As a linguist, I really appreciate reading/hearing people write/speak in a non-Native language, as the constructions are really interesting, and while I don't intend to laugh at anyone, sometimes amusing:
> Perhaps I am the one who possesses the face image of the most boss in the world. I must have it more than his parents.
This is from a Japanese-speaking person most likely. Besides the small note with two Japanese characters (ヽ(‘ ∇‘ )ノ ﾜｰｲ”), you can see some strings it in the screenshot.
I've been learning Japanese and studied in Japan for a while and it is fascinating to see this:
> When you are working, you have browsed information that is not relevant to your work, haven’t you?
I don't know enough Japanese to translate half of it, but that kind of negative question termination is really characteristic from the language: "masenka?" (ませんか？) or even "sou desuka?" (そうですか？) as a reply.
The interesting thing is that you can see the progress depending on the English level of the person, as Japanese people who are more fluent in English will first translate it into "right?". Even more fluent people will leave the sentence open-ended like it's missing something as they realize it's not so natural in English but still haven't totally switched over.
Note: I'm Spanish and it's also funny to catch myself saying some of these different things as well.
> This is from a Japanese-speaking person most likely.
More things pointing to this being a Japanese blog:
"aho" in "Ahogrammar", the name of the blog, is Japanese for stupid/silly.
The wordpress theme is setup to write dates in Japanese.
The default "Hello World" post from the wordpress installation has been left intact and is in Japanese.
He links to his Github, where he registered himself under a Japanese name and as living in Tokyo, as well as published code for a Japanese chatbot that can search for restaurants [1].
What fascinates me is watching the communication of concepts shift in different languages - watching people map the concept from one language to another as they translate the concept. And then sometimes a concept might have a dedicated word or means of expression, meaning the translation is asymmetric in length.
In a way, it's like porting a program, from one language which supports ternary operations, to a language that does not have ternary operations - and having to manually write out the ternary operation as an if-then-else statement.
I've had some really laughable times in Thailand in regard to this. Google Translate is really horrible at Thai <-> English, where both English and Thai speakers are left in confusion and usually laughter. Some examples: someone was telling me about the fresh mountain air, Google Translate showed 'drug scene' (I asked them for clarification and no, they weren't talking about drugs); another idiom which I didn't find out what it means, but 'eye twitching' was what Google Translate was giving, though the person didn't really mean their eye was twitching..
I find it exciting to figure out someone's native language, or to understand the phrase in the original language before translation.
A Spaniard asked me once to give me the "carpet", which made no sense in the context. He meant to say "file folder" ("la carpeta" in Spanish), hoping the Normans had brought the equivalent French word to England and save him a lookup in the dictionary.
Ok, that was really weird. I'm a native English speaker, although I learnt German a few years ago and haven't used it since. I must have woken up in a German mood or something.
Well, with the "å"[1] it is :). Also in Swedish, I think?
Danish has "sprog" which sounds a lot funnier if you say it "in English". In Danish it sounds quite similar to språk -- just soften everything until it turns into a mush of vowels.
[1] For people not versed in Scandiwegian, there's this tradition of "å" -> "aa", "æ" -> "ae", "ø/ö" -> "oe" from the olden days... which is surprisingly useful even in these days of (one would hope) "pervasive" Unicode. :)
It's common to write aa as å when it's not available (though I only assumed it wouldn't work in HN, maybe it does). Also historically it was aa and became å
I share you fascination ... I had a colleague with whom I had to work with closely who spoke much the same way. Novel sentence construction aside, it caused a lot of weird misunderstandings constantly. I found it difficult to fix meaning and predict how she might interpret something by her feedback.
(1) This is a clever implementation. Maybe with a mobile camera it can be even more convenient to use?
(2) True knowledge work requires breaks, and can not be measured with simple metrics like "boss watch what on screen" or "lines of code"
(3) Even true knowledge workers can get into a non productive youtube loop, and sometimes external influence helps to prevent procrastination
(4) If your relationship with the boss is based on these types of system, you better look for another place where you are respected 360 for your contribution
(5) We should respect people that can not easily find interesting work or bosses that respect you
(6) Communication, context and respect are always better than authority, hierarchy, and politics. Alas, humans can be very good at both
Couldn't you use face recognition and skip the deep learning part.
I was playing with the Sonos Python API and I found one where if the camera spotted an office worker it played their theme music.
It used some face recognition API.
But good work nonetheless
i remember many old-school DOS games featured a "boss key". with a single key-press, the screen would instantly hide the game and show some innocuous "business app" instead.
Heh, one time the boss walked back into the lab, looked at one of my workmates computers and said "Ah, I see you're running lookbusy" (for the younger amongst us, lookbusy was a program that would intercept a hot key and display a fake Lotus 123 spreadsheet on your screen)
Changing what's on your screen won't help much when your boss has access to your internet logs, and potentially remote access to your computer... (Yes, these are both still things in startups today)
I don't think people realize how sophisticated network security software is and how easy it is use. There is a good chance you're being watched and what you do is in a weekly or monthly report. Certain things you do send a notification to admins or your boss.
Indeed. My company has Remote Desktop/SSH logging systems and I've been trying to get audit reports for my team. Basically reports to see when security/IT infra is reviewing this material but hasn't been going anywhere. I'm sure they like watching but don't like being watched themselves.
Recently they turned on blocks for a large number of sites like box, dropbox, google drive, slideshare, youtube, sourceforge, .... Someone might share company IP on the internet so lock it down. I think its just blind application of default rules but I've had no luck in getting even more reasonable stuff like sourceforge reversed yet. I'm worried it will be bitbucket and github next because they can be used to share files who needs that right?
I always have an ssh tunnel toward squid running on my scaleway server (3.6€ per month). The portable version of firefox allows me to avoid the enterprise policy that prohibit customizing proxy in chrome.
Depending on how serious your company is about network security, it's entirely possible they MITM all secure connections. Especially something really suspicious like a persistent SSH tunnel to a scaleway server.
I don't even understand why you'd go through all the effort. It's a silly position to put yourself in. If the IT policy bothers you that much, talk to somebody about changing it or find another job.
In the situation where you're using work equipment this is really not a good idea. In a former life I was looking into users that were behaving 'oddly' to see if we needed to talk to their manager or our legal team.
Routing all your traffic to a server in Online.net's network? At best I'm assuming you're pirating stuff.
I hate the idea of my boss looking at my screen. I'll browse reddit or watch YouTube videos or check on my sports team whenever I want. If you have a problem with my productivity, let's talk about it. Otherwise, respect my fucking privacy. I'm an adult and a professional.
To be fair, and I'm speaking as an outsider here since I'm relatively young and haven't had any experience in your industry, employees are paid per hour, which means that your firm has bought your time for that hour. You can't really use that time to do your own stuff.
That's just the way I see it. Someone correct me if I'm wrong and this sort of thing is normal.
True if you are packing peanuts, but in reality there is so much downtime that you often don't have job responsibilities 100% of the time.
If you doing creative work or any work that requires thinking you also need mental breaks.
Reddit and YouTube also have plenty of work related material.
And lastly most people in the tech sector are not hourly employees we have global contracts where they are legal for a reason; if I'm staying an extra hour or opening my laptop over the weekend because that's when I got some inspiration or finally cam up with a solution I see no problem if I want to read the news for 15 min at 10am in the morning.
Lots of people, especially in engineering and similar professions, are salaried. We are paid weekly to accomplish whatever amount of work our boss expects of us that week. That doesn't necessarily mean any specific number of hours, or that the work be done continuously without breaks.
The trade off of course is that sometimes the work takes more than the nominal 40 hours, or has to be done at odd hours, and you don't get paid more for that.
You pay hundreds per month for your car, why do you let it sit unused in your driveway most of the time? (Hint: You're paying for it to be available the instant you need it).
People even get paid for "on call" hours where they're sitting at home watching TV.
If you're the kind of manager that employees constantly feel the need to "look busy" around, you're probably getting less real work out of them, not more.
Your employer wants to get best value for their money.
Some bad employers think this means arse-on-chair for that hour. They may go as far to time loo breaks.
Some better employers recognise that employees, and thus the work they produce benefit from some flexibility.
But, I think obviously, employers can't allow completely free use of their computer network. They need to defend against malware and they need to protect their data. They also need to stop people watching porn in open plan offices.
If you are employing someone who is watching porn in an open plan office the problem isn't with your internet filtering system. It is with your employee so just fire them! If someone is dumb enough to think watching porn in the office is a "good idea" then they are too dumb to be working for you. Just my 2c.
I caught a group of employees watching porn in an open plan office. I told them to be more careful and dismissed them. I was at that time only an intern anyway.
Coding isn't that type of job. Very few people can concentrate on coding problems uninterrupted from 9am until 5pm and it's usually very unproductive to try. Any boss that expects that is unrealistic. Most of the time when I'm up against a difficult problem the time I get most breakthroughs is on lunch or a loo break. Sometimes you need to lose focus to gain inspiration. Coding isn't just about numbers, it's creative problem solving.
We're also an industry of constant learning. Although I can't really say HN is a learning material I'd be willing to try to justify to my boss, staying connected and up to date on the latest happenings has gotten me out of several jams in work.
That's how the company would like to see it, I agree. I don't understand however why you'd throw your own life under the bus. You're arguing like a gazelle saying "we shouldn't run from the lions, they're hunting us because they're hungry and want to eat us". The only ones who stand to gain from such behaviour are the lions themselves. That's what puzzles me each time I see an argument like that from someone who isn't a C-level person that directly benefits from the labour of those he/she employs. You stand to gain nothing from such treatment - your life won't improve, your salary won't improve, your benefits won't improve, you'll just have to work harder. The corporation already works under the assumption that every single millisecond you spend on-premises produces value for them to exploit. Your best self-interest is in minimizing the control the corporation has over your life, while maximizing the appearance of doing useful work. That's just business. On the morality side of it, you do have an obligation towards the actual users and clients, so you should try to actually do your job and make things better for them. I just don't understand why you'd feel a moral obligation towards a non-human business entity.
You can't program from second 1, you need to concentrate and sometimes there are problems. Doing something else and then returning to where you left actually helps in doing it different/better
I agree. I was contributing to a project on GitHub and after trying continuosly for two days I was stuck. I then came back to the issue after a week and fixed it almost instantly. It was just a stupid mistake that slipped my mind the first few times around.
I'm still relatively young but I think people (bosses) quickly forget that line that the company bought your work hours. Your performance on tasks is what matters in long term.
Haha oh you are so cute! Respect and trust your employees???? Whatever will you say next!?
But seriously I agree with you 100%. In my experience if a manager is one of those time-nazi types then they are more than likely the biggest waste of time and money for the company themselves and they just want to deflect attention.
Companies that want to treat employees like children should expect their employees to then act like children. Want an adult? Fucking treat them like one.
I'm fine with my boss seeing what's on my screen because he has no expectation that it will be my editor 100% of the time. He doesn't go out of his way to look, but our desks are also positioned such that he's going to see it when he's going to his desk.
I agree entirely. I wouldn't even dream of caring that someone seen I was looking at HN or Reddit. If the boss is that much of a nob, then I would just go out my way to make his life as difficult as I possibly could in a snide way while I searched for a new role.
When I worked at a thankless "startup", I set up a Pi Camera pointed out of the window from my desk that was next to the window. It was setup to take a picture every five minutes of the trees whilst the office was closed.
One of my colleagues took exception to this when he came in about ten minutes earlier than I (not that he could tell it was using the camera, or even what it was doing) that he thought it a great idea to rip the camera out of the pi by the ribbon and pull the SD card out when it was on.
When I discovered the smashed up pi in the morning, I asked who broke my pi and explained that I was capturing a time lapse of the window. He told me I should have asked permission before recording people in the office.
My initial reaction was to have a go at him, tell him he was responsible for any costs, tell him that he was overreacting and that he is in a room with literally 45 laptop cameras pointing at him daily, but he remained resolute that he was in the right and I was some kind of perv.
The only image my pi camera captured that wasn't the window was a single frame of his angry face as he ripped apart the delicate ribbons and wires plugged into the pi.
That job was pretty bad in most respects, and I finally got out of it to go contract professionally, but there are a few bad memories that linger.
This reminds me of a 'boss proximity meter' that we made while in college. Now; this was the early days of when Bluetooth started to appear on mobile phones. What we did as interns was to have a SW on desktop that alerted you when bosses Bluetooth enabled phone started to approach your cubicle. That was a lot of fun! And mostly of novelty value of course! And I did learn a thing or too about BT in the process... :)
While this is a fun project, the ultimate conclusion here should be: if you feel uncomfortable in you job or browsing the internet near your boss, it's time to move to a different job. I understand this is not a privilege possible by everyone, those that can should exercise it.
Any decent face recognition library would have done the job. But i guess the intention was to learn DL, and use it also as a marketing tool. Well done and really good presentation.
I can deal with not having doors, but that call-center-meets-assembly-line layout with seats intended to be filled by engineers actually gave me the chills to learn that they really do exist.
I supposed the application wouldn't do me any good: working at a place like that, I'd sooner fire myself!
A door isn't that helpful when everyone can just ping you on Slack anyway. And it's not like you can close the app for a while, because then people think you're unresponsive and unhelpful. Especially when 1/3 of your team is remote.
But I can mentally snooze a Slack notification for three minutes or so, enough to neatly tuck away everything in my head and reach a state where I can more easily resume what I was doing. That doesn't work as well when I have someone breathing down my neck who "just wants a really quick word".
Am I the only one who thinks, gee, can't we just do actual work at the place we are being paid to "work" and not goof off needing something like this?
I get it, people need downtime every now and then. How about doing something that's different, but still benefits the company?
Maybe I'm just getting old, but it really bothers me how much I see coworkers on Facebook, or worse, especially as most of them are the ones who barely put in an 8hr day.
If this bothers you and your bosses, a much more effective approach than trying to physically catch them would be to simply either block Facebook or write something that logs the amount of time people are spending on the corporate network browsing those types of sites. Tell everyone that these wasted time stats will be baked into their performance reviews.
It's more often in meetings that I see it, people on their phone randomly flicking through their Facebook feed rather than participating. My personal thought is, if you're that bored, then excuse yourself from the meeting and do something else.
"Catch" is the wrong word. That implies there's punishment. It's more a disappointment, than a retaliation. I don't want to look for the bad in folks, I want to encourage the good.
That would be true in other places I've been in the past (especially in the Valley), but whenever someone on my team is responsive outside work hours and has been working more or less as expected during office hours, I tell them to take the afternoon off or come in late. If it's a recurring thing due to a major deadline that's behind schedule, then they get extra vacation days.
Good luck defining what is "different, but still benefits the company." In particular, I'd wager there is someone that has found or done something on facebook that was worth more than a typical day of most people's work. Hell, a typical good day.
Your salary, if it's appropriate to your skill level and work output, is based on 8ish (ish due to lunch / breaks) hours a day of your level of output. If you want to do non-work related things for half the day, then obviously you shouldn't expect to be in office less than 8 hours and still be doing your part to earn the salary.
Now yes, if your job is under-paying you for your actual ability, then obviously that changes this balance. Same goes if you're constantly pulled in outside work hours to do things and still put in 8hr days (and your salary isn't factoring in those extra hours). If either of these are happening, your better bet is to find an employer who values you as more than just a cog in a wheel if you can.
I'm not arguing for the "capitalist employers side" saying work more, get paid less b/s. I'm saying engineers in general are well paid (compared to many other fields) and we shouldn't take advantage of that.
In a real world, you actually want to do this when __anyone__ is passing by. You don't want to be seen as a slacker by your boss, but you also don't want to be seen as a slacker by your colleagues.
In which case, this is actually a much easier problem to solve since all you need to do is detect any motion (instead of all this convoluted--although hilarious--deep learning task).
This is like the story where some government tried to come up with a super high-tech pen that works in the space (because regular pens don't work in zero gravity environment) when the final answer was just a pencil.
So the lesson here is: there are many ways to solve a problem, and if you don't know what problem you're trying to solve and you don't know your customer well enough, you will end up wasting a lot of resource doing something totally unnecessary. (But it was a fun blog post! Kudos for that)
> This is like the story where some government tried to come up with a super high-tech pen that works in the space (because regular pens don't work in zero gravity environment) when the final answer was just a pencil.
The debris from a broken pencil or from sharpening one is a real hazard in space. Pens that work in zero gravity were privately developed by the Fisher Pen Company and bought by both NASA and the Soviets for a very reasonable price.
"Originally, NASA astronauts, like the Soviet cosmonauts, used pencils, according to NASA historians. In fact, NASA ordered 34 mechanical pencils from Houston's Tycam Engineering Manufacturing, Inc., in 1965. They paid $4,382.50 or $128.89 per pencil. When these prices became public, there was an outcry and NASA scrambled to find something cheaper for the astronauts to use.
Pencils may not have been the best choice anyway. The tips flaked and broke off, drifting in microgravity where they could potentially harm an astronaut or equipment. And pencils are flammable--a quality NASA wanted to avoid in onboard objects after the Apollo 1 fire."
> Perhaps I am the one who possesses the face image of the most boss in the world. I must have it more than his parents.
:)