Gongol.com Archives: October 2024
October 11, 2024
Awful people keep attacking the Internet Archive
Change your passwords; the bad guys are doing bad things
The people behind product development should always have some exposure to how their work actually performs in the real world. It is extremely hard, and perhaps impossible altogether, to build a great end product without first-hand exposure to how it is used in the field. ■ This observation can, of course, be taken too far: Plenty of firms have only ever put engineers and product developers on the fast track to management. That's not always the right decision; a well-integrated firm can make use of talent from many different departments. And management itself is a discipline, so even those who cross over from other disciplines need to learn how to be good managers if they want to thrive. ■ But it's also a huge mistake to divorce production from the customer experience. Google has filled a virtual graveyard with abandoned products, and the ruthlessness of its killing undoubtedly has some effect on whether customers trust them with future products. Salt water apparently can turn Teslas into fire-starters and Facebook's "metaverse" ambitions were kneecapped because people found Mark Zuckerberg's virtual avatar unsettling. ■ It's not for nothing that "We eat our own cooking" is a phrase intended to cultivate customer trust. Those who experience their own consequences may not be better-equipped to imagine great new possibilities than those for whom a product is more of an abstraction, but they are much better-positioned to experience the pain of their own errors and oversights and to be motivated to fix them.
The National Weather Service office in Des Moines uses high-resolution, real-time satellite imagery to pick out wildfires in their warning area. It's a stellar use of satellite imaging technology, and a great example of what can happen when science and technology open new doors to let curious human beings exercise their problem-solving instincts. ■ Obviously, nobody developed the GOES-16 satellite (or its siblings) for the direct purpose of looking for wildfires. It's first and foremost for looking at clouds. ■ But along the way, someone deduced that looking for fires was a possibility, and now we have a tool that can potentially help detect un-reported fires at least a little sooner. That, in turn, increases the odds that firefighters can be mobilized in time to keep field fires from growing out of control. ■ Fire detection from space is the kind of incremental technological improvement that is all too easy to take for granted. It doesn't affect most people, most of the time. But it's vastly improved over the grainy, low-resolution imagery that passed for weather satellite coverage in living memory. And when it's able to perform at its best, it can make a big difference for people on the ground.
In a real sign of the times, a media outlet tested the use of artificial intelligence to apply for jobs and found that modern job searching is conducive to that sort of automation. ■ One of the celebrated tools customizes cover letters to go along with the applications and resumes. It says something pretty dreadful if an applicant chooses to automate their cover letter, which is precisely the aspect of a job application that is supposed to put some personality and color into an otherwise highly routinized process. Automating the task of cover-letter writing achieves precisely the most perverse result. ■ Job applicants can be forgiven for trying to level the playing field against a job market that's already known to use AI technology to screen job applicants and even to conduct preliminary interviews. ■ But everyone involved must admit that there's something wrong with this picture. Human capital remains human above all, and although people are prone to many forms of lamentable bias, anything created by people -- whether intentionally programmed or "learned" artificially -- is likewise going to contain artifacts of that same bias. We're only kidding ourselves if we think we'll achieve better results for human beings by stripping all remaining elements of humanity from the process.
Good advice for re-framing problems
Dr. Mark Lewis, an oncologist from Utah with a sizeable social-media following, offers some tips for re-framing problems that have been helpful for him -- like disconnecting outcomes from self-worth and staying true to an internal yardstick of success rather than comparisons with others. They are well worth considering, particularly in the spirit of World Mental Health Day. They might well be the devices someone needs to hear today. ■ Different strategies work for different people. We are far from knowing the working of the mind well enough, categorically, to be able to treat people's mental wellness with the precision of, say, a prescription for eyeglasses. Improving on that frontier ought to be a high priority for society. ■ For many people, it would be a fair start to discern where they reside on a spectrum from "internal processor" to "external processor". It's often confused with introversion versus extroversion, but the two are not the same. An introvert may need to talk through problems, and an extrovert might feel compelled to think quietly in a space full of people. ■ Knowing which processing style prevails can help individuals work through those methods for framing problems with the best chance of success. An external processor, for example, might benefit from periodically writing out a list of stressors in order to take those problems out of the abstract mind and put them in a concrete, external place where they can be manipulated and contended with. ■ It may be easier for external processors to discern which problems call for a plan and which can be simply "let go", simply by putting them on a physical page. That technique might be utterly useless for an internal processor, who might find such a list jarring or aggravating as it intrudes on their interior thinking. ■ Contrasts like these tend to make a lot of pop psychology look ridiculous to at least half the audience at any given time. The "Plus-Minus-Interesting chart" may seem like a godsend to some and a total boat anchor to others, which is why anyone's list of hot tips has to come with either an implicit or (preferably) explicit list of contingent factors. Otherwise, a fair number of people may encounter that advice and come away either disappointed or frustrated. ■ There is no single path -- and certainly no shortcut -- to mental wellness and balance. But the path for each person needs to be constructed with some guidance towards self-awareness from the outset. Until we can diagnose a person's psychological makeup as reliably as we can test their cholesterol, there will remain a great deal of important work to do.
