They can hire and pay the temp workforce, of course, but the cost of hiring a bunch of people for a few days is a lot higher than the hourly wage you pay them. Best case you can go through some temp agencies, and I'll be surprised if they haven't already done that, but once you've exhausted that resource you're going to be getting bottom-of-the-barrel personnel, if you can even find them.

It makes sense that Amazon finds it more cost-effective to retask office workers for a few days. And if you're going to do that, and you don't want to interfere with those office workers' normal work too much, it makes sense to pitch it as optional so the office workers can determine how much time they can spare without interfering with anything essential. Likewise, it makes sense to give them access to conference rooms with VC equipment in the warehouses, so if they can take any urgent meetings during their warehouse shift.

So. If folks want to actually read the article, theres a preprint of it here on arXiv dot org, https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F2408.078... . Dont stress, its legit, thats how preprints work.

Anyway. From best I can work out, this is a fairly game-theoretic approach. But essentially "rationality" here would seem to mean "makes decisions that would get the highest utility according to funky bayesian scoring system" which, its totally a thing in economics and also corners of the internet obsessed with that kind of thing, though its an approach psychologists are a bit suspicious of, and philosophers tend to consider it somewhat tautological. But for some applications its a pretty good way to determine if someone is making a "rational" choice.

Beyond that, I'm gonna say "dont ask me", the approach in this paper is definately outside of my academic expertise as to judge its soundness.

They're not saving money. They're retasking office workers who make $100+ per hour to do work they usually pay a lot less for.

OTOH, if it keeps customers from having bad experiences because the system is overwhelmed, it may be a good use of those expensive workers.

Nah. These are salaried workers being asked to do something during their normal work hours. It's basically not possible to avoid paying them.

Weekdays 10 am to 6 pm. That's normal work hours. Unless they're being forced to use vacation time, they're being paid.

More likely 100-200/hour, more if they're software engineers or similar highly-paid office workers. $30/hour is only $60k/year. There's no way Amazon white-collar workers in NYC are making that little.

I don't believe that new hires should be looking for entry-level jobs, unless you mean the sort of jobs that basically require a college degree in order to even do the entry-level work.

The two things that college education were supposed to provide were either the foundation of education for being a leader, or the foundation of education for research. The latter has morphed into all sorts of disciplines, particularly into engineering, but the former still applies to an extent. If the job is truly entry-level for a great many possible workers then it shouldn't need a college education to get it, and a college education might well be wasted if going for a career track that starts out that way.

Part of the problem, arguably the biggest part, is that employers are looking for college degrees for jobs where having a degree doesn't mean anything. It means loads of people are going for expensive education just to get a rubber-stamp because HR departments are using that degree as a pass/fail. That's a terrible use of a college degree. That practice needs to end. Use college degrees where they're actually needed. Where they're not needed, treat them as a, "that's nice..." and move on.

...it was a typical case of American blind justice, and there wasn't nothing he could do about it, and the judge wasn't going to look at the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.

There's also a consideration in terms of the emissions and other environmental degradation that was suffered as a consequence of manufacturing it.

If it was environmentally far more costly to produce the vehicle than to operate it, or if the environmental cost to produce a replacement vehicle is higher than operating an existing vehicle, then removing an existing vehicle from the road is a foolhardy move.

Similarly, if someone only barely drives their vehicle, then the environmental effects of driving the vehicle are limited even as the vehicle ages.

I happen to own one of the last of the rear wheel drive Chevrolet Impalas from the mid-nineties. My car had six thousand miles on it when I bought it when it was seventeen years old. Even now I have only a little over 43,000 miles on it at 30 years old. That vehicle is not causing a lot of further environmental harm. I drove it daily for around seven years, I was averaging around 5,000 miles per year commuting those years.

If a government wants to do something useful, implement emissions standards laws, and enforce those emissions standards laws. That's what they do where I live, any passenger car made from model year 1967 is emissions tested to the standards it was built-to and it must pass unless it's registered with collector's insurance and not allowed for business/commuting. I don't like the headaches of emissions testing, but it's also not so much a burden as to make it untenable either.

This just raises the question of what it means to "know". The LLMs clearly have a large and fairly comprehensive model of the world, the things in it and the relationships between them. If they didn't, they couldn't produce output that makes sense in the context of the models we have of the world, the things in it and the relationships between them.

That has nothing to do with the comment you replied to. I was talking about Trump's cluelessness what is needed to retain the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency which is at best weakly related to its valuation relative to other currencies.

Only if hedge fund managers don't understand how the Fed chairmanship works. Trump can't replace Powell until February 2026, when Powell's term expires. Not unless Trump can make the case that he needs to be removed for cause, which would require evidence of misconduct, not just policy disagreement.

I'm sorry, but we've had tools to stack images as layers and to apply those layers as watermarks or overlays or even as 'frames' for decades now. The police department featured here has just demonstrated that they do not have a process that follows some kind of standard, they are using undocumented processes and random software that itself is probably undocumented to demonstrate evidence.

I could fully expect defense lawyers for cases that relied on the courtroom presentation of photographic evidence that features this police department's watermark or logo or other manipulation to challenge that evidence in an appeal. The police have already demonstrated they did not follow a documented chain of custody for handling and processing that evidence, so where the conviction was reliant on that evidence it might well be able to be excluded on a retrial if the court agrees that the police cannot demonstrate how they processed it.

When it comes to enforcing the law, stupidity may as well be malice.

I crack the occasional joke in telework meetings. The summaries from systems trying to process these meetings are often skewed by the jokes.

AI does not have the ability to detect the ultimately-irrelevant part.

So clueless.

The fact is that the trade imbalance is the largest single factor that makes the US dollar the world currency -- and also helps to keep the federal debt cheap. All of those countries that have a trade surplus with us send us lots of goods and in exchange they get lots of dollars. What do they do with them? They buy US-denominated securities, including treasury bonds. So many people and organizations around the world holding large reserves of US-denominated securities is what makes the dollar the world's default currency.

To the extent that he succeeds at "correcting" the trade imbalance, he'll undermine the dollar's status. And trying to bully countries into sticking with the dollar by threatening action that will make the dollar worth less to them is just... clueless. And that's assuming his actions to explode the debt while escalating financing costs doesn't result in enormous devaluation of the dollar, which would make it worthless rather than just worth less.

On balance I think I'm mostly glad that Trump is a moron, because if he weren't he would be really dangerous. On the other hand, if he had either a brain or the humility to listen to people who do, he might understand that he's trying to destroy what he's trying to control, and that winning that sort of game is losing. Probably not, though. He's amoral enough to be okay with ruling over a relative wasteland, because he and his will be better off.

From the article:

Oh please... The reason they're calling these things bi-folds for a single fold and tri-folds for two folds is because wallets have been using those terms in just that way. The bi- and tri- refer to the number of segments, which is the part that those shopping for wallets cared about. They didn't care that two segments meant one fold, they cared how two segments doubled-over fit in a pocket or purse. Likewise they didn't care that three segments meant two folds, they again cared how it fit where they wanted to store it.