corporate-culture 14

This week, I learned: sqlite-schema-diagram generates schemas for SQLite databases using Graphviz TechEmpower web server benchmarks place Rust servers on top browser.new is a good example of a browser agent. It slowly but independently does a good job of achieving the result. Example: What crew is common in Ingrid Bergman - Cary Grant films? twinny is an open source VC Code Copilot alternative. typesense supports embeddings natively. Binary embeddings are good enough. Cohere releases binary embeddings. Extract.langchain.com is a poor early interface to featurize unstructured.io Hume.ai offers voice emotion API and emotion-based conversational responses. An empathic AI. Rust is non-trivial. Inspired by We are under DDoS attack and we do nothing, I “wrote” a small binary that serves a parquet file as JSON. It failed and I couldn’t fix it. spleeter is a better alternative to demucs. Splits audio into pyannote-audio does speaker diarization uvicorn is faster than hypercorn but hypercorn supports HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. FastAPI with uvicorn is reasonably fast. Representational engineering lets you control LLM output based on preference on the fly. When I set up a training: On inviting for DuckDB workshop on Sun evening, Gramener starts accepting immediately, Straive doesn’t. Straive has high spread of joining time. When joining Gitlab Pipelines Workshop, Straive starts meeting (e.g. Premlal) many minutes early. Gramener floods in (due to alert). Straive streams in slowly. Gitlab Pipelines Workshop acceptances: Gramener 47, Straive 100

(I had intended to write this post sarcastically, a bit like my web freedom survey. But sarcasm’s confusing to read. So I’ll just be straight and mild.) If you’re a well-paid professional in an Indian IT services firm, your freedom is limited. (This holds if you’re a student, too.) You clock-in and clock-out. You’re searched on your way in and out. You need your boss’s permission to leave. You work on what you’ve been told to work on. You cannot be trusted to freely access the Internet. The last bit worries me the most. Perhaps because in all the other cases, there are humans I can put to shame or fight, face-to-face. Or because I am a Net addict. Don’t know why. ...

There was a time when workers were searched when they left, to make sure they weren’t stealing. They were paid by their hour, and had to clock in/clock out. They had supervisors to ensure that they didn’t slack off. They weren’t allowed to make calls at work. After all, people were lazy and thieving in those days. Nowadays, we’re enlightened. We respect and trust our employees. Like a family. We don’t micromanage their activities. We don’t tap their phone calls. ...

The hours in consulting are pretty long. 65 hours a week used to be my norm, and that’s ignoring the travel time to and from work. So there wasn’t too much life outside of work. (I’ve come to realise, though, that what you do outside of work doesn’t change that much with more free time. What does change is that you just enjoy it more – both in and out of work.) ...

The view from my office is pretty good. Comments Anonymous 30 Sep 2006 7:35 pm: Neat. Is it your office or your current client’s office? Have you guys broken even? Or is it still lifeline from the parent? S Anand 30 Sep 2006 9:20 pm: Thanks! This is the Infosys office, not a client’s. As for breakeven, yeah, we actually have!

An article on NYT about Ray Ozzie: can this man reprogram Microsoft?

How Company Employees Use The Web.

Southwest Airline’s effort to be humourous. Southwest … have [my business] because of low fares, and force-marching their employees through comic routines will do little to affect my choice of carrier. They are, however, wasting their “research” dollars and undoubtedly humiliating their employees. I suggest they stop. While the phrases themselves were well-crafted specimens of humor, delivered with carefully practiced inflection of the voice, the eyes of the pressganged comedians were cold and dead. ...

A Nike ID story. An e-mail correspondence between Jonah and Nike about creating a personalised ID called “sweatshop”.

Microsoft (2002) vs IBM (1982). An article on whether Microsoft will go the IBM Way. Microsoft’s ability to adapt and prosper hinges on meeting a third main challenge: creating trust.

Rant on HP’s customer service. Long, but interesting. I read it end-to-end. It’s curious, how impersonal a big company can get. via Metafilter

Enron’s voice mail. No, that’s not true, but it’s pretty similar to Enron’s real voice mail at 1-703-853-6161. (And funnier, too).

Salon’s article explains how silly people can get when firing employees.

I found some interesting articles on Strategy & Business magazine. How Novell manages their reseller channel, how brick-and-mortar companies can brand on the Internet and corporate culture on the Internet.