I don’t have a Boston accent (RI) and say Wusstah, as does everyone from the area (including surrounding MA) I’ve known.

It’s more Wusstah than Wooster in my experience.

It starts when the popcorn begins to cool enough that both it’s safe to ram mouthfuls and it’s a race against the clock to finish before it becomes cold.

Part of the issue will be convincing the decision makers. They may not want to document a process for deviation x because it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t occur, and you don’t need to record specific metrics if it’s a generic “manual fix by CS” issue. It’s easier for them to give a support team employee (or manager) override on everything just in case.

To your point, in theory it should be much easier to dump that ad-hoc solution into an AI knowledge base than draw up requirements and budget to fix the application. Maybe the real thing I should be concerned with is suits using that as a solution rather than ever fixing their broken products.

I think there’s good potential where the caller needs information.

But I am skeptical for problem-solving, especially where it requires process deviations. Like last week, I had an issue where a service I signed up for inexplicably set the start date incorrectly. It seems the application does not allow the user to change start dates themselves within a certain window. So, I went to support, and wasted my time with the AI bot until it would pass me off to a human. The human solved the problem in five seconds because they’re allowed to manually change it on their end and just did that.

Clearly the people who designed the software and the process did not foresee this issue, but someone understood their own limitations enough to give support personnel access to perform manual updates. I worry companies will not want to give AI agents the same capabilities, fearing users can talk their AI agent into giving them free service or something.

They are almost certainly not actually working that much though. Look up the recent Massachusetts state police overtime scandal.

There is a reason that as long as Hellfire Citadel has existed, the first Google auto complete suggestion is “Hellfire Citadel entrance.”

I’m pretty sure this is just how people try to manipulate Trump. He responds to flattery, and this almost makes it sound like Trump would be weak to do nothing.

What is interesting is how non-vocal many of these “concerned citizens” are when the criminal justice system does the same thing to normal people. It is why I have a difficult time believing the concern is really about justice and due process in many cases.

From what I’ve read, 65+ was about evenly split Harris-Trump in 2024. 40-64 broke decidedly Trump. If the markets (and 401ks) manage to bounce back by the time the 40-64 cohort largely enters retirement, I fully expect they will have learned absolutely nothing.

It also speeds up the games a bit. I simply do not have the time as a full adult to sink 10+ hours into a single game. I have actually finished every game of Civ 7 I’ve played so far, which has never happened with any prior Civ installments at my current playtime.

Yep. He wasn’t really reviewing the nuts and bolts, just the drive experience. I didn’t get the impression he got a ton of time with it and only spent an afternoon puttering around. It felt below his standard honestly for thoroughness.

The fragmenting of teams needs more attention. My group uses a follow the sun model that has our team split up across at least seven countries, plus a decent chunk are always contracted through a vendor. Add in remote workers, and it’s very difficult to see an effective way to organize.

When I was a kid, someone tried to name a summer camp team Sofa King Cool. It originally slipped past, as the names were submitted on paper. One of the counselors renamed them Couch Queen Chilly after saying the original one out loud.

Run This Town - Fixed an issue where, under certain circumstances, it wasn’t possible to deactivate the Aguilar imprint after meeting with Bennett.

I just ran into this and had to use the workaround a couple days ago. They have great timing.

That was my thought also. Trump getting rid of a legal gender distinction altogether by accident would be hilarious. I hope he stands his ground and insists it’s not a mistake.

As far as company material, at least public facing, you’re entirely correct. It’s almost exclusively corporate speak rather than anything useful. That’s not unique to DEI, though, and convincing corporations to make their public HR content more exact when they’re not quoting the law is unfortunately pissing up a rope.

DEI is not a singular method. It’s a larger framework in short concerned with certain outcomes. A number of different methods may be part of DEI at a particular place. I think you are driving at a salient point in that the grammar used with it can give that impression. It’s easier to speak about in a way that isn’t repetitive by using shorthands, and there’s definitely danger there that uncurious people not willing to have good faith discussions like we are will make assumptions.

Conquering that is going to be difficult because it’s a larger linguistic issue common to many unproductive politicized topics. I hate that a lot of discussion time is taken up by essentially semantic arguments rather than substantive ones. I’m not sure how to solve for that because language almost always creates more generic categorizations to lump similar but distinct ideas to save time. To your point, by its nature that introduces vagueness.

For me, the lesson needs to be to seek depth where something seems disagreeable but has vagueness, especially ideological labeling. I wish that was a realistic ask for all people. It has made me change my opinions a lot over the years as I’ve learned more—not necessarily dramatically, but it has tempered them with nuance.

That’s certainly a fair point. Though, there is a difference between complaining about what something actually is versus what some supporters may desire. Not sure I see much distinction made from the grumbling crowd when they cry DEI hire.

My opinion on that matter isn’t a simple yes or no. If we could realistically make significant progress undoing generations of institutional racism purely looking at socioeconomic background, I’d be much closer to no. Socioeconomic background is not really a checkbox that many companies are willing to suss out, however, since it requires a lot of effort and has many dimensions.

The hope with using it as part of decisions is that, since in aggregate a race or gender may have statistically worse representation, you’ve got increased likelihood of a hit than going in blind. But if a company is achieving the same results going on their metric of socioeconomic background, that’s sufficient to me.

I’m sorry if recognizing the complexity of the situation leads to bad perceptions, but I’m not going to pretend the world is simple to appease those who are not interested in nuance. My interest is in achieving outcomes and frankly we don’t have the knowledge on which methods are most realistic and effective. I can’t make a hard decision about something without that.

I’d really like for there to be a mostly agreeable method of evaluating socioeconomic background that companies would be willing to implement and have real A/B testing. That’s total fantasy considering how the world works, though that is why I don’t take a hard stance that there’s one way to work at it.

There really is no mentionable amount of DEI hiring quotas, at least the market I am familiar with (US). It’s practically illegal due to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. Though it was rare even before that. Not sure if that is the case in other places.

I think that’s sort of an impossible task though, for any sufficiently large idea. You can’t control all people. I definitely agree there should be concerted effort to educate people on what something is truly about. However, that is already happening, but you can’t teach people who won’t hear or only listen to outlets who oppose it ideologically. Basically every company with a DEI department gives training of some sort to their employees, yet many of them will ignore what they are told if it doesn’t fit their preconceptions. I have seen it at my own company (people arguing we shouldn’t do something we already don’t do).

For the point about universities, this is a fairly significant area of discussion in the field of education. I won’t pretend to be an expert on the ideas or statistics. But deciding what is “better” is a very difficult question. An elite school in the US is objectively more likely to produce better outcomes in the aggregate, but a lot of that (in my opinion) comes down to confounding variables: only accepting already high performers, having more opportunities, having access to already successful people, not having to work their way though school, etc.

If we could truly remove many of those, especially around wealth, access, and opportunities by making school affordable/tuition free and distributing access and opportunity amongst all schools (e.g., internships), I think we could much more accurately measure the quality of schools here. But we simply can’t right now.