Ozzie_osman

The Nature of Tyranny, by El Kawakibi (a Syrian scholar). The book is 100 years old, and originally in Arabic, but there are some very good translations.

Great read on tyranny and it's adverse effects. Very relevant to what's happening in the world day.

Unfortunately unavailable on Kindle.

It's sad that so much of this conversation has devolved into technicalities of whether this is a genocide.

You can't look at this, at reports coming out of Gaza and the West Bank, at Israel's own government officials' statements, and not, at minimum, believe that brutal war crimes were committed on a massive basis here. Whether it's "Holocaust level" or "genocide" is a red herring. It needs universal condemnation, it needs to stop, and the people who did it need to be held accountable.

  > The US is morally superior in every way that counts.

This in a thread about how the US bombed a school.

This is quite the paradigm shift. Can't wait to get my hands on it.

No one should have nuclear weapons except for me. Oh you already have them too? OK, just us then.

One sequence here could be the Board fired him (as CEO), then he removed/replaced the Board (as main preferred shareholder).

Either that or he somehow has control over IT and is just shit posting and controlling Slack.

In systems thinking, this would be called "intrinsic responsibility" (or lack thereof).

  > Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision makers. Because the pilot of a plane rides in the front of the plane, that pilot is intrinsically responsible. He or she will experience directly the consequences of his or her decisions. 

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12139955-intrinsic-responsi...

I love postgres and use it heavily, but I still don't fully understand how it overlook MySQL. Maybe because of Heroku adopting it.

MySQL was generally faster, and while MyISAM was a bit limited Innodb was pretty powerful, and you had the choice. It was also simpler (imo) and avoided a lot of the xid/vacuum issues.

That said, still love Postgres. But at the time it started eclipsing MySQL, MySQL felt better positioned.

> While undoubtedly tragic, most displaced people at some point move on with their lives, and stop terrorising their neighbours and the world.

The irony is that this statement (which I disagree with) could be applied equally well to both Israel and the Palestinians.

Yes, but statistically Israel (IDF + settlers) commits crimes like that on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis.

I loved this. Unfortunately, I don't know how realistic it is at this point. The entire modern Western system is built on incentives, and it would require dramatically changing the social order and economic system.

Yes, writing code that (appears to) work was not the hard part. Even before LLMs you could find very cheap contractors on Upwork or through offshoring companies to write "code".

Well-engineered code is hard. It still is. Code that is reliable, extensible, maintainable, scalable, legible, understandable is hard. Code where the specs and the "why" behind it were pressure-tested via thought and good intuition.

There are people rich enough to do that in our current world. They don't because either they have a moral compass or because they fear the law.

  > but my dad kept saying it wouldn’t hurt to really make it clear I wanted to get into the school.

My mother convinced me to do the same after I was also wait-listed at my top choice university. I sent them an email updating them on things I had done since applying (in May, two weeks before graduating), and two days later, I got my acceptance letter.

This looks awesome. I'm very excited about how learning will evolve harnessing AI. I'm also a huge fan of Andrew Ng.

I wish they hadn't raised so much money. I'm not sure "large funding round" sets up the right dynamic for what he's trying to do.

This is how it has always been throughout history (and still is in most parts of the world).

Individual is part of nuclear family, nuclear family is part of extended family, extended family is part of tribe, etc. When one part is in need, the others jump in to help.

I wonder whether this applies more to coding agents, or whether it'll apply as well to other types of agents.

It feels like coding agents get better at a faster rate and are easier to train.

I would personally love to see an end to the universally existing bait-and-switch of brokers listing unavailable units just to get you on the phone, then when you contact them, saying "Oh sorry that unit just got rented (or sold), but, I have another one that might suit you"

AI can make individuals 2x or 5x or 10x (?) faster. Lack of trust, alignment, and ownership can make _teams_ 2x or 5x or 10x slower.

Decisions are special things. One of the golden rules of life is that a person (or entity) making decisions is somehow impacted or otherwise getting feedback on the repercussions of those decisions.

When you cognitively surrender to AI, or to another person (be it a leader/manager, or a subordinate/report), you are asking for trouble.

One thing that changed reading for me was Readwise. One of my favorite products. Super simple concept, I just highlight quotes I like, then I get a daily email of random things I've highlighted. Great way to retain info from non-fiction books, and to retain the feeling of special parts of fiction ones.

This is really cool. Can it play nice with gdrive or Dropbox? For better or worse, that's just where my data lives now but I'd love this layer.

Anecdotal and more for unskilled than skilled workers, but having traveled to Germany a bunch, I found that taxi drivers and delivery drivers seem pretty unhappy there. They mention not feeling accepted, feeling constantly looked down upon, etc. There's a bit of that in every country, but generally, the immigrants I've found in Germany seem a lot less happy than the ones I've met in other countries.

"writers who wrote the most in history"

Proceeds to ignore Eastern writers (Arab, Chinese, Persian) who wrote just as much or more.

An org that big doesn't "see". A triager with very little context and authority is probably the one making this call and my guess is the process is failing to direct or escalate it to the right person.

AI has caused a lot of leaders to overreact. Great leaders find a balance between overreacting and waffling. It's often wise to dampen your response a little bit, without dragging your feet.

100% this. This is why it's so hard to trust AI on code reviews, at least for now.

The main thing is the old forums were sorted by recency (how new a post was or how recently it was replied to) rather than some AI-driven engagement mechanism. They were structured (you'd have several rooms for different topics on the same forum).