I knew about Angel Flight but wasn’t aware of this. Thank you for sharing, and for flying! My dad was the top contributing pilot for Angel Flight in Texas a few years back. If he was still able to fly, I’d be pushing him to take this on as well.

Sociopathy is the inability to feel empathy. This is not inherently a bad thing, it’s only bad when people use that to harm others.

A common trait for sociopaths is seeking success, which is defined differently in different cultures. In the US, success is usually defined by fame, money, or power, so we see a lot of sociopaths in government, C-suites, and Hollywood. However, in India, success is more defined around family involvement, and so sociopaths there are often seen establishing those strong family ties and working to fit in.

Some studies suggest that 4% of the population have the brain profile of sociopathy. That doesn’t mean 1/25 people is evil. But when someone who is sociopathic uses that lack of empathy to harm people, that’s when they become a danger and should be called out for it.

Source: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, Ph.D (and my memory thereof)

Have you seen the panda that was raised by zookeepers? The zookeepers had to teach it to break bamboo, which was hard for them so they often grimaced while doing so. The panda learned to make a similar face, seeing it as part of the process. They’ve even caught the panda making the grimace after breaking the bamboo, like it realized that it forgot to do the thing and had to make up for skipping that step.

My dad wrote software in the 90s and developed a pretty good name for his business. He once got a call from Microsoft saying they wanted to package his software in their newest OS builds. Holy crap, right?! That would be a major break!

They told him they needed to do some deep interviews to set the plan in motion. I can’t remember if there were supposed to be 4 calls total or if it was on the 4th call, but after a couple conversations my dad realized the questions they were asking were to reverse engineer his software. They were never trying to make a deal; they were trying to learn what they could so they could rewrite it and not pay him a dime. He told them to pound sand.

There were a few other conflicts he had with Microsoft. I was young and didn’t understand it well, but my whole childhood I knew Bill Gates led a shady as fuck company and thought he was an awful POS. It honestly still kills me to admit that he (now) does some good in this world.

THIS! My cardiologist has instructed me to eat 7-10 grams of salt a day. He literally encouraged me to eat things like chips, pretzels, pickles, salted nuts, and ramen to get more.

I supplement with electrolyte mixes with 1g sodium. They cost over $1 each and I am supposed to drink 2-3 a day. I still don’t get enough salt to feel my best.

It’s fucking obnoxious to have health conditions that mean I need a thing that so much of the world tells me is bad, and everyone else is trying to get rid of.

That’s when it becomes Rita as opposed to “heat Katrina”.

For folks who don’t remember/know about Rita because they didn’t live through it, less than a month after Katrina a record-breaking cat 5 hurricane was heading for Texas. Everyone still had Katrina on their minds and panicked. Millions of people (literally estimated as 2.5–3.7 million) evacuated, or tried.

The highways out of Houston came to a total standstill. About 100 people died before the storm even hit land because of the evacuation. And then the hurricane itself was nbd; the evacuation was literally the worst part.

My partner has an Anovo affected by this and he knows the details better than me, but IIRC the app allows you to set times to change temps or things like that. The device still works without the app, but you lose the convenience factor of being able to monitor or make changes at a distance.

H&R Block has prioritized these worker-focused things since 2020, and in the past year its stock price has frequently broken its record high since going public in 1962. Its CEO has been interviewed by Fortune magazine about his commitment to keeping a “work from anywhere” policy at the company. The business is “winning” by the most public metric used to determine that, and I think their commitment to these exact things is a big part of why.

It’s amazing: when you treat employees like human beings, you tend to have better employees, and better employees make you more successful. /shocked pikachu face

You make a good point, and yet I wouldn’t be shocked if many people were still rabid fans even if he sold it at their expense. There’s a lot of weird idolization around him, and seems like the kind of thing many of his fans would laud as his great business acumen, ignoring the negative impacts it had on them.

Remorse: “I am sorry for what I did and the impact it had on the victim. I made stupid choices that hurt another person, and while I can never take that back, I will seek to do better so no one needs to suffer from my actions again.”

Not sorry you did it, just sorry you got caught: “I can’t reverse it, so I have to carry the consequences. It’s the biggest mistake of my life.”

I believe people can change and I think it’s important we hold space for people to do so. However, that hinges on the person actually growing, which often starts with showing remorse. I know you implied that this guy has done so, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that.

Even the quote you posted somewhere else about it being the worst thing he’d done, or something like that? That very much sounds like a, “I’m not sorry I did it, I’m sorry I got caught” kind of statement.

Asked if van de Velde had ever expressed any remorse to him for rape, Immers [his teammate] said: “No, he doesn’t, he doesn’t explain it.” (source)

“I have been branded as a sex monster, as a pedophile,” he said. "That I am not — really not.” (source)

If there’s an apology or some actual statement showing his remorse, I’d love to see it, but I’m skeptical that it exists. This whole controversy he’s had a huge opportunity to step up, apologize, and rebuke his prior actions. Instead, he’s faced it all with silence and a reaction of ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ That is not the behavior of a person who acknowledges they were in the wrong, imo.

I hired a 65-year-old guy last year. I knew he was older, but didn’t know his age until after he joined my team.

It was also a slightly new career path for him. He’d worked as an IT Project Manager for most of his career, focused on backend systems interacting only with other IT folks. Now he’s a Program Manager on a Product team so it’s not wildly different, but his stakeholders are significantly different and the way he works is different (focusing at a higher level than before).

And he is rockin’ it. I love working with him and seeing him grow into this role has brought me a lot of satisfaction. He is a great member of my team. He’s mentioned wanting to retire within 5 years and I’ll be sad when that happens, but I hope I have the chance to be his last manager and support him through when he makes that choice.

I’m not trying to minimize the challenges of changing jobs as you get older; the statistics speak for themselves. But I do hope that if you want that change that this anecdote might help inspire you. There are other hiring managers who will only care about what you can bring to the table.

That’s interesting context on the root of the word, but just because the name of the personality disorder was inspired by Greek mythology doesn’t mean the word’s use today is invalid.

Words change and adapt new meanings. Etymology tracks where words come from, but those roots don’t dictate how new words are formed. The word “narcissism” has been in use for over 100 years and while people might know it has ties to the myth, there isn’t anyone who would use it to mean “this person is just like Narcissus.”

If we followed your logic, we’d have to stop using words like atlas, cereal, music, mentor, morphine, nemesis, and so many other words that come from names of people/gods in Greek mythology lest someone assume we mean some detail from the inspiring myth that most people don’t even know about.

The assistant parallel is an interesting one, and I think that comes out in how I use LLMs as well. I’d never ask an assistant to both choose and get a present for someone; but I could see myself asking them to buy a gift I’d chosen. Or maybe even do some research on a particular kind of gift (as an example, looking through my gift ideas list I have “lightweight step stool” for a family member. I’d love to outsource the research to come up with a few examples of what’s on the market, then choose from those.). The idea is mine, the ultimate decision would be mine, but some of the busy work to get there was outsourced.

Last year I also wrote thank you letters to everyone on my team for Associate Appreciation Day with the help of an LLM. I’m obsessive about my writing, and I know if I’d done that activity from scratch, it would have easily taken me 4 hours. I cut it down to about 1.5hrs by starting with a prompt like, “Write an appreciation note in first person to an associate who…” then provided a bulleted list of accomplishments of theirs. It provided a first draft and I modified greatly from there, bouncing things off the LLM for support.

One associate was underperforming, and I had the LLM help me be “less effusive” and to “praise her effort” more than her results so I wasn’t sending a message that conflicted with her recent review. I would have spent hours finding the right ways of doing that on my own, but it got me there in a couple exchanges. It also helped me find synonyms.

In the end, the note was so heavily edited by me that it was in my voice. And as I said, it still took me ~1.5 hours to do for just the three people who reported to me at the time. So, like in the gift-giving example, the idea was mine, the choice was mine, but I outsourced some of the drafting and editing busy work.

IMO, LLMs are best when used to simplify or support you doing a task, not to replace you doing them.

Is a derpfake when AI makes you look stupid?

Though even this delayed back out might be what the DNC wanted all along. Primaries in the last two elections showed there are a lot of people who want Bernie or other less-establishment politicians. By waiting so long, they basically get to name whomever they want without pretending they should listen to voters.

“The only thing worse than bad leadership is broken leadership” is a quote from my favorite book, and I can imagine the DNC operating from this perspective. Campaigns and primaries would have broken up the party’s voters, and they might just be banking on whatever call they can make themselves.

I took that comment to be summarizing the platform’s perspective, rather than their own. I think it’s common sense that people will watch/engage with things they don’t like, but the algorithms don’t care about how you feel or why you watched something; they see engagement and they give you more of that thing to drive more engagement. As far as the unfeeling numbers go, engagement might as well be liking; they don’t need to distinguish a difference.

“Put in a headlock and thrown to the ground” doesn’t just sound like playful wrestling to me.

I didn’t know that so I looked it up. Source

“In the next hundred days, I will learn to go off the prompter and Joe Biden will learn to stay on the prompter.”

That’s good to know!

The waxed kind are not always PFAS! I use Reach Listerine Ultraclean and they specify no PFAS. It’s a waxy kind that slides easily!

When I first learned PFAS was a thing in floss, I figured it had to be in the stuff I use. Maybe it was at some point, but it’s not now.