We sell some very complicated and expensive instruments. As such, making them work is quite hard. One of our biggest expenses is our engineers that go out, physically, to help customers. Company policy is that the first visit is always free. These customers can be very remote (Deep sea oil platforms, Australian outback, quite nice ski country ;) , etc). Often their issue is simple but they can also be very complex. We have phone trees, email, texts, iridium phones, etc. to talk customers through things to avoid these first visits and then hep them afterwards. So adding in AI chatbots is a natural way to help out. People don't feel quite the same 'shame' in asking really dumb questions to a chatbot that they do to a real person. So, to make these chatbots smarter, we use some of this AI mumbo-jumbo (RAG), to help them out. So far, it seems successful and the customer and engineers like the enhanced/AI manuals.
2) Making said manuals
We support 35 languages and many regulatory environments. Our instruments are all compliant with whatever version of a government agency you've got (modulo a lot of time, money, ITAR regulations). As such, making all that paper (manuals, compliance docs, contracts, etc) takes a lot of time and effort and has to pass the legal tests too. So AI is really helpful with it. Most of the work for these large stacks of paper is essentially boilerplate, but all subtly different so that literal copy-pasting doesn't get you quite that far. AI systems have been able to, last I checked, get that team about 5x faster, as it cuts out ~85% of the process and drudgery. Since these documents get hauled into courts, they can't just be blindly AI made, and a human always has to go over everything with a sharp eye still, but AI helps out there a bit too. Last lunch I had with them, they were saying that they were actually working on their burn-down charts now and not just going from panic to panic. As in, they could actually do their jobs.
I know this is a bit of a non sequitur but, on my feed just below your comment, some asked for the RSS for this blog. The juxtaposition of the two comments here is just soooo HN
3 weeks!? Man, I'm still figuring out where a decent sandwich joint is by my work at 3 weeks. There is no way that I could be up to speed on a code base in that short of a time.
Look, I know what you're getting at, and I know that you can feel that a hire isn't good in less than a month. But buddy, you got to give them at least a few months here.
A few months with the wrong hire is detrimental to the team.
Your stars will get annoyed that you have someone not pulling their weight, your team will have to clean up the mess of bugs and incomplete stories, and the mentors will spend more of their time supporting an engineer that will not come up to productivity no matter how hard they try.
If it’s really a bad hire, you can’t be afraid to move quickly. If it’s not going to work out, I’d rather it not work out in a month than not work out in six months.
A mentor of mine once said, “You will never regret firing somebody, but you will regret not firing somebody.”
Part of being a manager means having a bias for action and being able to back your decisions once you’ve made them.
Admittedly, you’re not just shooting from the hip and firing at random. But by the time you get to the point where you have to thinking about getting rid of an engineer, it’s probably past the point of no return and you need to move.
Man, I wish I could downvote this knee-jerk, reactionary comment.
I’m guessing you’re neither a successful founder nor executive from your comment?
If your comment is really good faith, why don’t we try this exercise: you tell me why it wouldn’t be “dumb overgeneralized advice” to make sure you understand it fully.
Total anecdote here: Watching college ball today and nearly every commercial (80%+) are Christmas commercials in some way. The day after Halloween, not the day after Thanksgiving. I know Christmas creep is a thing, and I may not have been paying attention in past years, but it seems like companies are desperate for black Friday to come this year
By the 2040 US presidential election, anti-gambling legislation will be a bigger party platform issue than abortion is for one of the two major US political parties.
We are ruining a generation of men with this, just as we did with alcohol in the era before prohibition. A wiser and more sensible approach is desperately needed today, but will not come for another 15 years until the damage is inescapable to see.
The ads and apps are very much targetted at men. I have seen "some and few" gambling apps targetted at women. Traditionally too, gambling was more of a "male" issue.
Also, the people loosing money on crypto, MtG and games with gambling mechanics tend to be more of men. It is kind of a gendered issue.
Does it disproportionately impact men because:
- men are still expected to be financial “winners” in relationships
- men adopt high risk strategies to accomplish such status
- sports are essential to identity and social activity in 2025
> But gambling is not high risk strategy to become rich. It is basically certainity to loose money strategy.
But these commercials and ads filled with gold, pictures of cash, crowns, and explosions beg to differ! And think how sweet it would be to win, big, on a bet only you know about.
I mean, in my little part of the world if you go up to any sub 24 year old male and say: " What's the line?" you'll get the betting numbers for the 'largest' local team playing that day.
It's a bit different today in particular though as we're in equinox season (when many major sports leagues play on the same day). So your local college football team is playing today, the world series game 7 is today, and there are NBA and NHL on today, and NFL is tomorrow.
I don’t know this is new. May as well say sports have ruined a generation of men, for at least three generations. But my comment was admittedly more so addressed at the gender issue.
There’s something entertaining about an article on addiction-driven gambling and then a comment that uses a provocative, attention grabbing hook, on a website that has trained its audience to respond like Pavlovian dogs to bait.
Yes, many neurons fire at discrete intervals set by their morphology. In fact, this DFT/FFT/Infinite-FT/whatever-FT is all the hell over neuroscience. Many neurons don't really 'communicate' in just a single action potential. They are mostly firing at each other all the time, and the rate of firing is what communicates information. So neuron A is always popping at neuron B, but that tone/rate of popping is what affects change/information.
Now, this is not nearly true of every single neuron-neuron interaction. Some do use a single action potential (your patella knee reflex), some communicate with hundreds of other neurons (pyramidal cells in your cerebellum), some inhibit the firing of other neurons (gap/dendrite junction/axon interactions), some transmit information in opposite ways. It's a giant mess and the exact sub system is what you have to specify to get a handle on things.
Also, you get whole brain wave activity during different periods of sleep and awake cycles. So all the neurons will sync up their firing rates in certain areas when you're dreaming or taking an SAT of something. And yes, you can influence mass cyclic firing with powerful magnets (TCMS).
For the cochlea here, these hair cells are mostly firing all the time and then when a sound/frequency that they are 'tuned' to is heard, then their firing pattern changes and that information is then transmitted toward the parietal lobes. To be clear too, there are a lot of other brain structures in the way before the info gets to a place where you can be conscious of it. Things like the medial nuclei, the trapezoidal bodies, the caleyx of Held, etc. Most of these areas are for discriminating sounds and the location of sounds in space. So like when your fan is on for a long while and you no longer hear it, that's because of the other structures.
At my org it more that these AI tools finally allow the employees to get through things at all. The deadlines are getting met for the first time, maybe ever. We can at last get to the projects that will make the company money instead of chasing ghosts from 2021. The burn down charts are warm now.
Nah, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that Machine Learning is a legitimate field of study, and not just thinly veiled demon summoning.
I feel similarly about MS Word. It can actually produce decent documents if you learn how to use it, in particularly if you use styles consistently and never, ever touch the bold, italic, colours etc. (outside of defining said styles, although the defaults are probably all most people need). Unfortunately I think the appeal of Word is that you don't have to learn this and it will just do what you want. Is AI the panacea that will both do what you want and give you the right answers every time?
I have 2 files. One is a .pdf . The other is a .doc . One file has a list of prices and colors in 2 columns. The other file has a list of colors and media in 2 columns. There are incomplete lists here and many to one matching.
To me, if I can verbally tell the AI to give me a list of prices and media from those two files, in a .csv file, and it'll ask back some simple questions and issues that it needs cleaned up to accomplish this, then that is AGI to me.
It is an incredibly simple thing for just about any middle school graduate.
And yet! I have worked with PhDs that cannot do this. No joke!
Something this simple, just dead running numbers, dumb accounting, is mostly beyond us.
1) Enhanced User guides/manuals.
We sell some very complicated and expensive instruments. As such, making them work is quite hard. One of our biggest expenses is our engineers that go out, physically, to help customers. Company policy is that the first visit is always free. These customers can be very remote (Deep sea oil platforms, Australian outback, quite nice ski country ;) , etc). Often their issue is simple but they can also be very complex. We have phone trees, email, texts, iridium phones, etc. to talk customers through things to avoid these first visits and then hep them afterwards. So adding in AI chatbots is a natural way to help out. People don't feel quite the same 'shame' in asking really dumb questions to a chatbot that they do to a real person. So, to make these chatbots smarter, we use some of this AI mumbo-jumbo (RAG), to help them out. So far, it seems successful and the customer and engineers like the enhanced/AI manuals.
2) Making said manuals
We support 35 languages and many regulatory environments. Our instruments are all compliant with whatever version of a government agency you've got (modulo a lot of time, money, ITAR regulations). As such, making all that paper (manuals, compliance docs, contracts, etc) takes a lot of time and effort and has to pass the legal tests too. So AI is really helpful with it. Most of the work for these large stacks of paper is essentially boilerplate, but all subtly different so that literal copy-pasting doesn't get you quite that far. AI systems have been able to, last I checked, get that team about 5x faster, as it cuts out ~85% of the process and drudgery. Since these documents get hauled into courts, they can't just be blindly AI made, and a human always has to go over everything with a sharp eye still, but AI helps out there a bit too. Last lunch I had with them, they were saying that they were actually working on their burn-down charts now and not just going from panic to panic. As in, they could actually do their jobs.
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