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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Your first interpretation wasn’t the case in this specific ad, because the “minimum 5-10 year experience” was on the list of “essential experience and skills” and there was a separate list of “desirables”.

    Your second explanation just supports my original infuriation - just state the range that you’re interested in, without calling it a minimum.

    Actually, I got that job, I’m still working for the company, but to your last point, I have to say it’s hilarious how bad our communications dept is at communicating to the rest of the company.





  • Not just Amazon. I had a parcel being delivered by DPD while I was on holidays. I checked the delivery’s webpage, which said “if you’re not in, we’ll leave it with your neighbour”. Great!

    While I was on holiday, I checked the status on the day of delivery: “you weren’t in, we returned it to DPD depot”. Somewhat annoying, but the depot is only 15 minute drive from mine, I can go collect it then I’m back home.

    Checked it again when I got back home: “returned to sender”.

    The fun thing was that the item was the modem from my new internet provider, and my old provider was ceasing their services that very day.




  • I’m also a non-native speaker and I’ve also been taught to speak a certain way (“you and I are going” but “he saw you and me”; don’t split infinitives; don’t end sentences with prepositions, etc.), but then I read Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct and - even more relevant here - The Sense of Style. We’ve been taught to use language a certain way, but our teachers were following the prescriptivist school of thought. You say these rules were written by native folk, but it’s often (if not usually) the native folk that say less when they “should” be saying fewer.

    I know you said it’s only mildly infuriating to you, but if proper use of language is something dear to your heart (as it is to mine) - I really recommend the above books as I think this is something not worth to get even mildly infuriated about. The border between less and fewer is fuzzier than you think and - in the words of Pinker - once you really master the distinction - that’s one fewer thing for you to worry about.

    Edit: typo






  • This is probably going to be an unpopular comment, but I wanted to present the view in favour of what I call WFW (working from work). I’m sure it’s always going to be different for specific cases, but I do see benefits of WFW. We have an open plan office and a lot of casual conversations between us turn into serious conversations about projects and sometimes they have important outputs. Sometimes you overhear a conversation that you realise you know something about and you make a valuable contribution to it. None of this happens when people are WingFH. I’m lucky enough that my only line report is a hard working person, so I let them WFH probably a bit more than other managers let their reports, but I still like when they are WFW because of the contributions that they make to those conversations I mentioned above.

    I’m an introvert, so I totally get the argument of being able to focus better when you’re not surrounded by people and their conversations, but at the same time I honestly noticed that my productivity decreases when I WFH. I’m sufficiently honest with myself to notice that and feel bad about it and this is actually the main reason why I do commute for an hour every day just to WFW, even though our company policy says that we can WFH 3 days a week and my job is 95% desk based.

    I think it’s often has to considered for individual cases because as I said, my report does 110% whether they WFH or WFW, but I know from other managers that some of their reports really stuttered and stumbled when they were asked “so you WedFH yesterday, what did you do exactly?”

    I’m not trying to say “everyone should stop WFH”, but it seems to me that most of the comments in this post are aligning with “just let your employees WFH!” and I wanted to present the other point of view, from the perspective of a non-senior manager who also has some non managerial responsibilities himself.



  • Of course it needs to be controlled and regulated. Like any other drugs. One of the reasons drugs are expensive is because there is so many regulatory hurdles that drug makes have to deal with before they can touch a patient.

    I get your hypothetical, but it has two shortcomings. Firstly, training the immune system against cancer mutations is fairly easy, because the mutations are not present during the process of T and B cell maturation, so in the population of circulating naive T and B cells in a patient, there are likely to exist ones that are going to recognise the cancer antigen. Whatever proteins drive the dark pigmentation of skin or green eye colour will be used to drive the negative selection of T and B cells in the person with dark skin or brown eyes. And so, even if you administer a “vaccine” encoding these proteins, their immune systems will not be able to mount a response against them.

    Secondly, what about the practicalities. Say you made the anti-green eye vaccine - how do you administer it to people? I’m assuming we’re not talking about some dystopian future where forcing people to receive injections that contain biologicals killing them is legal. It’s not the kind of “vaccine” that you could just spread in the air or add to drinking water for it to take effect.


  • I think the first point to make is that this is not really the patient’s own genetic information, but that of their cancer, something they desperately want to get rid of. And the second point is that to my knowledge, there is no county on earth, where taking part in a clinical trial would not require the patient’s consent, which is to say, all people in the study were informed that the genetic sequences of their cancers will be analysed and used to generate a vaccine.

    As for the potential to become a weapon, you would have to elaborate, because I really don’t see how the Moderna vaccine strategy could be weaponised.