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bkirkby

254 karma · joined October 31, 2011

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/bkirkby; my proof: https://keybase.io/bkirkby/sigs/DqPFL0v-jo5aVamC1gYvN1cnJDxXcknRto835CeEGYA ]
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bkirkby··on Commodore Releases Flip Phone
get grok on it and I'm in
bkirkby··on 4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches
this is a poignant example of rent seeking
bkirkby··on Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem
why is it three logicians? wouldn't it work with just two?
bkirkby··on A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
there are parts of the American market that are free and there are parts that are not. We'd have to get into specific details to classify said parts.

While I don't think the existing economy is so binary (bicameral?), you are free to assume either a free market or not and make your arguments accordingly to explore the principles of free markets versus planned economies. I don't think a critique of the general principles of free market versus not relief on my specific answer. We are talking about ideals espoused in a self-proclaimed manifesto, so it's appropriate to speak about the ideals.

bkirkby··on A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
indeed but sometimes abstractions are useful. i would argue that in this case the binary is useful because of the PP's use of the word "totalitarian" (as in "totalitarian neofeudalist").

i am arguing that the word was misapplied to the essay since the essay was promoting free markets and it's central planning that offers opportunity for totalitarian control.

bkirkby··on A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
i don't think anyone has a clear answer for "winning the argument" since definitions can be endlessly debated.

i think a more useful question is "what about the existing US economy is what makes it work/effective?" another useful question is "what about other economies make them less effective than the US economy?"

to answer the first question, the US economy works better when it's a freer market. magatte wade gives a convincing answer to the second question about africa when she points out it's generally very difficult to start a business in african countries.

i'm curious about what alternative you are interested in promoting and how. are you against free markets or do you have ideas on how to make markets more free?

bkirkby··on A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
i see control and influence as being two separate things. mainly, control is forced by the controller while influence is granted from the influenced.
bkirkby··on A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
the "control" of a "weighted control economy" is usually enforced through government (including those politicians you reference). so when we bring in more government then it's less free market. how close we are getting to a free market depends on who is in power and calling for reduced government intervention/regulations for businesses.

as far as control of media, traditional media is becoming increasingly irrelevant and when free speech is allowed on social media the economy becomes more free.

and small players seem to disrupt all the time. openai being the most obvious recent example. twitch being another notable example before that.

i usually don't respond to distracting personal questions, but your use of bicameral confused me a little. did you mean to say binary?

bkirkby··on A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
did you mean to use a different word than "aristocracy?"

and what is "equality of condition" and how do you achieve it?

bkirkby··on A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
how totalitarian? you have free markets (which the manifesto supports) or planned economies and planned economies are where totalitarianism works.
bkirkby··on Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
there appears to be no effort by cpj to determine if the journalists were killed by palestinians or israelis. is that accurate?
bkirkby··on Finding a Tech Job Is Still a Nightmare
In the article they are talking with students who haven't graduated yet, a couple of PMs, and one software engineer who took a three month break between gigs and has been looking for a month.
bkirkby··on Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?
Ten years into my self-taught software engineer career I ran across a statement "if you aren't seeing problems in your work that can be solved by graphs (or any advanced algorithms really), then you are likely avoiding those problems."

I thought he may be right, picked up an algorithm book and started a "coding club" at the company I was working at where we'd meet and go over the details of a specific algorithm.

I became a better programmer for it.

bkirkby··on Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
"money doesn't grow on trees and runways are very real and scary, so without deadlines companies fundamentally cannot function."

Runways being real doesn't mean you need deadlines. Deadlines are useful to motivate the unmotivated.

The better path to dealing with shrinking runways is early and continuous delivery of valuable software. This is facilitated by making sure the team is aligned and onboard with the solution (for motivation) then giving them the environment, support, and trust to get the job done.

This is further enhanced by self-organized teams since the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

With that emergence, the team will deliver valuable and working software at regular intervals (measured by weeks or months at most, preferring the short timescale) and the stakeholders will determine when that valuable software is valuable enough for customers to pay for.

This early and continuous delivery is the primary measure of progress. It also facilitates a welcoming of changes to the requirements at any stage (as the focus is delivering value, not getting a roadmap done).

Roadmaps and deadlines will often get in the way of this system of efficiency in software delivery precisely because the estimation game gives team permission to use all the time negotiated in the estimation, which is already padded enough to ensure an "under promise and over delivery."

All of this is taken straight from the agile manifesto (which is over twenty years old now): https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

bkirkby··on Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35
inference, object detection for one.
bkirkby··on AI will save the world?
With tax credit the cheapest Tesla is $30k. With default interest and loan terms, the Tesla would cost about $4500 / year.

Median annual household income in the US is $71k, so the cheapest Tesla would be ~6.3% of median household income.

Personal finance experts say car loan payments should be no more than 10% of take home pay. (https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/much-spe...)

You not being able to afford a Tesla and the cheapest Tesla being generally affordable can both be true.

bkirkby··on A runner who leads every pack and then vanishes
Curious what you can find about IT bands? I used to run triathlons. Stopped when I had a long recovery from a cracked foot. 10 years later I have chronic IT band tightening that pulls my knee out of alignment and causes constant pain.

When I was doing triathlon, I was in the Clydesdale division because I had a physique more like a football player than a runner. I've often wondered if my leg/knee problems of today are casually related to my choice to seriously do an exercise against body type.

bkirkby··on I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing
Ianal, but I think ddg could come back and claim that their service doesn't copy the content or that their abstract is fair use, so a dmca wouldn't apply to them.

If that happens I'd use language about the exclusive "public display" right that you have over your work.

I'm not aware of this claim being used for a dmca, but I'd like to see how such a claim turned out.

bkirkby··on Disagreeable personalities do not have an advantage in power at work (2020)
I use the "safe enough to try" test. If I can't convince my coworker or employee that my idea has better tradeoffs (using my 30+ years of experience), I'm humble enough to know that maybe I'm wrong. I then ask myself the question "is what they are proposing safe enough to try?" If the answer is yes, then they will do their work their way and we'll learn something. They will learn the old guy might know a thing or two or I'll learn that new things come along all the time.

Either way, we are better off for it.

bkirkby··on I have reached Vim nirvana
I stick with regular vi for a very long time because of this. I was a systems consultant way back when and I'd have to work on several variants of unix that had a mich-too-long lag time on getting vim ports. Iirc, sparc was the unix that took the longest in getting a gnu tools pipeline, so once they had vim and I could reasonably expect most of my customers could install it, I switched.

I now do a pretty standard config (mostly use the vim plugin in VSCode since I'm a software dev nowadays).

bkirkby··on Tell HN: Musk's aircraft are not using PIA transponder codes
That not every plane used by musk technically applied, or is able to apply, for a PIA kinda misses the main point. Sweeney )the jet tracker) has proudly claimed himself that he has cracked the PIA and will continue to post musk's location to matter anyone's privacy wishes.

https://www.globalair.com/articles/pia-privacy-program-no-ma...

You can't "well akshually," out of the privacy concern here.

bkirkby··on My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness
i'm not sure i would call it _completely_ sad. i would say the sad was mixed in with awe. in an instant i felt both incredibly small and incredibly important. it was very surreal.
bkirkby··on My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness
Fwiw I had something akin to the overview effect when I attended a full solar eclipse. I thought I was prepared. I had read up on what to expect because I wanted to make the most of the experience for the kids. I wanted to make sure we observed the "shadow bands" (snake like shadows traversing across single colored surfaces that aren't always visible).

Everything did proceed as I expected (including the shadow bands), but when the eclipse was full, the earth went quiet. All the animals stopped and wondered (including the younger children who were boisterously playing seconds before the full effect).

As I stared up into the heavens, I had this deeply profound realization that our planet is traveling through space like all the other planets. The observation and experience of an eclipse made the abstract concept of space a reality and brought it closer to me in a way that just thinking (a lot) about space has never done.

bkirkby··on Barriers to Business – How cities can pave a path to entrepreneurship
What you describe is the exact reason we should question your very premise. "For example, let's say that to do some specific the law says a degree is required."

Why is the government in the business of requiring degrees for financial transactions? Maybe that's valid for a doctor, but it's certainly not valid for a hair dresser.

bkirkby··on Barriers to Business – How cities can pave a path to entrepreneurship
Can you offer examples at different levels of government where red tape accurately predicted the cost of the red tape? Not hypotheticals, but actual rules.

An adjacent question is when governments predict the cost of a particular program. I always say when that occurs their prediction is actually a floor and the program is going to actually cost prediction+.

bkirkby··on The endgames of bad faith communication
i've taken a clue from Jessica Livingston. she responded once to bad faith communicators by saying (not a quote): "i'm not inclined to engage with people who are purposefully trying to misunderstand me."

it both disengages you from the situation while also calling out the bad faith actors.

bkirkby··on AWS us-east-1 outage
fwiw, we are seeing errors when trying to publish to SNS although the aws status pages say nothing about SNS.
bkirkby··on Stripe hiring issues make some lose job offers
not to be too critical, but you should read the article before commenting on the content of the article.

to be clear, they spoke to two people who had offers rescinded and a former recruiter at Stripe who talked about general turmoil in the hiring process.

bkirkby··on Rust Moderation Team Resigns
it's very similar to working in a corporation and seeing someone get fired. the company is bound by legal concerns to not reveal why the person was fired, which leaves everyone else wondering if the person had done something fireable or if the company was playing politics with power.

i've heard netflix does things a bit differently. when people are asked to leave, their manager sends an email out to everyone explaining exactly why that person was asked to leave. i assume their generous severance package contains a legal release for netflix to be able to do that.

bkirkby··on Tasking developers with creating detailed estimates is a waste of time (2020)
i've heard business leaders express the suspicion that sw eng teams are trying to avoid accountability by claiming estimating is too hard.

and every time i've seen people try to correct for this it results in different layers of management adding arbitrary fudge factors to the time estimate which inflates the actual time that it takes to do something. these corrections build inefficiency into the beginning of the project and bake them in.

it's an answer to "how do we not be wrong about when things will be done?" over "how do we move faster?"

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