Keegs

I’ll admit I’m one of these nerds but I disagree. There’s a difference between being opinionated and not allowing me to change the defaults on a device I own.

The things you attribute to unionization are, I think, a bit of a stretch. Hollywood especially. Actors and writers have been organized for a long time. Smaller studios like A24 with a reputation for making good movies when larger studios milk existing franchises still use organized labor.

I know you're kidding, but it surprises me how often I hear the idea that an organization the size of the FCC can't multitask.

I re-read the portion about Theranos but can’t follow his argument. Elizabeth Holmes once said her company had a flat structure, Theranos ended in scandal, therefore flat organizations are more prone to scandal? There are as many examples of successful flat companies as unsuccessful companies mentioned in the piece.

> Time, however, comes into play when a molecule collides with another one, triggering a chemical reaction. Then, a storm strikes. The quantum steadiness bursts when the sections of the electronic cloud pour from one molecule upon another.

If only my college chemistry class started here. I really enjoyed physics but for some reason never grokked chem. This might’ve changed all that.

I got to see Trampled by Turtles play last weekend. The experience of watching them jam at the end of each song - six musicians giving it 110% and perfectly in sync - is something I’ll never forget.

You can always take a class from an org like Stop the Bleed or NOLS that trains regular people. We can’t predict how we’ll react in emergencies we haven’t drilled, but I bet even a little bit of training goes a long way.

> If an LLM can compose a poem found in no existing book, paint an attractive picture that no one has ever seen,

An LLM can write a poem that fools me into thinking it’s good, but not anyone who reads poetry as a hobby. Poetry is inspired in a way that’s hard to replicate with a prompt.

Artists also take inspiration from other artists, but the “distance” between their influences and their work is so much greater than the distance between an LLM’s that I don’t fault anyone who think it’ll take time for LLMs to catch up.

I’m interested to know where this idea comes from. Is there a good reference you recommend? My anecdotal experience has been that low density websites like Medium are more stressful than higher density websites like Substack/HN because I have to do more work to read the text on the page.

To paraphrase Matt Levine: the fact that you lost a billion dollars means someone else trusted you with a billion dollars, and that’s reason enough for financiers to trust you with yet another billion, thinking surely you’ll get it right this time.

I wouldn’t be shocked if they came back. It’s so hard to build that being a large company gives you both the opportunity and incentives. It’s normal to want a short commute. If you can offer employees an affordable place to live near your office, you might even get away with lower salaries: if the difference would disappear to rent anyway, why not live in Googleville with complimentary YouTube TV?

This is something I think about a lot. We have societal issues with critical severity that are effectively marked WONTFIX. The latest innovation in consumer tech is only going to feel more and more absurd.

Computer Networks: A Systems Approach takes a subject I didn’t think I’d like and presents it in a way that made me want to read every chapter. It’s a master class on how to make technical content enjoyable, and a great intro/refresher to networking. Can’t recommend it enough.

> I move further away, and take longer to get to work, and spend that time listening to audio books.

I like audiobooks and it would be nice to get paid to listen when I do. I would not trade even two hours of my day, every day I commute, by moving further away. You would have to be paid more than you value that time for it to make sense.

Exactly. It’s too easy for these decisions to become a formality. ProPublica’s reporting on Cigna[1] is a great example:

> Before health insurers reject claims for medical reasons, company doctors must review them, according to insurance laws

> A Cigna algorithm flags mismatches between diagnoses and what the company considers acceptable tests and procedures for those ailments

Sounds fine, except

> “We literally click and submit,” one former Cigna doctor said. “It takes all of 10 seconds to do 50 at a time.”

[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health...

I naively used to think that BuzzFeed could be a new business model for investigative journalism, with revenue from the native advertising in its other arms going towards Pulitzer Prize-level work. What a shame.

There’s a role called sales engineer that typically exists in the sales organization but requires a technical background. From the engineering org’s perspective, your SEs are there to make sure sales doesn’t oversell or undersell. At my company your pay is commission-based but with a higher base than sales proper.

I’m a big fan of the cube rule except for its salad category. The idea that a frittata and a bowl of tomato soup are equivalent is hard to swallow (pun intended).

The majority of homes in America are occupied by their owners (this is what home-ownership rates measure). It is not true to to say the majority of American adults are homeowners - that ratio is a lot lower.

“The expected value is negative so playing the lottery is silly” also misses that someone looking for a way out of poverty and seeing a lack of alternatives might judge the opportunity cost of his 2 dollars and 5 minutes worth the vanishingly small chance of getting a payout. The choice gets harder to defend the more you play, but I think it’s in bad taste to say lotteries are a tax on people bad at math.

I think that was presented as an ideology rather than anyone’s personal beliefs. Paraphrasing Zizek, to follow an ideology you don’t have to believe it’s true; it’s enough to act as if it is.

> There are less profitable and more profitable industries and companies don’t move out of the less profitable ones.

Entering a different market is expensive and takes a lot of time. It’s also not guaranteed you’ll succeed.

> they’d all be selling crack instead of furniture. Or at least mandating the employees be on it for productivity.

Selling crack is against the law and afaik so is requiring employees to use PEDs (see the parent’s idea of governments deciding what’s out of bounds). The tactics Purdue used to push OxyContin are a good example.

> Because you don’t want to harm people

Yes but you see the risk to our brand is less than the expected return so harming people is in the shareholders’ interest.

> As an anarchist, wouldn’t that be something you’d approve of?

I suspect GP considers themself an anarchist in the pop culture sense, which has little in common with the political practice.

Something similar is happening to Spotify. They’ve shoehorned a lot of “features” into the app recently that will surely make money but at the expense of UX. Attrition is a lagging indicator; there’s always a point where mounting annoyance finally justifies switching services. I always wonder if that’s accounted for or if there’s just no incentive to care.

Firefox is not an “inferior tool.” Its cookie segregation and CSS styling feature are not found in Chrome. I don’t use Firefox for moral reasons, I use it because it’s better.

> It is very difficult to find someone who can do it, and they command a premium because of it.

Is it difficult because people like this are rare, or because so few people are ever considered for these positions?

I think layoffs matter too. ICs may be fired more for performance reasons, but they disproportionately face uncertainty created by rounds of layoffs, uncertainty that isn’t compensated.

For an explanation of what changed see this forum discussion [0]. I’m not a fan of the tab metaphor in general but the implementation could’ve been worse.

[0]: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v1-0-0/44873

But the same $50m paid to a single employee (on top of hundreds more) is not robbery?