ascendantlogic

I had a relatively good relationship with my mother but in my 20's and 30's I had a bad habit of being too busy for her. Either working or playing I was off doing things and not returning her calls. I lost her about 18 months ago and now I beat myself up for it.

I'm posting this here because this site caters to a crowd of people who tend to be workaholics. I've read comments here from people saying their mothers came to see them but they were too busy working to spend any time with them. At the end of your time on this planet it won't be the code you wrote or the marketing materials you worked on that you will remember. It will be the family and friends you spent time with.

I would argue that macOS isn't the selling point it used to be but it's still less annoying to me to work with than WSL on Windows 10 or wrestling with a Linux distro and shitty display drivers.

Anecdotally I just see a lot more people using DuckDuckGo as an alternative to Google. I will be the first to admit that I was clearly wrong in my assessment.

There's always two things that these armchair quarterback software devs seem to miss: Scale and Money.

Sure you can hack together a small Google clone using Elasticsearch in a weekend. Can you index all the worlds information and serve the worlds search needs with your little MVP? 99.99% chance no, even if you were given a few hundred engineers to scale it.

Even if you could do it technically, where are you coming up with the money to do so? That's not seed-round or even series A round money to do that. That's series D, hundred+ million dollar swipes of a VC's credit card just to get off the ground. Microsoft threw billions at it with Bing and still never became more than an also-ran. The only place that seems to have a real chance is DuckDuckGo, and I'd be very interested to see how their story has played out up to this point.

Google benefited greatly from growing as the web was growing. Trying to index the world's information in 2020 is an astronomical task compared to indexing the world's information in 98, 99 era.

Not at the $0 price point they don't.

My days right now are full of Chef, Terraform, Bash, etc. The coding I am doing is usually scripts and utilities. It's more about glue and automation vs actual product/feature dev.

I've been devops/infra for the last few years and my web dev skills have fallen into disrepair. So I'm doing a side project with Django REST API, Golang Job Runners and React SPA to bring myself back up to par.

It's very rare to give any credence to any breathless "X is dead". Do what makes sense for you to solve the problem in front of you. There's anti-patterns but bike shedding over architecture patterns is a waste of time for a large majority of most CRUD webapps with low traffic requirements I'd wager.

Except for the massive number of miners securing the existing Bitcoin network and creating the security that is the inherent value of said network.

Bitcoin hasn't been extinguished because it's not a replacement for fiat. Transaction scaling still isn't there and no one in their right mind spends their bitcoin on coffee when it could 10x in a year and then drop 90% from there just to 10x again. It's become an investment class and governments are fine with that because people are investing their fiat into it and then pulling it back out to fiat later. There's no threat to their sovereign monetary policy yet.

That's because there is none. This person you're responding to is taking a story about someone doing a pretty prudent move as an attack on him or herself.

> This may be an unpopular opinion, but things like this happen.

Yes, and at Facebook in the context of data gathering they seem to happen ALL THE TIME. So if they did actually care about privacy they'd make changes to curb these sort of "mistakes", but taken in aggregate the relentless "bugs" show a pattern of willful malevolence.

No, there are definitely people who care about those things and those are things that should definitely be cracked down on. But human nature always prevails and the power hungry always want more power. "Won't you think of the children" is sort of a punchline for any sort of barely-masked power grab legislation that has gone through in the last few decades.

I feel conflicted over this. I was a strong believer in the original mission of transparency and showing us what the world's elite and powerful were doing. But once they started playing favorites with information disclosure during the 2016 election their entire existence became tainted in my mind. Obviously I don't want to see the man burn for showing the world some of the terrible things that happen behind closed doors but I also don't trust him or his organization anymore to be impartial arbiters of transparency.

Politicians do not care about the ramifications of this. They only care about granting themselves power over who sees what when through the guise of combating hate speech, terrorism, child porn, etc. Posting a blog about this will change nothing.

Depending on how open they are start asking questions about their cap table too, especially if they're offering you equity as a large part of compensation. Getting 1-2% in options is wonderful unless they have a down round or two on the books and those investors are going to wipe everyone out with their ridiculous liquidation preferences regardless of how much the liquidity event is for.

I was being facetious but thank you for the earnest answer.

What is this "bonus" thing you speak of?

The first part of the hype cycle is "I have a hammer and now everything is a nail". The second part of the hype cycle is "I need to hammer some nails but I'm tired of hearing about how great hammers are".

Unfortunately I agree. Since Silicon Valley leans left so heavily this is the sort of thing you sit on until much later in the process. I personally feel that Google, Facebook, et al are too big and powerful now, this is going to immediately set those companies against her so she's kneecapping her campaign before it even gets started.

You're discovering the dirty secret that a lot of people generally don't care about doing the right thing when doing the wrong thing is so lucrative. People will talk a big game but shove a pile of cash in their face and things get complicated fast.

While it is in fact possible for there to be plenty of men there working diligently on reversing gender bias, I feel it's more of a complete-lack-of-self-awareness thing and that someone should have looked at the demographics of those awards and said "hmmm, what are the optics on this going to be?"

Glad they caught the bug before the fork instead of after.

Yes because humans are still the end users here and humans congregate into groups. Network effect is a human trait. In order for any network to be useful it needs a majority of people agreeing to use it, and to that end it ends up with inertia. There is no utopia, there's just "more decentralized" or "less decentralized"

As with most things the concept of "decentralization" is shades of gray. While there is no central controlling entity in the Ethereum network, there are people behind it and using it and people tend to congregate into groups with power structures.

If you want to force a transaction to be reverted you need to either create a cataclysmic event prior to the event you want changed, or you need to own billions of dollars in hardware and spend tens if not hundreds of millions on electricity currently to overpower the network via 51% attack.

1. No one was forced to run the new client that backed out the DAO 2. The existing network with the stolen funds and the DAO lived on as Ethereum Classic

There was no central entity mandating that everyone was required to run the "new" network. It was entirely up to miners and people running nodes to decide which network they supported. Further the decision to back out the DAO hack was done via vote so that's another important part of decentralization called consensus.

Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 come very close to recapturing that Baldur's Gate magic. I highly recommend them.

> used as tokens in money laundering scams.

As opposed to the US dollar which is constantly used in money laundering scams perpetuated by some of the biggest names in global finance?

I'm more worried about the United States carrying a 21 trillion dollar debt load and what that will do to our economy more than I'm worried about "past performance not being indicative of future results" in the crypto markets.

> Bitcoin's natural customer base -- tax cheats, money launderers, drug dealers, etc, and will probably in fact over correct.

Funny I should read your comment about Bitcoin's use for criminal enterprise after I read about Goldman Sach's alleged hand in a multi-billion dollar fraud in Malaysia, or Deutche Bank's multi-billion dollar money laundering. Or going back a few years the Panama Papers and that entire underground financial apparatus that drummed up exactly zero long term outrage or changes. I'll be more inclined to believe crypto is only for thieves when you convince me that the existing financial system isn't also completely rife with thievery and cheats.