1penny42cents

OP wanted to distance themselves as far from a bad economic environment as they could.

For people early in their careers, working hard is the best way to grow their future earnings and opportunities. They have too few skills, connections, and experience to differentiate otherwise.

Focusing only on the asymmetry between those with and without meaningful equity misses the point.

Not everyone is lucky enough to get equity from day one. The rest of us have (at most) a few critical points in our careers to do well enough such that we get a shot at meaningful equity at some point in the future.

For those from underprivileged backgrounds, they’re lucky to get even one chance in their careers for meaningful growth.

People without equity will work harder if they expect it to bring career or compensation growth.

If it’s a great company, people will work extra hours to move ahead, knowing it will pay off in their careers. “Great company” is always relative to the individual and where they are in their careers.

As people mature in their careers, they split off into “people with equity who continue to work hard for it” and “people without equity who have a good work/life balance”.

But as long as there’s the promise of a life-changing development, people will (sometimes rationally) work outside of their agreed hours.

> What I've seen with AI is that it does not save my coworkers from the pain of overcomplicating simple things that they don't really think through clearly. AI does not seem to solve this.

100%. The biggest challenge with software is not that it’s too hard to write, but that it’s too easy to write.

An addiction is when our dependency an activity outweighs the net-negative effect of it.

If there’s no net-negative, there’s no addiction.

So yes, some people just enjoy working. Others are workaholics. It’s not all-or-nothing and the evaluation depends on how you calculate the net impact of work on the person’s life.

What OP was calling out is that chronically sacrificing sleep seems to consistently take its toll down the road. So chronically enjoying work at the expense of sleep can be a form of workaholism.

everyone talks about the alignment problem, not nearly enough about the accountability problem

I’m actually working on this now, starting with sleep quality and cognitive performance (memory/attention/fluency) as dependent variables.

The vision is to have an index of protocols that people can try for themselves and see whether and how broader claims apply to their own minds and bodies.

If you or anyone else is interested, please send me an email at camhashemi (at) gmail.com. I’m looking for early adopters!

Regarding the “realism” proposed here, that leadership defines what shipping means: there’s a good faith and bad faith interpretation.

The bad faith interpretation is that this is corrupt and misaligned.

The good faith interpretation is that each leader has context and motivations that are important.

The right interpretation depends on the exact circumstance.

Getting leaders aligned on the right definition of “shipped” is a separate problem to the one described here, and it’s not the project lead’s direct responsibility. It’s the responsibility of the leadership team, the CEO, and the board.

But the realism proposed in the post is useful for project leads. Meeting leadership’s expectation is not necessarily corrupt, and if it is corrupt, it can be improved by directly discussing and negotiating what it means to ship a project.

crazy double whammy:

1. US gov trying to break up your search monopoly

2. ChatGPT disrupting your search monopoly

The original post is a question about people’s beliefs, not a proof or a case for any one belief.

Many believe in determinism, or at least the functional equivalent, and it poses a challenge to the popular belief that we can choose what we do. That’s the problem I’m interested in understanding.

Indeterminism, which includes that base layer of randomness, still presents a dilemma with regards to free will, doesn’t it? From the perspective of free will, and absent a more explanatory theory, they are functionally equivalent theories. Whether my brain is randomly producing actions or from an infinite chain of determined causes or a mix, free will is nowhere to be found without a more precise explanation.

The question is about free will given different assumptions of reality. My main challenge with your angle is that it’s firmly missing the point.

I am not arguing for determinism, nor the existence of God, but since I’m asking what people believe, I’m including both answers as options.

Thanks for this!

I suppose for our purposes, both determinism and indeterminism create the same paradox of free will. Determinism gives every event a determined prior cause, and indeterminism opens the door for random or otherwise undetermined prior causes, but both are incompatible with the notion of free will.

Would you agree with that reframing, or am I missing something?

> The problem starts in assuming “the portion humans operate in” is relevant or reasonable

the question is whether humans have control over their actions. human operations are definitionally relevant.

you seem to suggest throwing away determinism because there are open questions at extreme scales. but determinism does explain reality at the scale we're interested in, and you haven't offered a comparable explanation.

occam's razor would suggest we take determinism seriously until we have another theory which more clearly explains the phenomena of interest while also addressing the challenges you've raised. and it seems that most people do take determinism seriously, which is why free will is such a debated question.

It’s a reasonable challenge to determinism, but quantum decoherence seems to make that opening smaller, no? It seems you can explain much of reality using determinism, especially the portion humans operate in.

Also, in case it’s not clear: I am not assuming determinism or claiming that free will is an illusion, just explaining the challenge if one does assume determinism, which many do.

Exactly, foolishness is bravery without cleverness

Perhaps I should have clarified that “success” is relative. Success for someone born into poverty is different than someone born into royalty.

I’m focused on the qualities we should focus on in our adulthood to maximize our personally determinable chances of success. I believe all adults should do that for our own lives.

With that view, the question is whether homeless people benefit from being clever, brave, and persistent more than any other mix of traits, for example towards the pursuit of getting off the streets. I would say yes!

What do you think?

I definitely agree with the idea that we choose to will something! I tried to get that across in the essay, but maybe not as well as I could have.

What I meant between skill and will is that a skill is multivariate, whereas will is more unidimensional: you choose to do something or not.

That unidimensionality levels the playing field a lot. Let’s say someone is struggling to communicate well. They might need to learn and practice having an audible voice, avoiding verbal tickets, and having an understandable line of thought. If someone is struggling to be brave, they just need to practice going for what they believe to be right.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing which increases the probability that one may be brave, but I believe it does ultimately come down to that next decision. You may be more brave by having a better track record of bravery, but it can be washed away with a single cowardly decision. The playing field is much more level.

Regarding wealth, it’s a good point. Perhaps I should have clarified that “success” is relative. Success for someone born into poverty is different than someone born into royalty. I’m focused on the post-adulthood qualities we should focus on to maximize our personally determinable chances of success.

What do you think?

Doesn’t your upbringing essentially manifest itself into your personality and virtues?

My favorite aphorism about luck is that you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.

After becoming adults, luck rarely falls into our laps. We have to make decisions that make us lucky.

Through that lens, bravery is the will to buy a ticket. Many people don’t. Cleverness is the quality of the ticket, since they have different probabilities of success. And persistence is the decision to keep playing the game, even after you’ve lost every other.

So I think the three qualities are aligned with the view that success is just another word for luck.

What's the correlation between code quality and business success?

It’s a great analysis but I think it’s too either-or.

If you have a monolith anyways then yes, why use a distributed systems solution like JWT? Completely agree.

But if you already have an auth service, making it optional for the majority of requests is a distributed systems win. Even if you need to implement forced logout or some other features which require hitting the auth database, they can be optional requests. If the auth service is available, you get better security, otherwise the services can decide whether to continue or not.

This is better than your entire app going down or slowing down with the auth service. Though the refresh token bit is still a challenge, it’s a smaller one than a hard dependency on the auth service on every request.

Again, if your auth service is just a component in your monolith, the author is completely right. It’s context-specific.

fwiw I’ve written about that here: https://camhashemi.com/posts/building-through-uncertainty/

camhashemi.com

I write about a mix of building software, teamwork, and rationality.

How has this evolved to today? Any growing pains or learning lessons? What stayed good about this as the team and product scaled?

This is only irrational when the outcomes are well-understood to be equally satisfying.

The candy bar exercise is a good example of when it’s irrational.

The problem is that similar-seeming outcomes may be just that: _seemingly_ similar.

The university decision is a bad example of when it’s irrational. The search space is infinite, the variation in possible outcomes is high, and it’s very easy to overlook one or more critical factors.

The skill is then to be able to identify the threshold when all outcomes can be considered well-understood and when time spent deciding costs more than time sooner started.

When things are moving slow and surprises keep popping up, one could be acting irrationally in the way the author describes. When things are moving fast and surprises are minimized, no need to worry about spending too much time decision-making.

Reminds me of this talk, "Stop Writing Classes": https://youtu.be/o9pEzgHorH0

Changed my perspective on this newfound tool I'd learned to use called "indirection".

My favorite quote is something like "don't waste 10 minutes now to save yourself 2 minutes later".

Monoliths and Microservices: https://youtu.be/gOZFmFNl1uk

Types vs Tests: https://youtu.be/apu-J0msaiY

Stop Writing Classes: https://youtu.be/o9pEzgHorH0

Breaking up your test suite: https://youtu.be/9_3RsSvgRd4

Nailed it.

Focusing on sales to solve internal problems is like focusing on work to solve internal problems.

It can work to an extent, but sometimes you need to solve the internal problem before you can get the results you need.

So it's a feedback loop that leads to circular thinking. The problem is when we try to blame the external side of the feedback loop, to avoid seeing that our internal side is the problem.

That oscillation is necessary to be able to converge on the optimal medium for any given problem.

Otherwise we get stuck in "modularization bad" or "modularization good" mindsets, where both are wrong.

The problem is that the loudest backers overshoot and oversell the true potential.

The truly innovative people are those who add the proper constraints and work within them to solve the problems where blockchains actually fit best.

Focus on how you feel, and the rest will follow.

Do you want to feel bored? Boring? Not good enough?

Figure out how to feel excited, and the results will follow.

If you remain feeling boring, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The results will be boring. There's no shortcut.

How can you get exciting outcomes while feeling bored?

> it has been difficult to establish whether alcohol directly causes cancer, or if it is linked to possible confounding factors (such as smoking and diet) that could generate biased results.

> It was also unclear whether alcohol is linked to other types of cancer, including lung and stomach cancers.

If smoking was a confounding variable, shouldn't we see an increased risk of smoking-related cancers?