I don’t find it physically exhausting but definitely mentally and spiritually draining. (“Hurry up and wait” in particular is a rage-triggering thing for me.) I learned to adapt by always carrying a book with me that I can pull out and start reading while others around me dither and force waiting periods.

The covid lockdowns showed me just how vulnerable the automation industry is to disruptions.

It also showed how valuable the automation industry was to cutting COVID-19 off at its knees if a bunch of pansy right-wingers hadn’t started to screech they couldn’t breath because of a few grams of paper on their face. (Weird how they can wear masks now when it involves being cruel to non-whites…)

When COVID-19 hit there was a shortage of surgical and N95 masks world-wide. Then a guy invented a machine that could “print” obscene numbers of surgical masks per day, each machine costing only about $50,000. Within weeks surgical masks were available to the point that they cost almost nothing. Then someone else figured out how to make KN95 masks easier to mass produce on the same kind of “printing” machine and now KN95 masks are also cheap like borscht and universally available.

Without automation there’d have been a whole lot more deaths to COVID-19 around the world, not just in snowflake countries.

What beans? I already spilled them: Entrust had “Tiger Team” that consisted entirely of people who’d found flaws in the security of the product; it existed entirely to NDA-bind the “team members” to squelch talk about the security failures.

You want me to spill the beans on the flaws? Can’t. I do marketing, not techie stuff. I just know about the “team”, not about the things people found to get into it.

I’ll make up the difference for both of you as a service to all the craft distilleries that would otherwise be going under.

There was a certain kind of discreet club that SO and I used to attend regularly, but it kind of fell apart during the Great Lockdown of 2020 and the subsequent COVID-19 management practices.

Dance clubs I never went to, at any point in my life really because I hate with the burning passion of a thousand suns most dance club music.

I didn’t sign an NDA, the guy I was dating did. And the company is long zombified (Entrust).

Sort of? Except it’s not like a rite of passage. You just occasionally, for at least 15 years, stumbled over someone who would swear that it happened to them. At least the drop bear gag is so frequent you know it’s a joke pretty quickly.

I went to NYC on business (trade show, working the booth). I was glad I was there only for the closing weekend. Some of my colleagues had to work the booth the whole week and be in NYC the whole time.

I really did not like New York, and I didn’t even go to the rougher areas. Just too noisy for me, too expensive, and it smelled bad.

And this was in the early '90s.

I have to agree here. I decided after a job interview in Houston I wouldn’t go to the USA ever again. This was in the mid-late '90s. It hasn’t improved in that time.

It wasn’t so bad when I was there (in the '80s) but yes, Italy has far more important and beautiful cities to visit.

My personal favourite was Florence.

Any theme park. Except Disney. I’d gladly go to a Disney park. After hours. With a tanker of kerosene and a box of matches.

These ones? If so, that would be a neat trick given they’ve got a sizable stone inside.

Absolutely. And also, compare, sometime, the medals the USA gives to its service members compared to the medals that Canadian service members get. I mean the USA isn’t Soviet bad but it’s also pretty pandering.

I genuinely have no idea. If only one or two of them had gone the “personal story” route I might have actually believed the tale. But one person after another reporting it as “I did/saw this” just baffles me. I don’t know if it’s confabulation or some kind of leg-pulling exercise.

It does work.

If you’re the one doing the trickling.

(No points if you guess what gets trickled…)

I have a weird one that haunted expat circles in China in the '00s and deep into the '10s. It has to do with Santa Claus candles.

No, really.

The story went like this: a group of people were in a “western-oriented” restaurant in which each table had these Santa Claus shaped candles. They were there for their weekly get-together but this time they stayed a very long time and the candle burned down to the end. And what did they see at the bottom of the candle? A little metal box with a grill. A microphone! Someone had planted a microphone at their table to spy on them and they caught them in the act!

Now the thing is, the first time I heard this story I heard it as a first-person story. “We” were in a restaurant and “I” saw the electronic module at the bottom of the Santa Claus candle. I was very new to China at the time so I still had my paranoid schizophrenic glasses on and I believed it.

Then, two years later, while I was travelling in a city in another province, I got together with some local expats. Who told the same story to me. Every detail was the same. It was a Santa Claus candle. They’d stayed later than usual. The candle burned down to the point you could see a little metal box with a grill. I did some checking, and there was definitely no link between the people I was talking to and the people who’d first told me the story.

Fast forward another two or three years … and I get the story again. And again in the same year, different place. And again the next year.

Each time it was a story told in the first person with identical details, told in the same way, with little to no variance. And at no point could I ascertain any link between these people, so this had to have been a story that had been circulating widely for a very long time. Yet each time I encountered it, the story was identical and told as a first-person story, stretching credulity for a large number of reasons.

People aren’t stupid, by and large. (They may talk stupidly. They may act stupidly. But they can actually see things. They just sometimes ignore that before talking or acting.) And yes, they can tell when the “praise” and “encouragement” they get is hollow and pointless. You don’t even have to look at the obsequious degenerative AI slop to find this. You can go back to all the late-'80s to early-'90s crap with participation trophies/certificates and “everyone’s a winner”.

When I started in school, it was really hard to get recognized. It took a lot of work and those who got recognized for it had a sense of genuine accomplishment. They had genuine self-esteem. But there’s that word: self-esteem. Self-esteem is very important, make no mistake, but unfortunately it’s not something that can be easily codified or built up in people. Institutions can’t stand complex problems with complex solutions, so they went the easy way. They started handing out trophies and certificates to everybody. Sure some of them might be marked “first place” or such (though often, as this trend became entrenched, they didn’t even get labelled with that much; people would be announced as first place, but the trophy was a generic “I attended” variety), but everybody had a trophy or, increasingly, just a certificate. (And of course since they now had to hand out dozens of trophies where before they’d only hand out a few, the trophies dropped in quality to generic, plastic, chrome-plated crap and the certificates were placed in low-grade plastic holders that would warp in three weeks.)

And a weird thing happened.

Because the people who “won” a trophy for being there knew this wasn’t any meaningful celebration. OK, maybe the first couple of times they were happy about it, but it didn’t last long and pretty soon trophies, certificates, and other forms of “recognition” got viewed as more junk. That “self-esteem” wasn’t building in those who lacked it, but those who actually worked hard for recognition certainly lost theirs. “The trees [were] all kept equal by hatchet, axe, and saw.” Because genuine self-esteem comes from genuine effort leading to genuine accomplishment and authentic recognition. And we’re very good at spotting the inauthentic.

So bringing it back around to that AI and your question, yes, excessive encouragement can have the opposite effect if it comes across as inauthentic and patronizing. The nauseating obsequiousness of AIs is one of their more off-putting features for “normal” people, and it does active harm to people who have serious self-esteem issues, either tanking them further or puffing it up to the point of delusion.

I’m curious: in which world are people living where this wasn’t a predictable outcome?

Note: I’m not saying a “desirable” or “good” or “just” or such outcome. Just “predictable”.

The last tech job I worked marketing for had a security product (you probably have used it without knowing it). They had a group in-house they called the “Tiger Team”: people who were supposedly tasked with testing the security of the product. You got into the “Tiger Team” by finding a flaw in the security.

The “Tiger Team” did nothing. At all. Didn’t even meet. Hell, half of them didn’t know who the other members were. The job of the “Tiger Team” was to sign the NDA that had dire consequences if you spoke to anybody else about the “Tiger Team” and/or the security flaws in the product.

So basically the “Tiger Team” existed only to conceal flaws in the product. Not to fix them or find more.

We were watching Blazing Saddles in the dorm rec room. The infamous line came up:

We’ll take the <slur for Chinese> and the <slur for black people>, but we don’t want the Irish.

The Irish immigrant RA (who was drunk because, well, Irish¹) started booing loudly and raucously about that, slurring something about how the Irish saved civilization or some such all while gesticulating wildly. He eventually got up on a folding table using it as a makeshift soapbox.

And then the table collapsed.

Incrementally.

First the legs on one side closed, turning the table into about a 40% ramp. He wound up on his ass and sliding down until his boots hit the carpet.

While he was sitting there stunned, body straight up, legs slanted down to the floor, eyes wide in shock, the other side of the table collapsed. And somehow, despite his inebriation and surprise, he still wound up sitting.

“And that’s how the Irish do it!” he said, before getting to his feet and staggering out of the rec room. To the sound of delighted applause behind him.