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The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

annehelen.substack.com

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Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#81

Post by zasdffaa »

esaym wrote: post #4

>Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. There's an experience that lives rent free in my mind as well. As a teen, I worked at a bait shop that was on the Gulf coast. They sold mostly live shrimp but had other live stuff for bait as well. Salt water was pumped from the ne…

We NEED a multifaceted version of this for computers, relevant to their internal state (and maybe HD errors). Something that would tell of meme use, mem fragmentation, cpu use and spikiness, locality of cpu, disk behaviour, working set size and so much more in a visceral form. I mean more than on-screen info.

(there's an old story of a guy sitting on ancient, giant disk drives to tune his program but not so much else I know of).

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#82

Post by jseban »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #75
jseban wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blaming the technology is what's unfair. You can go back in history and see the luddite movement or Marx's theory of alienation to describe exactly the same issues in the industrial revolution, do you think we should have used that to stop technological progress in 1896? Of course you always want a job that's easy and physical and natural, but you also want all the niceties of modern society. There are also many choi…

I want all the niceties of modern society to include high quality widely available single-payer health care, sane non-captured media, politicians who are responsible to voters and not to corporations and extremely rich individuals, significant social investment in education and basic research, no forced personal debt, climate stability, and no indirect incentives which reward crime as a workable path out of extreme p…

Having a utopia is impossible hard, and those issues you want to solve are literally the same fundamental problems that have existed since the dawn of civilisation, they are not caused by technology, and destroying computers in the office and insisting on only using rubber stamps and fax machines is not going to help in any way.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#83

Post by Bayart »

pm90 wrote: post #5
esaym wrote: post #4

>Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. There's an experience that lives rent free in my mind as well. As a teen, I worked at a bait shop that was on the Gulf coast. They sold mostly live shrimp but had other live stuff for bait as well. Salt water was pumped from the ne…

People who work closely with machines develop an instinct for how it operates. If you think about it, all mechanical machines are state machines (in the CS sense) and if you’ve had to work with and fix shit long enough your brain commits those experiences to long term memory.

I agree, and I'd say good computer guys also make good mechanics. The core skills are the same. There's a guy called M539 on YT who's the best mechanic I know and just started out doing it as a hobby aside his IT job.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#84

Post by zeristor »

esaym wrote: post #4

>Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. There's an experience that lives rent free in my mind as well. As a teen, I worked at a bait shop that was on the Gulf coast. They sold mostly live shrimp but had other live stuff for bait as well. Salt water was pumped from the ne…

Now I’m commuting I’m fed up of how noisy the tube is compared to the newer trains, was BREL just crap?

I’ve taken to using an audio spectrograph app on my phone to watch the white noise, and the band of resonances.

Quite interesting in probably far too geeky away, I’ve not been called up for suspicious activity whilst innocuous I’m not sure how I’d be able to explain it.

I’ve also been thinking about tracking the sound of the bath filling to gauge how much is in it, just to track not to use. I guess air pressure, and water temperature play key parts.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#85

Post by koonsolo »

caffeine wrote: post #79
koonsolo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most studies on the topic indicate that >50 hours has https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-wo...

What’s true on average might not be true for certain individuals, and power-law mechanics might make those individuals more significant than everyone else who makes up the average. Like imagine Elon Musk works 80 hours a week and he doesn’t suffer any negative consequence, he just becomes the most productive human ever according to the market. And then a bunch of other people work 80 hours and they do suffer burnout…

I'm pretty smart and a hard worker. I have a Masters degree in computer science. I can do about 4 to 6 hours of concentrated work per day. I never seen anyone do more or better. I know plenty of people who claim to work a crazy amout of hours. But in the end it always turns out they are deceiving themselves.

I don't know Elon, so maybe he is different. But in the end, I'll believe it when I see it.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#86

Post by noduerme »

burntoutfire wrote: post #80
noduerme wrote: post #46

Funny. I just had this conversation about ennui, probably not an original one, with a colleague who told me she wrote a thesis on ennui in college: Why did George Jetson go to work every day? Was it just to have a reason get away from his family? Wasn't the goal of that society that no one had to work, and everyone could be creative and leisureful all the time? Did George want to buy a newer robot? Was he cheating on…

> What's going to happen to everyone when there's a universal basic income and nothing to do but doomscroll... are they really going to become artists? Why not just consume media all the time? That's what most of unemployed people are doing at the moment, they aren't creating art. Besides doomscrolling, there's infinite amount of tv series and video games to consume very cheaply. In a world of abundance, more expensi…

Tenacity to do it in the long haul, forever, is hard. It's something I deeply respect in people who manage it, and something I struggle with. But at least trying, or knowing you have the capacity to create something, or having the ambition to create something out of love (doesn't have to be art; could be rebuilding a V6, could be planting a garden), seems like a really important part of being human that you just can't get from consuming media. And there's no indication that people will do more of this if they have more free time. There's every indication they'll do less, and consuming media will be their only hobby.

What's the point of a species that just consumes media? I mean, I guess, what's the point for a species like ours of maintaining a huge group of individuals that act like a flock of birds or a school of fish? Assuming they aren't necessary for defense - i.e. as cannon fodder - and they're consuming resources. Evolutionarily speaking, what's the upshot of having a huge class of media consumers who produce nothing?

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#87

Post by dav_Oz »

caffeine wrote: post #79
koonsolo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most studies on the topic indicate that >50 hours has https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-wo...

What’s true on average might not be true for certain individuals, and power-law mechanics might make those individuals more significant than everyone else who makes up the average. Like imagine Elon Musk works 80 hours a week and he doesn’t suffer any negative consequence, he just becomes the most productive human ever according to the market. And then a bunch of other people work 80 hours and they do suffer burnout…

Isn't there a sweet spot though?

As Elon, by virtue of his massive wealth now, is depriving an ungodly amount of people of financial resources and opportunities. I mean on that scale I venture to say it's like a Usain Bolt sucking up nearly all the sponsoring for 100m sprinting so there are very few left to even challenge him in a professional sense which makes him even more "valuable". [Of course in this analogy (achievements in sports/wealth) there is a external natural limit in sports all acknowledge: "age"].

So, while form a individual perspective (one-dimension) the expected value investing 80hr/week in becoming a centibillionaire is "positive" on the whole this approach can at aome point severely limit the space of possibilities in terms of technology. I guess that's why Elon - certainly aware of this - tries to push concepts like "rate of innovation" where he makes his patents "open source" so he can offset his own stifling influence.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#88

Post by somewhereoutth »

jseban wrote: post #82
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want all the niceties of modern society to include high quality widely available single-payer health care, sane non-captured media, politicians who are responsible to voters and not to corporations and extremely rich individuals, significant social investment in education and basic research, no forced personal debt, climate stability, and no indirect incentives which reward crime as a workable path out of extreme p…

Having a utopia is impossible hard, and those issues you want to solve are literally the same fundamental problems that have existed since the dawn of civilisation, they are not caused by technology, and destroying computers in the office and insisting on only using rubber stamps and fax machines is not going to help in any way.

> utopia

Or 'Europe' as we call it.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#89

Post by rightbyte »

spoonjim wrote: post #40
esaym wrote: post #4

>Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. There's an experience that lives rent free in my mind as well. As a teen, I worked at a bait shop that was on the Gulf coast. They sold mostly live shrimp but had other live stuff for bait as well. Salt water was pumped from the ne…

There are startups today that automate this process with machine learning. They record the vibrations from your equipment and notify you when something changes or is likely to fail given historic patterns for similar equipment.

They are selling the delusion that factories wont need qualified mechanical engineers to maintain the machines and interpret the vibration data.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#90

Post by noduerme »

jl6 wrote: post #78
noduerme wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this. It holds true for looking at code to some extent - what people call "code smell". But the main difference would be that failure modes in CS tend to be binary - a piece of code produces the expected result or it doesn't. And unless you do something to the environment, it doesn't wear down over time. Whereas your car's brakes don't go out all at once (hopefully), and yet it's guaranteed to happen eventuall…

> But the main difference would be that failure modes in CS tend to be binary - a piece of code produces the expected result or it doesn't. I think if you’re talking about CS and code you’re right - it’s a very pure and deterministic system. But if you consider software engineering at scale, you do get scenarios where failure states emerge in a gradual fashion, like the OP example of a worn mechanism. An example woul…

I guess my response to that would be that any change of platform - like scaling up, replication, etc - is an alteration of the environment, similar to changing the geometry of your car's wheels by changing their size, getting different shocks or raising/lowering it. Then you could expect failure states to emerge, but that's when you're looking for unpredictable behavior. I think I was just trying to make the point that in a static system, code you write that works keeps working, whereas mechanical things break down. Emergent problems in mechanical systems come from normal wear, not from scaling.
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