Notes

A work-in-progress attempt at changing the terms of my relationship with Twitter. Thoughts are also works-in-progress. Subscribe to the feed.

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  • “All music sounds the same,” complains the fart-scented old white guy who only listens to one genre of music.

  • So it is that we become a compendium of the people who were supposed to love us, even if they perhaps didn’t.

  • Between Mute and Murdebot I have now come to the simple conclusion that Alexander Skarsgård is funny as fuck and making him not talk in Mute was a terrible idea 🤣

  • I believe that existing (pre LLM) software dev was flawed, largely inadequate, and a recipe for future crises.

  • Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s 14 management principles:

    1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

    2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

    3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

    4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.

    5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

    6. Institute training on the job.

    7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.

    8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

    9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

    10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

    11a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.

    11b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

    12a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.

    12b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.

    1. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.

    2. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.

  • Become the thing you fear, so that it will cease to control you.

  • Most importantly, with no thought given as to if any of these locals have the slightest interest in knowing you. Forbid that the inhabitants of a developing country might have a purpose to exist outside being a conduit for the self-actualisation of a western middle class youth fresh off the back of an overpriced humanities degree. https://vidurabr.com/essays/in-defence-of-tourists-over-travellers

  • I won’t perform my rock bottom for you for the sake of being believed.

  • The Turing Test II: Return of Alan. Except this time, it’s two LLMs arguing online and you’re supposed to pick a side. Plot twist, the only correct answer is to leave. (And go kill the billionaires)

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