You criticize the initiative because you judge it doesn't have impact on the product or business. I would challenge the assumption with the claim that a sense of acconplishment, of decision-making and of completion are strong retention and productivity enhancers. Therefore, they're absolutely, albeit indirectly, impacting product and business.
Any kind of documentation has a target audience. Your test is very valuable if and only if the target audience is a total beginner. Of course it's still very hard to write good documentation even if you have identified your target, but having someone totally illiterate on the subject matter review your documentation is as useful as if I'd have to review a PhD thesis in quantum physics. It just doesn't make sense (trust me :).
Writing documentation is hard. Start with: Who am I writing this for?
edit: I may have misunderstood OP's "with minimal expertise" for "total beginner". They're two different things, absolutely.
For most public documentation, you don't get to pick your audience. You think you'll have people with certain experience, but then it turns out you're wrong. Usually a lot of the time. And even when you're not wrong, having the steps essentially from scratch listed out reduces the number of times people get stuck, because they think about things they may have missed.
I cannot tell you how many times I've had to go through 30 hyperlinked pages of fluff explaining universal basic concepts before finding the five sentences I actually needed (buried in five different places).
And just as many where people explain in detail exactly how to do foo with bar without explaining why I would want to do foo in the first place and what a bar even is.
Way too much documentation is like this. Then again, lots of times asking coworkers about an existing system or a new ticket that's not detailed properly ends up with them saying 30 pages of fluff to me before I can get to the nugget
As much as I'm not an AI booster, it has helped a lot when I hit a wall with poorly done documentation where the related bits I need are scattered all over and even a text search isn't helping me
I was gonna write something similar. Know the audience. I've also come to the conclusion that "total beginners" (and certainly "minimal expertisers") didn't nowhere to read the docs anyway so it didn't matter.
In other words, people who are used to reading docs can read (good) docs just fine.
Yes, of course, good docs are a must. They are critical to success. But not all docs have to explain how to use a right-mouse button.
Perhaps in addition to a description of the expected audience, it might be an idea to list some assumptions made about the reader? e.g. has installed software previously, confident with bash commands, &c
I almost systematically use BLUF (Bottom Line Up-front) when I write docs, I think I'll make TABLUF a thing from now on (Target Audience and Bottom Line Upfront) :)
The experts are likely to be skimming and interpolating your doc, so they'll get through it but you won't know why. You won't know if your doc works, or if it even addresses the subject matter. This is also true of academic papers.
My mom taught CS in the 1980s, and told her students on day one: "Computers are stupid, they will only do exactly what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do." Program code is, in a sense, a tutorial for an utter beginner. The benefit of coding is that you can do the "beginner test" over and over without wasting anybody's time, so you know that the computer will get through it. But an expert (including yourself) might read that code and never see that it does or doesn't work.
Distillation, when done improperly, can result in very toxic substances. It requires care and craft and since alcohol is not only a drug but a transformed product (like LSD or meth), it is perfectly fine that some state-level supervision apply: anything ranging from plain interdiction to controlled production. Note that the level of control usually depends on potential health issues and culture, it is not usually strictly bound to the product itself, since we can observe variations from region to region.
By that logic it would be acceptable for the state to regulate all sorts of common culinary techniques. Note that those are regulated in a commercial setting. I'd have no objection to similar regulations pertaining to restaurants that wanted to serve alcohol that was distilled, brewed, or otherwise prepared on site. In that context it's equivalent to the regulations pertaining to the handling of raw meat.
Similarly, perhaps the state ought to regulate the use of refrigerators in a residential setting since various failure modes there can easily land you in the hospital.
Enough people have contracted botulism poisoning by storing chopped garlic under oil in their fridge that the FDA has a warning about it on their website. So I suppose that would also be acceptable to regulate? Or perhaps just cooking oil in general? After all, it's quite flammable and people commonly start house fires when frying things.
While we're at it, perhaps canning things at home ought to require a permit?
The standard that "thing could pose a hazard therefore regulation is acceptable" is far too broad a criteria as it applies to approximately everything that exists and entirely disregards individual freedoms.
> It requires care and craft
A fine whiskey? Sure. The equivalent of vodka? Don't be ridiculous.
> alcohol is not only a drug but a transformed product
It most certainly is not. Distillation concentrates something that is already there.
Alternatively, fried eggs are a transformed product but at that point the term as used is so absurdly broad as to be rendered entirely useless.
> A fine whiskey? Sure. The equivalent of vodka? Don't be ridiculous.
Given the variability of quality and flavor among vodkas, this is not quite true. Water mineralization, number of distillations, type of filtration, terroir and remaining "impurities" from the specific mash used. All of these affect the character of the vodka just as they do any spirit. That's why no one takes vodka distilled a million times seriously, if you can even call it vodka.
(And that excludes things like barrel-aged vodkas, like the venerable starka, or a well-made bimber which cannot be accused of lacking character.)
The pure process of Distillation does the concentration of something that is already there. But is it always pure when amateurs do it? Can you guarrantee that nothing goes wrong, that the product is tested for contaminations every time?
Do you swab your pan fried chicken and culture to test for salmonella after cooking it? Or do you just follow the recipe and basic food safety guidelines? Perhaps you judge doneness by a combination of fillet thickness and cook time? Or perhaps you go to the trouble of using a digital thermometer just to be safe?
Yes. Arguably, because amateurs are not cost bound, they tend to make a less "containinated" product due to the way the collection and blending works.
You discard the foul flavors and harse volatiles that commercial folks keep for cost.
>Can you guarrantee that nothing goes wrong, that the product is tested for contaminations every time?
Life isn't about that kind of guarantee. You don't practice the same level of food safety at home as you're required to maintain in a professional environment.
People frequently get blind or just die from home made booze when distilling and not checking for methyl alcohol. Quite common on poor parts of the world but also ie eastern Europe and russia.
Misinformation. Unless you happen to own a GCMS you don't check for methanol. Rather you discard the heads and the tails from a fractioning still because that's where stuff that isn't ethanol comes out. In the modern era you'd use a digital thermometer for this task.
Someone suffering methanol poisoning from DIY distillation is equivalent to someone landing in the hospital after failing to cook his chicken all the way through. It's simple incompetence, likely due either to blatant disregard for safety or else to attempting to wing something based on only the most topical of knowledge.
Isn't the remedy for methanol ingestion... Ethanol? Just keep drinking?
I have two distillers and I've never distilled alcohol. I do distill water in my eletric one. I turn it on and leave the condenser part off until bubbles form, I blow the steam off to ensure it steams again, place the top on, set the timer for 3 hours and shut it off then. The pre-boil ostensibly let's the petroleum and the like escape, and the stopping before dry prevents anything with a higher phase temp than water from distilling.
I use it for coffee machine, kettle, and ice machine, just to cut down on maintenance.
Ten years ago I bought 3 copper five gallon distillers, and gave two to my in-laws and kept one for myself. I tried to distill water in it but it was not coming out clean, so I packed it away till I had time to use it outside on a propane burner after purging it with alcohol or some non-copper eating acid.
> Rather you discard the heads and the tails from a fractioning still because that's where stuff that isn't ethanol comes out.
This is also incorrect. It comes out throughout the distillation process, with a higher % concentration in the tails, but an over all reduced volume due to lower % distillate.
> Someone suffering methanol poisoning from DIY distillation is equivalent to someone landing in the hospital after failing to cook his chicken all the way through.
It's more like taking raw packs of chicken and rubbing your eyes. That has to be intentional.
This gets repeated a lot but doesn't actually stand up to any scrutiny.
If you go and look, you will find that cases of blindness are caused not by "improper" distillation, but rather by the adulteration of the finished product- that is, extra methanol being added after the fact.
If you can find a verifiable case of a person going blind from home distillation, I would be interested to see it.
I would disagree, but on,y considering I think this is not the right prompt to test against. Hence not the right question.
While you're asking to find creative ways to get rid of the player, I think what LLMs are unable to do (at this point?) is to come up with the idea of an aging mirror, let it sit for a while and only then get back to it when they met its attached character.
The dungeon master did not follow a track of events but rather picked interesting somewhat random contents and moments from the campaign and picked them up to create new story lines.
That doesn't seem like something an LLM would do easily.
Its not something an LLM would do with simple chatGPT type prompts, but it's something I can imagine building an agentic system to do. It's not trivial but seems feasible with current day LLMs.
If you design the system to have this exact quality (among many others), where clues are dropped earlier in the quest line for later quests. It's a matter of breaking up the prompts and iteratively refining the outputs.
Who in 2025 does NOT see the "tsunami of burnout"? It seems to me that everybody is talking about it since at least the stabilization (not "end") of the COVID pandemic.
I've only skimmed through the article, so apologies if I missed some important bit of info.
Employers generally refuse to openly discuss it with anyone who isn’t a retention risk, which made interviews unattended very weird when I would give perfectly honest answers to the candidate about “why is this position open?” (a question that most candidates don’t ask because they’re desperate for employment).
The anecdote doesn't strike me because your friend the pastor said it, but because it's a rule as old as times that every high-schooler was taught.
- The introduction should announce the thesis and its development
- walk your way towards your thesis
- The conclusion should summarize your thesis (and hint at openings towards new grounds)
But somehow, everyone seems to forget it and is in awe whenever someone recaps it.
And every high schooler, TedX speaker, and Malcom Gladwell impersonator gets this wrong: It only works if intro and conclusion present a different view on the information, otherwise it's simply boring the audience to death.
Excellent point. I do Platform Engineering in a B2C business, our budget is very thin despite demonstrated the economy of scale provided by proper use of the platform.
