Not OP, but it is probably either "Average Hold Time" or "Average Handle Time". I supposed the usage here indicated some call center metric that management was expecting in a certain range but the new tool skewed it in a different direction.
> ... I make performance improvements, I stabilize CI, I improve code readability, remove compiler warnings, you name it ...
These are exactly the kind of tasks that I ask an AI tool to perform.
Claude, Codex, et al are terrible at innovation. What they are good at is regurgitating patterns they've seen before, which often mean refactoring something into a more stable/common format. You can paste compiler warnings and errors into an agentic tool's input box and have it fix them for you, with a good chance for success.
I feel for your position within your org, but these tools are definitely shaking things up. Some tasks will be given over entirely to agentic tools.
> These are exactly the kind of tasks that I ask an AI tool to perform.
Very reasonable nowadays, but those were things I was doing back in 2018 as a junior engineer.
> Some tasks will be given over entirely to agentic tools.
Absolutely, and I've found tremendous value in using agents to clean up old techdebt with oneline prompts. They run off, make the changes, modify tests, then put up a PR. It's brilliant and has fully reshaped my approach... but in a lot of ways expectations on my efficiency are much worse now because leadership thinks I can rewrite our techstack to another language over a weekend. It almost doesn't matter that I can pass all this tidying off onto an LLM because I'm expected to have 3x the output that I did a year ago.
I use an agents.md file to guide Claude, and I include a prominent line that reads UPDATE THIS FILE WITH NEW LEARNINGS. This is a bit noisy -- I have to edit what is added -- but works well and it serves as ongoing instruction. And as you have pointed out, the document serves as a great base if/when I have to switch tools.
Coincidentally, a nearby county has just announced that they have begun installing new Flock cameras [0].
Their stated reason is: "Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts."
The cameras are good when we're all on the happy path, but as soon as a bad actor gets involved, all of that surveillance won't look so great. History shows that the odds of that happening are decidedly non-zero.
EDIT: Searching for some info on the grant referenced in the article, it appears that a county must match 20% of the grant amount; one example is [1]. I'm sure this looks like a great deal to county officials.
> Small counties generate huge revenues with traffic cameras.
Whether or not that is true, I suspect it is, the best way to avoid fines for breaking traffic regulations is to not break traffic regulations. They can't make anything from you that way if you do.
Until they start changing speed limits, adjusting the timing on yellow lights, or just saying you ran a stop sign when you didn't and - oops! - they happened to have their dashcam off or their car angled so the actual intersection was just out of view.
If they are that corrupt then you have problems beyond traffic fines. Get your own dash cam and such so you can prove they are lying. No, in an ideal world you shouldn't have to, but if you have a corrupt police force you aren't living in an ideal world.
A Sedgwick, Kansas, police chief used Flock Safety license plate readers to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend’s vehicles 228 times over four-plus months and used his police vehicle to follow them out of town, according to a city official and a report released this week by the agency that oversees police certifications.
Before posting that you couldn't Google the Milwaukee cop who got busted for abusing Flock camera access? From just a week ago?
If you want an absolute torrent of abuse search for cops running the IDs of their exes. That's why it's dead certain that Flock cameras will be routinely abused.
So you think you can solve police accountability and keep the cameras? I admire that level of ambition. Have you got the Nobel prize nominations lined up already?
> Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts.
Hot take: AMBER alert is a way to keep the public paranoid about child abduction by strangers, an evil but extremely rare act, and turn their paranoia into support for law enforcement. It may not be the intended purposes, but the (real) purpose of a system is what it does.
It is no surprise that Flock, like other parties pushing for the erosion of privacy and personal freedom, are following the same playbook. Don't you want your kid (or your doggo) to get home safe? If you don't let us spy on you your literally supporting child abductors. Checkmate libertarians.
The reality of AMBER alert is they overwhelmingly come from custody dispute cases where the child's safety is not in jeopardy, because they tend to be the only kind of cases where they know enough about the "abductor" to issue an alert that is not just "look for a man driving a white van." The reality of child abuse is you should be infinitely more worried about authority figures dealing with the child — parents, relatives, teachers, pastors, coaches and yes, the police — than strangers driving unmarked white vans.
I agree with the rest of what you wrote but the quote is an overly cynical tired cliche when applied in a blanket manner. There are specific situations involving bad faith actors where it is directly relevant, and there are also times where it can be a useful observation about the impact of perverse incentives that build on top of unintended consequences.
But the way you're using it there it's no better than other politically charged nonsensical slogans.
Did anyone else get Semantic Satiation while reading that article? I started wondering what the origin of "it turns out" was. I got distracted, and from that point on, it just looked weird, not meaningful.
If OpenAI and Google stay in sync with Anthropic on this, will Trump try to ban all of them from the federal government? What alternatives would they turn to?
They might de facto take them over via the defense production act, board demands, or shut them down, and then put the screws on Google who they can already control via their shareholders.
There is a whole situation with dealing with military contract during Trump 1, and it didn't go well for Google, I doubt Sundar will go the same route once again.
You'd probably want to clone the BSSID of one of the APs, the SSID is unlikely to be used as it gives zero context to which office it's at most of the time.
Right. I have aphantasia and I've never felt bad about it. Maybe confused a few times, but that happens a lot anyway for any number of reasons.
I posit, without evidence, that the people who feel "confusion, frustration, shame, and inadequacy" about something like aphantasia are simply attention-seekers. If it wasn't for lack of mental imagery, it would be for something else.
Hmm, agreeing that the pathologization of aphantasia is distasteful but then immediately positing that people who might feel shame and inadequacy about having it must be "simply attention-seekers" seems counterproductive. Not treating aphantasia as a disease and also acknowledging that people may suffer mental illness triggered by it are not mutually exclusive.
For me, learning that normal people go about their days constantly hallucinating had the opposite effect. I think it could partly explain some problems in society, e.g. people's susceptibility to advertising.
I think your implicitly getting at something here. Both are dealing with an inferiority/superiority dynamic. The suggestion of a group you identify as being less, causes a predictable reaction to characterize the other (non-aphantasia) as problematic/hallucinating (i.e. broken/lacking). This ties back to the post where the author speaks of feelings of inadequacy (shame, etc...) about being unable to visualize, again signs of an inferiority complex. While such complexes may be traced back to particular memories or events, they're also habits of thought which are common place and culturally reinforced, so much so that they seem quite normal. For example, the culture of idol worship, like raising up of tech heroes while implicitly lowering your own self worth, which happens often on this site.
The fact that the author doesn't mention the details of the memory or events of the day also suggests shame and concerns of being judged for them.
The good news is they are writing about their struggles which suggests their willingness to work with these fears.
I think the answer probably isn't about pretending you're not better or worse, but accepting that being better or worse at something doesn't change your inherent self worth. Accepting that your not in control of many of your conditions and conditioning can free the mind from a sense of guilt and the fear around judgement of yourself and others. Hopefully this helps the author and those who struggle with notions of identity and self worth.
> The suggestion of a group you identify as being less, causes a predictable reaction to characterize the other (non-aphantasia) as problematic/hallucinating (i.e. broken/lacking).
No, it's not a defensive/counterattacking reflex. The thought of people hallucinating all the time is terrifying to me, because hallucination is a sign of something being very wrong, like schizophrenia. After getting past the language barrier and finding out these were "mental hallucinations" rather than "visual hallucinations", it's slightly less scary, but still unsettling for me to think about. Finding out that visualization was actually a thing meant that idioms that I thought were metaphors or superstition were suddenly something the majority of the population takes literally. People who have "invisible friends" talking to them all day long scares me though.
Also, the metaphorical "little voice in the back of your head" that tells you what you're about to do is a bad idea.. Apparently people really hear that too? It would be nice to read about the differences between genuine hallucinations and mental imagery or sound from someone familiar with both. Obviously there are differences but people just get offended or simply weirded out most of the time when you ask.
Also you might find it interesting to read Jaynes' Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It's evidently controversial and not a viewpoint to uncritically adopt wholesale, but it does get you thinking about mental visualization/audiolization vs. hallucinations etc... and contains some intriguing historical anecdotes.
> It would be nice to read about the differences between genuine hallucinations and mental imagery or sound from someone familiar with both. Obviously there are differences but people just get offended or simply weirded out most of the time when you ask.
It seems like the "voice in the head" is distinguished from real voices by a mechanism similar to how tickling yourself doesn't cause the same sensation as another doing the tickling. People with inner voices and visualizations might actually be hallucinating all the time, they're just aware of it and not being misled by their senses like a schizophrenic would be.
Regardless of current mechanism, susceptibility to advertising would still be present even if all currently exploited cognitive pathways were removed or deactivated across all human minds, as the advertisers would keep experimenting until they found another one.
I will say it was a mind blowing experience to learn after decades of buddhist practice other people were LITERALLY seeing things (and in some cases trying not to). I never found it detracted from my experience as learning to NOT get distracted by that stuff is half the battle for a lot of people. So it can be a warp whistle in some ways. It is also why I am probably more interested in playing/listening to heavy doom music as it is hypnotic in its monotony. I reckon it is why I am fixated on genera lisp, smalltalk, self esque environments as they are more tangible for creating scenes on the screen that match how I am thinking about code (inside out and all that).
Well, even the idea of "diagnosis" in this case implies that there is something wrong. I saw the whole idea of aphantasia/variations in mental imagery enter the mainstream over the past ~decade, it's really disheartening how people just can not ever accept that there are differences between people without immediately branding one type as good and the other as bad.
So true! I was well into my thirties until I learned that people actually can "see" images. I was totally perplexed by this revelation. After some research I realized that this also applies to taste, smell, sounds.. and none of them I can "imagine".
In hindsight this explained a lot of things. One example would be that I always was bad at blindfold chess even though I was a decent chess player. Before, I never understood how people can do this.
Still I am absolutely fine. I can recognize all these things. I can describe them. I just can "imagine" them.
After the first shock you understand that everything has pros and cons. E.g. I never have trouble sleeping. I close my eyes and turn the world around me off. My wife can see images very vividly and always has trouble going to sleep.
In the end we just need to accept that the brain is very complex and each of us has developed / adapted the best way, allowed by our biology.
That's so funny: I also first started to realize I had aphantasia during a period when I was taking chess very seriously during university. Unlike even lesser skilled peers, it was so difficult for me to understand games written out in chess books without playing them out on the board and I couldn't understand why...
Experiences like that are how I understand the question of 'shame' relating to aphantasia and the importance of 'diagnosis'/understanding how your mind actually works. 'Diagnosis' just helps you understand how to adapt and prevents you from slamming your head against approaches that won't work no matter how hard you try.
Similarly on sleep, I can sleep anywhere anytime with little effort and always tell my wife, who often has insomnia, "just close your eyes until you sleep" to her frustration.
What's really remarkable is how similar the life experiences are of most who have aphantasia...
I definitely have memories linked to smell, but I can't imagine or remember and pull them up on demand, I am reminded of them when I detect that scent. I can make myself imagine/remember sourness though, but not other flavors. Just thinking of lemon, citrus, pickles, etc. makes my mouth water and start tasting sourness.
You can see this in action today, if you make the effort to manually remove yourself from data brokers.
Some of the brokers do offer an easy removal process and will handle your request right away, but then your record will reappear after some amount of time, obviously purchased from another broker.
I would not be surprised to discover that these individual brokers are, in fact, owned by the same entity and they merely exchange records periodically.
This is the reason that I choose to use Optery. They have the bandwidth and tools to chase my records on my behalf, for as long as I pay them.
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