It’s their willingness to make up shit to appear more interesting that is at the heart of this. Being interesting or rather, being perceived as interesting, is core to their personality and they think that’s normal, but it is not.
I don’t know about “everybody”. It depends on your circle I guess. I know very few of these people and none of my friends are like that. I don’t give a shit about being interesting and nobody I value does either.
Having to choose between what is actually good for you and what is “relaxing” and then deciding to divert all available funds to “relaxation” is not a money issue.
For some reason, ignorance most likely, I'm not impressed. Looks relatively easy. Not for me, but for anybody with some math skills it looks easy to improve upon naive solutions.
To be fair, a completely optimal solution definitely seems out of reach, but I'm not interested in those.
OK thank you for elaborating. I tend to assume that such laws - "let's listen in on everything you do" - need firm and solid justification. Coming up with a simple counter-example on first try signals to me the problem has not been handled effectively (understatement of the year). I'm not talking about having the perfect solution, just.. something that does not immediately fall down on first try within a few minutes.
This, so much this. I feel that society as a whole is eeking slowly into 80-90's level computing, but it is completely asymmetrical. Some parts of society are hyper-evolved, like social media and entertainment, but others are stuck in earlier phases like your example. In that case even 70's level tech and theory would be an improvement.
CS and educated tech people in general are in a hyper-educated bubble where it is normal to talk about distributed systems and algorithmic complexity, but there are an awful lot of smart people without those backgrounds.
A lot of knowledge that's traditionally branded as "technical" is IMO generally useful, but overlooked. For example basic queuing theory in of itself is exceedingly useful. Nothing fancy, just the steady-state, blocking probablity, what chance of how many "clients", etc.
I witness very large (gov) organisations lacking any kind of in/out flow modeling, statistics, etc. No dashboards, no insights. Just going by feel. Everybody is "overworked", but if you dare to say it might be a good idea to start quantifying some of those parameters you'll be in a very silent, very awkward room and will never be asked anything ever again. I wish I was kidding.
AI? Let's start previous-century level process automatization and professionalization first and we'll see in a few decades if we're anywhere near ready for the next step.
Edit: It's btw interesting that most (high-level) managers at these orgs are all alphas, like history and political science majors. I guess it's no wonder they are trying to solve production problems through "consensus" and endless meandering, but it's also frustrating.