgravepencil.com/collections/the-heritage-collecti...] makes some good pencils, though some folks don't like the pronounced hex shape. Mitsu-bishi and Tombow produce some very nice, affordable pencils, though they can be hard to find at times. Everyone knows about Blackwings, but they were never my cup of tea -- the pencil is longer than the average wood case, and the eraser, for as nifty as it is, isn't that great.
Though I use pencils less these days, my current favorites are the Tombow 2558 in 2B and the Musgrave Greenbelt.
This will no longer be true next year, as The American Ornithology Society's Diversity & Inclusion Committee plans to rename all these species with "non-colonized, inclusive" names.
Fully remote work has always benefited the employer more than the employee, at least financially. Before the pandemic closed my employer's local office space (we were all told just to work from home), part of the employer's budget for each employee included infrastructure costs (office space, furniture, internet access, maybe food, beverages, etc). My salary did not change when I became fully remote, so the company realized significant savings by telling one hundred to just work from home.
Now, if a company has always been fully remote, then, yes, this sort of thing is ultimately going to hurt the employee because the company needs to recuperate those unplanned costs.
Personally, as a fully remote employee, I don't how to feel about this. Sure, I'd love my employer to offset some of my utility costs, but I also don't want them to assume that means they can control their use (which is their right in the context of an office space).
Not just time, but cost also. As my wife also works from home we've been able to scale back to a single car for 2 years now. Since owning, insuring, fueling, repairing, and maintaining a car typically runs $6k-$10k/year (depending on your tastes and mileage) I've gotten a substantial financial benefit from being remote.
Unless it was already a short-term lease agreement, which is not super common in CRE, chances are your company was still footing the bill for their lease on that office space. Most office space is leased on 5-10 year terms.
different contracts. ISPs may or may not be tied to the building. Our bandwidth in our offices was generally on 2-year contracts. We were locked into the building for 10-years, but if we wanted to turn off the power and water and phones we could have.
> I'd love my employer to offset some of my utility costs.
Yes but I would rather be paid more than waste my time and divulge a lot about my life to my employer. While these might be beneficial in the short term to those already employed this might hurt remote work employers and employees.
>Weirdly, only left wing people read him. But he's actually quite libertarian compatible.
There are quite a few on the Right that read Illich as well. He was, essentially, a communitarian anarchist. Some of his thought is well-received on the Right, particularly his critique of institutionalized education and medicine.
There's a heavily online right-wing presence that admires Ilich; of the people who could be described as "right-wing" I've seen that talk about Ilich, most are either hobby homesteaders or people with advanced CS/engineering degrees that read a lot of "online rationalist" work about a decade ago.
I've read a handful, and agree that he truly understood the effects of technology and Modernity. It's worth reading the French sociologist/theologian Jacques Ellul, too (they were contemporaries).
I like Ellul unfortunately he is much more cloudy in his statements and analysis, it takes much more energy to decipher (even in French) and make your own what he's saying.
I'd rather recommend reading basics stuff like Guy Debord (Society of Spectacle), André Gorz (Métamorphoses du travail), Schumacher (Small is Beautiful), Kohr (The Breakdown of Nations). A little bit of Bourdieu cannot hurt either
For Lewis Mumford [0] maybe "Myth of the Machine" - with his concept
of "megatechnics" - is more readable than the earlier "Technics and
Civilisation", but his earlier insights seem ever more relevant.
For Neil Postman [1] the standard reader is "Technopoly", but for me
"Amusing Ourselves to Death" is a real treat. It was literally a
description of social media and modern "performance politics" 40 years
too early.
There is too much paperwork involved with performance related firings and layoffs happen so fast and so wide it's usually done by lottery.
Can confirm this. My employer dropped about 10% of staff in order to back fill those positions with contractors from low-cost centers (India, Hungary, Costa Rica). Managers were not consulted in the decisions, and simply told they were losing employees $x, $y, and $z.
I can confirm this: I know several mechanical engineers that do mission critical-type systems (think "power plants"), and they routinely use Excel VBA for calculations.
> My fav was when ms announced they'd paid an academic to fix =rand(), ignoring all the others.
I am not sure what that means.
Excel keeps all the bugs for backwards compatibility. So the sheets made years ago still provide same results.
In few cases the depreciated some functions -> the old ones still work, but are relatively hidden and the users are encouraged to use the new ones.
They probably should do the same with the statistical functions that supposedly have problems due to rounding. But that cannot be fixed - precision is up to 15 digits.
Also if you wanted an article that talks on Excel precision, you can start with the wikipedia page:
Excel has many problems, but you linking to few website that supposedly prove that "Excel bad" - but at the same time - those exiles simply dont work, is somehow very funny.
> It is very interesting that since the AI climber is trained on actual climbers, it could, in principle, provide beta to climb consistent with your own style. If you train the bot exclusively on footage of yourself, it would return movement based on your style. If your style is finessy-all-backstep-all-the-time (aka The Edlinger), it can provide beta consistent with that. If your style is to square up and pull (otherwise known as The American), it can provide beta consistent with that instead.
I would think this is actually a Bad Thing. It's very easy to get stuck trying to make a sequence fit your style of climbing. The better approach (especially for long term skill acquisition) is a willingness to learn new styles. That's to say that every sequence is only solvable via one particular style, but I think long term development is hindered if you approach every crux with the one thing you are good at.
> So, in terms of solving complicated beta faster, I see real utility to this.
I can agree with this. But, to the point that others have made, I do wonder what this and the availability of beta videos for many, many routes and blocs does to climbing skill overall. Perhaps I'm just a grumpy old man, but, particularly when bouldering, sorting out the beta should be part of the journey toward eventually sending. Last fall, I visited Hueco Tanks after a six year absence. I suppose I was a bit disappointed to see so many people watching YouTube beta videos of nearly every problem they tried.