Rov_Scam
1hr ago
In this situation, yes. It's my opinion that while intangibles may have an effect at the margins, they can't compensate for lack of talent. You see this a lot in the college game where teams without talent will often develop an unusual scheme to make the best of what they have. Look at a team like Navy. They compete in the top division but can't recruit like the rest of the college cesspool can. For years they ran the triple option under coaches Paul Johnson and Ken Niumatalolo, long after the triple option went out of style. If you're not familiar, the triple-option is a descendant of the wishbone, which was developed in the 1960s and reached its zenith in the 1970s and early 1980s. It's a 3-back attack where the quarterback reads what the defense is doing post-snap and either keeps it, hands it off to RB 1, or pitches it to RB2, depending on where the hole is going to be. Teams like Texas and Oklahoma won national championships using this approach, but it had since been superseded by any number of other schemes. When Johnson took over in 2002, most of the good college programs were running pro-style offenses, which required skilled players of sufficient size and speed. The advantage of the triple option is that it didn't require any of that, just players who were good athletes capable of executing a simple system. And the fact that few teams ran the system meant that their opponents had to make special preparation when they played against them, which was tougher than normal since it was so different from what teams were typically running.
The result was that Navy had much more success than service academies typically have. Between 2002 and 2015, Navy only had two losing seasons, one of which came in Johnson's first year running the scheme. By contrast, rival Army only had a single winning season across the same period, and most of those seasons they only managed 2 or 3 wins. I use these dates because Army hired Jeff Monken in 2014 and started running the triple option. Though the team struggled his first two years, they've only had a single losing season since. The thing is, neither team is going to compete for a national championship (though Army came close a couple years ago). Both teams play in the AAC, a conference that isn't the most competitive. Navy plays Notre Dame every year, and hasn't won since 1963. And the teams Notre Dame was fielding during the Charlie Weis era weren't exactly gangbusters. Scheme was able to turn below-average mid-major teams into above-average ones, but it wasn't able to turn them into mediocre major teams.
In a broader sense, though, it's funny that you mention coaching, because this experience played out in real life. In 2021, Urban Meyer, who coached the Florida Gators in 2008 in the middle of an illustrious career that included stints at Utah and Ohio State, was named head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars. This was a bad team, but it nonetheless had players who were 100% NFL talent, and Trevor Lawrence, the hottest QB prospect. The results speak for themselves. Meyer's tenure in Jacksonville was an unmitigated disaster, and he was let go before the season even ended. He thought the team had potential, but he seems not to have realized the level of talent in the NFL; I recall reading a quote from him where he said in an exasperated tone that it was "like playing Alabama every week". Now put this in the context of the offense Meyer actually ran in 20088: The Spread. Like the triple option, spread offenses were developed as a way to take advantage of lesser talent. The first time I recall seeing it was when Pitt played South Florida in 2001. USF was a mid-major that had just started a football program a few years prior and couldn't land top recruits, even compared with mediocre programs like Pitt. Instead they got fast receivers and a mobile quarterback, and used a 4 wideout set with no tight end and only one running back. They passed constantly and kept the tempo up, and a pro-style team like Pitt had trouble keeping up. USF ended up winning the game by 9 points, even they had no business doing so.
Florida actually ran a run-first variation of the spread called a spread option which incorporated aspects of—you guessed it—the triple option. Elements of spread offenses have worked their way into the NFL over the years, particularly following 2010 rule changes prohibiting hits on defenseless players, but the implementation is much different than in college. If there's been a trend in NFL draft busts over the past decade, it's taking guys similar to Tebow who are great atheletes but who come from offenses similar to what Florida ran in 2008. The weakness is that these offenses rely on the QB making one read and then running, and that doesn't work in the NFL. We've seen the careers of Colin Kaepernick, Justin Fields, Malik Willis, and, well, Tim Tebow all struggle due to an inability to hang in the pocket long enough to find the open man. In the NFL, the open windows are tight, and they aren't open for long. Meyer's passing approach relied on Tebow looking to see if one guy was open (by NCAA standards) and taking off with the ball if he wasn't. It also relied on Tebow looking at what the defensive end was doing and making the decision whether to hand the ball off or keep it. NFL quarterbacks do a little of this, but generally speaking, NFL defensive linemen are fast enough that a college running back isn't going to get a jump on them based on what they do immediately after the snap. And with no NFL-caliber tackles, Tebow is likely on his ass before he can even figure out what the defensive end is doing. Anyway, I could get more into this but I think that's enough for now.
Rov_Scam
15hr ago
Right, but if the AI gave an individual controller bad advice, it would only affect that controller's decisions, it wouldn't cause the communication system between airports to stop working entirely.
Rov_Scam
15hr ago
I heard a radio interview on the way home from work where the guy said that all the AI system does is give suggestions to the controllers about weather, traffic conditions, etc. It's added on top of the system and doesn't have any control over it. I think the second possibility is more likely.
Rov_Scam
15hr ago
I'm not sure there's anything specifically to blame on Trump, but the Commerce Department was aware of this whole situation over a year ago, and Trump told them to back off, during which time he continued engaging in deals that probably violated export restrictions.
Rov_Scam
16hr ago
That's not really the point, since few people are claiming women are objectively as good as men at sports. The point is that quality of competition doesn't necessarily equate to how much money and respect the public is willing to give you. College football isn't more popular than the NFL, but it is more popular than any of the various B-leagues that have come and gone over the past few decades, despite a lower quality of play. Serena Williams would probably lose handily to a guy like David Ferrer, but she's made a lot more money, and Ferrer only made as much as he did because guys like Federer, Nadal, and Novak were able to draw interest. Novak may be pushing 40, but he's still better known than anyone ranked above him.
Rov_Scam
16hr ago
No, it was never true. Even top prospects have trouble adjusting to the speed of the NFL, and a lot of little things are exponentially tougher; for instance, the open windows for receivers are a lot smaller and shorter. But let's take a closer look at the players:
QB Tim Tebow: The defense kept every game close, and he was able to pull off late-gem heroics. But he wasn't an NFL caliber player, and was out of the league in a few years. Jon Kitna at least had a solid career as a backup and occasional starter. WR Riley Cooper: Spent a few years at the bottom of the depth chart on the Eagles WR Percy Harvin: Made the Pro Bowl and was Offensive Rookie of the Year, but he was no Calvin Johnson. Admittedly, his career may have gone differently if he weren't a locker room cancer. C Maurkice Pouncey: Solid career at an important position. RG Mike Pouncey: His bullying aside, he was very good TE Aaron Hernandez: His murdering aside, he was very good RB Jeff Demps: Was a freshman in '08 and barely had an NFL career. RB Chris Rainey: Fun Fact—a friend of mine was once on lockdown at his house after he caused a DV incident that led to a SWAT team shutting down the whole street. Before that, he couldn't beat out such luminaries as Jonathan Dwyer and Isaac Redman. The following year he got cut from the Colts for an unspecified violation of team rules after 2 games and no touches. DE Jermaine Cunningham: The Pats moved him to LB and then benched him after a disappointing rookie season. Also had a PED suspension somewhere in there. DE Carlos Dunlap: Had a decent career, but couldn't crack the starting lineup of a mediocre Bengals team for several years LB Brandon Spikes: Another guy with an okay but unmemorable NFL career CB Joe Haden: I always liked Joe Haden. Good career. CB Jackrabbit Jenkins: Decent career despite the legal issues. FS Ahmad Black: Practice squad/special teams guy SS Will Hill: Slightly better career than Ahmad Black
The only true NFL caliber players on this list are Harvin, the Pouncey brothers, Hernandez, Spikes, Haden, and Jenkins. Dunlap did too, but his history suggests that he wasn't anywhere close to that level while in college. That's 7 of 22 guys who can hang, and another 7 who were fringe NFL players with short careers. The remaining 8 didn't play in the NFL at all. Most notably, all but two of their O-line, including both tackles, half their D-line, and 2 of 3 linebackers were not good enough to play for a team as bad as the '08 Lions. As awful as that team was, they were still mostly starting journeymen who were able to hang around the league for a while.
Rov_Scam
18hr ago
Microsoft says that the outage happened after a server update, so while there's no reason to believe it was a cyberattack, saying it wasn't AI-related involves a lot of throat clearing—I guarantee that AI was used to generate at least part of the code for the update, and there's a good chance that shitty AI code is what brought the server down.
I was not kidding when I said that Jensen could end up as the greatest traitor to America since the Rosenbergs. I believe that he personally will face criminal charges at some point.
I'm curious how this will affect the Trump administration. Obviously the Republicans were already in worse shape than anyone realized without this scandal, but not that Trump's aura of invincibility has been shaken, does this do real damage?
Rov_Scam
20hr ago
I know it went out of business. I'll admit that my entire knowledge of it comes from what a friend of mine told me 15 years ago so I can't provide too many details.
Rov_Scam
20hr ago
You obviously don't remember the World Basketball League, which had a 6' 5" height limit. I think the CEO of Giant Eagle was behind it.
Rov_Scam
20hr ago
There's men's college football and basketball. Why should these get the respect and money they do when at least 60% of the athletes involved couldn't crack a CFL or NBA Europe roster? Why do I occasionally hear equally ridiculous things like the idea that the college championship team could beat the Browns or whatever the consensus-worst NFL team is?
Rov_Scam
22hr ago
That's not true. If a school only offers a sport for girls and a boy wants to play, they have to let them. This happened about a decade ago at a school near me when a couple boys joined the field hockey team. My cousin was attending the school at the time and said that the boys that did it were both pricks who only did it because they wanted to cause a controversy.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
If you're talking about a competition that has separate categories for men, women, juniors, masters, sport, first-time participants, and people who weigh more than 200 lbs., you're not talking about a serious competition but an event designed to attract the widest participation possible. I've been semi-involved with the organization of these kinds of competitions (I wasn't part of the organizing committee but involved with the host organization), and I can assure you that the resources don't exist to do any kind of verification beyond the honors system. A 25-year-old who "feels old" isn't going to sign up for the masters division just to increase his chances at a trophy for the same reasons that people who are actually good don't sign up for the sport division.
And these categories don't matter much for the average participant. I pulled the results for the Great Race, a 10k held in Pittsburgh every September. The top men's time this year was 31:05, and the top women's time was 34:46. The top men's master was 33:49, and the top women's master was 38:33. If the top woman raced in the men's category, she'd have finished in 30th place, which doesn't sound impressive until you consider that the men's category had 2,458 participants with a median time of 56:26. For comparison, the women had 2,671 participants and a median finish time of 1:03:02. The median man could certainly increase his success by racing with women, but going from 1,229th place to 671st place isn't the kind of improvement most people think of.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
There's a bit of a dip, but the stock was trading in the same general vicinity less than a year ago, and it was tanking long before this news came out. If you told someone who didn't know anything about the situation that the stock imploded after Huang resigned, and asked them to guess when it happened based on the stock price, they'd guess October 5.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Jobs was fired for a reason. He had vision and dynamism, but that didn't translate into having business sense. The Mac looks good in hindsight, with its modern GUI and famous Super Bowl commercial, but history tends to forget that it was expensive and underpowered, and flopped in the marketplace at a time when it was cheaper and easier for businesses to buy IBM compatible PCs. It was obviously his vision that ultimately brought the company back from the dead, but it's no sure thing that the company would have survived if Jobs had stayed.
Apple has seemingly become less dynamic
For the past decade at least, Apple has been the only tech company that operates on the principle of developing products and charging customers for them. A radical prospect, for sure, but in today's tech environment, not being dynamic seems like a good thing. Even their AI products seemed measured and promise to solve particular problems, not items that seem to be capable of everything and nothing at the same time.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Right, there's a difference between saying you should be in the business of building compute and the business of already having it. The companies you mentioned also have other business that is actually profitable, so even if they're losing money on AI compute it doesn't affect their bottom line as much.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
The suits they filed never alleged actual fraud, just procedural violations that they pretended were some kind of cheat code to get election results thrown out. Nothing that was actually alleged had any bearing on the results. Furthermore, even if they had alleged fraud, they would have needed to have the evidence ready to go. It's not like they had six months to conduct discovery. Nothing new has come out in six years.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
Let's assume that you aren't Trump and have no control over anything he does, and have no control over who the candidates are. We'll also assume that you're in some kind of master position that allows you to coordinate all of the campaigns and how money is spent. All primaries are done the first week of May, giving you six months to work your magic. How do you campaign differently?
Rov_Scam
7d ago
I've known several people in the same situation, and if it's a good company, it's worth sticking around. If the company were oblivious to his problems or were backing him, it would be a different story, but if they're actively working with him to change, then he's already on thin ice. If he doesn't change, he'll be gone soon enough. If it goes on long enough I wouldn't rule out complaining to management. I used to work at a firm where one of the partners in charge of our division was a notorious bitch. I never had a problem with her, but people who worked with her directly often complained about how she would reserve certain "high level" tasks for herself, not do them, and then blame her team for the problems that arose. Several of the people under her complained to the partner who was co-managing the division with her, and several of them left. The result was that they pulled her supervisory duties and everyone left on the team got raises. A few years later she got forced out and went to another firm, but the last I checked she is no longer there either, and the state bar website shows that she's self-employed at an address that's a private residence. She also bought a decent-sized house with her husband while I was working with her and the house that comes up is a townhome, so she's probably divorced too.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
I don't manage people anymore, but when I did a lifetime ago, one of the things that my bosses were adamant about was that evaluations had to include at least some negative feedback. The reason for this is that nobody is perfect and that if I'm just checking off "excellent" for every category they're going to assume that I'm not actually paying close attention to their performance and correspondingly not doing my job. Is is bullshit? Maybe, but I will say that it makes you seriously think about employee performance and I'd rather be constantly motivating my team to improve than just being complacent. To be clear, the same was true in the opposite direction, i.e. that if an employee needed improvement in multiple areas we had to find something good to say about them, and if they were really that bad we should just fire them and not waste time evaluating their performance. It's also true that evaluations cover the entire period, not just the most recent part. If they had to reach back months to find something for you to improve on, I'd say that's a pretty good sign.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
No, because any legislation has to go through the president. If it doesn't work his party shares the blame equally. If he vetoes it he takes the blame alone. Plus, the "party in power" is who holds the presidency, regardless of who controls congress. Democrats didn't get any credit for not controlling congress during Biden's last two years.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
The idea behind an oath is that you're consciously making a promise with God as a witness, implying that there is a divine obligation to tell the truth. The reason, as @vorpa-glavo points out that some Christians, most notably Quakers, forbid swearing oaths, is that their existence implies a double-standard. In other words, to swear an oath to tell the truth implies that you might lie absent the oath, and you should never lie. This actually became a serious problem in early Pennsylvania, when a government run by Quakers found it difficult to operate in the broader context of a legal system that required oaths for various things. The workaround is the affirmation, whereby one keeps God out of the equation and just reaffirms that he's telling the truth now, the implication being that he always tells the truth and is doing so here as well. I believe Franklin Pierce is the only president who affirmed his oath of office, and the option is theoretically available.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Another reason not to trust AI. Wolfe won in 2014, not 2010, and Shapiro won by a pretty wide margin in 2022.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
I think it correlates in certain situations where exposure is an advantage. If you're running in a crowded primary, having money earlier means you can start running ads and getting name recognition before your competition finds out if they even have donors. This is what happened in the 2014 PA Democratic gubernatorial primary; Tom Wolfe was independently wealthy and was able to get his name out there enough that his polling lead was large enough for him to start challenging the incumbent weeks before the primary was even over, despite being a political newcomer. This year, Stacy Garrity couldn't compete with Shapiro financially and didn't start running ads until very late in the campaign. The result was that for a while after Labor Day something like 30% of the electorate couldn't name the Republican candidate if you put a gun to their head.
With shit like President, I don't think it matters one iota in the general. With Senate it can matter, since an underdog can make an impact they wouldn't be able to make on a shoestring budget. But there are diminishing returns. Once a campaign is well enough funded that they've already done all their ad buys (it's a lot cheaper if you buy early) and they don't have to be too careful about what hotels they stay in, it's not going to do much. Spending a ton of money on late TV buys doesn't have the same impact on voters who have been seeing your ads for months. I almost think it's counterproductive, as there are certain candidates I'd never vote for based on ads alone. That guy from MS put together a good one, but most of them are just black and white shots if the opposition with dire voiceovers saying that they support tax cuts that ship jobs overseas. These are unwatchable but are at least predictable; more often than not, going outside the box makes them completely impossible, like the Stacy Garrity ad with AI Josh Shapiro talking about what a bad candidate he is.
Because if the AI fucks up your taxes, Sam Altman and Dario Amoedi aren't going to assume responsibility.
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