adamcharnock

I agree that this really could signal a massive shift in our society. But I’m also seeing people conflate humanity with jobs and productivity. And while I don’t have evidence for it, this feels to me like a rather North American proclivity.

Yes knowledge worker jobs may significantly suffer, but that is far from being ‘humanity’.

It seems to me that professions that involve interacting with the real world could go largely untouched (dentists, factory workers, delivery people, drivers, anyone working with nature).

Of course, feel free to hit me up with your counter-arguments!

I saw a super simple example of this back in the 90s when I was first leaning web development (was in Web Development for Dummies or some such).

The page prompted the user for the password, and then used the password to generate the URL for the hidden page and redirected the user there. Of course this wasn’t over HTTPS, and you got a 404 if you entered the wrong password, but it was still a neat hobbyist trick for the era. I think the author even wagered that readers couldn’t defeat it.

I’ve found the performance to be pretty good, and I use it most days. I certainly rarely feel as though I’m waiting for it. The global search can take upto a second to return results, but that is as bad as it gets for me.

I recall some blog post about a major refactoring/sharding they did sometime in the last few years. Maybe that helped?

I think this is a good point, and you don't deserve to be downvoted for it.

I think some of my examples do try to change wider society, but it is just more subtle and less overt/wholesale. I think there will be activists/evangelicals in any sub-culture.

I suppose it is counter-culture in a universe where people dismiss it as being hedonism.

And while hedonism may be a side-effect in some situations, even that comes from eschewing the standards of wider society. I'd argue that is the definition of counter-culture.

I'm pretty sure I've been existing in a number of counter-cultures for the last decade or two. These have been either linked to my identity or physical location, I couldn't have properly experienced them through consuming media on the subject. Certainly all required an active choice and/or lifestyle change on my part.

Maybe people mean something else by counter-culture, but here are examples from my life:

- Freelancing/contracting, and actively living substantially below my means. This has given me free time in a way that really changed my view on the world and allowed me to be around other people who were not in the 9-5 working world.

- Sexuality & ENM, plus living in a large city. There is a huge non-obvious culture of LQBTQIA people in this culture which often have very different outlooks on life to the mainstream.

- Communal living. Living in a warehouse with people from very different walks of life. I was exposed to so many fascinating ideas and people this way. It was a truly magical time of my life in which I also played a part in supporting the queer/ENM sub-culture of my city.

- Buying land and living off grid. There is a whole sub-culture of people doing this, both online and (more importantly) physically around me.

So I think counter-culture is available but – having written the above – I'm not sure if I am agreeing and disagreeing with the OP. On one hand it exists, but on the other hand I'm saying that it is very hard to access without making material changes to one's life.

The ISP I started: https://gardunha.net/en/

Currently looses money and causes me stress, but it is pretty cool.

Factorio, interestingly. Their dev blog talked about how it was typically constrained on memory bandwidth.

Does anyone know how non-compete agreements are enforced in the care of non-USA citizens?

I’m based in Europe (Portugal) and working for a USA company. This isn’t a serious concern, just curious.

I don't share my opinions on the internet any more, or at least try to avoid it. That's what my friends are for. I don't finding it a rewarding experience, and I find the prevalence of other people sharing their opinions online to generally make the experience worse for me.

I will however share my experience, what I have done, how I did it, how it worked, how it failed, how I choose the live my life, and why I make those choices. But these are not opinions, rather they are facts about me. People can do with those facts what they wish. If people disagree, well that hardly matters because these are my choices not theirs.

I've been discovering this for the first time over the last 24 hours and, much like many others, it really has blown my mind. My various thoughts have been:

- This does feel like a new way of accessing information. Could Google pivot to this? Maybe, but turning ships that large really isn't quick or easy. And this technology is so obviously useful that I'm not sure they'll be given much time.

- Is this what we can expect from the new Apple search engine? Is this going to be another iphone-unveiling moment? Maybe, but they haven't been amazing at delivering cloud services.

- How is this going manifest in my professional life. Does InteliJ/VSCode have a built-in agent that I can ask to draft code for me? Do they own that, or does my IDE just hook into GPT BigCo's service that we all have a subscription for?

- How could this be used to generate advertising revenue? (because I'm sure Google is asking itself that question). Is that possible, or will a different revenue stream be required?

- Are there any major limits on how much this technology can improve? Sure it seems to work great with images, prose, and code. But in the future could it design me a house? Plan a wedding? Manage my builders for me? Be a friend? Or do those involve solving other additional really hard problems, and code/images/prose are just the low hanging fruit?

- Will API design not matter? Will APIs become more important, or irrelevant? Will this technology just be able to use whatever interface you want to present to the world, be it an old XML SOAP API, a reactive web frontend, or running shell commands?

- How much training data is required for this technology to be able to use our services? Do only huge services have enough training data out there? Can this technology ever learn to use my little new REST API that I've just published docs for? Will my little service be forever ignored if it cannot?

Answers welcome

EDIT: Minor proofing changes

Not the OP, but with similar experience levels and I’ve never done a LeetCode interview, and even regular interviews are pretty light. I mostly contract though, and they generally offer me full time after a little while if I want it.

I knew this was going to be about my friend Paul even before I clicked on it! He’s a really lovely guy who does so much good for the world.

I don’t really have much of substance to add here, but yeah, he really is working to make the world a better place.

Side note: if you want to get a ballpark for one way latency, just measure the approximate distance of the undersea cable on Google Maps (in km) and divide by 155. That will give latency (in ms) to +/-10%, excluding any additional last-mile latency (Wi-Fi etc)

That is a really good point that I hadn’t considered. Presumably this comes at the risk of dropped packets if the upstream link becomes saturated? Does one just size the links accordingly to avoid that?

That’s interesting. And I’m sure they have some very knowledgable people working for them who may(/will) know things I don’t.

That being said, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were pushing 17G of UDP on 100G transports. Probably with some pretty high-end/expensive network hardware with huge buffers. I.e you can do it if you’ve got the money, but I bet TCP would still have better raw throughput.

I’m really looking forwarding to seeing the original commenters reply on this. But I’ll share my experience too.

I’ve found UDP to be great for latency but pretty awful for throughout. Especially over longer routes (ie inter-region transports). Also, if you fire UDP packets out of a machine in a tight loop then there is every chance you could overload various buffers and just loose them (depending on the networking hardware).

TCP is comparatively amazing for throughput, but you do take a latency hit (especially on the initial handshake, which doesn’t exist for UDP).

There are some very experienced people commenting here though, and I’d be happy to be corrected or expanded upon.

This is slightly impractical for non-critical communication for me because many of my friends are foreigners like me. Example issues:

- many people I talk to have phone numbers from different countries. Making such communication expensive.

- also, I suspect many people around me have not updated their WhatsApp number for a while (or have multiple SIMs)

- no one here optimises for SMS or call minutes. Some people will be on data only (either data only SIM, or Wi-Fi only)

I've written a tool to do this not once but twice now! The first was for ingesting netflow data, the second from ingesting AWS VPC flow logs. In both cases this was storing 'flows' rather than raw packet information.

I'd be super interested in tooling to help with this. I'm running – literally right now – a Python script that is writing about 100k flows per second into Postgres (TimescaleDB). It is batch rather than realtime, and it geocodes the flows on the way in.

Part 1

Find a therapist you like. Not because of any mental heath issues, but because I guarantee you that they will save you more money than they cost you by a long way. The right therapist will be able to ask you the right questions to help you figure out what to do next, and even make helpful suggestions.

This is absolutely not the same as talking to a friend or partner. It is their job to use their experience help and advise you. They are entirely in your corner with you, just like you would expect from any professional.

Part 2

Perhaps a different perspective – I've been freelancing/contracting since I was about 22, and I'm now 37. Full stack, but leaning heavily towards backend given the chance. My latest contracting role is actually as a network engineer (which I gained the knowledge for because I started an ISP during the pandemic).

I've not encountered any issue with nearing my 40s. I think the three key things are: be a good communicator, be comfortable talking about money, and doing your job well. All three are equally important, and you can probably get by with only two.

I've always worked in either small companies, or in very small (or solo) teams within a larger company. I know that I excel in that environment, so that is what I stick to.

But if you really do hate technology, then perhaps it is time to find something else. Again, the therapist will really help so much with this.

Happy to talk more about any of this.

I’m seeing a few unhappy comments about this, so I’ll just point out a couple of things:

1. This was introduced in a beta. It was then removed from subsequent betas until a fix could be found.

2. Running docker on a router could be really helpful in some cases, especially for small ISPs such as mine. For example: being able to run a recursive DNS resolver at the broadcast tower (ie nearer the customer) without having to run an entire server would be great. Or running a Prometheus exporter on the router for metric collection. Or for local processing/archiving of netflow data.

There are some really helpful use cases for this, but they are not the normal devops reasons for using docker.

It looks like they're based on Hetzner. I would guess they are building on Hetzner's dedicated servers. Not that that's a bad thing, I'm a big fan of their dedicated servers.

Source: The IP listed in one of their examples is 2a01:4f8:a0:380b::1. If you lookup the ASN it points to Hetzner.

On a smaller scale, I’m on off-grid solar and I potentially have 20kWh excess generation a day on solar (+/- 100%). Any exciting ideas regarding what I could shove that into?

To offer a few datapoints here… I do see more moderated drinking in UK/European people in their early-twenties. Even when alcohol is free/cheap, people seem to stop well short of being drunk.

I also see people make a conscious active decision to alter their states of mind. Say for a particular party, or for a particular sunny Sunday afternoon. And alcohol is normally only a small part of the picture in this regard.

I suspect any study that only looks at alcohol consumption is going to see a very limited view of any overall social trend.

I would be very interested to see data about drug consumption, broken down by substance, alcohol included.

Edit: this could also be seen as a regression to the mean. UK drinking culture has been a bit extreme.

A good point. This sounds like the kind of thing that could be incorporated into a mileage reading at the annual vehicle inspection (which I assume the USA has??). Vehicles which are for entirely private-road use don’t get inspected, so that’s ok. Or they are specially classified somehow.

Everyone else just accepts that what the system lacks in accounting for private road use, is made up for in simplicity and cheapness of administration.

Possibly true. Not sure it is relevant though.

Especially given then title of the article, and that insulin in generally free in Europe AFAIK.

A phrase I've heard said: The rest of the world thinks of the USA in the same way that the USA thinks of Florida.

I don't think anything manmade and space-borne is going to have enough structural integrity to perform any kind of summersault upon impact at that velocity.

See the fighter jet vs concrete wall video [1]. That was going at 500mph, and notice how the tail of the craft doesn't even perceptibly slow down. And a change in velocity would be required for the tail to rotate around (whether the impact is on an angle or head on)

This space object was travelling at 5800mph, 11+ times the speed. Sure a meter or so of moon dust may be a bit softer, but its solid rock underneath right? I'd guess the equivalent would be putting a kitchen sponge between that fighter jet & concrete wall.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4CX-9lkRMQ

I’m really not sure there is a strong argument against this. I think our salaries are too high, and I’ve been thinking that since I started contracting about 15 years ago.

Intelligence really doesn’t seem like the solution to any of our big problems.

I’ve heard this argument before (and probably made this argument at some point too), and it seems to boil down to thinking that people would agree with me if they would just be a bit smarter and/or more informed.

But I don’t think this is true at all. If it was then smart people would agree, but they don’t.

There is another line of thinking (often seen in science fiction) that suggests all problems are solvable if only you are smart enough. But they are not, some problems simply don’t have a reachable satisfactory solution. There is a reason these science fiction stories often come with a ‘benevolent’ dictator to impose the smart fix on everyone, because taking away free will is the only way to solve some of the hardest problems.

I think there is a strong argument for emotional intelligence, worldliness, and empathy though.