Provided the goal is solid internal culture at the company, the company would have an automatic dart thrower that reliably hits a target that is the wrong target altogether.
Supposing you hired a consultant to be "culture keeper" for this company -- and she or he said, "I'm just going to reason about context by treating this culture as a body of text" -- you would instantly assume that they didn't have skin in the game and didn't understand how culture actually grows and accretes, let alone monitoring and validating eventual quality or reliability. We can't read about what rules apply in some foreign culture's situations and then remotely prescribe what to do socially in a foreign culture we've never set foot in. We can't accurately anticipate even the second-order effects of our recommendations in that situation.
We simply have to participate first. It would be better for this to be a role that involves someone inside of the company who does participate in navigating the culture themselves so that they make accurate observations from experience. A person trustworthy enough to steward this culture would also necessarily be trustworthy enough not to alarm the chief of HR. Based on my model of how work works, from experience, I am wondering if they imagine they want this sensitive role filled with a nonhuman 'trusted' advisor so that it can't ever become a social shadow power center within the firm.
Or maybe they don't want to admit that modeling culture is beyond the reach of their matter-of-fact internal process models and simulations, and they're just wishfully hoping you can abstract away all of the soft elements without producing social fever dreams or ever having to develop a costly true soft element model. But then you absolutely abstract away where the rubber meets the road! That's quite a roadblock, to be honest with you.
Oh, your response basically captures hours of conversation I’ve had with that and many other clients. I completely agree, no AI tool can replace years of experience within a company. Trying to model that too literally risks creating misunderstandings, or worse, damaging trust and reputation.
It definitely will never be a replacement for HR or top executive thinking. At best, I’ll be proposing something much lighter, more like a glorified internal search tool for real user examples. To be honest, I’m still all figuring it out. Best case: a helpful resource guide. Worst case: it adds no real value.
The tricky part is, if I don’t provide something, even just a prototype, they’re already looking at other consultants who’ll happily promise the moon. And that’s my bigger concern: if I’m not involved, someone else might introduce a half-baked solution that interferes with the SaaS I’ve already built for them.
So now I’m in a position where I need to put together a clear, honest demo that shows what this tech can and can’t do, just to avoid further complications down the line.
Ironically, this all started when another “AI expert” sold them the idea.
I’ve been saying the same thing all along, we’re not quite there yet. Maybe one day, but not now.
I also get that businesses want to take full advantage of this tech when it’s pitched as a money-saving opportunity, the pressure to act fast is real.
I wonder how many other devs and consultants are facing similar situations?
It seems to an outsider like California involves exceptional biodiversity, and exceptional habitat protection laws, coupled with the electorate's vocal idealism about the possibility of preventing preventable animal suffering, plus the distaste of many voters for a schedule of very frequent controlled burns in all parts of the state in order to thin the constant buildup of combustible underbrush. These leave PG&E unable to avoid being liable for interactions of transmission lines with the wildfire kindling they have to route through. Even though California may not be more mountainous than those other Western states, its development pattern may have more wildland-subdivision interface overall, which adds up.
Not sure, but it is difficult to imagine where these new sounds are coming from. I have never heard another bird quite like some of the sounds, one particularly clear one sounds like "eel" but it's as clear as a human would pronounce it.
He also cycles through a pattern (probably for attracting a mate) and it gets more and more complex as time goes on. He keeps adding to the noises and pattern, but it's very predictable.
> ... the twentieth century may have widened the subject matter of the novel, but it has failed to deepen it
Even if we were to deny artistically creative 20C novelists their depth as a mere retread of the nineteenth century's, whatever that means, I don't think that the same terms of dismissal would apply to comic books, graphic novels, hypertext novels and hypertext graphic novels, or novels written with radio or audiobook dramatization in mind, all of which do allow mature thrills to be expressively enhanced and intermingled -- not only cheap thrills.
Scott Miller had a good idea about the importance of the novel form, however: "Maybe I'm just thick ... but whenever novels run out of simple intrigue, they tend to fall into a sort of formulaic display of personal insightfulness, and beyond the scope of about a chapter, one insightful individual carries on in fiction a lot like the next. That said, I have nothing against intrigue, even porn; if I were honest with myself, I'd probably put INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE on a list of 20." [1]
People already paid their taxes on all of the principal before they donated it to fund education. You and I are not chartered as an educational endowment; things like Roth IRAs exist for us.
I think the point is that money for many was taxed before the paycheck ever came in. And you have no control over it. Part of your W-2 goes to fund social security, part of it to fund the federal, part of it to fund the state.
Taxing donations is just double dipping on your money. That's how you discourage donating.
glycyrrhizic acid in licorice can drop your blood potassium level and cause cardiac arrhythmia, however, as well as commonly raising blood pressure [1]
The article says that renting residential units for short terms (of less than 32 days) is already banned citywide in Barcelona. Tourists can stay in hotels.
Supposing you hired a consultant to be "culture keeper" for this company -- and she or he said, "I'm just going to reason about context by treating this culture as a body of text" -- you would instantly assume that they didn't have skin in the game and didn't understand how culture actually grows and accretes, let alone monitoring and validating eventual quality or reliability. We can't read about what rules apply in some foreign culture's situations and then remotely prescribe what to do socially in a foreign culture we've never set foot in. We can't accurately anticipate even the second-order effects of our recommendations in that situation.
We simply have to participate first. It would be better for this to be a role that involves someone inside of the company who does participate in navigating the culture themselves so that they make accurate observations from experience. A person trustworthy enough to steward this culture would also necessarily be trustworthy enough not to alarm the chief of HR. Based on my model of how work works, from experience, I am wondering if they imagine they want this sensitive role filled with a nonhuman 'trusted' advisor so that it can't ever become a social shadow power center within the firm.
Or maybe they don't want to admit that modeling culture is beyond the reach of their matter-of-fact internal process models and simulations, and they're just wishfully hoping you can abstract away all of the soft elements without producing social fever dreams or ever having to develop a costly true soft element model. But then you absolutely abstract away where the rubber meets the road! That's quite a roadblock, to be honest with you.