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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Internal combustion engines are very picky about how fast they spin, since they get their power from burning fuel the rate at which fuel enters the cylinders to burn correlates strongly to the power they have available. And since each cycle of a cylinder burns about the same amount of fuel the faster the engine spins the more power it generates.

    This is why internal combustion engine vehicles have gearboxes (transmission in the US?) to ensure that you can spin the engine fast even while the wheels are slow) or stopped) so you have enough power to start the car.

    Electric motors by contrast generate power through the strength of their electromagnetic fields, which is just how much current gets pushed through the electromagnets. How fast the motor spins just changes how fast the electronics have to “move” the generated field without changing the strength, so you get similar power even at slow speeds.

    So electric motors have enough torque at low speed that you can start your car without needing a gearbox.

    Note: this post is a gross simplification and probably mis-uses some terminology but it should give a general understanding of why the transmissions are different.



  • Because companies have been talking up how their adoption of AI is going to make them faster and more able to capitalise on opportunities in order to prop up their valuations for a while now and it seems to work as far as share price goes.

    Being able back up this talk with metrics showing that their employees are all in on AI reinforces this, since the share price is the metric the business optimises for over product development employee reviews will index on this over cost effectiveness, and at most big tech companies engineers are very much making every decision with an eye to performance review optimisation (i.e. how it will affect their next review rather than the product they are building)

    There is also some lesser incentives in that meta employees care directly about the meta share price since a lot of their compensation is in the form of RSUs.

    I’m not condonig this as a desirable state of affairs, just explaining the incentive curve that the actors are following.



  • Oh it’s easy;

    Does doing it the correct way increase your workload but make the business more profitable in the short term? Do it the correct way.

    Does doing it the correct way preserve your safety at the cost of operating efficiency? Do it the incorrect way.

    The second kind of unfollowed rule is there as a liability shield, it’s so that if you get hurt the business can claim you weren’t following your mandatory training and they aren’t liable.

    But if people did follow it then they would get a kind word from their supervisor saying we don’t have the time for that even if it is in the official training. Because the supervisor themselves is in a worse bind, they have to tell management that the new liability shield is being followed as it won’t work otherwise, but they are on the hook for the productivity of their team in such a way that they can’t allow people to follow the slow process.