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yafbum's comments

yafbum | 2 years ago | on: Tiny volumetric display

There's another similar thing needing correction, which is that the LEDs near the center sweep a much smaller volume than the ones at the edge, and should be dimmed in order to yield equivalent luminance. LEDs describing tiny circles very close to the center would need to be dimmed a lot since they'd essentially be stationary. Wouldn't it be better then to sweep slightly larger circles at the middle anyways?

yafbum | 2 years ago | on: Star neuroscientist may have manipulated data to support a major stroke trial

Scientific fraud robs the community twice: the first time by wasting research funds on fraud, the second time because experiments with the appearance of success funnel more dollars to them, taking away funding from other areas that might look less sexy but might have yielded a breakthrough of they'd been pursued. Grant issuers should insist on some form of end-to-end third-party data custodianship to prevent tampering with data during analysis. Seems better than the many billions of $ being wasted on fraud and subsequent missed opportunity.

yafbum | 2 years ago | on: Return to office is 'dead,' Stanford economist says

The title is misleading without context. TFA doesn't argue that RTO is a bad policy or is being abandoned. It only presents facts showing that the post-COVID RTO trend is flatlining, i.e. employees aren't currently RTO'ing any more or any less than they were last month (as a share of paid work days).

yafbum | 2 years ago | on: Amazon exec: it's time to 'disagree and commit' to office return despite no data

People need to stop using data as an excuse for making decisions, or apologizing for not having data, or arguing about the lack of data as an excuse for maintaining a status quo. As entrepreneurs, as managers, as individuals we make decisions with no perfect data all the time. It's called dealing with risk.

Sure you could get a sense for how much active coding time or whatever BS metric you can track, and look at correlation with WFH, but that stuff is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. How's new grad onboarding affected? How's team culture and conflict management affected? How is dealing with difficult health challenges affected? Working remotely is a big shift with likely long term longitudinal effects on an organization that are hard to predict. You can't A/B test or analyze your way out of every single decision there. So I respect people making decisions without data on this, that's what they're being paid the big bucks for. As I'm sure they will respect my decision to leave the minute the terms of the arrangement no longer suits me, which will add a data point of N=+1 somewhere.

It's ok to ask to see the data if you're curious. But people are often asking for data not out of curiosity but just because they disagree with the consequences of a decision that affects them. I think that's disingenuous. You could deploy a team of data scientists to tell me that the org will definitely be 5% more productive if everyone worked from some office an hour away, and it wouldn't really matter to me. I still prefer having a remote work option and I won't commute more than 40 min to work. We don't need to ask for data about things we don't like, we can just disagree and either commit or create the attrition outcomes that will drive different behaviors in the future.

yafbum | 2 years ago | on: Noyb files GDPR complaint against Meta over "Pay or Okay"

I'm sure there's plenty of local enforcement, I'm just talking about my own cookie wall experience which is mostly happening when consuming Europe-based news outlets. I was really surprised to see that it was enabled by some national agencies which have explicitly okayed the cookie wall for such cases.

yafbum | 2 years ago | on: Noyb files GDPR complaint against Meta over "Pay or Okay"

News outlets based in Europe routinely pull this cookie wall crap. I guess they get a pass for very very principled reasons and not just because they are based in Europe whereas Facebook isn't... /s

Banging Facebook over the head might make Facebook suffer, but it isn't going to create an alternative privacy-conscious social network, or even the incentives to the existence of such an alternative. It's just going to further add cost to a bunch of properties that might have once been dominant and hegemonic, but aren't anymore (hello tiktok) and destroy value that would otherwise have accrued, primarily, to advertisers whose ads now will be much more crappily targeted.

yafbum | 2 years ago | on: If needed, you have a role at Microsoft that matches your compensation

Nonprofit status relates to the absence of investor payouts, and doesn't fundamentally have much to do with pay levels. Some employees can be on occasion willing to accept lower pay when the motives are altruistic, but most employees at nonprofits are paid (have to be paid) market rate.

yafbum | 2 years ago | on: If needed, you have a role at Microsoft that matches your compensation

The premise of founding OpenAI as a nonprofit with "nobler" goals than making money was that it would be a strong magnet to the right talent. Going to work for Microsoft (or any other tech company for that matter), from that point of view, is like crossing over to the dark side of the force. It will be interesting to see how many of OpenAI's employees were there because of its nonprofit status, and how many were there in spite of it.

yafbum | 2 years ago | on: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

While it is true that the govt looks to keep such engagements short, SVB absolutely did not shutter. It was taken over in a weekend and its branches were open for business on Monday morning. It was later sold, and depositors kept all their money in the process.

Maybe for another, longer lived example, see AIG.

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