#operationalization

[onedayimmashowallubitches]

Born to be a poet forced to believe in science

[notbecauseofvictories]

as much as I love history and Chicago history especially, I do sometimes forget how recent everything here is. I was at the Hull House Museum with a friend of mine the other day, and we had a wonderful time listening to the curator talk about the birth of social work, the women who drove it forward, and the ghost stories that haunt their stomping grounds despite no one really dying there.

As we were walking around after the tour, my friend pointed out that Jane Addams' dress (the one on display in that room, black and small and otherwise unremarkable) had an uneven hem. "Oh, good eye!" the curator, who was walking alongside us, exclaimed. "Addams' tuberculosis left her with some spinal curvature, even after corrective surgery. She had most of her dresses altered to ensure the hem would be straight when she wore them---but on a standard dress form, the hem looks uneven."

"I always forget that having a tailor or dressmaker was considered typical back then," I said.

"No, by that point it was much more common to buy a dress from Sears and have it altered," the curator replied cheerfully. "That's what Addams did."

The whole exchange was maybe a few seconds, but it sticks with me even now. The idea that Jane Addams bought a dress from Sears---where I have also bought dresses, where my mother bought dresses---makes me feel insane. And yet, we're only talking about a hundred years ago or so. Is it so unreasonable that I, as a disaffected teen, was drifting through racks of mass-produced garments, just as Jane Addams did a century before? The exact location of the hands making those garments has changed of course; the workers' protections that Addams' contemporaries fought for have resulted in offshoring that work to less-guarded parts of the world. But it gives me a strange sort of fellow feeling to think about it, all these many decades later.

[calcichel]

Looking for some insights from the aro community...

If you're an aromantic person who is not in a romantic relationship but who feels like they are abundantly (or at least sufficiently) loved... can you talk a little bit about what your situation is, and how you found the people you did? It would really help me to hear some happy stories right now...

[hypokeimena]

recently (re)discovered that the iocane powder scene in the princess bride is an unimaginably huge ocd trigger for me, BUT

because i first watched this movie while i was still altricial and was regularly re-exposed to it throughout my development. this actually means i'm unbelievably powerful at dealing with this one, specific trigger.

[eirianerisdar]

Williams, what the hell happened after monaco?

I was asleep when you sent this because quali was at 4AM for me but I have to admit the engine cover flying off Alex's car wasn't what I expected

They also messed up operationally in spacing both Alex and Carlos' Q1 runs so their first run wasn't optimised even if there wasn't a red flag for the engine cover debris

Carlos has said before that the team needs to do better with operations because they can't afford a lower perfection rate when racing throws unlucky moments at you like the impeding. Williams can't afford operational mistakes because the car is usually fighting for the last 3 points positions if everything from driver to operations is optimised. A mistake on either end from team or driver takes them out of that point window.

[roscvcins]

lifted the blogwide nsfw ban and rewrote those rules on this fine sunday

[compacflt]

Hello, me again back with another question about the US Navy that I can't find an answer to online so I'm turning to the only source I can think of that may help. And yet again I know you say your knowledge of the US military isn't as deep as it seems but it's better than mine considering I'm not from the US, I just wanted to know how officers get off aircraft carriers? It seems like a very basic question but I'm just wondering about if in Top Gun Maverick the carrier they were on was in port and they took it to wherever the Dagger mission takes place, or they got taken to the ship if it was already at sea? If so, how would they get there? If there was an emergency, say a family member was dying, they were in the middle of the ocean and got emergency leave approved, how would they get to land? Would the ship have to port at the nearest US Naval Base? Or would you have to land on the carrier somehow? This has been on my mind for a while so any help would be greatly appreciated, your blog really adds a realistic layer to Top Gun that is refreshing

navy logistics is some of the most interesting stuff in the world. especially World War II navy logistics (the infamous ice cream barge!!!). But even today how equipment & rations & personnel (and MAIL!!!) make it on/off boats is SO fascinating & takes ungodly amounts of coordination. take a look at this video posted by the uss gerald ford (CVN 78) a couple days ago.

those are sh-60s (Sea hawks—navy black hawk variant) dropping palletized goods from a cargo ship onto the flight deck of the carrier. Including sailors’ mail, overseas goods, food etc. just awesome stuff.

in terms of officers getting on/off ships, yeah you could do it a few ways. Number one would be when the boat makes a port call. Fun fact, It used to be a huge time-honored tradition for crews to make “cruise jackets” with the names of every place your ship/carrier had stopped. not too sure if it’s still done but it was a big thing after wwii. both mav and ice would probably have them.

port calls would be when crewmen and officers especially could leave the boat & party it up on dry land. so you get the stereotype of navy officers cheating on their wives with foreign women in “foreign ports of call.”

number two, if it’s a high ranking officer like the carrier strike/battle group commander (typically a RDML) who needs for some reason to leave the carrier at the center of the CS/BG formation & go to another ship, yeah you just send over a chopper like an SH-60 to go pick them up and ferry them to wherever they need to go. when I wrote ice (RADM) as deputy Cdr of third fleet (four carriers) that might be one way he’d get around the fleet. (But also not 100% sure he’d even be at sea. That was kind of just for plot/emotional reasons to separate him from mav.) but so like.. if the fleet commander/deputy cdr had a family emergency (say: found out that Carole is gonna die soon) and he got cleared to leave, he could hop on a helicopter in range (SH-60 has a range of about 400 mi for instance—the similar USCG HH-60 jayhawk, which was canonically what picked up mav & brought him back to base after he blew up the darkstar, has a range of 800 mi; if not in range he’d have to move his carrier closer [wouldn’t happen, he would be SOL]) which would take him to the nearest allied airfield with a plane to fly home. Which is what happened in my fic. lots of hurdles to clear. it’s very inconvenient & obviously not encouraged.

here is a relevant section from my wips.

for the mission in Top gun: maverick, obviously we don’t know for sure where the mission takes place, but it’s clearly somewhere in the northern INDOPAC region close to the ocean in specifically third fleet’s AOR (area of responsibility). (the list of reasons I chose southeast Russia to be the enemy location in my fic is soooo unbelievably long.) the navy would have a carrier strike group in the region for some time before. then it would make the most expeditious sense for the aircrews (mav, rooster et al) to be flown in from SoCal to somewhere closer, like a navy/air force base in Japan or South Korea, before they get transferred either by land (walk onto the carrier) or by air (chopper pick-up). given the time constraints of the mission I’m going with chopper. Carriers are fast… like really fast by boat standards… but not “travel across the Pacific Ocean in a day” fast. and not “waste time for a port call pick-up” fast.

also (random piece of nautical knowledge I know for some reason) there are some (possibly non-military) reasons why you’d do a personnel transfer by sea. take cruise ships for instance. When they pull into a port, there’s a whole guy whose job it is to take over for the captain to steer the boat into the port they presumably know very well. so this is actually how local cruise ship pilots get onto cruise ships. disney cruises included.

sketchy as fuck. I’m not sure if there’s a similar concept for aircraft carriers when they pull into unfamiliar ports… but I wouldn’t be surprised. however that’s for the captain of the boat. I would be shocked if high-ranking managerial officers ever needed to embark & disembark like this. but i just think it’s kind of funny.

[askagamedev]

I've played plenty of games in my life with high skill ceilings, but every once in a while when I play the first hour of a game I'll stop and gawk knowing I'm performing well below what the game can ultimately allow. It's intimidating/discouraging sometimes! What do you think might lead to that? As opposed to the plenty of other games where it feels much easier to slowly practice into competency?

It's mentally discouraging if you can't see a path to get to your goal from where you currently are. Much of human growth as we grow and mature is learning how to "operationalize" - how to break down large seemingly-impossible tasks into smaller, doable tasks. For a small child that might be learning that "clean your room" actually means "put your toys in the toy chest, put your shirts in this drawer, put your pants in this drawer, and make your bed". Before understanding that breakdown, "clean your room" might be an impossible task for the child.

Similarly with games, it can be incredibly daunting to see a huge gap in game skill and/or performance because you haven't yet learned how to operationalize the tasks needed to perform at that level yet. Depending on how much grit (the "not giving up" quality) the player has, that can either be the end of it or it can be the point of catharsis for the player to figure out how to get to where she wants to be. As we learn these skills and figure out how they fit and work together, the overall goal should become more and more practically achievable. As designers, we generally try to avoid creating experiences where skill gaps are shown so visibly for just that reason - we don't want players to give up before things get fun - but there's also that tradeoff of players wanting to see just how cool and awesome a thing can be at its highest potential.

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[specialagentartemis]

GPS’s need a setting for “I KNOW how to get there I just need you to tell me where to turn.”

[notarealwelder]

(too pithy and probably incorrect about it)

One thing LLMs are not good at — not sure if getting any better, honestly — is gear-level models. Having a model at all; being able to articulate it; applying it to a situation and looking at discrepancies; having ~well-defined uncertainty; updating.

(or maybe i just can't prompt them to do that. not being a power llm user, can't speak with authority really.)

As a consequence, they are dog shit at structure-preserving morphisms. You can't transform a structure precisely enough to meaningfully reflect the original if you can't.... catch the boundaries of what's important or not? Can't check whether your correspondences of internals/pieces of 2 things are adequate if you don't, really, work with internals? If you don't or can't think of a thing as made out of pieces and nothing else? If your mental processes can't....check...whether an a : b :: c : d pattern is valid by looking at the structure/properties of abcd?

And therefore, they suck at writing, writing being at least 30% about structure-preserving morphisms.

[girderednerve]

listening to my partner's mandatory HR class readings about performance assessments & like. this is such a mean-spirited way to think about other human beings. but also, it's stupid as hell

[noisytenant]

did makeup and i kind of ended up looking like i was going to a taylor swift concert but it's not uncute. it's just unusual

[uraandri]

i thought i was gonna be bored to tears but then i got introduced to operationalism and this incredible sentence

''there is no stupidy more widespread whitin sociology than the idea that we have to define, describe or ''know'' what we're measuring in order to be able to measure it''