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This is really impressive! Great job.

One small piece of feedback… There were a couple times where I asked to learn something, and it asked me to repeat a phrase back, which was great. But when I repeated it back, I know I didn’t quite nail it (eg perhaps said “un” instead of “una”) and rather than correcting me, it actually told me I did it perfectly. Maybe there’s some tuning with the prompts that may help turn down the natural sycophancy of the model and make sure it’s a little more strict.

Keep up the great work!


That's just the Leonhart. There are a number of other manufacturers that are approved for various types of tournaments including Tornado, which is most common in US tournaments and has a 3-man goalie bar.

https://www.tablesoccer.org/tornado


Official tables can have either style.

There are quite a few tables that are considered tournament grade by the various table soccer associations, including ITSF (I think at least six manufacturers at this point?). In the US, Tornado is the most common tournament table by far and has a 3-man goalie bar, but many European tables like Bonzini or Garlando have the 1-man and raised corners.


Coda Hale's "work is work" is my favorite analysis of this topic, because of its focus on axiomatic mathematical upper bounds on productivity and how you can avoid hitting them:

https://codahale.com//work-is-work/

The solution, as mentioned by other comments already, is for leaders to ruthlessly focus on keeping work efforts as independent as possible:

> When presented with a set of problems which grow superlinearly intractable as N increases, our best bet is to keep N small. If the organization’s intent is to increase value delivery by hiring more people, work efforts must be as independent as possible. Leaders should develop practices and processes to ensure that the work efforts which their strategies consider parallel are actually parallel. Shared resources should be continuously managed for contention, and where possible, the resources a group needs should be colocated with that group (e.g., if the work involves a lot of design, staff a designer to that group). Combined arms doctrine isn’t just for soldiers.


But you will end up with different divisions trying to solve the same problems in ways that either confound each other or the customer.

Nobody wants to deal with a company that behaves like eight rats in a trenchcoat.


>you will end up with different divisions trying to solve the same problems in ways that either confound each other or the customer.

I'm pretty sure you just described most of the 100 largest consumer products companies, and a good fraction of the Fortune 500.

[0]https://consumergoods.com/top-100-consumer-goods-companies-2...


More like every larger corporation...

If you have non factory assembly line[1] personnel above 1000 chances you have that

[1] physical and direct nature of work sometimes countermands weird multiple solutions


I’m very much describing a Fortune 500 company that nearly went bankrupt due to a combination of this and drinking the Jack Welch Koolaid.


> But you will end up with different divisions trying to solve the same problems in ways that either confound each other or the customer.

That's the tradeoff.

You either allow teams to work independently and lose some efficiency through work duplication. Or, you centralize the work and you lose efficiency through centralized bottlenecks.

For small to medium orgs the centralized approach works better. But as the org grows, the bottlenecks become worse and you're forced to switch to the independent approach which is more scalable.


A couple things:

* The guidance is to allow teams to do work independently in parallel, not give them no direction or strategy of what to work on. Without small discreet teams that can operate without a bunch of external blocking approvals or manual processes, you simply will not get work done as the org scales because your productivity will quadratically approach zero.

* He addresses the cost of coherence (both its creation and its absence) in the post, which is worth reading in full. He also talks about how to structure a product portfolio in order to avoid the “confounding competing solutions” scenario.

In short, you’re not wrong, but the downside you outline is tractable—centralization of decision making is not.


Eh, personally I prefer eight rats in a trenchcoat to the kind of sclerotic bureaucracy that seems to dominate most midsized companies. I might be confused about why the rats are doing different things, but at least they're doing things.


Nor is such a company productive when looked at from the outside.

Google might be a good example of this. Each team likely seems productive internally because they come up with new products quickly but customers wonder why the company is producing 4 different chat apps, 3 video services, and nothing seems to work together.


Google's multiple public facing apps that do the same thing are a unique issue. What's not unusual is for a company to have multiple internal tools, vendors, processes that are duplicative.


That becomes a branding issue. Many large companies own many smaller brands that are kept independent. You see this a lot in food also with mobile where each smaller brand can focus a smaller group. This gives customers choice but keeps profits with the entity.


Interesting how copy-pasting that link leads to the article while cliking it leads to Wikipedia.. reminds me of jwz's site.


Oh dear, he got me.

  <script type="98f4b28488f8bdfd1252d4f9-text/javascript">
    try {
      if (document.referrer) {
        const ref = new URL(document.referrer);
        if (ref.host === 'news.ycombinator.com') {
          window.location.href = 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddy_the_Pig';
        }
      }

      // If you're reading this, you've entirely missed the fucking point. Go touch some grass.
      if (Math.random() > 0.9) {
        window.location.href = 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random';
      }
    } catch (e) { }
  </script>



That seems like it would be an alienating environment to work in. I'm much happier working in a collaborative environment instead of one where everyone is just working independently on their own thing.


Factoring work into independent modules that are owned by teams does not preclude active and vigorous collaboration. It just means you don't need a giant list of approvals or manual actions from people all over the company in order to ship something or make a decision.


Isn't this what The Mythical Man-Month is about? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month


Met my wife of now 13 years at age 30 via a group dinner put together by a mutual friend. A good friend of mine just met the love of her life at age 39 via online dating. Don't stress about getting older; when you find the right person it will just click.

> I have no idea what hobbies to pickup or where to search for places where people hang.

I suggest that instead of finding a hobby that you think will help you meet people, you focus on what you love to do. If it's a solo activity (e.g. gaming, coding), go figure out how to do it socially (meetups, game nights, hackathons etc). Follow the stuff you love and use it to connect to people. It will allow you to be authentic and meet people who have the same interests as you and share your values.

Hang in there!


That was also my first thought (injection all the way down), but doesn't this reduce the problem to enforcing simple character escaping?


You can inject prompts by having text hidden in images, simple escaping will not save you.


The article indicates that it was 841's mother who was likely fed by humans. 841 was born in captivity and care was taken to prevent human association:

The pup was raised by her mother until she was weaned, then moved to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. To bolster her chances for success upon release, 841’s caretakers took measures to prevent the otter from forming positive associations with humans, including wearing masks and ponchos that obscured their appearance when they were around her.


I'd guess this is how domestication happens, over generations. It kinda fits my understanding of domestication.


Domesticated animals all have smaller brains, perhaps because they dont have to think for themselves, they just do what they get told.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.081...

"Nearly all domestic animals have been shown to have smaller brains than their wild counterparts [1–7]. Those that are most important to humans, mostly for consumption or companionship, display the greatest amount of reduction. These include pigs (approx. 34%) [8] and sheep (approx. 24%) [2], and dogs (approx. 29%) [3] and cats (approx. 24%) [3], whose brains reduce more than twice as much as those of other domestics"

"Bullfighting cattle, which are bred for fighting and aggressive temperament, have much larger brains than dairy breeds, which are intensively selected for docility."

So if you are aggressive and violent, you have a bigger brain, but does brain size correlate to intelligent? Maybe the recent musk v zuck is an indication of throwing off those social constraints.

Either way, the state stating they have to kill the otter would mean this is a smart otter not fearful of predators like humans. Interesting that hormones are also cited for the increased aggression, is the oestrogen choline pathways giving the otter ideas?


Highly recommend this radio show if this is something you're interested in.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/new-nice


At this point I think we can be confident their "measures" were wishful thinking at best...


"I love these humans, they're so silly with their funny otter puppets!"


Right?

As if the whole captivity experience isn't inextricably colored by those silly humans running the show and all their associated machinations. Ponchos? seriously?


I had a major issue with Bank of America that I could not get any support on. I filed a CFPB complaint and was directly contacted by a representative the next day who solved my problem.

Complaints are a big deal for these banks and fintechs; if the complaint level gets high, the auditors show up and plant themselves in the office and start digging. And when they start digging, they find things... things that end in public fines and damaging press releases.


More like fines for 1/10% of profits made from the illegal behavior.


When a developer wanted to build a 5 story condo building on an entire block across the street from the SF property I've owned for the last ten years, many of my neighbors opposed it. I wrote to our building's ownership and told them that we should support that project and that my only question was "can they add a few floors?"

Repeal prop 13 and my taxes will go up enormously--and I'll vote for that repeal at any opportunity.

Some of us do actually believe that the long term common good is worth sacrificing our own personal short term gain.


It's a fair point. What makes Lafayette a good place to build without increasing sprawl or traffic that it is right on a BART line. "More of everything" should probably be caveated with "more of everything near public transit".


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