I know nothing about the reasoning behind the original decision from Synology, nor the internal politics at play, but typically the customer support tail is not wagging the dog of the rest of the company. Might be bias/anecdata from the places I've worked, but product usually drives everything, and the support staff has to deal with the consequences.
Yes, but it's not support wagging the dog,
If they sell a NAS, the customer adds drives to it and already runs into issues requiring support, it creates cost which becomes part of a product problem.
In B2C that's a legal warranty-issue in many countries, because if the product didn't provide the advertised core-functionality the customer has the right for a full refund of the purchase price (within the EU for a period of 24 months!)
Below are the three alert levels for all hazards in Australia, including tsunami:
- Advice: An incident has started. There is no immediate danger. Stay up to date in case the situation changes.
- Watch and Act: There is a heightened level of threat. Conditions are changing and you need to start taking action now to protect you and your family.
- Emergency Warning: You may be in danger and need to take action immediately. Any delay now puts your life at risk.
The scale slides up and down, but can immediately be set to Emergency Warning if the situation demands it.
They can also be further defined with 'Calls to Action':
- 'Monitor conditions'
- 'Prepare now'
- 'Seek shelter immediately'
- 'Move to higher ground immediately'
Siren systems aren't widespread across the country, though systems are popping up in some flood-prone parts of Queensland. Sirens are typically activated when the 'Emergency Warning' alert level is reached.
You're watching out for something so that you can then warn people when it is happening. An example would be someone on fire watch. If they see a fire, they warn everyone. Emergency responders like fire departments have terms like Third Watch (hence the TV show) for the crew pulling the overnight shift.
So more than considering noun/verb, the subject is key. You're watching the storm for a tornado. You're not watching the tornado.
It’s clearly easy to get them reversed evidenced by the large number of people admitting it. I too had them reversed growing up, but took until I really got into learning weather in preparations for storm chasing way back before the internet. At least until I learned how expensive it is, and life had other plans for me.
Mocking someone for not understanding something you do is not a good look, and you should really try to be more empathetic. We all didn’t know something at one point.
I reversed them on purpose to make a point, so I don't feel mocked. My point was how easy it is to mix them up. Warnings and watches are, linguistically, very similar.
Additionally, his comment was a gentle correction, not mocking. I think his empathy is fine, not sure what language you're even calling him out for.
just saying it is easy to get them reversed just shows how GP is out of touch thinking it is strange that someone would get them reversed.
also, it's just not helpful to intentionally reverse them the way you did in such a declarative manner. Grok might use that as its basis for giving out the wrong information one day
I’ve also struggled with over-analyzing where stuff should go. I’ve restarted a new Obsidian vault based on PARA [1], and am experimenting with using LLMs (both Cursor and Claude Code) to help me decide where stuff should go. Been a big help so far.
I've started seeing a number of people talk about using Claude Code for searching, writing, and organising text documents. It is an interesting trend to me. I tried it out with my non-technical girlfriend and she really liked using it for helping with analysing interview transcripts. It seems like that agentic workflow is really effective outside of coding as well.
I just hope non-technical people that pick this up also pick up version control. Or, is there a better alternative to Claude Code that can accomplish a similar thing while being more friendly to non-technical people?
F1TV had some fun with it in their usual post-race programming: Joylon Palmer (F1TV announcer) did a deadpan "breakdown" of the Lego race during his segment, and Sam Collins analyzed the aerodynamics of the Lego cars in his.
The drivers all said it was the best driver's parade they've been in. I don't know how marketing like this works, and if it was worth it for Lego in the end, but what a masterstroke. Lots of fun organic mentions of Lego over the past week because of it.
This is what I don't get. We don't have masses of unemployed people waiting in the ranks to fill a large amount of new jobs, as unlikely an outcome as that even is. Which means any large uptick in people working in manufacturing would have to come from some other industry. So what jobs would we give up for it?
Yeah, we've used CAPTCHAs to great effect as gracefully-degraded service protection for unauthenticated form submissions. When we detect that a particular form is being spammed, we automatically flip on a feature flag for it to require CAPTCHAs to submit, and the flood immediately stops. Definitely saves our databases from being pummeled, and I haven't seen a scenario since we implemented it a few years ago where the CAPTCHA didn't help immediately.
Reminds me of the advice around the deadbolt on your house - it won't stop a determined attacker, but it will deter less-determined ones.
I agree, I love the Mazda approach to this in my CX-50. I'm not even sure if the display is touchscreen or not, because I always use the wheel-clicker thingie in the console to control it.
This was an intentional design choice from Mazda, of course, that goes hand-in-hand with their philosophy of giving such control to the driver that they "[feel] oneness with the car, as if it is an extension of their body." [1]
When searching around for a quote like that, I found a HN discussion from 2019 about the Mazda decision to eliminate touchscreens. [2]
Mazda only enabled the touch on the LCD when the car was stopped. It seems that with the Gen4 models (2019 onward) they just cost-reduced the sensing circuit out of the design and nobody has really complained. Taking that layer out also reduces the spidering issue when the OCA fill rewets.
The paper calls out a few things that they didn't cover:
> The CCC+TL model predicts the age of the Universe as 26.7 Gyr against the generally accepted value of 13.8 Gyr. This is of deep concern and needs the model validation against multiple observations, including BAOs, CMB, Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), and globular cluster ages. Our focus here is on BAOs.
I am not in academia and therefore am not qualified to have strong opinions on any of this, but I do like the idea of papers not swinging for home runs all the time by explaining everything, and instead being happy with hitting a single by proposing something intriguing and asking for others to chime in.
Unfamiliar with academia here, and I can't quite figure it out from TFA - does a retraction always imply wrongdoing, instead of mere "wrongness?" Or are papers sometimes retracted for being egregiously wrong, even if their methods were not intentionally misleading?
I've certainly seen papers retracted over copyright/IP issues with images or other details. Funnily enough, this doesn't mean the article goes away, just that it gets covered with a "Retracted" watermark.
Retractions are primarily associated with wrongdoing, but are sometimes also issued for "honest mistakes". If so it's typically with a very clear explanation, like in the link below.
Also, in biomedical research papers can get retracted if they can't show the subjects consented to have their samples (e.g. removed tumors) used in research even if the science itself is sound.
Not being familiar with her, that isn't telling me anything.
It seems like you're implying she's written exceptionally shoddy papers.
But on the other hand she could also just be exceptionally honest -- one of the very few researchers to retract papers later on when they realize they weren't accurate, as opposed to the 99+% of researchers that wouldn't bother.
Also I would imagine that retraction rates might vary tremendously among fields and subfields. Imagine if a whole subfield had all its results based on a scientific technique believed to be accurate, and then the technique was discovered to be flawed? But the retractions wouldn't have anything to do with honesty or quality of the researchers.
Having been in academia, having felt the pressure, knowing reproduction is not sexy and takes time away from "actual experiments", knowing some theories or groups have cult-like status, knowing that not having papers means not getting a PhD, despite working hard, being smart, knowing that this is (experienced as) very unfair, etc... I'm very sure that 4 in 10.000 is the tip of the iceberg.
We need more reproduction. Or have some rule: Check all assumptions. Yes, it's a lot of work, but man will it save a lot of fake stuff from getting out there and causing a lot of useless work.
Having considered it I reckon it could be due to some systemic abuse of the process. Or it could be that she is working in a field where there is a high uncertainty rate.
Why don't you explicitly state which you think it is?
No, many honest researchers retract their own papers because they found a problem that cannot be solved by publishing a correction/errata (a kind of mini publication that corrects the original work).
It is extremely bad to use number of retracted papers as a judging factor for a researcher. Using the number of retracted papers because of fraud (fabrication of images, data, stealing work, plagiarism...). Self plagiarism is a slightly different case with a much broader grey area.
I actually retracted one of my papers. It was before it was published, but after I had submitted it. I had discovered a flaw in my methodology the night before that did have material impact on the results. I was so stressed out for 24 hours until I spoke to my advisor.
My advisor was very chill about it. He said that retractions aren't a big deal and was glad I spotted the issue sooner rather than later.
I corrected the experimental methodology and while the results weren't quite as good, they were still quite good and I got published with the correct results.
> I corrected the experimental methodology and while the results weren't quite as good, they were still quite good and I got published with the correct results.
I disagree. Your new results were much better, because they were sound.
The article said there was no finding that the primary author did anything wrong but that the original photos were no longer available so the paper could not be corrected.
NOTE: I DON'T FOLLOW THIS WORK CLOSELY: I am not sure that there are any successful programs using pluripotent somatic (adult) stem cells, if they even really exist, though there's lot of successful work with differentiated stem cells. So I think there's an unstated subtext as you surmise.
This paper was very important and eagerly received because the GW Bush administration had banned federal funding for research using foetal stem cells as a sop to the religious right (all that work moved to sg and cn, and continued in Europe).
If wrongdoing is the same as intentional deceit, I would guess there are some that were not intentional, but instead driven by incompetence or simple mistakes.
Fraudulent/doctored images don't fall in to the incompetence/mistake category though.
Some types of mistakes/incompetence: improperly applied statistics, poor experiment design, faulty logic, mistakes in data collection.
Okay, I can answer this. Papers are never retracted for theory proven wrong and they are always retracted when wrong-doing is found. This is why the high level research stuff always has researchers recording their data and notes. Before computers, my exp early 1990s, We had to record everything in a notebook and sign it.
That statement is wrong. Papers do get retracted because a major innocent error is found. This often happens at the request of the author (typically with an explanation from the authors). . See the comment a bit further up for an example.
There's a difference between "theory proven wrong" and "proof being wrong". A finding that Theory A is wrong is still a valid finding. A wrong finding about Theory A is just a lie, it carries no value, and should thus be retracted.
In practice, wrong findings that aren't due to misconduct and aren't very recent are usually not retracted though. It's just considered part of the history of science that some old papers have proofs or results now known to be false. It is pretty common in mathematics, for example, for people to discover (and publish) errors they found in old proofs, without the journal going back and retracting the old proof. A famous example is Hilbert's (incorrect) sketch of a proof for the continuum hypothesis [1].
I have a friend who got their paper retracted, because it turns out they had made a big mistake in implementing an algorithm -- so big that after fixing it, the results entirely disappeared.
In that case, the retraction isn't didn't really get any publicity, and I'm actually proud of them for doing it, as many people wouldn't bother.
However, in practice I would say the majority of retractions are for wrongdoing on the part of the authors.
I wish, particularly in the case of the modern internet, that it was easier for authors to attach extras to old papers -- I have old papers where I would like to say "there is a typo in Table 2.3", and most journals have basically no way of doing this. I'm not retracting the paper over that of course! This is one advantage of arXiv, you can upload small fixes.
> Or are papers sometimes retracted for being egregiously wrong, even if their methods were not intentionally misleading?
There could be a mistake the authors made which led to a wrong interpretation. Like, someone might write another article commenting on that mistake and wrong conclusions. But that wouldn’t be a reason for retraction. Something should be incredibly wrong for authors or journal to do that. Retractions due to fraud are much more common.
Academic research rarely (if ever) cares about "intentions" of the authors. I'd say papers are exclusively retracted for being "egregiously wrong" (or at least not trustworthy), and never for any "wrongdoing". The wrongdoing just happens to be a pretty good indicator that the conclusions probably aren't trustworthy.
The entire home-buying process (in the US, at least) seems to be built on shady-looking ways to nickel and dime people. I remember telling friends when going through it that it'd be easy to scam me because I got so used to urgent requests to pay some fee for inspections or legal stuff or whatever that I'd just shell out the money without asking questions.
It's got nothing on medical billing. Seemingly random bills from entities you may never have heard of showing up months later even when you paid a shitload (thousands) up-front.
[EDIT] Oh and they may not put enough info on the bill to figure out WTF it's even for, without calling them. It'll have some uselessly-generic single-line item for what was probably multiple things, but you'll have to spend an hour on hold to find out what you're supposed to be paying for.
