Chris Ellis @intrbiz@bergamot.social

Company: < goes through a twenty-five step process with an hour of downtime to downsize an RDS instance >

Also company: "We like RDS because it makes operations easier."

This may the most arrogant public statement from a corporation I have ever read.

You know who else relied on "experienced inside experts" instead of regulators to validate the safety of a system? Boeing with the 737-MAX's MCAS.

Put on some of your favorite music.

When companies say things like "if you are not in the office three days a week we will penalize you at performance review time" they are inherently contradicting their own claims that remote work results in reduced productivity.

If remote work were bad, you wouldn't need to add an artificial penalty for working remotely, it would show up IN the performance data.

If you have to threaten people with artificially lowered performance scores for not coming into the office, you are admitting that performance has nothing to do with RTO.

New entry in #PostgreSQL Event Calendar:

👫 PostgreSQL Conference Europe

Date: 2023-12-12 - 2023-12-15
Location: Prague, Czechia

ICS file: https://ics.postgresql.life/6q60cc7pqb62s6ed9me9jq26co.ics

New entry in #PostgreSQL Event Calendar:

👫 PGDay UK 2023

Date: 2023-09-12
Location: London

ICS file: https://ics.postgresql.life/j2rolsh6s11a84vclfemmoeec8fsbdapujh8fo6c0u853r7kat82ent8g2.ics

I love how so much of the AI debate is on things like:

* Will AI take people's jobs?
* Will AI destroy creativity?
* Will AI take over the world?
* Will AI be used to make people poorer?

And not:

* Will corporations that use AI get rid of people's jobs?
* Will corporations that use AI destroy creativity?
* Will corporations that use AI try to take over the world?
* Will corporations that use AI make people poorer?

Because these LLMs and machine learning systems and so forth aren't just wandering around randomly out there - they're owned by corporations. The corporations are the ones putting them to use. The executives that run those corporations are the ones making the decisions to pay people less, to increase their profits, to make creative people act as subeditors for LLMs.

It's the corporations, and the ethics-free systems that govern them, that cause these things. They're the ones pushing to have more AI.

The rest of us would be happy just having a bit more humanity in the world.

PSA, if someone asks you for contact info (e.g. a phone number) of someone you know, the correct response is "I can't give that to you, but I can give them yours".

It's efficient and adds no round-trips, it's privacy friendly, it's non-awkward and it's social engineering resistant. It's a universally good rule.

And the corollary, of course: Don't ask someone for another person's contact info - ask them to pass on yours.