I can see this working reasonably for text that you can understand without referring to figures, and for texts for which there is external content available that such a conversation could be based on. For a new, say, math paper, without prose interspersed, I’d be surprised if the generated conversation will be worth much. On the other hand, that is a corner case and, personally, I suspect I will be using this for the many texts where all I need is a presentation of the material that is easy to listen to.
They have been independent since 1956. Other (majority non-European) British colonies/protectorates as diverse as Singapore (ind. 1965), Belize (ind. 1981), India (ind. 1947) and UAE (ind. 1971) managed to build peaceful societies.
We need to recognize that the people of countries like Sudan are not children who don't know any better, contrary to European leftists' views. They are fully functioning adults who made a series of choices that led to the present situation.
On gaining independence in 1956 Sudan endured two civil wars with up to a million deaths in the first civil war and between one and two million deaths in the second civil war.
Colonial governments like the British often (almost always) left a mess behind them.
Comparing Sudan to Singapore, India and the UAE is comical. This level of analysis on HackerNews, that ignores the realities of how different countries evolve / are influenced is why we cannot have an honest conversation.
Please enlighten us why it's comical. Economically, Sudan was richer per capita than India in 1960 and even as recently as 2017 [1][2]. It had, and still has, a more homogeneous population ethnically and linguistically. Yet India manages to keep things mostly calm while Sudan can't.
Not relevant as the partition was outlined in the Indian Independence Act 1947 which created the constitutions. The Act was agreed upon by the legislature representatives of the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, and the Sikh community with Lord Mountbatten.
The point stands that decolonisation was a mess and the colonisers played a large part in it.
I think the point is in spite of decolonization being orders of magnitude more messy countries like India have established fully functioning peaceful societies.
Every single piece of land on Earth has been attacked and colonized at least once. Why have some peoples managed to do well and others so bad? I think there's something more to learn.
It's the British Isles. Scotland joined England in the United Kingdom.
This is just one where you're clearly incorrect.
Colonialism developed as a concept describing European colonial empires of the modern era, which spread globally from the 15th century to the mid-20th century.
That kills off almost all of your examples.
That people in the comments aren't even taking the time to check the definition of terms is sad. The statements pro colonialism reek of racism and white supremacy.
> Colonialism developed as a concept describing European colonial empires of the modern era, which spread globally from the 15th century to the mid-20th century.
The concept was developed from European colonial empires, but it describes more than just them.
The way Muslims invaded Portugal and Spain, established their strongholds, exploited native population and maintained their rule for several centuries until kicked out fits the same mold, as do countless other examples, from Northern Crusades a thousand years ago to Soviet Union's domination of Central and Eastern Europe just a few decades ago.
If you think that European nations do not have a long history of being invaded by foreigners, seeing their land taken away and given to settlers while being made inferior and exploited, then you are very wrong and I encourage you to pick up a history book on any smaller European nation.
The British Isles is a geographic term. It includes(&always has) Ireland given that Ireland is a part of the British Isles but has never been part of Great Britain (the land mass).
The United Kingdom you refer to has a fuller name - "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland" (past) replaced by "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) (present).
I assume you're familiar enough with history to recognise that Ireland(landmass/people/culture) was a colony of the British (with or without your pedantry)?
I live in the former Roman province of Hispania. We were at least colonized by Romans, then by Saxons and then by Arabs.
The Arab imperialists left here 500 years ago.
If I were to live further to the East in many of today’s EU/European countries, I could very well live in places where Ottoman imperialists left only 100 years ago.
Sudan is now free of imperialists for 70 years. Only 30 years less than countries like Greece, Slovenia, Croatia and a few others in Europe.
The Celts were colonized by Romans and then colonized again by Franks, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans. Western Slavs, Balts, and Estonians were colonized by Germans. Parts of Balkans (esp. Greece) were colonized by the Ottomans.
Nationalism did lot in this regard. But really when you consider it Ukraine is just continuation of European nations conquering lands from each other. Which has been going on for well probably before Romans...
Are you perhaps assuming they have no chance of learning to govern themselves peacefully?
I don't subscribe to this fixed mindset. I believe all peoples can learn to do well. It's hard, but possible. So the lack of conolialism isn't the answer, but lack of learning.
Perhaps they can, but there’s 0 evidence for it. Regardless my point was that they have had tremendous suffering since being decolonized. Endless conflict with external meddling from all over. I suspect that had they been under colonial rule since then they’d have significantly less suffering and stable. But what can you do because that ship sailed.
They’ve had endless civil war essentially for 70 years. Maybe “Sudan” isn’t a real place and the people inhabiting those lands need to sort it out and figure out who rules what. The UN should stop recognizing Sudan as a state as it’s obviously failed. Remove itself from the region and let the people there figure out borders. Rip the Bandai’s off instead of prolonging this idea of Sudan that obviously isn’t real.
People need to be ruled to maintain order. The alternative is chaos which leads to suffering until order is restored. The colonists ruled competently and maintained order even if your social justice reflex doesn’t feel good about it. What they left, decolonization, is a soft colonization from afar, managed by entities with no skin in it. This is why it’s disorderly and chaos reigns and suffering is a way of life for the people of those lands.
Colonization is preferable to that. However, because that’s not a palatable form of social order today the next best thing is complete abandonment and true self determination to discover where the borders are and who rules them. This will be bloody, yes, but have an outcome that leads to order if not tampered with. That’s preferable to the last 70 years.
Almost every animal has a simpler, easier life than the average human.
Penguins have a far easier life than the fish they eat. I feel sorry for the small fish; everyone is after them; big fish, sea gulls, octopuses, pelicans, penguins, dolphins, seals, humans... What creature on this earth does not eat herring or sardines? Humans even started feeding their ground up bones to chickens and other farm animals (who would otherwise not eat them)! Give the sardines a break!
I strongly suspect that there is, I've seen this effect in play so many times at smaller timescales, and you'd expect to be even stronger at longer ones
I am still waiting for companies to realize that offices in the pre-pandemic sense are a completely unnecessary expense, a drag on productivity and a competitive disadvantage for the organizations that keep clinging on to this idea. It's easy to talk about the importance of meeting face-to-face, when you ignore the opportunity cost of enabling this versus scaling down to more up-to-date spaces that make things like workshops, larger meetings and pair programming truly comfortable, and reinvesting the savings into higher salaries and other benefits. Are the management teams in our industry just waiting for someone to pull the trigger, or are they hoping that no-one will do so, and that everyone will just forget that the pandemic taught us how meaningless commuting to work is?
I am waiting for the exact opposite. I love WFH, my team loves WFH. All of us will tell you how much more productive we are and Individually we might be. As a team…we are definitely not more productive and no one wants to say that uncomfortable part out loud.
Sooner or later that truth will trickle upwards and we will all be back to a commute and cubicles.
> Sooner or later that truth will trickle upwards and we will all be back to a commute and cubicles.
This very might well be the case for your company. However, globally, there are advantages for the employer, and disadvantages for the employee that need to be accounted for. I believe we will start to see salaries diverge between remote and in-office work to adjust for whatever particular situation the company is facing.
Advantages for Company:
- A lower salary can be offered.
- Employees are less Geo-constrained
- Less office space to rent
Disadvantages for Employee:
- Harder for junior employees to learn
- Social isolation
- Lower salary is possible
The situation is likely to be variable from company to company, I have a feeling that soon "remote work" will be an integral part of the identity of each job posting.
Maybe just a management issue, but my team is full of people being really productive at their pet project. When it comes to accomplishing business goals, less so. An effective team needs to effectively work together, and that largely is not happening with remote.
This is just "works on my machine" applied to businesses. If most businesses are struggling with remote work, saying "just get good at it" won't help - they would if they could. Fact is a lot of companies are going to be forced back to in-office because they can't stay competitive otherwise.
I think we agree. WFH itself can work with the right environment, but I question wether certain kinds of companies are realistically capable of fostering that environment. Personally I think that if a company finds that it can't do WFH effectively, it shouldn't even be doing tech, and should contract that work out to a company that can WFH. It's like, a code smell for business.
I think it’s a perception issue. We perceive ourselves to be more productive because we have a bias for WFH. Some folks may actually be, but now the whole is no longer greater than the sum of its parts where once it was.
> I think it’s a perception issue. We perceive ourselves to be more productive because we have a bias for WFH
Even avoiding the time lost in the commute would make someone more productive. If you add how you avoid having to go through the cognitive load, wear & tear that the commute causes, even further.
Perhaps, but that hits more for personal productivity rather than work productivity, although I agree there could be a slight gain to start without the early commute. However, what I have observed in myself in colleagues is there are more midday distractions in WFH (dog walks, answering the door to solicitors, attending to kids, etc…) that don’t generally happen at the office.
> there are more midday distractions in WFH (dog walks, answering the door to solicitors, attending to kids, etc…) that don’t generally happen at the office.
Yes, that's a prominent situation with WFH. People may think that you can 'just do stuff' because you are 'at home'. It takes some adaptation to get things work in an organized way so that they wont get in the way of work.
> As a team…we are definitely not more productive and no one wants to say that uncomfortable part out loud.
Can being in a loud, stacked office in front of computers with a bunch of other people be called 'more productive'?
The only thing that exists in such an environment compared to work from home is the supposedly better communication. But how many times do you communicate with a colleague over the course of a single workday. Nobody wants to be disrupted when they are concentrating. So people already avoid disrupting each other, limiting the interaction during work.
In such an equation, the only thing that is necessary for totally replacing work environment seems to be people getting used to collaborating through chat, voice and videos. That should fix the majority of the issues and only leave the watercooler aspect of the office unaddressed.
> Nobody wants to be disrupted when they are concentrating. So people already avoid disrupting each other, limiting the interaction during work
This is where WFH is worse in my experience. Because someone cannot see that I am behind a closed door or heads down focused, there are more interruptions to me. Even marking yourself unavailable in chat is often not respected, mainly because products like Teams does a pretty shitty job of conveying status and no one pays its status any respect.
> Because someone cannot see that I am behind a closed door or heads down focused, there are more interruptions to me.
Definitely its necessary to have some organization to adapt to wfh must be done in the household and also the household must be made aware that work is work and its not just someone 'studying in his room' like a teenager or college student.
> Even marking yourself unavailable in chat is often not respected
That's an adaptation on the remote workers' side though. With remote, the communication needs to be async. So people should be able to just drop stuff into chat so the remote people can respond whenever they can. Turning off notices while concentrating is a must for any chat app for that reason. You can turn the notifications off, let the messages pile up while you concentrate, then respond to the messages when you are going through a communication cycle. (unless on call though)
You can just ignore their messages and pings when you turn off notifications while you are concentrating - then when you are back you can respond to them. Similarly, you can assume that your messages will be asynchronously processed by your teammates in the same manner. It takes some time to get used to such an async communication style, but it works and its scalable.
> I am still waiting for companies to realize that offices in the pre-pandemic sense are a completely unnecessary expense, a drag on productivity and a competitive disadvantage for the organizations that keep clinging on to this idea.
When their top investors and board members are often also top investors and board members of the firms that own the commercial real estate, it may be hard for them to come to that realization.
