it_depends_man

Ah yes. Work that tracks you, not by your output, but by whether your mouse jiggles a statistically correct amount. Nice.

I'm not applying but I have a comment / suggestion:

A pattern I'm seeing here, in activism and open source is that you basically want the full package right now. While I understand that that is what you need, people like that don't grow on trees.

It would be good if there was a "trainee" position for people to gain the kind of experience you are asking for. And guidance, by you to make sure they learn the right lessons. Possibly including a private-ish best practices handbook or whatever. I know that that means additional work in the short term.

Thanks for reading, all the best wishes!

(Compare to linux' kernel team asking for kernel devs and the policy of "pick any topic you'd like to work on". Do I expect a fully course on everything, bringing me from "high school knowledge" to "kernel dev professional"? No, of course not. But a few book recommendations would be great. In that case. Not sure if you can learn moderation from a book.)

Sure. Yes. I'm aware.

The point is, if an employee isn't productive, the company should notice, because they should be running some kind of oversight over the work either being done or not being done.

If the work is being done, even if the employee isn't always 100% focused, the company shouldn't care.

If the work is not being done, the company should care, regardless of how active the mouse moves.

using mouse jigglers to fake being at work is the kind of thing that keeps more companies from allowing WFH.

No, companies don't allow WFH because they don't trust employees or can't verify, employees doing their work from home. Most of the time, because the company people don't understand that work and couldn't judge if it's being done correctly without adults in the room.

tldr: people should be hired and fired based on their performance. Crazy talk, I know.

We have figured out how to run everything, absolutely everything, in the 1950s.

The original computer "AI" craze was started by "cybernetic systems" and for good reason. You probably only know of the bastardizations of "cyber-" that don't have anything in common with the original concept.

The original concept goes like this:

1. set a goal
2. perform an action
3. measure how much impact that had, did it get you closer to your goal or not?
4. If you are at your goal, you're done,
5. otherwise adjust your actions, got to 2. (This is "feedback" and the reason that word is now so common. People at the time knew)

The faster you go through the loop, the faster you will figure out what works.

You can measure anything you want, as vague is you want. Happiness, money, productivity. It's the way democracy is designed to work, in which case the feedback is vague and the cycle time is measured in years. It runs your thermostats, in your home, big national power grid power plants. It's how autopilots autopilot.

The idea that "nobody could have predicted..." or "nobody responsible" is a myth. We have the science. We know how it works.

Every failure we still experience is a failure we allow to happen. Because of profit, politics, or whatever.

Didn't catch something "going on for years", maybe someone should check more often. "Crazy single individual causing a tragedy"? No, that's a person at risk, probably with social or mental problems you didn't take care of before, didn't flag, and didn't stop in time.

"Nobody wants to work on our open source project" Really, how is your onboarding? Do people take a look at the docs/culture and run away screaming? Yeah?

When you lament the loss of ready and experienced volunteers, what we lack are people who’ve learned at the side of truly talented people

What I'm actually lamenting isn't the lack of experienced volunteers.

I'm lamenting the fact that the groups in need lack the awareness that nobody is teaching the stuff they need and that they should do it themselves.

E.g. https://kernelnewbies.org/ I wasn't kidding when I mentioned them. Their idea of "outreach" is to open the door and wait for people to fall in. They have no teaching material, they have no recommendations. I'm recognizing that there is something happening that is in my interest and I personally would put in the time to learn whatever is necessary to get to the level that is required to seriously touch that code. I just literally don't know where to start and have no point to connect. There is a https://kernelnewbies.org/KernelMentors mentors program. Not only is their only point of contact a mailing list, if you follow the link, you will find that the mailing list doesn't actually exist.

I helped design large-ish electrical grids. 30-100k cables

Without the actual calculation bits, unfortunately.

Not very interesting. Bad software. Management didn't really care about the problem. I was there so the problem was "managed" from their point of view.

Your joke, but as a short video by joel haver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnUpTyKSjag

Yeah, except I'm on your side, and that kind of protest is obviously not getting it done.

Because it's what has been tried for decades and the problem is still there.

France’s electricity, which were 70-80% nuclear at the time, didn’t see any increase in price.

Yes, because the government decided they couldn't raise the price.

Électricité de France (EDF) – the country's main electricity generation and distribution company – manages the country's 56 power reactors.[5] EDF is fully owned by the French Government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

Mastodon has very nice keyword based filter system.

For example, I have the filter "idiot did a thing", and the keywords are a number of names of... popular people that news don't get tired of talking about, even though the thing isn't actually newsworthy.

So if I'm in the mood, I can check out what they did that day, and if I'm not in the mood, I'm aware that they did something again, but I don't have to get angry over the specifics.

Same for other "ongoing" hot topics, that I already am informed about, where I don't need the 24/7 doomscroll effect shoving negativity into my face.

The meritocratic, capitalist way, would be to to put a property tax on it and to increase that tax, until

• rents increase so much that people can't afford to live in cities anymore
• cities lose essential employees
• society shuts down
• THEN property loses value
• then it can be bought cheaply again
• and also rented for a low price, because the tax on the low value property is also low

Let's go people!

Having this problem can also be managed by going through the loop. If you original goal was "calculate stuff to prevent bad things", and you can't do it because you're choosing too much accuracy, you can experiment with the accuracy until you find a good middle ground.

We can use super detailed FEM, CFD what not sophisticated science, but sometimes the stuff from the 1800s is just fine.

A bit, but not really. The key is to understand that it can be applied to very small scale and very simple processes as well. But that it's still the same concept.

E.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_%28device%29

Or not getting enough sleep by noticing you're tired and changing your daily routine to change it.

People have tried to run economies with it and that... failed. I think it could be interesting to try it again now that we have seriously wide spread internet access and fast, cheap communication. But forcing it on everyone is probably a bad idea and it's not even necessary. For example, if the data is just easy to access, big companies should do it themselves. That's their entire purpose. We're just hindering efforts that way, because the data interfaces are usually not designed to make it this easy. Like, we don't have a common standard to order material online, or to watch those prices.

So when a fast food chain orders potatoes for their fries and steel mill orders coal and iron, they're using different systems that have to be maintained.

And the reason I'm writing it here, is that people don't know about it. Therefore they don't demand it from their democratic leaders or unions and therefore we don't have it.

I'm not saying anything new.

It's the same kind of voting, negotiation, discussion system we already use everyday. Those just look different when they are the same thing. We are 95% there, we're just missing one or two last steps.

The boring part. Making sure that there are holes in the walls for sockets, enough capacity in the cable trays. Planning the routing, but I didn't have access to algorithm of the software.

Collecting the ever changing inputs from people who want devices with cables in rooms and spaces. :)

So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”

Yes.

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they’re not so easy to replace.

To whom?

If people agree with you, they will move and block and defederate. And if they don't they don't.

Sounds like a "you" problem.

Their server, their rules. If they want to run a political censorship social platform, they can and it's totally ok if they un-invite you.