Steam Workshop: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. NEW: Dwemer Sphere Follower! A Dwemer Automaton factory dungeon that has been sealed for centuries and treasure locked away. Located just East of Hamvir's Rest near Whiterun. Adds a large level. Skyrim MOD BOTさん の 2018年11月 のツイート一覧です。 写真や動画もページ内で表示するよ! RT/favされたツイートは目立って表示されるからわかりやすい!.
The Lost Wonders of Mzark is a mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, created by.Info:Lost Wonders of Mzark is a quest/dungeon mod for those who prefer a more puzzle-oriented game. The enemies you encounter within must be disposed of in careful ways, and you'll find more than just fights awaiting you in the depths of Mzarnumez. You might think of it like Dead Money, but for Skyrim.Features:-4 new quests that span several hours of gameplay, all fully voiced and scripted, and based around puzzles and hidden items.-An enormous new non-linear dungeon, Mzarnumez, filled with wonderous dwemer contraptions. Huge foundries and robots, mineshafts, submarine bays, and vaults await within Mzark's greatest creation.-New enemies to fight, from the invincible holograms, dwemer bots, and more! As well as mini-bosses and puzzle-bosses galore.-New weapons and spells, explode your enemies with holostaves, project holograms to fight for you, or cause a massive amount of leeks to appear in front of you, if you're into that.-A special artifact, not seen since Arena, which will let you unlock the secrets of the dwemer.-3 new armored robe sets, all geared towards magically oriented charactersTo start the quests, head to the far ocean, to Mzarnumez (which is marked on your map) and press the button inside.Mod requires the Dragonborn i Dawnguard expansion packs.
To install use Nexus Mod Manager. Popular files for The Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimNameTypeSizeDateTotal7 daysmod82.6 MB8/.3K699mod1.3 MB167.2K372mod1315.3 MB4/.9K193mod165.8 MB3/12/201653.9K179mod1851 MB3/13/201666.9K163mod14.8 MB1/23/201716.3K161mod284.9 MB65.3K159mod340.9 KB136.4K155mod12.6 MB94.6K143mod1.4 MB19.5K120mod452.8 KB17.1K118mod8048.5 MB8/28/201716K115mod284.9 MB19.2K111mod1515.2 MB1/22/201829.9K91mod11.2 MB8/31/201612.5K89mod135 MB13.4K86.
1 year, 5 months ago Well, not even last night's storm could wake you. I heard them say we've reached Morrowind, I'm sure they'll let us go and do a speedrun.IntroductionThere's the of Morrowind's main quest that involves basically travelling to the final game location using a few scrolls and spells and killing the boss.However, there isn't a Morrowind speedrun category where someone tries to become the head of all factions. For all its critical acclaim and its great story, most of quests in Morrowind are basically fetch-item or kill-this-person and there aren't many quests that require anything else. But planning such a speedrun route could still be extremely interesting for many reasons:.
There are 10 joinable factions in Morrowind (Mages/Thieves/Fighters Guild, Imperial Cult, Imperial Legion, Tribunal Temple and the Great Houses: Hlaalu, Redoran, Telvanni). The player can only be a member of one Great House in a playthrough, but that still leaves 8 factions to do.
The transport system. It's not just a matter of fast travelling to certain locations like one would do in Skyrim or Oblivion.
Instead travel is by several transportation modes including boats, caravans and teleportation spells that. Walking is required a lot and so it's important to manage faction questlines to avoid unnecessary redundant trips to different cities. There are many ways to become the head of a given faction.
Faction questlines use a promotion system where new questlines open up as the character attains higher ranks at a faction. Promotion is a matter of not only reputation points (awarded by quests) but also player skills and attributes. Some quest objectives can be pre-completed or done in a different way. For example, if the quest giver wants the player to kill someone, that someone can often be killed before the quest even starts, at which point, most of the time, the quest giver will give the player the reward anyway. However, sometimes this might not work and the player will lose out on reputation points required to unlock further questlines.
Similarly, in most fetch quests the questgiver suggests where the player can get a given item, but doesn't care if it was bought in a nearby shop a few minutes ago.So given those features, this can get really complicated. On the way to a given quest objective the player can pick up another quest or pick up an item that might be needed at some point for a quest for a different faction that they aren't even a member of. What could be an efficient route through one faction's quests might be inferior to a slower route when all factions are played through since it could be that points in that route are visited in other factions' quests anyway, and so on.In other words, planning an efficient route through all factions would be a fun computer science problem. A note on skill requirements and Morrowind's levelling systemThere are a couple factions where the final quest can be completed immediately, but that just results in a journal entry saying that the player character is now the head of the faction (and the advancement is not reflected in the character stats). I decided I wanted to rise to the top the mostly-honest way instead.Unlike Skyrim and Oblivion, advancement in Morrowind factions requires the player to have certain skills at a certain level. There are 27 skills in Morrowind and each faction has 6 so-called 'favoured skills'.
Becoming head of a faction requires the player to have one of these skills at a very high level (roughly 80-90 out of 100) and 2 of them at a medium level (about 30-35).Morrowind characters also have 7 attributes, each of which 'governs' several skills. Attributes also play a role in faction advancement.So that's kind of bad news, since in a speedrun we won't have enough time to develop our character's skills. The good news is there are trainers scattered around Morrowind that will, for a certain fee, instantly raise these skills. The bad news is that these trainers won't train skills above their governing attributes.
Raising attributes requires levelling and levelling in Morrowind is. I'll get into the actual levelling strategy later. Different routes through a given factionI quickly gave up on scraping quest data from the game files (since most quests are driven and updated by a set of dialogue conditions and in-game scripts) and instead used the to manually create a series of spreadsheets for each faction that included quests, their reputation gain and rough requirements.Here's an example of one such spreadsheet:This spreadsheet already shows the complexity of Morrowind factions. There are two intended ways to reach the top of the Mages Guild: by having enough reputation and skills to become a Master Wizard and either completing all of 's quests and challenging the current Arch-Mage to a duel or completing all of 's quests and getting a letter from the upper management telling the current Arch-Mage to step down. I later found another way, by reaching the rank of Wizard (one rank below Master Wizard) and then talking to the current Arch-Mage about a duel, which is quicker.Other than that, there's also multiple ways to complete a quest.
Edwinna Elbert's final 3 quests requiring the player to bring her some Dwarven artifacts don't require the player to actually go to the places she recommends: the artifacts can be acquired from different locations or even bought. Generating all possible routes through a faction.turned out to be tricky.
The first cut of this was encoding each quest in a YAML file as a set of prerequisites and required items/actions for completion. For example: edwinna2:giver: edwinna elbertprerequisites:rank: Conjurerquest: Chimarvamidium 2quests:- Dwemer Tube:rep: 5completion:items: miscdwrvartifact60- Nchuleftingth:rep: 10completion:goperson: anes vendu.This encodes the start of Edwinna Elbert's advanced questline, which requires the player to have become a Conjurer in the Guild and completed Edwinna's previous quest.
To complete this quest, the player needs to have the tube in their inventory (I used the in-game item ID). Completion gives the player 5 faction reputation points.The questline continues with and to complete that quest, the player needs to go to a certain NPC (he's an archaeologist who has, as it turns out, perished). Unlike the previous quest, this action (of going to a person and interacting with them) requires us to have started the quest.So with that in mind, we can generate a set of all possible ways to complete a guild using breadth-first search:.
set of all sequences completing the guild S = empty. do:.
for each sequence in S:. if it already completes the guild, ignore it. otherwise, get all possible next quests that can be done in this sequence:. where the quest prerequisites have been met (e.g. A previous/required quest in the questline has been completed). where there's enough reputation to start a new questline.
add each one of these possible quests to a sequence to create several new sequences. replace the current sequence with the newly generated ones. until S stops changingCombinatorial explosions, combinatorial explosions everywhereWhat could possibly go wrong? Well, firstly there's an issue of ordering.
If the player is juggling two parallel questlines from different questgivers, each possible interleaving of those is counted, which causes a combinatorial explosion. Secondly, routes that are strictly worse than existing routes are generated too. For example, if completing a certain guild requires us to only complete quests A, B, D and E, there's no point in generating a route A, B, C, D, E: there's no way doing D won't take extra time.I hence did some culling by making sure that during generation we wouldn't consider a sequence if it were a superset of an already existing quest sequence.
This brought the number of generated routes (subsets, really) down to a mildly manageable 300.Is this good? Well, not really. This only accounted for which sets of quests could be completed. There was no mention of the order in which these quests could be completed (yielding probably millions of permutations), the ordering of actual actions that would complete a given quest (for example, completing a given quest could involve killing someone and that could happen even before the player character was aware of a quest) or the alternative routes (like fetching a required item from a different place or doing an extra objective to get more faction reputation).Worse even, this was just the route generation for one faction. There were 7 more factions to do (and I had to pick a Great House that would be the quickest to complete too) and even if they didn't have that many ways to complete them, brute-forcing through all the possible routes with all factions would definitely be unreasonable.This method also wouldn't let me encode some guild features.
For example, Morrowind's legal assassin guild, has several questgivers around the world, any of which can give the player their next contract. Furthermore, the reputation required for the final questline to open can be gathered not only by doing assassination contracts, but also by collecting spread around the world, each yielding about the same reputation as a contract. These items can quite often be found in dungeons that the player has to visit for other factions anyway and it could be the case that doing those quests to collect these items is overall faster. Attempt 2: a single quest dependency graphI hence decided to drop the idea of combining all possible routes from all guilds and instead did some experimentation to find out if there are obviously quick routes through most guilds. Turns out, there were and so instead of solving a few million instances of the Travelling Salesman Problem, I could do with just one.
Still impossible, but less impossible. Quick overview of fastest routes for a given factionIn the, the introductory questline can be completed in a matter of minutes and yield 22 reputation points and then Edwinna's quests can be completed en route to other quest locations that will likely have to be visited anyway. 1 year, 5 months ago This is a quick template for a cold e-mail that can be used for initial reconnaissance and information gathering for a software engineer/entrepreneur that would like to break into a new industry and doesn't know where to start. Feel free to use it and alter it as you see fit!Dear (name of CEO),My name is (name) and I'm an entrepreneur based in (city) with (n) years of experience crafting software products for (Google/Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Microsoft).As someone with the gift of an analytical mind that leaves nothing unexamined, I believe I am uniquely positioned to quickly get up to speed with the domain knowledge intrinsic to a given field that would take normal people years to acquire.
I have hence been interested in creating a business that solves some of the unique problems that (industry) faces. I was wondering if you had a few minutes to answer some questions so that I can find out what these problems actually are?Firstly, I'm interested in the business processes in your day-to-day work that have the potential to be replaced with a CRUD application. Do you use an Excel spreadsheet for any of your operating procedures or business intelligence? Do you think there is scope for migrating some of those in-house systems to a software-as-a-service platform so that you can focus on your business' competitive advantages?Secondly, I am a big proponent of distributed ledger technology as an alternative to single-point-of-failure classical databases in this increasingly more trustless society. Would you consider replacing part of your data storage, inventory tracking or other business operations with a custom-tailored blockchain-based solution that leverages smart contracts to ensure a more robust experience for all stakeholders?Finally, do you think running your organisation could be made easier with a bespoke shared economy service that empowers workers to flexible time and lowers your human resources overhead while allowing you to tap into an immensely larger pool of workforce?
This is an innovation that has successfully added value to taxis, hotels and food delivery and I firmly believe that there is a unique proposition in applying it to (industry).I look forward to hearing from you.(my name)Sent from my (device)Yes, this is satire. But if you remove the over-the-top buzzword soup, the messiah complex and flavour-of-the-month technology, it really doesn't seem like there's much a person without any connections or experience in an industry can do besides cold-emailing people and asking them 'what do you use Excel for?' 1 year, 5 months ago source:Abstract: I examine inflation-adjusted historical returns of the S&P 500 since the 1870s with and without dividends and backtest a couple of famous investment strategies for retirement. I also deploy some personal/philosophical arguments against the whole live-frugally-and-then-live-frugally-off-of-investments idea.Disclaimer: I'm not (any more) a finance industry professional and I'm not trying to sell you investment advice.
Please consult with somebody qualified or somebody who has your best interests at heart before taking any action based on what some guy said on the Internet.The code I used to produce most of the following plots and process data is in an. IntroductionEarly retirement is simple, right? Just live frugally, stop drinking Starbucks lattes, save a large fraction of your paycheck, invest it into a mixture of stocks and bonds and you, too, will be on the road towards a life of work-free luxury and idleness driven by compound interest!What if there's a stock market crash just before I retire, you ask? The personal finance gurus will calm you down by saying that it's fine and the magic of altering your bond position based on your age as well as dollar cost averaging, together with the fact that the stock market returns 7% on average, will save you.As sweet as that would be, there is something off about this sort of advice.
Are you saying that I really can consistently make life-changing amounts of money without doing any work? This advice also handwaves around the downside risks of investing into the stock market, including the volatility of returns.I wanted to simulate the investment strategies proposed by personal finance and early retirement folks and actually quantify whether putting my 'nest egg' into the stock market is worth it.This piece of writing was mostly inspired by NY Times' that shows a harrowing heatmap of inflation-adjusted returns based on the time an investment was made and withdrawn, originally created by Crestmont Research. They maintain this heatmap for every year.This post is in two parts: in the first one, I will backtest a few strategies in order to determine what sort of returns and risks at what timescales one should expect. In the second one, I will try to explain why I personally don't feel like investing my money into the public stock market is a good idea. Simulating common stock market investment strategies DatasetThe data I used here is the S&P 500 index. And I'm assuming one can invest into the index directly.
This is not strictly true, but index tracker funds (like Vanguard's VOO ETF) nowadays are pretty good and pretty cheap.A friend pointed me to a that has an interesting argument: using the US equity markets for financial research has an implicit survivorship bias in it. Someone in the 1870s had multiple countries' markets to choose from and had no way of knowing that it was the US the would later become a global superpower, large amounts of equity gains owing to that.As a first step, I downloaded Robert Shiller's that he used in his book, 'Irrational Exuberance', and then used it to create an inflation-adjusted total return index: essentially, the evolution of the purchasing power of our portfolio that also assumes we reinvest dividends we receive from the companies in the index. Since the companies in the index are large-cap 'blue chip' stocks, dividends form a large part of the return.I compared the series I got, before adjusting for inflation, with the from Yahoo!
Finance and they seem to closely match the Yahoo! Data from the 1990s onwards.The effect of dividends being reinvested changes the returns dramatically. Here's a comparison of the series I got with the one without dividends (and one without inflation):The average annual return, after inflation, and assuming dividends are reinvested, is about 7.5%. 1 year, 5 months ago IntroductionAll of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.—Blaise PascalAll too often, in online and offline discourse, when I (or I see someone else) voice a concern about some phenomenon, the argument gets shot down with something like 'Your problems are first-world problems, there are people who have it (or historically had it) much worse than you' or 'Well, it could always be worse. What if you didn't have (a job/a car/food/money/a romantic partner)?' In a way, it feels like a special case of whataboutism ('Yes, X did a bad thing, but Y also did a bad thing, so how about we discuss that instead').
To myself, I used to call it 'the African children fallacy' and sure, it's kind of insensitive, but I thought that it nicely references a well-known form of it ('how dare you complain about this when there are children starving in Africa?' ).Recently, I started digging into it further and learned that it's called 'the fallacy of relative privation' or the 'not as bad as' fallacy. In this essay, I want to investigate why I don't like it being used, as well as possible reasons for it getting brought up.
1 year, 7 months ago IntroductionOnce upon a time I bought a car. I drove it straight out of the dealership and parked it on my driveway. This is a thought experiment, as youth in the UK can't afford neither a car nor a driveway and I can't drive, but bear with me.I bought a car and I drove it around for a few months or so and life was great. It did everything I wanted it to do, it never stalled and never broke down. One day, I got an e-mail from the dealership saying that they'd need to update my car. Sure, I thought, and drove there to get it 'updated'. They didn't let me look at what they were doing with the car, saying that they were performing some simple maintenance.
Finally, I got my car back, without seeing any visible changes, and drove it back home.This happened a few more times over the next several months. I'd get an e-mail from the dealer, drive the car back to them, have a cup of coffee or three while they were working, and then get the car back. Sometimes I'd get it back damaged somehow, with a massive dent on the side, and the dealership staff would just shrug and say that those were the manufacturer's instructions. Then a few days later, I'd get summoned again and after another update cycle the dent would be gone.At some point, I stopped bothering and after a few missed calls from the dealership my car stopped working completely. I phoned the dealership again and sure, they said that the car wouldn't work until another update.
I had the car towed to the dealership and drove back without any issues.One night I got woken up by a weird noise outside my house. I looked out the window and saw that some people in dark overalls were around my car, doing something to it. I ran out, threatening to call the police. They laughed and produced IDs from the dealership, telling me that since people were frustrated with having to update their cars so often, they'd do it for them in order to bother them less.I sighed and went back to sleep.
This continued for quite some time, with the mechanics working on my car every week or so. I'd invite them for tea and they would refuse, quoting terms of service and all that sort of thing.One day I woke up to a car covered in ads that seemed to be related to what I was browsing last night. There wasn't anything controversial, thankfully, but it was still a bit unsettling. The dealership support staff said it was to offer me products relevant to my interests. I asked if I could take them down and got told that it was a part of the whole offering and the vehicle wouldn't work without them.
So I had to drive to work surrounded by more pictures of the that I was comfortable with.After a year or so, the manufacturer had innovated some more. When I got into the car and turned the ignition key, a bunch of mechanics appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and picked the car up, ready to drag it as per my instructions. Turns out, the night before they had removed the engine and all the useful parts from the vehicle, turning it into a 'thin client'. It was supposed to make sure that when there was an issue with the car, they could debug it centrally and not bother all their customers.Finally, one morning I got into the car and nothing happened. Turns out, the manufacturer was acquired by a larger company last night and their service got shut down. I sat at the wheel, dreading being late for work again, and suddenly woke up.
Meanwhile in the real worldOnce upon a time I opened a new tab in Firefox on my Android phone to find out that besides a list of my most visited pages to choose from, there also was a list of things 'suggested by Pocket'. What the hell was Pocket, why was it suggesting me things and, more importantly, how the hell did it get into my Firefox?I remember when pushing code to the user's device was a big deal. You'd go to the vendor's website, download an executable, launch it, go through an InstallShield (or a NullSoft) install wizard if you were lucky and only then you would get to enjoy the new software. You'd go through the changelogs and get excited about the bugfixes or new features. And if you weren't excited, you wouldn't install the new version at all.I remember when I went through my Linux phase and was really loving package managers. It was a breath of fresh air back then, a single apt-get upgrade updating all my software at once. And then Android and Apple smartphones came around and they had exactly the same idea of a centralized software repository.
How cool was that?I'm not sure when mobile devices started installing updates by default. I think around 2014 my Android phone would still meekly ask to update all apps and that was an opportunity for me to reestablish my power over my device and go through all the things I wasn't using anymore and delete them. In 2016, when I got a new phone, the default setting changed and I would just wake up to my device stating, 'Tinder has been updated. Deal with it'.And it's been the case on the desktop too. I realised that Firefox and Chrome hadn't been pestering me about updates for quite a while now and, sure, they've been updating themselves. I like, but I like it in my media player, not in my browser.It's not even about automatic updates.
I could disable them, sure, but I would quickly fall behind the curve, with services that I'm accessing stopping supporting my client software. In fact, it's not even about browsers. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to use Skype 4 (the last decent version), that is, if I could find where to download it.
As another example, I recently launched OpenIV, a GTA modding tool, at which point it told me 'There's a new version available. I won't start until you update'. Uuh, excuse me? Sure, I could find a way around this, but still, it's not pleasant being told that what's essentially a glorified WinRAR that was fine the night before can't run without me updating it.(as an aside, WinRAR now seems to be monetized by having ads on its 'please buy WinRAR' dialog window.)If I go to a Web page, gone are the days of the server sending me some HTML and my browser rendering it the way I wanted.
No, now the browser gets told 'here's some JavaScript, go run it. Oh, here's a CDN, go download some JavaScript from there and run it, too.
Oh, here a DoubleClick ad server, go get some pictures that look like Download buttons from over there and put them over here. Also, here's the CSRF token. If you don't quote at it at me the next time, I'll tell you to go away. Oh yeah, also set this cookie. Oh, and append this hexadecimal string to the URL so that we can track who shared this link and where. Here's your HTML.
But the JavaScript is supposed to change the DOM around, so go run it. It changes your scrolling behaviour, too, so you get a cool parallax effect as you move around the page. You'll love it.' As a developer, I love web applications. If a customer is experiencing an issue, I don't need to get them to send me logs or establish which version of the software they're running. I just go to my own server logs, see what request they're making and now I am able to reproduce the issue in my own environment. And with updates now getting pushed out to users' devices automatically, there are fewer and fewer support issues which can be resolved by saying 'update to the newest version' and instead I can spend time on better pursuits.
Finally, I don't need to battle with WinAPI or Qt or Swing or any other GUI framework: given enough CSS and a frontend JavaScript framework du jour, things can look roughly the same on all devices.However, that leaves users at the mercy of the vendor. What used to be code running on their own hardware is now code running on the vendor's hardware or code that the vendor tells their hardware to run. So when they end up in a place with no Internet connection or the vendor goes out of business, the service won't work at all instead of working poorly.By the way, here's an idea on how to come up with new business ideas. Look at the most popular Google services and have a quick think about how you would write a replacement for them. When they inevitably get sunsetted, do so and reap kudos. For example, I'm currently writing a browser addon that replaces the 'View Image' button from Google Image search results.In fact, it's not just an issue with applications.
Once upon a time in early 2017, I came home from work to find my laptop, that had been on standby, decided to turn itself on and install a Windows 10 update. The way I found that out was because the login screen had changed and it was using a different time format. And then things became even weirder as I realised that all the shortcuts on my desktop and in the Start Menu were missing. In fact, it was almost as if someone broke into my house and reimaged my whole hard drive. Strangely enough, all the software and the data was still there, tucked away in C:Program Files and its friends, it's just that Windows wasn't aware of it. Thankfully, running a System Restore worked and the next update didn't have these problems, but since then I stopped allowing automatic updates.
Except there's no way I can figure out what a given update does anyway. ConclusionI'm really scared of my phone right now. Here it is, lying by my side, and I've no idea what's going on in its mind and what sort of information it's transferring and to where.
When I was a kid and got gifted my father's old Nokia 6600, I was excited about having a fully fledged computer in my pocket, something with a real multitasking operating system that I could easily write software for. Now, I'm no longer so sure. 1 year, 8 months ago IntroductionImagine if we could turn this:into this:The first picture is a graph of how many people enter the London Underground network every minute on a weekday. The second graph is for the weekend, except slightly altered: I normalized it so that both graphs integrate to the same value.
In other words, the same amount of people go through the network in the second graph as in the first graph.Would you rather interact with the former or the latter usage pattern?The data geek in me is fascinated at the fact that there are clear peaks in utilization at about 8:15 (this is the graph of entrances, remember) and, in the evening, at 17:10, 17:40 and 18:10. I'll probably play with this data further, since the dataset I used (an anonymized 5% sample of journeys taken on the TfL network one week in 2009) has some more cool things in it.The Holden Caulfield in me is infuriated at the fact that these peaks exist. Millions of toilets suddenly got flushed and were suddenly silencedIt's alarming how often society seems to hinge on people being in the same place at the same time, doing the same things.
The drawbacks of this are immense: infrastructure has to be overprovisioned for any bursty load pattern and being inside of a bursty load pattern results in higher waiting times and isn't a pleasant experience for everyone involved. Hence it's important to investigate why this happens and whether this is always required.Have you heard of? Whenever a popular TV programme goes on a commercial break or ends, millions of people across the UK do the same things at the same time: they turn kettles on, open refrigerator doors, flush their toilets and so on. This causes a noticeable surge in utilization of, say, electric grids and the sewage system. As a result, service providers have to provision for it by trying to predict demand.
This isn't just an academic exercise: in the case of electric energy, generators can't be brought online instantly and energy can't be stored cheaply.In the case of the Underground network, there are times on some lines where trains arrive more frequently than every two minutes (pretty much as often as they can, given that the trains have to maintain a safe distance between each other and spend some time on the platform) and yet they still are packed between 8am and 9am. Any incident, however small, like someone holding up the doors, can result in a knock-on effect, delaying the whole line massively.Why are people doing this to themselves? Friday is a social constructThe weekend was a great invention (although Henry Ford's reason for giving his employees more time off was that they'd have nothing to do and hence start buying his own, and other businesses', goods). But does the weekend really have to happen at the same time for all people?Some of the phenomena governing people's schedules are natural.
It does get dark at night and people do need light. It gets cold in the winter and people need heating. But the Earth does not care whether it's the weekday or the weekend, a Wednesday or a Saturday. And yet somehow the society has decreed that Wednesday is a serious business day and any adult roaming the streets during daytime on that day might get weird stares.Expanding on this, do working hours have to happen at the same time either?
People naturally need rest, but what they don't naturally need is to be told when exactly they can work and rest. And in some types of work, like knowledge work, being told when to work is not necessary and even can be harmful.In professional services, in most cases, the client doesn't care when the service is being performed. The client wants a tax return to be prepared: they don't want the tax return to only be prepared between 9 and 5. The client wants their investments to be managed: the investments don't need to only be managed between 9 and 5.
Fixed work hours make no sense since it's not time the client is buying, it's the result. Knowledge work isn't predicated on people having to do it at the same time or even at a given time.The fact that everybody has to work fixed hours hails from the Industrial age assembly line thinking (in fact, the term 'line manager' is still used in the UK to refer to one's boss). If one part of the assembly line is missing, the assembly line doesn't work. Hence the management has to make sure that all parts of the assembly line have finished their sandwiches and are in place for when their shift starts. The whole shift also has to get their days off synchronously, as it can't function at all after a critical mass of people has taken the day off.This is in no way an argument for longer working hours.
If a person has exhausted their working capacity for the day, what's the point of holding them in the office until a given hour unless they're in a role that requires that? Some people work better when they have a set goal and some time to achieve it, to be used at their discretion. Some people work in bursts, where the output of one day can overshadow the rest of the week. Mandating fixed hours for knowledge workers means they aren't as efficient as they can be for their employer and further suffer from the utilization peaks that they themselves cause.
Corporate accounts payable, Nina speakingDo we still need offices? Some criticize working from home as a way for employees to slack off. But if you think your people won't work unless they're watched, maybe you're hiring the wrong people. A loss of productivity from not having someone standing over their shoulder is offset by the gain in productivity from not having someone standing over their shoulder and not working in a distracting open office environment.A benefit of offices is that they encourage communication and sharing of ideas. It's much easier to walk up to someone and ask them something, and information travels around quicker and more naturally.On the other hand, imagine if you were a medieval scholar. They would usually work alone, with all communication with their peers done over long-form letters.
Communication used to be asynchronous and there was no way the letter would be delivered as soon as it was fired off, hence there was no expectation of getting a reply in the same hour or even within the same day.Nowadays, people are expected to respond to messages instantly, which means they have less and less uninterrupted time in which they can't be distracted.Would you rather have a 1-hour chunk of time to do work in or 6 chunks of 10 minutes, interrupted by random phone calls, instant messenger pings and people walking up to you? The former option is much, much better if you want to do any. Productivity is highly non-linear and 10 minutes of work result in better outcomes when they come after some time to ramp up. Even the anticipation that you can be interrupted can distract you and prevent you from getting into a state of.Perhaps there's no need for people in the workplace to expect others to be able to instantly respond to them. In fact, slower, asynchronous communication can lead to more robust institutional memory inside of an organisation. Instead of the easy fix of tapping a colleague on the shoulder to get an answer, the worker might instead devise a solution for an issue themselves or figure it out while typing up an email, adding to the documentation and making sure fewer people have that question in the future.Do all meetings have to happen at the same place or at the same time? Some of them do: sometimes there's no replacement for getting all stakeholders in the same room in order to come to a decision.
But meetings are also a great way to waste company money, setting thousands of dollars on fire by the simple act of blocking out one hour of several people's time.What is now a synchronous meeting (together with the flow breakage than that brings: I found that I'm more productive in a given hour if I know I don't have to go anywhere in the next hour even though the time I'm spending is the same) could be an asynchronous e-mail chain or a set of comments on the intranet that people can get to at their discretion. Peter, you've added nothingThere's something mesmerising about being able to watch live coverage of an event.
Instant notifications of a new development are a way to gratify yourself, feel like you've done something, get a small dopamine rush from getting another nugget of information. But in reality, not much has changed and this development will likely be insignificant in the end.In this age, people have no time to think about their reaction: everything is knee-jerk, synchronous and instantaneous. An incident happens. Minutes later, we find out there is a suspect.
Minutes later, there's a witch hunt across social media for the suspect and their family. Days later, the suspect is acquitted and there's another suspect.
Information, not necessarily valuable or true, nowadays travels so fast that things can easily get out of control and anyone with Internet access can join in the madness.There are a few billion times more people than you and your brain can't process inputs from them all in real time. Hence people have to operate with abstractions. Instead of constantly receiving a stream of data that interrupts your life and ultimately doesn't add anything to it, why not go to a different abstraction level and lower the sampling rate, instead reading a weekly newsletter?If you had an investment portfolio, would you act based on looking at its performance every hour or every day?
Or would you instead be aware that all the noise from the daily developments will probably cancel itself out and turn into a clearer picture of what's happened? Bernoulli's principle works in January, tooA friend of mine works in a role where she needs to interact with offices in other countries that don't maintain UK bank holidays. What her employer does is increase her holiday allowance instead, making bank holidays a normal working day.
I think this is amazing. The time when most people are away on holiday is the best time to get some work done in the office and the time when most people are in the office is the best time to go shopping, visit doctors, go to a museum and do all other sorts of other life admin things.From a cultural point of view, public holidays are amazing. From a logistical point of view, they're a nightmare. If everybody is having a holiday, nobody is, and the fact that everyone is observing the holiday at the same time yet again creates usage peaks in all sorts of places.For example, synchronous buying of presents means that retailers have to overstock their wares in run-up to major holidays, say, Christmas, and, worse even, have to offload all the Baylis and Harding soap sets at fire sale prices starting at about dinnertime on the 24th December. Hilariously, the best time to shop for Christmas presents is in January.And most holidays are taken around these times too.
People in the UK get fined and can even get prosecuted for taking their children on holiday during term time. The fine is usually less than the difference in price for airline tickets and accommodation between taking a holiday during term time and outside of term time, but that price difference is just a consequence of the difference in demand between those times. There are still planes in January, but they're. And airports aren't such an unpleasant experience.In any case, most parents are now coerced to take holidays only outside term time, which has a knock-on effect on flight/accommodation usage and prices. ConclusionI honestly don't know how to solve most of these problems. Maybe with the rise of remote work and teleconferencing this will naturally go away, moving us to a future where nobody can have a case of the Mondays any more.
Some companies are embracing parts of being asynchronous already, like Basecamp (ex-37 Signals) who list the benefits of remote work and fewer meetings in.It's more difficult on the social side. I dream of a relationship where we agree to celebrate all holidays (Christmas, Easter, Valentine's etc.) a few days later to take advantage of the trough in the demand that comes after the peak. In addition, to be efficient, education indeed has to be synchronous: one teacher educates multiple children and any of them.