analyst74

> A friend contacted Maree that evening, sharing the uploaded video. At the time, Maree “didn’t think much of it”.

> But after seeing the TikTok video featured in media reports describing her as an “elderly woman” with a “heartbreaking tale,” she said she “felt dehumanised”.

Not trying to support the tiktoker, who is obviously a douchebag. But it's interesting that the negative emotions didn't trigger until it becomes news.

Full surveillance state sounds scary, but reliable, private, non-traceable financial transaction scares me more.

I wished all the articles promoting those schemes talk about potential risk, i.e. increased crime, and how they can be mitigated.

For successful YouTubers, the money coming from YT is actually not their primary income, one YouTuber publically said YT payout is ~1/4 of their total revenue. Their other main sources of revenue includes brand deals, affiliates, product/merc sales and direct donation.

Tiktokers are generally following YouTuber model in how they monetize their content, minus Ads revenue share.

Databases designed to query large amounts of data tend to rely on partition key to allow parallel workloads (i.e. map reduce). And this partition data is stored like hash index.

Big query would be one example.

In my humble opinion, the key is to focus on solving problems for your key customers.

Most breakthrough progress I observe come from doing things that are conventionally considered impossible, low impact or just bad decisions. But the person/team had an insight to make it possible and wildly profitable.

If you look around, it happens all the time. Google famously made search useful; TikTok found an edge in low quality short form videos, despite all existing major players concluding high quality long form videos is the way.

Keep in mind that the contrarian vision and initial implementation is just the start, they needed continued investment and innovation to stay ahead of competitions, or get copied and leapfrogged.

The more I work with high performance teams and individuals, the more I realize the value of creativity. It can be creativity in technical solutions; it can be creativity in managing complex constraints; it can be creativity in connecting the dots and identifying multiplier projects.

When faced with difficult problems, there is a very large difference in effectiveness between engineers. And it's not a one-dimensional scale, a brilliant engineer in one area can be quite average when solving different types of problems due to lack of context/domain knowledge/experience.

Database is basically just ab abstraction to help you ingest and query flat files on disk.

If you skip that and do your own ingestion and querying...you just have a built-in database?

This might have some performance shortcomings, but given maturity of caching these days, you can probably just add caching layer in front of the inefficient query engine when the needs arise.

This is wild, I remember even a bunch of very motivated and persistent YouTube employees couldn't remove a racist song calling for violence against Asians. Does Instagram have much less red tape on content moderations than YouTube?

As a very logical person who developed social intelligence much later in life. One very surprising thing I noticed, unthinkable to my younger self, is that many people only engage with people they are interested in.

If upon initial judgement and they find you not interesting, they basically tune you out, and won't attempt to find out what interesting things you have to say.

My guess of why companies don't pay current employees more, is that they believe, correctly or incorrectly, that good talents will naturally rise through the ranks and would be compensated reasonably, while the rest are simply replace-able cogs.

Then once you build a track record, bring your team back to Canada, completely avoiding greencard queue.

And they massacred the people who lived here before them and started a new country. You must be proud.

I worked at companies where managers are little tsars of their turf, and Google.

The difference with Google is that: 1) you can give feedback to your manager, both anonymously and explicitly, and they'll affect their perf; and 2) your success, in terms of impact and promo are part of your managers success; 3) perf committee will challenge and can override your manager if the rating given seems too low/high given the evidence.

These forces while do not take power away from manager completely, they provide some checks and incentivize managers to respect and support their reports.

Of course, all these nice things come at a cost, that is perf becoming a somewhat transparent and heavy process that eats everyone's time and mental energy.

The author did a really good job of pointing out problem of promo culture, but the solutions suggested are more inspirational than actionable.

All founders/execs/early employees are easily aligned on compabt success. But how do you align incentive of later hires?

In order to reduce time spent on perf, you'd have to rely on a few people who knows an employee's work instead of a larger peer group and committee. The person entrusted with this decision (typically the manager) now wields tremendous amount of power over others. This leads to a different set of problems, like "B player hires C player", yes-man culture, ICs spending effort brown nosing instead of creating value, etc.

Building a culture is all about incentives, it's easy to identify and reward user/company impact when the team is small. But as number grows, it becomes harder to do that, and the declared core values gets ignored as the reward system departs from that.

Is it really that hard to get an entry level job these days? I graduated community college a few years after the dot com bubble burst, and was able to land a 30k job easily, it was less pay than my waiter job.

Did those really low paying job go away? Or has it become really competitive to even get those?

It's a difficult topic, I don't think any country has found a humane way to deal with terrorist organizations.

US chose to bomb Afghanistan into the ground, China chose to establish very strict social controls. Both are terribly inhumane to innocent people in those regions, but what are real alternatives?

Because you're seeing it through the lense of western media.

If you start with the assumption that Chinese government is trying to do good for its citizens, those are straight forward decisions.

CCTV protects people from street crime; credit score seems to provide tremendous value in establishing trust between strangers, let's build a better version; people > algorithms, let's regulate the latter.

An FBI director makes less than 200k, and will be very politically connected and influential; an engineer making that much probably has as much political influence as people living in the projects.

Money can buy political influence, but that's beyond the reach of lower echelon of wealthy.

Doordash already does this in some neighborhoods where dashers get robbed consistently.

Amazon follows the hire fast PIP fast strategy.

Look what that did to their reputation and company culture.

Netflix is a little more successful at this, but they have a much smaller eng footprint and much higher compensation in order to attract and retain top performers.

At staff, or even senior levels, you only have a limited time after joining a company to identify opportunities and initiate projects. Once your projects go live, you're responsible for them. If your initiatives keep failing and getting scrapped, you'd be out of a job soon.

> Speed also incentivizes corner cutting, nepotism, and all sorts of corrupt behavior.

Compare that with SF bay area politics, I don't think speed has any effect on corruption.

Fractional reserve.

Also, recession causes people to spend less and save more. Further reducing demand.

Current rate, which is nearly 0, is also an important consideration.

What this means is if you borrow at 0.25% interest rate yesterday, and it becomes 0.5% tomorrow, your cost of borrowing just doubled.

Poor boomers are affected more by inflation than market crash.

I think when China defeated the theocratic rules, it was an improvement for Tibetan people. But a government's legitimacy is constantly re-evaluated by the governed, and it's the ruling party's job to earn the support necessary for maintaining a stable society.

Using force to ensure conformity can work for the short-term, but history shows even the strongest dictators will fall eventually, if they lose the support of the people.

Totally agree, being attacked for your viewpoint used to be just a problem for minority viewpoints/identities. But now even those who were previously safe are seeing increasing risk in backlashes.

We have gone from silencing the minority to silencing the majority, this is terrible, but silver lining is that now maybe more people are invested in solving the problem.

Isn't it also possible that someone who drives a low key car can drink and drive under the radar?

I was told once that if I want to look fast, drive red, if I actually want to go fast without being caught, drive black.

Anyone remember cuban crisis during the cold war? In fact, even today US is still sanctioning Cuba despite it no longer have USSR backing or any ability to threaten US.

You underestimate how much threat a hostile neighbor poses.

That is not true, cities in Alberta have observed very stable housing prices since 2014, and there is plenty infrastructure and space to build.