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Nobody cares

grantslatton.com

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Re: Nobody cares

#771

Post by semilattice »

I agree with that.

US is becoming a culture of 'Good enough'

This is very prevalent in Eastern Europe, near east, probably China and India, not sure. Certainly not Japan.

Culture - is what people do when nobody is watching (or they think that nobody is watching) (I am stealing this definition from somewhere else).

So changing from good-enough culture to 'We are closer to perfectionists, culturally' -- is a big change that would take generations.

To be honest -- I am not if there is a 'one thing' that would drive this, may be it is an instinct, something built-in, more prevalently, in specific ethnics groups but not in others? if it is an instinct, then it should be preservable during immigration. Are the Japanese when living for more than on generation in a 'good enough culture' preserving the perfectionist traits ?

Re: Nobody cares

#772

Post by wpm »

marcosdumay wrote: post #766
gizmo wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there are "reasonable justifications" for the shitty status quo, but that's kind of the point. Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work. We're not actually doomed to have crappy furniture, flimsy and buggy appliances, byzantine legal codes, ugly architecture, and hosti…

> Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. I dunno. At the first problem, impeding cyclists that want to merge into a walkway zooming at 20mph without paying enough attention to even see their lane is ending is a quite good reason. Maybe he should be asking for some "cyclist-calming" measure instead, so they will slow down before not being able to make into the walkway.

There’s a huge difference between “impeding” and “causing you to fucking crash”.

Like, what an insane take.

Re: Nobody cares

#773

Post by BizarreByte »

simoncion wrote: post #456
Edman274 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a rebuttal to the idea that the doctor doesn't care?

Why would you think it's a rebuttal? Six months' wait to see your GP for an in-person visit is a worryingly long wait. If I heard someone say that they were required to wait that long for in-person doctor's visits, I'd wonder why they were still seeing that doctor and ask them polite questions to try to figure it out.

> Six months' wait to see your GP for an in-person visit is a worryingly long wait.

I always find it cute to see what Americans consider a long wait for any medical service.

For myself in Canada the very minimum time to see a GP is a month and a half and that's a best case scenario. Get a different GP? Impossible.

Re: Nobody cares

#774

Post by [deleted] »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #687
tass wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live, even with streetlights, most people I see walking after dark carry a torch. It’s easier than ever to carry one.

Honest question: Do you mean that most pedestrians are actually using (not just carrying on their person) a torch while walking along lit streets? I have essentially never seen that where I live, except some joggers have lights attached to their clothing but that's just so others can see them better. I can't imagine street lighting in an urban/suburban area being so bad that that would be necessary. That's a terrible…

[deleted]

Re: Nobody cares

#775

Post by rrrx3 »

jl2718 wrote: post #427
azeirah wrote: post #210

> The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care. I was working in this space! And I got fired for refusing to work on more upsell features for clients like Coca Cola and such. I don't want to work on adding fucking ADS into c…

I have an interesting anecdote about that. I was consulting for a very large tech company on their advertising product. They essentially wanted an upsell product to sell to advertisers, like a premium offering to increase their reach. My first step is always to establish a baseline by backtesting their algorithm against simple zeroth and first-order estimators. Measuring this is a little bit complicated, but it seeme…

> They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.

I worked in the adtech space for almost 10 years and can confirm this is where we landed, too.

>The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature.

This is why I got out. No one cares about getting the right ad to the right person. There's layers upon layers of hand-waving, fraud, and grift. Adtech is a true embodiment of "The Emperor's New Clothes."

Re: Nobody cares

#776

Post by pclmulqdq »

drunner wrote: post #744
pclmulqdq wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roads do this all the time "for no reason." Plenty of neighborhoods have very sharp curves to get drivers to slow down. This is one of many "traffic calming" techniques. Also, I'm not sure where you got the idea that engineers don't care about the speeds of bikes (especially around pedestrians).

The example by the author is an unsafe one. You think putting unsafe sharp curves at the bottom of hills for cars is acceptable? Your example is good, and the matching example of a bike lane is the opposite of what was shown in the article.

> You think putting unsafe sharp curves at the bottom of hills for cars is acceptable?

Yes, it is absolutely acceptable and it happens all the time in road design. It happens specifically because people (apparently in all vehicle types) will speed on the long straightaway down the hill into whatever comes next. Many, many suburban areas with hills will have sharp curves or T-intersections at the bottom of hills as a matter of course and it does work at slowing down the traffic going down the hill.

If you look at street view on the actual road, that is exactly this situation: a very straight road with a lot of visibility, leading toward a very long and complicated intersection where everyone needs to pay attention and go slowly. Nobody traveling a reasonable speed on a bike will be surprised by that turn since they can all see it coming for literally a mile.

I assume the alternatives to this specific merge are either:

* Merge the bikes into the car traffic and pray to god that they obey traffic signals at the upcoming intersection (we all know this isn't happening), while also accepting that they accelerate very slowly compared to cars.

* Set up a dedicated bike lane with dedicated signals (which is very expensive).

The engineers here clearly opted to instead merge the bike traffic with the pedestrian traffic through that intersection so that the existing pedestrian signals apply to them. You can see that the bike lane continues after this intersection, so they literally just did this to handle the intersection.

TFA on this point reads like "cyclist (or illegal moped user) doesn't want to be slowed down and doesn't care about anyone else."

Re: Nobody cares

#777

Post by rrrx3 »

mrweasel wrote: post #583
jl2718 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an interesting anecdote about that. I was consulting for a very large tech company on their advertising product. They essentially wanted an upsell product to sell to advertisers, like a premium offering to increase their reach. My first step is always to establish a baseline by backtesting their algorithm against simple zeroth and first-order estimators. Measuring this is a little bit complicated, but it seeme…

Effectively the advertisers could buy less ad space and get the same or better conversion? That is somewhat hilarious because that means that not only are the end-users "the product" the advertisers are as well. There's only cows for the milking, on either side... and shareholders.

Yes. It works really well. You can do a WHOLE LOTTA ARB(tm)(circle R), buying the crap placements at super low CPMs and selling the performance difference to clients. This is mitigated by those clients who ONLY WANT THE BEST (but of course, sir, right this way) - but there are ways around that, too - like the MFA (made for advertising) domains of all the big-name sites you can think of that solely exist for your RTB machine to pump ads stacked on top of each other, and only visible to bots and crawlers. It doesn't help that on one side, you have folks astute with math (Data Scientists et al.) and on the other, a metric shit ton of Media Planners/Buyers who are just handed a budget and are often pretty naive about the intricacies of how it all works. But it all sort of goes back to the original point - people put on blinders. They just wanna see the metric get hit, the numbers go up. Most of the time they don't care how any of that works as long as they look good to their boss, and the industry mostly obliges.

Re: Nobody cares

#778

Post by pbronez »

wpm wrote: post #772
marcosdumay wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. I dunno. At the first problem, impeding cyclists that want to merge into a walkway zooming at 20mph without paying enough attention to even see their lane is ending is a quite good reason. Maybe he should be asking for some "cyclist-calming" measure instead, so they will slow down before not being able to make into the walkway.

There’s a huge difference between “impeding” and “causing you to fucking crash”. Like, what an insane take.

Solution then is to add slowing features uphill from the cut over.

Re: Nobody cares

#779

Post by bjornsing »

DharmaPolice wrote: post #77

As someone who works for a local government bureaucracy - not caring is a coping mechanism because if you let every sub-optimal thing bother you then you'd just burn out. Very few jobs are structured in a way that those directly involved can determine how things are done so there is no real value in caring about how long a process takes. Where people have some agency you might be surprised how much people do care eve…

That doesn’t explain the doctor who doesn’t care that they are misdiagnosing their patients though… Or am I missing something?

Re: Nobody cares

#780

Post by entropi »

bruce511 wrote: post #380
amatecha wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, it's not good enough that you're already a paying customer- they have to try their best to manipulate and coerce you into spending even more. It's insulting, abusive and honestly pathetic. These thirsty lamers have to try every trick in the book to eke a few more cents out of me? Embarrassing. Modern tech/business does not have a shred of pride or dignity, as per TFA.

Businesses aren't in business to prioritize the customer point of view [1]. They are not in business to prioritize the employees point of view. They are in business to maximise revenue, and profit. If you work for a business, your job is to work on their priorities. By all means object or quit if you don't agree with them. (And yes, assume you'll be fired for refusing to do their tasks.) If you're a customer, and you…

Badmouthing bullshit practices of a company is also a part of the agency here.

E.g. Yes, I hate that McDonalds (like tons of other companies) is incessantly bugging me and quite blatantly trying to upsell me. As a result, I rarely go to such places anymore. So they lose my business. But I will also complain out loud. This is part of the deal with bullshitting your customer base. This is part of my agency. Losing me as a customer, as well as getting badmouthed left and right is the cost of extracting that 3 additional cents from me. Now the company also has a choice.

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