Justsignedup

This is why people argue for fixing the earth. We already have a planet we're perfectly adapt to. We just need to keep it habitable.

My favorite fact about Mars is the soil fucks with our hormones. Children born on Mars won't be able to survive because the dust will literally destroy their ability to develop. Shit is haaaard.

A good point is made.

If you're in a hole, the best way out is not to keep digging. It's hard to see that you have to accept a delay but a delay is exactly what you need when you're not making good progress. Slow down, finish shit, move on. Same with load. Sometimes just gotta do less at once.

- the worst code quality is when engineers who aren't already experts in a specific thing can't experiment. This is multiplied 10x for junior engineers.

- the most qa rejections happen when engineers need to work 10-12 hours straight to complete a feature and it will always be sub par even at the end. You pay shortly for problems because you didn't let anyone think deeply.

- at some point you need to be able to declare bankruptcy and abandon work because otherwise you'll sink.

The problem of "free to leave" is that that only works with unlimited resources. Why should I allow a random person into my house to eat my food and promise to assist, only to be free to leave at any time. And they have to go to another house, why would someone there do the same.

Being altruistic is great, but at some point you run out of necessary resources. And altruism dies at scale when resources dry up.

You're probably onto something. Being too big leads to problems. But also leads to power.

You can't fuck with the US/China, even if nukes were removed, because they are a massive force that will crush you beneath their heel. So there is mass power in unity. However you look at europe, and you see a lot of gains as well, where multiple smaller governments exist, and a unifying body was created to compete with the likes of the US without giving up their individuality. But also the US is distributed since states govern themselves with overarching federal oversight.

It is massively complex. At the end of the day we need not only a small anarchistic state, we also need reasons why some cult of personality won't be able to rally his million followers and start guns blazing taking over neighbors. Unfortunately I feel like democracy is the least bad system we got.

The problem with ideologies is that they work really well in small communities.

Communism works. In a small communjty/village. Same with anarchism. Because that's basically how small villages work. You can adjust as needed in the moment without too much effort.

The problem happens when you grow. What happens when people you are governing you will never meet? What happens when you're busy and can't research all the complexities of local politics and some old person is stirring up trouble with yells for not in my backyard stuff... And one person starts bribing and so on.

A critical motivation for dumb web was blackberries and early iphones. They had extremely limited computational power.

Remember flash? It was just too power hungry to run on phones.

Today's phones are stronger than yesterday's computers.

They're kinda the only game in town in China. Which translates to they can dictate what language chinese developers code in and lock out any potential non Huawei hardware while they sit on a monopoly.

I tend to only do these when desperate. And I found best companies don't need to rely on such gimmicks.

For me, I'm not worried about artificial beings being smarter than us being able to reason about things better.

I am far far far more worried what a corporation would do. Look at the TikTok algorithm and how good it is at hijacking our thought process. Do I need to fear it in and of itself? No. I fear the company using it to drive behaviors a certain way because it is profitable.

I think Westworld had a great version of this. They create a super intelligent computer, and they could have just as easily asked it to solve climate change as to manipulate stocks. And ultimately the machine wasn't after anything, just working on a directive. And when asked to shut down, it did. (season 3)

Thats the point here, its all about who gets to direct it, and if it is Elon Musk, I fear for our future.

What I found as an interesting point is the concept that an imitator can't really tell it a different way, because to explain something from a different angle requires you to see it as a 3d object, and not as a flat painting just seeing the result, not everything that goes behind it.

Thinking up how to use that.. How to use the concept of explain something to me, and me not understanding to see how deeply they get it.

An alternative view on things:

EVE online taught me more about commodity trading than anything else, because I didn't have the cash to sink into trading and I was able to understand concepts that were only weird and theoretical in the past.

Factorio is a great fun game that also involves the fun parts of programming. Would I be programming if I wasn't playing factorio? No. I'd be watching a mindless show. Meanwhile it does teach debugging and monitoring to young engineers, and has gotten quite a few into programming.

And as /u/VincentEvans correctly mentions, how much of our smartest is wasted just making trading engines that do NOTHING other than help the wealthy gain more cash, and hyperoptimizing ads!

Whenever a company is gleeful for regulation this is where my mind goes. Do they see regulation as an extra moat? We have the cash and years head start. It's love government procurement. Companies love it because once they are in, they rarely have competition and can charge extra.

We are not always the target demographic. I know many people who use apps because they were the default. Most people used Internet Explorer because it was, and many still don't know that there's an alternative, or even why use an alternative.

Sadly this will take off, and be tied to everything apple. From a tech perspective I would never use their tools even if they are the most convenient. But the reality is most people will see this as the only option for password management, and 1password isn't free, so for them they will see no better way out.

I often attribute this to free layoffs, but the problem is that if your _senior_ leadership and employees leave, the problem is that you're in a bad situation. Laying off some people who recently joined, are a bit underperforming, etc is a great way to do layoffs. But losing your top talent is the best way to sink yourself.

However the effects are felt a few years down the line, and these big orgs usually praise the CEO for doing this genius maneuver and saving a bunch of money, only to later leave in a few years when shit is about to hit the fan. Overall its a weird time. And to note, I do like working from the office, so I happen to be in the minority who likes hybrid. Though even I cannot deny the benefits of being able to WFH and get to a doctor appointment or take care of my kid when she's sick.

Can't use Mac without rectangle. You don't need magnet.

Owly is my fav for anti sleeping at certain times. Though critical to disable the ads via startup features. I haven't found abetter one. Though it has quirks.

Also some commands in the cli for like key repeat. Like wtf why can't I turn off accent hold when I want to repeat letters.

What you are saying makes sense IN THEORY. however in practice in the US most people have the shittiest insurance, at the highest cost. A chunk of america doesn't have insurance and we all pay a lot extra for their problems, and a friend of mine is in the chunk who is taking medication he is alergic to, because the stuff he isn't he can't afford, and finally we have the wealthy who have the best healthcare in the world.

Insurance for an optional thing makes sense: You don't _have_ to drive (okay, I'm in NYC), but you can, and you need insurance if you do. And mainly its to cover damage _you_ do to others.

For health insurance. Everyone in the world will need healthcare. Period. The only exception is if you're super healthy and then get your head suddenly cut off and are dead instantly. Other than this one case, you will need health care. The problem is that in america, breaking your arm, or getting alcohol poisoning may bankrupt you. And as any doctor will tell you: An ounce of prevention is worth 2 in cure. Let people get treated before things get bad, and they can stay productive members of society. As John Oliver said "the national anthem should be people holding out their medical bills and complaining in unison, because it is the only experience that ever single american has in common"

How about health insurance not being tied to profits. Startups pay the full brunt of health insurance since they don't have real profits they have nothing to write off. Meanwhile large orgs get to write off a ton of profits as Healthcare costs for employees.

So startups tend to have real garbage insurance. As someone older with kids startups are getting more and more prohibitive because I need that Healthcare. Maybe startups should be a young man's game. Maybe not.

its a one-click stop for most people. Though all I can think of is:

"All ads are bad, block them... except for mine."

Dating is very messy necessarily. I mean it is the literal end goal of our biology, so difficulty is kinda the point. But. Anyone who's not aware of trends is gonna have a difficult time. Old strategies don't work well. Old outlooks don't either.

Honestly, I never allow people to abbreviate. You have to say "authenticate" (who are you) vs "authorize" (what are you allowed to do).

In fact I flag most abbreviations in code, for exactly this reason. We aren't charged by the character, spell it out, future you will always thank you.

The problem is news requires money for research. Bullshit doesn't.

So news sites need to fund journalists and somehow make enough money. Bs sites just need to make cheap shit content fast enough to sell enough ads or "zing the libertard" merchandise.

Social media is killing it but not because they not paying per link. And making them pay will make the problem even worse.

Unfortunately I don't have any solutions. Everything that comes to mind ends up no better than now.

Interviewing for Sr eng positions (IC5) most gave me 400k or so total compensation (about 230k in salary and 200k in stocks give or take). Then again this may be due to being in NYC.

IC6 were higher.

However I could be in an area that is above average pay rates. So I wouldn't dispute your numbers, they do seem more likely to be accurate.

In new york that's below McDonald's fry cook employee pay.

Also maang total compensation for Sr engineer roles is about 400k+

This is more or less where my brain was heading. The utility of exactly once system is quite high. But the utility of coding knowing that it is at least once, hopefully, and if not we'll do a catch-up, means that I will code knowing that my work must be safe in an environment with these constraints.

The best argument I have for a postgres background worker queue is simplicity. You're already managing a db, why not have the db simplify your startup's infrastructure. Honestly, with heroku, sidekiq, and redis it isn't even simplifying. But for startups simplicity is useful so they can scale when they need to and avoid complexity when possible. But that's the only argument I'd make.

To be honest. I like the at least once constraint. It causes you to think of background jobs in a idempotent way and makes for better designs. So ultimately I never found the removal of it a mitzva.

Also if you don't have the constraint and say it works and you need to change systems for any reason, now you gotta rewrite your workers.

The uniqueness of Helldivers 2 and Deep Rock Galactic (owned by a very pro-consumer company), is that it is a highly cooperative game that gives no reward for not being cooperative. This spawns kinda the best of humanity. And the fiction is really fun to get into.

It was really great seeing people lock arms in protest over the fact that a chunk of the community was gonna get screwed over.

They likely realized that maintaining their own language is very risky and going full on standardized means they can take advantage of massive progress in the entire ts ecosystem.

Custom is great right up to when the lead eng leaves.

Talking to people, settings terrifies them.

Command line dominates in quick flexibility. But is awful when it comes to discoverability. Most people can't even find the turn off ads button in windows 11. And people hate that. So what hope do they have at a terminal.