I spent way too long ignoring the park and rides at major events. Then I started paying attention and they always had them and it was always so much nicer. No more excessively long walking, no more mpossible traffic getting in and out.

As long as the event clearly highlights park and ride options, it’s fantastic and has been going on forever. These events pay the bus charter companies to generally provide rides free of charge to the riders.

You just run the same query a bunch of times and see how consistent the answer is.

A lot of people are developing what I’d call superstitions on some way to overcome LLm limitations. I remember someone swearing they fixed the problem by appending “Ensure the response does not contain hallucinations” to every prompt.

In my experience, what you describe is not a reliable method. Sometimes it’s really attached to the same sort of mistakes for the same query. I’ve seen it double down, when instructed a facet of the answer was incorrect and to revise, several times I’d get “sorry for the incorrect information”, followed by exact same mistake. On the flip side, to the extent it “works”, it works on valid responses too, meaning an extra pass to ward off “hallucinations” you end up gaslighting the model and it changes the previously correct answer as if it were a hallucination.

There’s an assumption that these companies actually value competency.

For many companies, once they established the brand value, competency becomes an expensive superfluous thing. From that point forward it’s about high margin while churning so the customers don’t immediately catch on that the good folks are gone. Especially once they’ve converted a critical mass of customers to renting their product, then the money keeps rolling in and the product can pretty much plateau.

In companies serving businesses, it can take a long long while before the right people at the customers catch on enough to care. When the product sucks for the users and they gripe to leadership, well a few rounds of golf with the vendor and that can is kicked down the line. The employees need to suck it up because this is the premier solution in the industry…

Just yesterday I was faced with someone complaining because something that was “supposed” to work didn’t work. They proceeded to describe a function they wanted to use that didn’t exist. Finally it came out that it was what GPT says to do… Sigh…

That’s a good point. Back in the day if he was leading a big brand to a cliff, others intervened and kicked him out and had the side effect of saving his reputation. Notably, it’s probable his leadership would have destroyed PayPal, but others took the reigns away from him. So when Tesla pretty much made his name, folks simply noted his early leadership at PayPal and retconned attributing him with the crazy success, despite PayPal originally outcompeting the online payment company he was a part of, getting the leadership briefly nearly tanking it, and getting kicked out allowing it to flourish.

Not only did he never apologize, he paid for investigation in the hopes that the diver randomly turned out to be a pedo and vindicating him. Then when that failed, he tried to play it off as “of that’s just a common south African generic insult, no one takes it literally”, with no one banking him up on that one.

I mean if you read some of what his first wife wrote, he was pretty much this bad. Though at the time she was saying it the world didn’t want to hear it. He also did the whole retcon Tesla to be founded by him over 15 years ago, in some pretty petty behavior. When x.com failed relative to PayPal, he somehow managed to get them to merge and make him the head of PayPal, and then they kicked him down when we almost tanked PayPal.

It basically seems that a critical mass of people were covering for him and propping up the brand of his name and image, likely for the sake of their investments. Which should be a fairly familiar story, because 80s Trump had the same things going on, very bad business results glossed over by investors needing to keep the Trump brand strong for the sake of their own money. Both trump and musk successfully tied up some big business fate with their names specifically, forcing investors to play into the conceit.

I wouldn’t bother with the webcam monitoring, but there are absolutely people who will barely work if they aren’t actively engaged with teammates frequently.

It could be because they don’t understand something or don’t have confidence to do task without some ad-hoc training, and sometimes this is just easier to navigate face to face (someone getting starting may be shy about soliciting help, or may feel intimidated by the prospect of “interrupting” someone important.

It could be that they just lack the discipline to stay on task if too many options open up.

It could be that they need the cover of work as “bad guy” to get them away from family members that don’t take their remote work seriously and impose on them.

Nice try, ChatGPT