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2024-10-15

Week 197: Teams player

I started a new contract. So far, I have spent almost all my time on calls, which is absolutely my least favourite part of work in the modern age. In-person meetings could be bad enough, but it’s so much harder to have a conversation over dodgy, high latency connections with people talking over each other. It’s just really hard work.

And then you add Microsoft Teams. I should have known. I was warned. I had heard that it was bad, but it’s really so much worse than that. The audio quality is terrible, on a device where competitor products work fine. Basic stuff like echo cancellation seems to be missing. Sometimes it freezes. Once, it arbitrarily and spontaneously changed audio device halfway through the call so no one could hear me. It signs me out in the middle of a call and invites me to sign in again (a trap, as this will terminate the call and deposit me on a home screen far away). Sometimes, even when I’m signed in, it forgets and asks me to type in my name. It spontaneously stops showing a shared screen halfway through a call. It’s hard to be on time when it takes a full minute for the rickety jenga tower of an interface to load.

And that’s only my first week.

I hope I’ll get a chance to do something that isn’t Teams meetings soon.

I was talking to someone about web hosting over lunch and I realised: young people these days don’t even know that GoDaddy used to be notorious for its sexist marketing and that time its CEO shot an elephant.

Even the most egregious organisations can redeem themselves, with a bit of hard work, and I think that’s a good thing.

We have paid off the last of the work on the house. That’s everything that was planned – at least until something else goes wrong or needs fixing. It feels good to be out on this side of it.

A few links:

• Britain’s Tories Are Lost Because Their Ideology Failed. From Bloomberg, not known for a leftist bias: “The Tories misdiagnosed Britain with mythical diseases and administered treatments that acted as toxins, like chemotherapy without the cancer.”
• LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem. “[W]e found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models …. Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching—so fragile, in fact, that changing names can alter results by ~10%!”
• How translators performed the herculean task of localizing the most incomprehensibly British videogame of all time into German, Portuguese and Traditional Chinese: ‘What on Earth are these characters even talking about?’. “Chinese translator Xiaoxiao Qu dealt with a snail-related ‘shell-shocked’ onslaught with her own ‘glyphic pun’ playing on the Chinese proverb ‘祸不单行’: ‘misfortunes never come singly’, drawing on the similarity between 祸 (misfortune, calamity) and 蜗 (snails).”