baazaa (u/baazaa) - Readit News

baazaa commented on We've got to stop sending files to each other shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/... · Posted by u/ColinWright

baazaa · a month ago

Because security locked-down anything more tech-savvy. Tbh I think the only 'allowed' way of sending data out where I work is to build an API and surface it from a data exchange platform so locked down the incompetent security team barely knows how to get data into it or out of it.

If you look at the venn diagram of 'things people want to send' and 'things people are willing to spend years of approvals and networking headaches to send' you quicky realise why emailed (or sometimes even on a USB) CSVs are the lingua franca of government data.

baazaa commented on AI: Accelerated Incompetence slater.dev/accelerated-in... · Posted by u/stevekrouse

baazaa · 3 months ago

One thing that I've noticed is that AI has made it even more abundantly obvious that the low IQs of middle-managers are the main problem.

They have a great faith in AI (which is understandable), but they're constantly realising that:

a) they don't understand any of the problems enough to even being prompting for a solution

b) the AI can explain our code but the manager still won't understand

c) the AI can rephrase our explanations and they still won't understand.

Traditionally middle-managers probably consoled themselves with the idea that the nerds can't communicate well and coding is a dumb arcane discipline anyway. But now that their machine god isn't doing a better job than we are of ELI5ing it, I think even they're starting to doubt themselves.

baazaa commented on The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting happiness.hks.harvard.edu... · Posted by u/47thpresident

agnishom · 4 months ago

I agree with what you said in the other two paragraphs, but I think people _are_ suggesting what you said, and it is not really an "explanation": it is part of the observation itself

baazaa · 4 months ago

The article is claiming that people need to put more effort into organising social events with tips on how to do it. And the tips around escalating discloure etc. are very much like workplace ice-breakers... utterly awful experiences that everyone hates.

Unless you first diagnose why people dislike socialising nowadays you're unlikely to fix the problem. Enjoining people to 'invest' in relationships is entirely missing the point, people used to hang out with their friends because they enjoyed it not because they thought it was an investment.

baazaa commented on The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting happiness.hks.harvard.edu... · Posted by u/47thpresident

baazaa · 4 months ago

No-one ever suggests the simplest explanation... maybe socialising is just getting worse?

Where I live there were long covid lockdowns and most people expressed relief about not having to go to parties and make painful small-talk with strangers. They were already forcing themselves to go to social engagements because they didn't want to be seen as a loser, but they weren't enjoying it. This is historically unusual, people didn't see socialising as a chore necessary to maintain one's mental health a century ago.

Every article on the issue though takes as its starting point that socialising is obviously great and there must just be small obstacle which prevents people doing more of it. IMO there wouldn't be an epidemic of self-diagnosed social anxiety / high-functioning autism / 'introverts who get drained by social interactions' if people were actually enjoying their social engagements.

baazaa commented on Things Zig comptime won't do matklad.github.io/2025/04... · Posted by u/JadedBlueEyes

msteffen · 4 months ago

If I understand TFA correctly, the author claims that D’s approach is actually different: https://matklad.github.io/2025/04/19/things-zig-comptime-won...

“In contrast, there’s absolutely no facility for dynamic source code generation in Zig. You just can’t do that, the feature isn’t! [sic]

Zig has a completely different feature, partial evaluation/specialization, which, none the less, is enough to cover most of use-cases for dynamic code generation.”

baazaa · 4 months ago

that's a comically archaic way of using the verb 'to be', not a grammatical error. you see it in phrases like "to be or not to be", or "i think, therefore i am". "the feature isn't" just means it doesn't exist.

baazaa commented on Who isn't a big fan of "impartial" news? People who don't have power niemanlab.org/2025/04/whi... · Posted by u/jaredwiener

baazaa · 5 months ago

Or in other words dumb people are less impacted by social desirability bias when responding to the survey because they don't realise that 'impartiality' is something to be desired.

As for why impartial news does so poorly in practice, it's often because it's utterly uninformative. 'Car bomb goes off in Kabul' is worthless info to 100% of the population, whereas the moment you try to contextualise it 'Car bomb goes off in Kabul, which is becoming more frequent, which suggests administration is lying about how well the occupation is going' then you're no longer impartial.

Journalists and editors have spent the better part of a century stripping all useful information out of their articles in an effort to be impartial. It would be much better if they instead aimed for a diversity of opinions than a mythical objectivity devoid of ideological bias.

baazaa commented on The average college student today hilariusbookbinder.substa... · Posted by u/Jyaif

baazaa · 5 months ago

"This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem. What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down."

Sounds like an educational system problem.

I find it very odd the need to blame phones for everything. POTUS probably can't read a serious novel cover to cover, few of the senior managers at my work can, these kids are all going to pass college despite not being able to do it, it's a basic question of incentives.

baazaa commented on Has the decline of knowledge work begun? nytimes.com/2025/03/25/bu... · Posted by u/pseudolus

mitthrowaway2 · 5 months ago

I often wonder the same thing. My conclusion has been that automobile infrastructure swallowed the budget.

baazaa · 5 months ago

Definitely this is what was happening mid-century (when indeed everyone else was ripping out their tram networks entirely).

But I think if you look at modern light-rail projects there really has been such insane cost-inflation it wouldn't be worth covering the city with trams even with a much bigger budget. Also because such a large fraction of the price is admin etc., it creates a bias towards more expensive infra (heavy rail) because the paperwork overhead is similar either way so you get more bang for your buck.

baazaa commented on Has the decline of knowledge work begun? nytimes.com/2025/03/25/bu... · Posted by u/pseudolus

pimlottc · 5 months ago

In many cases, quality is being driven down by automation that’s drastically cheaper and produces results that are deemed “good enough”.

Some of this is inevitable as new products and services move from being high end to mass-market, and it’s perhaps a bit chicken-and-egg to determine whether we accept this because we most people never really cared about quality that much anyway or because we just learn to accept what we’re given.

But it feels like there could be a world where automation still reduces costs while still maintaining a high level of quality, even if it’s not quite as cheap as it is now.

baazaa · 5 months ago

I once found some old price catalogues (early 20c) for shoes etc. and estimated the items there are barely any cheaper today in real terms. Now obviously that's partly because we have cheaper substitutes today, so we've lost economies of scale when building things the old-fashioned way and the modern equivalent has to be made bespoke... but it's still pretty alarming given we should be ~10x richer.

But consider an example which can't be blamed on that. My city (Melbourne) has a big century-old tram network. The network used to cover the city, now it covers only the inner city because it hasn't ever been expanded. We can't expand it because it's too expensive. Why could we afford to cover the whole city a century ago when we were 10x poorer? With increasing density it should be even more affordable to build mass-transit.

Obviously people blame the latter example on declining state capacity, but I'm not sure state capacity is doing any worse than Google capacity or General Electric capacity.

baazaa commented on Has the decline of knowledge work begun? nytimes.com/2025/03/25/bu... · Posted by u/pseudolus

WillieCubed · 5 months ago

I don't think the issue is that the West is going backwards in capability; rather, it's that although it has the capability to produce great products (software, media, etc.), it deliberately chooses not to because it's not as cost effective, because the people with expertise are overworked and understaffed, or because management had other priorities (see AAA game development).

In other words, the capitalists won.

baazaa · 5 months ago

AAA games are eye-wateringly expensive though, management aren't imagining it; my point is things becoming more expensive is a symptom of decline. I'm sure the late romans consoled themselves they could build another Pantheon they just cared more about efficiency now.

Where I work in government we've stopped paying for important data from vendors (think sensors around traffic etc.) because the quotes are eye-wateringly expensive. But I've worked in data long enough to know the quotes probably reflect genuine costs, because data engineers are so incompetent (and if it's a form of pricing gouging it's not working because gov isn't paying up). So it looks like we're choosing to be in the dark about important data, but it's not entirely a choice.

Saying we can do stuff but it's unaffordable is imo just another way of saying we can't do stuff.