Pretty rich that between this and Claude for Chrome, Anthropic just posted a ~40m YouTube video touting "How Anthropic stops AI cybercrime": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsCNkDrIGCw
In the context of the source material (the books by Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson), the 'greening' of Dune/Arrakis is a very broad plot theme. So, the comment is not one of 'green washing' but in keeping with themes of the series.
Full disclosure: Haven't read all the books, nor am I looking to after reading a bunch during the pandemic.
I've only read the first of the Dune books, and I do (somehat vaugely) recall the Freemen project to green Arrakis. My comment was intended less as a comment on the greening project in the context of Dune and more as a challenge to the idea that turning a desert green is a 'naturalist tale'. To me it sounds more like the tale of a property developer or industrial agriculturalist.
For this particular topic you should definitely read more of the books before commenting on the theme of the series. The GP is more thematically correct.
When asking if anyone in the protest had firearms, a journalist was ejected from a news conference. Would have been a good opportunity to disavow violence, but here we are. In this case, it's not so much painting with broad strokes as much as judging by the company they keep.
How is Russia invading Ukraine would take down Twitter? Does Twitter keep their DCs in Luhansk? I was speaking in context of significant ongoing global developments
In the context of 'IT Consulting Companies,' which the blog post is about, it means that clients are paying a higher billable rate than for more 'junior' staff.
I have worked in consulting, and internally, the above was pretty-much our definition of "senior" that we used to determine who was billed out at "senior rates:" The engineers who also had customer-facing skills and coördination skills and understanding the customer's byzantine constraints skills and so forth.
Those who focused on just coding were billed out for less than those who spent time in meetings and writing words.
I was made "senior developer" three months out of university for exactly this reason. It helped that I also knew what I was doing, but the whole 1st dotcom bubble was a crazy time.
I think this is an often missed point. The managers are often just as overworked as the employees but have to handle negativity from 2 directions, both their employees and their managers. They are just people and often their hands are tied due to company policy. They are often just cogs in the wheel as much as we are.
Negotiating courses often refer to this as the BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement). Considering what that scenario is and having it as your bottom line is the best piece of advice they impart.
Haven't looked at it in years but I remember Getting to Yes as being a great little book on negotiation. Maybe there are better books out there but I found it a good place to start.
There are a number of other things in there too. For example, you may not have the same priorities as the person you're negotiating with.
Hostage negotiation is a game played once between parties. Most of daily life situations are repeated games, in which dynamics are different. I found that the author was biased by their experience in one-off games and their suggestions wouldn’t generalize well into repeated games. Unfortunately, there is no acknowledgement of this until the very end of the book. Still a good read though.
Yep I agree on one hand but on the other, getting to that point is being 95% out the door anyway. Even if you stay, many managers and businessmen have very persistent bad memory and will remember you as the guy who twisted their hands or whatever. I've experienced this a long time ago; some of these people are very resentful and vengeful.
Often times staying at a place where you have thrown the "I'll leave for a better offer if you don't budge" card on the table successfully... is not worth it.
Also, I saw a lot of parallels with Playing to Win by David Sirlin [0], about competitive gaming.
One of Sirlin's points is that the most common reason casual players lose is because they restrict themselves to a subset of legal moves. I.e. they play the game they think exists, or they think is "fair", rather than the rules as written.
Transposed into negotiation, Voss feels very similar to me. Whereas most people get distracted with the minutiae, or their feelings about the negotiation, or 1,000 other non-rule parts... he treats negotiation as game.
Not in the sense of "fun" or "lighthearted" (he worked for the FBI!), but in the sense of understanding all the actual rules, and using those rules to win.
It came out of research at Harvard (by the authors of Getting to Yes) and is related to game theory. So it's academic (and therefore jargony) but is probably also intended to be more precise than alternatives or options.
That said, for day to day use, understand your alternatives if the parties can't come to an agreement works perfectly well.
IMHO there's a difference - alternatives and options are the things that you consider and discuss might offer to the other party within a negotiation, they are a part of it.
BATNA, on the other hand, is outside of that negotiation, it is the thing that you'll actually do if the negotiation fails. This will not always will match your statements during the negotiation about what your options are, it's something purely in your mind to compare with the actual alternatives being negotiated and something which, unlike these alternatives, does not require a negotiated consent of the other party.
Even just knowing the concept gets you halfway there, assuming you have any other options at all. It's a term everybody should know. BATNA BATNA BATNA!
