Rob Lion

If and when this all comes crumbling down, I'll probably be on ... Mastodon: @rnlion@tacobelllabs.net other Mastodon: @rnlion@mastodon.social Cohost: rnlion Quora, Ars Technica, who knows where? Never was much of a Poster, but I did find a lot of great people and stuff On Here.

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

Fire crews are reporting forward progress has been stopped for the #EdgewoodFire in Woodside. Evacuations are NOT anticipated at this time. Approx. 10 residences were initially evacuated as a precaution. I-280 & several major roadways in the area remain closed.

Woke up to thousands of new followers. Here's a crash course on the things we do here for the new folks #Baseballiscinema

one of the worst problems facing our culture is the amount of Fun Work currently being used up by people who don’t find it fun.

We CT scanned three different types of wine cork. The world of wine packaging is very sophisticated, aiming to balance tactile consumer experience against technical winemaking considerations. Click into the 🧵to see what we saw in the scans…

I am making the storyboard for the F-14 video tonight. This is one of my favorite images being used from a NASA document. This is the electron beam welding device invented by Grumman to weld the titanium wing box of the F-14. Titanium is easily oxidised, especially at higher temperatures. This device allowed them to weld titanium in a vacuum. For anyone that has an issue with the "insane engineering" title format. I present this as a counter argument.

silicon valley contrarians will go “wow all these historic institutions have been hollowed out and reduced to status-mills” while excitedly talking about how they gave twenty year olds 100k to “accelerate humanity into the lightcone” with repackaged open source software

just noticed that tiktok muted the audio on a video of mine because of a copyright strike based on... silence

[Fourth-Wall Break] I almost never cover celebrity dates of birth, because unless the figure belonged to royalty or a very important family, their birth was not newsworthy at the time. Today’s figure makes me break that rule, however, not only for his importance to history but because of his longevity into the present day. James Earl Carter, Jr., better known to all of us as Jimmy Carter, was 39th President of the United States, from 1977 to 1981. The 40th and 41st Presidents are both dead, but today Jimmy turns 100. He has seen 40% of US history, which is kind of an unfathomable gulf of time - when he was born, there were still people roaming the earth who had spoken with the Founding Fathers, or fought in the Mexican-American War. Jimmy himself has led an accomplished life - from his service as a Navy flier to President to humanitarian, he has proven himself to be a modern Cincinnatus. From this day forward, everything you will see on this account occurred in the lifespan of Jimmy Carter, an icon who, at the time of this writing, is still alive. Those grainy black-and-white photos and videos that seem like ancient history occurred, in fact, in the lifespan of a U.S. President who is still with us. Humans like Jimmy are crucial primary sources and valuable reminders of our shared past. Although he doesn’t have much longer on this earth, I treasure the fact that he has been with us at all. Happy Birthday, Mr. President.

1/Bell "Remora:" early-60’s idea for a 1-man “space pod.” Remora would let an astronaut work in a more comfortable setting than a pressure suit, while giving the astronaut more tools and greater protection from radiation, meteoroids & other space hazards. Name “remora” comes...

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Look kid - if you're gonna make it in this game, you need two things. - Lightning Strike ✅ - NO BIRDBATH!! ❌ You got it? Right. Get to work.

Additive Manufacture for heat exchangers! Using a Gyroid structure, a complex 3 dimensional interconnecting lattice inspired by nature, low pressure heat exchangers have been made that are 50% more effective than counterflow heat exchangers, but at only 1/10 the size.

Rare sighting of Apple molds! Left to right: AirPods, AirPods case, and iPhone lens I think these are a generation old so they were able to display them at IMTS.

Gambled on another mystery batch of film slides.

me researching: haha fuck yeah!!! yes!! me arranging that research into coherent prose: well this fucking sucks. what the fuck.

This post about a Delorean raises an important point. The move to huge cars blunts pretty much all the senses (sound, sight lines, road vibrations) and with them, the experience of driving. The perception of speed is significantly blunted, so people are incentivized to go faster.