Ah, interesting callout; I can totally understand why that is a turn-off. My sister recommended the book to me so I didn’t give the title any thought.

The story is definitely about that trope, and mostly turning it on its head. It’s about the women, with the underlying theme that they are what they are because of men but they own who they are and their future.

I hope if you give it a shot that you enjoy it as much as I do!

Deliberate in what way?

Oh, I may have a book (series) for you! The Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss. It starts with Mary Jekyll—the daughter of Dr. Jekyll—and expands to find Sherlock and Watson, a daughter of Hyde, Justine—the woman made to be Adam Frankenstein’s bride, and other women left in the path of various men who tested the limits of humanity. It even talks about Shelley’s book and why she might have written it as she did. The second book expands into the wife and daughter of Van Helsing.

I’m about 75% of the way through the second book and have been loving them. They’re very post-modern though, with the characters somewhat frequently interrupting the narrator to discuss the way the story is written. I love that sort of thing but know it’s not for everyone!

Leadership definitely drives a lot, but even with bad leadership a PM can and should do a lot to help here. I spent 5 of my years of PMing with an operations org that drove every big decision and I still did everything I could to protect my devs. I ended up in major burn out from it multiple times, but I don’t regret it.

Alerts that are waking devs up in the middle of the night have a user impact too, and a PM can and should communicate that impact and risk to the business side as part of why it needs to be prioritized. Alternatively, there might be a reason that the UI change is ultimately more valuable, and it’s the PM’s job to communicate why that is the priority to their devs. If developers with a Product team ever truly believe the reason they’re building something is just “because [insert team here] is excited about it,” then the PM failed at a critical responsibility.

“that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”

If this is happening, sounds like you have a shit-ass Product Manager (or no PM).

Signed, not a shit-ass Product Manager

Hey, I know the person who made this meme originally! (He got a kick of seeing his work spread around.)

I’ve had mine since before I started driving ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I noticed in my late teens I had a lot of freckles on the left side of my body and very few on the right, and I didn’t start driving until I was 22. I did spend 2 years in high school with a much darker tan on my right arm from hanging my arm out the window of a boyfriend’s car with no AC, but still have more left-arm freckles.

Great examples. The most valuable use for me has been writing SQL queries. SQL is not a part of my job description, but data informs choices I make. I used to have to ask a developer on my team all the questions I had and pull them off their core work to get answers for me, then I had to guess at interpreting the data and inevitably bug them again with all my follow-up questions.

I convinced the manager to get me read access to the databases. I can now do that stuff myself. I had very basic understanding of SQL before, enough to navigate the tables and make some sense of reading queries, but writing queries would have taken HOURS of learning.

As it is, I type in basics about the table structure and ask my questions. It spits out queries, and I run them and tweak as needed. Without AI, I probably would have used my SQL access twice in the past year and been annoyed at how little I was able to get, but as it is I’ve used it dozens of times and been able to make better informed decisions because of it.

My dad wrote software in the 90s and developed a pretty good name for his business. He once got a call from Microsoft saying they wanted to package his software in their newest OS builds. Holy crap, right?! That would be a major break!

They told him they needed to do some deep interviews to set the plan in motion. I can’t remember if there were supposed to be 4 calls total or if it was on the 4th call, but after a couple conversations my dad realized the questions they were asking were to reverse engineer his software. They were never trying to make a deal; they were trying to learn what they could so they could rewrite it and not pay him a dime. He told them to pound sand.

There were a few other conflicts he had with Microsoft. I was young and didn’t understand it well, but my whole childhood I knew Bill Gates led a shady as fuck company and thought he was an awful POS. It honestly still kills me to admit that he (now) does some good in this world.

My partner has an Anovo affected by this and he knows the details better than me, but IIRC the app allows you to set times to change temps or things like that. The device still works without the app, but you lose the convenience factor of being able to monitor or make changes at a distance.

H&R Block has prioritized these worker-focused things since 2020, and in the past year its stock price has frequently broken its record high since going public in 1962. Its CEO has been interviewed by Fortune magazine about his commitment to keeping a “work from anywhere” policy at the company. The business is “winning” by the most public metric used to determine that, and I think their commitment to these exact things is a big part of why.

It’s amazing: when you treat employees like human beings, you tend to have better employees, and better employees make you more successful. /shocked pikachu face

The assistant parallel is an interesting one, and I think that comes out in how I use LLMs as well. I’d never ask an assistant to both choose and get a present for someone; but I could see myself asking them to buy a gift I’d chosen. Or maybe even do some research on a particular kind of gift (as an example, looking through my gift ideas list I have “lightweight step stool” for a family member. I’d love to outsource the research to come up with a few examples of what’s on the market, then choose from those.). The idea is mine, the ultimate decision would be mine, but some of the busy work to get there was outsourced.

Last year I also wrote thank you letters to everyone on my team for Associate Appreciation Day with the help of an LLM. I’m obsessive about my writing, and I know if I’d done that activity from scratch, it would have easily taken me 4 hours. I cut it down to about 1.5hrs by starting with a prompt like, “Write an appreciation note in first person to an associate who…” then provided a bulleted list of accomplishments of theirs. It provided a first draft and I modified greatly from there, bouncing things off the LLM for support.

One associate was underperforming, and I had the LLM help me be “less effusive” and to “praise her effort” more than her results so I wasn’t sending a message that conflicted with her recent review. I would have spent hours finding the right ways of doing that on my own, but it got me there in a couple exchanges. It also helped me find synonyms.

In the end, the note was so heavily edited by me that it was in my voice. And as I said, it still took me ~1.5 hours to do for just the three people who reported to me at the time. So, like in the gift-giving example, the idea was mine, the choice was mine, but I outsourced some of the drafting and editing busy work.

IMO, LLMs are best when used to simplify or support you doing a task, not to replace you doing them.

There are some demographics where its usage is extremely common. I’ve come across multiple people who are on FaceTime calls while in public. Just walking around on video and speaker, talking to someone else. I can’t conceive of using it this way, but in some social circles it’s totally normalized.

This page has some interesting quotes. Reading through, it sounds like it’s hovering at or below the top 5 most common video chat tools. There’s a lot of bias towards quotes about 2020 usage so that’s obviously skewed, but that year at least 9-25% of various demographics were cited using FaceTime daily.

I use FaceTime 2-3 times a year to talk to my nephew, and maybe 3-5 times a year to screen share or show my mum things. But I do use Teams video calls literally 5 days a week (I try to avoid the video part when I can, but there are a few in leadership who really push for it. My company is never doing RTO, so I’ll accept a bit of video calling for the sake of permanent WFH!).

I think replacing the physical home button with a haptic button on the iPhone 7 also helped them improve their IP rating (i.e., water resistance). I could be misremembering that, though, and I have no idea if it’s relevant in this case.

And if you stay that many versions behind, you carry a gold mine of vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Your phone might work, but it’s far from a safe or good idea.

902 security vulnerabilities published for Android 9, 179 of which are “critical” (9+) vulnerability scores.

Including “This could lead to remote escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed. User interaction is not needed for exploitation.”

Yeah, no thanks.

Who are you arguing is to blame now? What other parents?

Yeah, our plan is paid for a year as well. If they drop our service quality before the year is up, that sure seems like a breach of contract.