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  • 22 comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: February 7th, 2025
  • I mean, there’s no real individual contract negotiation. The conditions are standardised by the framework agreement. They use a standard format where they note what pay class you’re paid by according to that agreement and that’s that.

    I understand the desire and reasoning to separate into “deserves the benefits of our negotiaton” and “doesn’t support us, doesn’t get anything”. For my employer, the potential advantage of individual contracts doesn’t seem to offset the added effort, so they just throw the rest in with the majority.

    As for negotiating power, last time they announced a one-day warning strike after a round of negotiations failed, our CEO was quick to pay out a lump sum to everyone and assure us that they’re committed to finding a fair solution and all. Allegedly, he wasn’t actually opposed to the union’s proposition, but as I said, it’s sector-wide so other employers have to agree as well and apparently didn’t. Still, that even the threat produced a reaction (and there was no full strike after it either) indicates that the union has plenty of power.

    I think many of us are aware that, member or not, we wouldn’t have these benefits if we didn’t have the union and just sign up on principle. Most of the sector is blue-collar, and I assume that a majority of them are indeed members.

  • Idk, isn’t arranging different employment contracts for members and non-members kinda difficult? You’d have to set up a new contract when someone joins or leaves the union.

    To be clear, the overarching part the union is responsible for is a framework agreement defining paygrades, holidays and such for all the employees in the sector.

    I fudged and conflated the workers’ council with the union, because ultimately, they have similar objectives in protecting workers and my point was to emphasise that good worker representation makes for a stable and pleasant enough working environment.

  • Unions are awesome.

    I’m working in the IT department of a heavily unionised non-IT company. The contracts the union negotiates with that company (and others in the same sector) apply to all employees in those companies, including those who aren’t themselves union members.

    I gotta say, pay might be better elsewhere, but I don’t have to fight for a yearly salary increase. I also don’t worry about being sick. I don’t worry about performance, because they’re not allowed to monitor it. I don’t worry about getting everything done in time either. If I’m overworked, I tell my boss and he has to see about reducing my load. Sure, might just be a good boss, but I’m pretty sure it’s also a workplace culture resulting from knowing we can’t be fired without good reason, and poor performance isn’t one (and might also land you in trouble for monitoring performance).

    Many of my coworkers have been there for 20+ years, through ups and downs and management changes and structural changes and all. It’s a good, reliable employer, and a solid union helps keep it that way.

  • Because violence tends to either escalate or peter out. Either you run out of people that support you or you eventually force the government to throw all its might at suppressing you. Unless you are very well-prepared, organised and have sufficient and resilient support, it might fail and not achieve much other than provide further pretext for crackdown.

    Historically, non-violent resistance has a good track record, if (and only if) it is targeted well and applied with resilience and persistence. It has a potential to galvanise the participants, stir people into action (which helps with recruiting more) and cast the injustice of a violent system into relief.

    Mind, non-violently doesn’t mean writing stern letters or standing on the wayside looking pissed. It absolutely includes disrupting, getting in the way, being a nuisance, being impossible to ignore. The Nashville sit-ins, for example, obstructed the business of lunch counters that refused to serve black people by taking up spots reserved for the people that the establishment would actually like to do business with. In our example, people might occupy the offices of the corrupt administrators, asking to talk to them and making them listen to their constituents in the most literal way, refusing to leave until they get results.

    It most certainly will be considered some form of unlawful conduct and will possibly be met with force. The police will be called and start making arrests. But a well-organised and patient campaign to coerce the corrupt officials into rescinding their decisions or resigning (at which point their successors will be subjected to the same demand) doesn’t need to hurt people.

    It just needs to erode their will until complying with the demands looks like the most bearable option.

  • Sure, if the provider is RFC882 compliant. I believe 882 has since been superseded too?

    I believe when I last researched the question to address some issue in my own regex, some Stackoverflow comment brought up an example of an address that could receive mail but wasn’t compliant.

    Hence the more robust approach, which is also the only feasible way to ensure that there are no typos and that the recipient is actually the one signing up: Send a verification mail to that recipient. If the correct confirmation token gets back to you, someone or something probably got and read that mail.

    You can do some minimal check to avoid things like spaces, ensure there is an @ in there somewhere, but beyond that, it’s really not sensible to check them against some long-winded regex.

    Particularly when you’re vibe-coding, can’t know whether the generator got the regex correct and also can’t debug it.

  • A guy I know is trying to pitch a tool to people he made with AI. Which is to say AI made it for him, because his coding knowledge just about covers HTML and CSS, as best as I can tell, so everything else (and probably a good chunk of those too) is slopped up.

    Recently, someone apparently had difficulties signing up with their email, but only their email. Their partner’s worked fine. The guy was at a loss. I’m not sure he could read the code at all or has any idea of how troubleshooting works.

    If it was open source, I’d probably look into it just out of curiosity. My money is on “AI trained on junior devs’ output did the junior dev thing where they discover RegEx and try to use it for email input validation”, because the provider has a dash in their domain and that’s the simplest explanation for email address troubles.

    He also should hire an actual developer to fix his shit. My rates start at 100€/h, increasing by 10€ every time he suggests I ask AI.

  • It requires exponential levels of labor for every cosmetic

    Unless all games use the same models and shit so the cosmetics actually are directly transferable because we’re only getting “generic variant of the One Game every game is now a generic variant of for the sake of content portability”. If you get too creative with your designs, you can’t participate in the universal cosmetic sharing and mutual marketing thing all the cool kids do.

    I wonder whether the engine will actually lock down your range of options to prevent that problem? Or maybe just heavily discourage developers from not implementing the “One Game” stuff. I’m both put off and curious to see how it’ll develop.

    legal agreements with disparate game owners

    Actually, the “stamp all your stuff from the same mould, and because we own all the things you stamp from that mould, we can freely share them between games and also hold your work hostage” approach would solve that too. If it all becomes too generic to copyright individually, whoever holds the rights to the One Game has freedom to do with his games whatever he wants.

    Sure, I make an asset in my game for a skin the player bought in your game, who keeps the money?

    The longer I think about this, the more I worry that my One Game joke is the only way to actually make this work, and also very desirable for Epic. That would make it less of a joke and more of a foreshadowing.

    Because I’m pretty sure the answer to that question is gonna be “the owner of the One Game”. Whoever first published that skin will get a cut of the sales, but since they’re so easily transferable across the standard objects you’re expected to have used, you don’t need to do much to have it transfer anyway. Besides, your skins also get shared with other games, making for free advertisement!

    Unfortunately, one game made Nazi uniforms, Epic refuses to ban them because they make good money off it and now you’ve either got Nazis running around your game or you need to somehow get out of the asset sharing thing.

    Okay, now I’m horrified at the prospect of how this might develop.

  • Maybe try German.

    Not sure I could construct a “plausible” single word either. The best two-word-phrase I could come up with would be “Gönnendes Desinteresse”.

    Apparently “Gönnen” has no simple, positive translation when applied to others. To yourself, it’s indulging in something, allowing oneself to have something. Applied to others, it means anything from a lukewarm “I don’t begrudge you (thing)” over “I’ll let you have (thing)” (in the sense of “I’ll let you have that victory”), a more explicitly approving “I think you deserve (thing)” to a cordial “I’m happy for you to have (thing)”.

    So basically, it means some form of “Disinterest while approving of others having something”. I suppose the missing piece is having a single word for “I think others should have this thing”.

  • In some cases, providers group multiple end users under one public-facing IP and do some address translation magic to sort out what goes where. Kind of like your whole neighbourhood having a single shared address and a central post office sorting mail into internal post boxes.

    So that “abnormal traffic” might not have been you personally. It could have been some other background process on your computer, or it could have been someone in your vicinity.

    Or their heuristics are spewing shit, who knows. Degoogling isn’t a bad idea, at the end of the day.

  • I mean, if Satan is portrayed as the Lord of Hell, him punishing people that haven’t died yet makes even less sense.

    Besides, the cases of people being punished for sin in life (like drowning damn near everyone, smiting Sodom and Gomorrah or striking down Ananias for a stupid lie) I’m aware of are still all God. If anything, the Serpent would be the tempter leading people to sin.

    In some places (notably Rev. 12), Satan is the accuser. That would make him part of the sinners’ punishment in the afterlife (unless Jesus intercedes on behalf of his faithful). However, I don’t think I’ve seen that framing used much in popular depictions, and it still wouldn’t make him a lord of anything.

    So I don’t know of any biblical source that would make any of the entities typically conflated with the Devil the Lord of Hell and the punisher of sinners

  • It’s some weird misconception that, like heaven, hell needs to have some sort of ruler. Naturally, the intuitive thing is to pick the mightiest entity in there and declare it the king, because that’s kinda how we perceive kingship. Aside from the fact that literally all the entities in there are convicts imprisoned by the final judgement, at which point there’s only one eternal king left:

    It’s a fucking sea of fire, what the fuck are they gonna rule?

  • to lie about the results and to generate more anxiety in others to keep up with your made-up achievements

    Emperor’s New Clothes style “we all need to pretend to like it” is an unfortunately common effect of decision-makers deciding they know some brilliant thing and any naysayers just aren’t suited to appreciate the brilliant thing.

    I think at least some of the wasteful or even harmful ways you describe of using LLMs come from this push to use it and “be more productive” with it.

    Some, sure.

    Others from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of language models. They’re text processors and generators designed to sound human. They can’t tell facts from filler.

    Just earlier, I saw a post elsewhere about someone having generated an article or something which cited three experts – wrongly, because it doesn’t actually know what the relation between the text in quotes and some supposed source is or why it needs to be verbatim to be a correct quote. That’s not a bug, nor a hallucination or whatever anthropomorphic euphemism people come up with for “random output happened to be wrong” (though, to be fair, “random” glosses over a highly complex prediction system that can predict plausible text quite impressively, even if it can’t predict truth).

    Students relying LLMs to generate their coursework are falling into that trap without any pressure of productivity. They don’t get that the purpose of coursework is to learn about the source material and the structure of academic writing rather than just produce text. They also don’t get that the LLM won’t look up, interpret and cite sources accurately in accordance with the subject of the question. It will generate a plausible-sounding answer to the question, and therein lies the danger: If you don’t already know the answer, how could you tell if it’s true?

    The same goes with people “looking up” information. Gemini will produce some text statistically correlated to the text it has read, but you never know whether that correlation reflects facts or whether it falsely attributes some shady business to companies who had nothing to do with it (about which there was a court case in Germany recently).

    Vibe coders without programming experience cannot qualify the output of their generator. It’s always harder to understand code you didn’t write (or maybe wrote long ago), but if you don’t even know how to write code, you’ll have no experience to compare it to.

    People using AI for coping with stress may run into a trap where they end up unlearning to cope on their own and potentially take on even more stress.

    The common thread behind these is that these AIs lack the understanding of the concepts they’re producing text about and semantic connections between them, and accordingly cannot treat these things with the same nuance and precision that humans can.

    But the ways they’re harmful doesn’t immediately become apparent. “Report where it’s harmful” doesn’t really work if it takes two years for a critical security flaw to surface that some code generator produced and nobody with experience caught. You may never notice your ability to deal with stress being eroded until some day you can’t ask your robot buddy for help and just crack instead.

    They plant traps in your education, your knowledge, your work, your psyche. To encourage people to use them without thoroughly preparing them for those traps is reckless.

  • You get all your teams to build some expertise and (hopefully) get a sense of where the technology might have some ROI

    You’d run the risk that they instead develop a dependency or overreliance on the tech. They probably won’t think about the “I” part of ROI and evaluate how many tokens a given task produces relative to the saved time and effort.

    Throttling it later might then cause a drop in productivity until they relearn how to do simple stuff they could do themselves but delegated to AI instead, whether or not it’s ideal for the task.

    For example: “search and replace” requires the LLM to ingest and then produce the whole document as output. Aside from the question whether it’ll have caught all instances and replaced them without otherwise altering the text (which a casual user won’t check), the amount of output tokens correlates with the size of the text.

    That’s a lot of wasted tokens for a task they could have done without AI, but so long as asking the computer is quick and convenient, they won’t think twice. Then, once the tokens are throttled, they’ll suddenly realise they’ve run out of tokens early because they burned a ton on tasks that seem trivial to them, leaving none for the more complex tasks they’d actually prefer to delegate (whether or not they should). They might not make the immediate connection which tasks eat so many tokens either, so they’ll take a while having to try all their use cases again, see how expensive they are, run out of their allotment early and wait for the next period.

    If you’re gonna have people figure out how to use it, you’ll have to throttle from the start to make them also figure out how to use it economically.

    Also, mandatory classes on the limitations and reasonable uses. Don’t let it get to the point where they find out the hard way that it’s not actually intelligent and has no concept of truth.

  • In the early days of the steam engine’s success, what helped it find an economic footing was the need to pump water from coal mines. At the time, logistics of transporting things over large distances were difficult, so having the coal supply on-site was an obvious benefit. So while using a steam engine to pump water from a pool would be quite archaic and inefficient, but at least for emptying the pool, it could technically be used.

    Of course, a locomotive moving the engine around would be entirely impractical for pumping a somewhat steady stream. Chlorinated water would also make for poor steam, I imagine.

    I guess driving a scrubber back and forth would be possible, but I could do that more efficiently by hand. I drink less water, eat less coal, don’t require rails and skilled operators and I’m easier to transport to the site. I’m not sure how the carbon footprint for a human compares to that of extracting and processing iron, but it won’t be favourable if at least one human is involved.

    The scrubber couldn’t be as large and heavy though. If you need a heavy scrubber, you’d also need a powerful motivator. That’s where a steam engine might have an edge over me: sheer power output.

    To match that, you’d have to employ and pay multiple people. So if the steam engine’s rent seems cheaper than that…