6,253 karma · joined April 18, 2014
Even if I happen to agree with a message, I still think non-emotional and nuanced takes are necessary.
There are a number of common-phrases I'll hear like "everything is connected" or "everything is alive/sentient."
However, not everything is connected, effective thinking is very much about identifying independent problems. Also I certainly don't believe everything is alive, and I certainly don't think this opinion should be held on the basis of chemicals rather than scientific data.
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Edit: And what's most disconcerting is that they seem to think these phrases "mean" something. If they said "Well, there's really no way I can articulate it, but it's changed my emotional outlook on a lot of things" then I'd be much more receptive.
No harm in having a scenario where a minority of people commit a domestic rebellion.
Obviously "clear" and "direct" are both positive-spin words, indicating that the author thinks there's some value to this.
As somebody who used to be incredibly blunt, and still is much blunter than average, I'll tell you that social graces, white lies, and indirectness usually serve purposes. The only time you need to be more direct is when people don't understand what you're saying (which actually happens a fair amount in business).
Take for example the PIP (performance improvement plan). On the one hand, the name of it is so whitewashed you could worry the meaning might be lost. However, renaming it to the blunt title "were-probably-about-to-fire-you-documentation", though refreshingly direct, would probably be a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people.
Does changing the words around it lessen the pain (in the long term)? Unclear, maybe it just spreads it out, maybe it makes it more shameful, because it indicates it's too severe to be addressed directly.
I always feel compelled to point out that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Or chemicals should be presumed unsafe until proven safe, rather than the other way around.
I'd also add that failure to do so should result in a $1,000 penalty, half of which should go as a $500 reward to anybody who reports the case (photo would suffice as proof). Officers should have their whereabouts tracked via there phones for accountability purposes, which could be used to verify such reports or identify officers.
Now every candidate starts hacking their github full of all kinds of code, or even paying people to, or copying work to create a perfectly manicured "facebooked" version of what their work looks like (probably with fake timestamps too).
Suddenly that signal becomes entirely worthless too. I think tech has one the best interviewing processes of all industries.
I think maybe a better use of the public outrage of cancel-culture might be to direct that call-out energy from celebrities to police that commit manslaughter.
Next step might be getting pictures on such a website.
I agree the average person responds to unusual behavior with the same innate revulsion we fee to a physical deformity (perhaps to a lesser degree). However I think both revulsions do dissipate with time.
I think what doesn't dissipate, is the distaste for when somebody doesn't follow important and healthy social codes. For example, there's a stereotype of "nerds" pedantically interrupting everybody to correct minor or irrelevant details ("um actually..."). Now, stereotype aside, this type of behavior is genuinely offputting and counterproductive.
To a large extent I think "coolness" is the ability to keep the conversation flowing when a potentially emotional topic gets invoked. The opposite is that person who has a certain trigger-word, where if it ever shows up in passing, derails the whole conversation on a 1-man tirade.
In summary, I find a lot of what makes a good conversational isn't following arbitrary norms of the era, but a strong empathy/understanding for the emotional effect of every topic and bouncing between those emotional states with grace.
Suppose you have two engineers, one in America, one in India. PRs cannot be merged without an approval. Suppose the average PR requires 3 back-and-forth comments before it gets merged.
In the same timezone this gets merged in an hour. In a different timezones its days.
If you can find any reliably bad strategy (in a fee-less market), then you have necessarily found an outperforming strategy that is the opposite.
Doesn't matter, the author still made an unsubstantiated claim, and hence is unscientific. He should change the title.
What this piece should be titled is "We don't have any evidence yet of multiple strains."
Firstly if that's his point, his conclusion should match. Saying there is "no correlation" is a reach.
Secondly, I'm not convinced I even believe that point. So is he saying that if I took an IQ test from nobel prize winners they would be equally distributed to a normal population sample (assuming a 100 minimum cutoff)?
I don't think you can assume the average person is honest/transparent. You can't assume the person you're negotiating your salary with is going to tell you if your offer is much too low. You can't assume HR isn't going to lie about the reason the fired somebody. You can't assume the company will give you any heads up if they're thinking about firing you.
A lot of people offering "feedback," especially public, especially if it's negative, are just angry venters. And this goes both directions E.g. Glassdoor.
Not saying it's good to have a chip on your shoulder about any of this, but it definitely shouldn't be swept under the rug.
In light of this attack, maybe going forward have a setup script that creates an SSH tunnel back to a machine that can talk to the salt-master for you. You could then have VPN, but if it's flakey at all, it could cost the ability to update machines.
Or perhaps (and I say this as a saltstack user) ansible really is the more secure model for those scenarios.
> Even if you didn't notice any unexpected symptoms, please: nuke and restart.
If I were writing this, I'd probably write something like "On May x, a remote-code-execution in (all versions?) public salt-masters (not minions?), was unveiled. Shortly thereafter, actual exploitation in the wild is being used. If your salt installation uses a salt-master, and it's internet-reachable, it may already be compromised, along with much your infrastructure. Section 2 is how to see if you are infected, and Section 3 is how to remove the infection."
" After all, the pandemic has thus far tended to hit more liberal regions, like New York, harder than more conservative regions. It is therefore possible that conservative and liberal differences are driven by a divergence in actual experiences with COVID-19"
WTF does that mean? Our salt implementation is on an entirely private network, so why would I be more likely than not to be compromised already?
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Edit: Re-downvotes -- This is a sincere question. Is there some evidence that the majority of salt implementations are compromised, or some mechanism by which this hits private networks? Or is that line just for dramatic effect?
Those in authority will never be above questioning and doubting, even if that means considering dumb questions.
At a stock level, I imagine their longterm plan is to replace warehouse workers with robots anyways.
If I'm an official charged with managing public health, and I use my early/special awareness of a virus to stockpile medical supplies, I see that a basically insider trading.
You're also glossing over the fact that his job was head-of-procument. So there's no way that privately procuring PPE didn't conflict with his job of professionally procuring PPE for the government. The fact that he chooses to lie about it presumably shows he knows it's wrong.
Not sure how you could see this as non-firable, potentially criminal.