blip54321

If your goal is to be a code monkey writing database-backed web applications, MIT is probably a very expensive way to get there.

The goal of the degree is to prepare people for data analysis, machine vision, 3d graphics, ML, signal processing, and similar. If you're not into that, going to MIT is wasteful for everyone involved.

That's not elitism talking; that's just the nature of MIT. Other schools aren't like that. For example, if you want to do a startup around a database-backed web application, Stanford is a fine choice. I'm not arguing Stanford is either better or worse; it's just a little bit less academic and little bit more entrepreneurial. There are other schools which emphasize other things. Harvard or Yale will move you more into the class of powerful people. Etc.

Yeah.... no.

Number of stupid mistakes on a test is not indicative of success at MIT. I was lucky in that I test well from having competed in different math contests, but I don't confuse that with being better. If I didn't compete in those, I would have been no less qualified.

The article is spot-on. MIT ignores test scores above some threshold. That's a reasonable way to go.

I think the bigger question is whether we should have exclusive schools like MIT.

Screening for college admissions made sense a century ago, when 5% of people went to college. Today, not so much. From an undergrad class perspective, the difference between MIT and a better state school is mostly the brand stamp and the admissions department.

Why do we want to stamp people with a stamp like "MIT"?

I disagree. Google Takeout is a sham. It doesn't have all the data they collect about you. It's almost adequate for data portability, but not quite. It's useless for data transparency.

Google Docs keeps keystroke-level logs of everything you type, for example. That's not in Takeout. Neither are things needed to conduct a security audit (that's a paid service for Workspace customers). Neither is a lot of advertising profiling data.

I've worked at an organization with a similar timeframe for some types of data requests (B2B, not GDPR-style ones). There were many parts of the organization which were mismanaged, but that wasn't one of them. That type of data request ("get all my data") involved walking through all the data we had. It wasn't indexed in a way which made it easy to grab.

This was an expensive batched job we ran monthly. We spun up a cluster of cloud machines. A map-reduce style operation would organize the data by customer. We'd ship it off to all the customers who requested it that month.

Adding appropriate indexes or similar would have been man-years of engineering work. This involved, for example, walking through server logs line-by-line and seeing which ones were associated with which customer.

There wasn't a compelling business case to do that. For normal operations, once a month was fine. If a customer had a particular need,, we could hypothetically do a one-off request out-of-line, but customers used the data for types of analytics where a one-month delay wasn't an issue.

I know of other pipelines with similar delays, for example, due to lack of automation. A person runs a task once a month, and automation would cost more than a person.

I won't chalk this up to dark patterns, so much as speeding things up having zero business value to Amazon. I just walked through the process, and at least the first two steps seemed very normal. Amazon sometimes does outrageous things, but here, I saw nothing to get outraged about.

It was not 2022 when this story happened.

The cost of backups also depends on your income. Stories like this led to more backups, but so did going from being a student, to first-job-out-of-college, to a senior employee.

There's a spectrum between a hard drive costing a full day's work at minimum wage to a few minutes work for a Googler, Amazonian, or a Metamate making $500k/year.

This experience helped move me from the first category into the second. I now do Google Takeout periodically, and have a full backup on external drives.

I'm also slowly degooglifying my life (and recommending the same to everyone around me). There is another grouping of two types of people: (1) Ones who don't do business with Google anymore (2) Ones who won't. That one took more incidents than backups.

Been there a half-dozen times with Google B2B products.

Best case was GSuite/Workspace, and not the recent one. I had a startup in the freezer (developed a lot of IP nights and weekends, but we needed to stop for about a year). Google sent two emails about the domain being idle, but filed its own emails as spam. If I don't log in within some time period, so I lost the domain. Google wiped out all the data of that startup.

Just because I don't check my gmail spam folder often enough.

OP has a fair assessment. It's an unfair defense. Whenever I've relied on Google, I eventually got !@#$%.

I've never had that problem with Amazon. Microsoft also doesn't do it much these days. This is really specific to Google (and Oracle; but Oracle !@#$% in the wallet, but at least realizes driving customers out-of-business is bad for business).

Not all GCP customers will be !@#$% here, but many will. People who rely on Google inevitably regret it at some point.

China definitely does.

... I suspect Russia will react by relaxing copyright laws on Disney films. Business will continue as usual, only without profits flowing back to Disney (or foreign reserves flowing out of Russia).

On a mile-high level, sanctions make sense to me. Many of the specific reactions seem less than thought out, beyond wanting to appear to be doing something.

Not buying stuff makes sense. Not selling critical resources makes sense. Cutting communications, education, culture, and entertainment? I'm less sold on that.

How's Google pay for Americans working abroad? If you're a US-based Googler going to an office like this one, does your salary fall to 1/3?

Yeah. My read on the paper was that a fourth dose might be useless. You get the immediate antibody response for a few weeks, and then you're back to same as after three doses, which is memory cells.

My pet peeve are webcams. You can only plug in a few before you run out of bandwidth.

I suspect Russia won't respect Ukraine's restriction on men leaving the country. And I suspect Ukrainian borderguards won't be anywhere close to the Russian-controlled border.

This seems like a good way to get saboteurs and terrorist cells into Russia.

Economic pressure hastened the fall of Soviet domination. If you believe Regan, it was the primary cause. It you don't (and you shouldn't), it was a contributing cause.

I'm not commenting on the broader topic; just that this strategy has worked before.

I think you're confusing how systems of government work. For a good description of dynamics in dictatorships, I'd recommend Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a political scientist at NYU.

To oversimplify, in a dictatorship, the dictator serves at the pleasure of the branches of the army, secret service, and police. If a majority believe he's unfit, he's out. Commanders have a lot of autonomy to refuse orders. That kind of infighting is common in China too. It's nearly impossible in a democracy.

Why do you believe Ukraine isn't losing units at the same rate? Pentagon estimates Russia lost 3-5% and Ukraine 10% of their capacity.

Let's break this down piece-by-piece.

(1) The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had elected kings and a parliament. It was a republic to the same degree as Rome or some of the more democratic Greek city-states. The only people who could vote were nobles, but nobles were about 10% of the population. That's about on-par with with Athens or the Roman Empire. Even in the US, only white landowners could vote when it was first founded. That's not too dissimilar from the Polish nobility.

(2) Jews emigrated to the Commonwealth from all over Europe for better treatment. Good treatment? No. Better treatment? Without a doubt.

The Commonwealth wasn't a modern enlightened democracy, but this was 1600, not 1900. It did incredibly well for 1600.

That's a great name for the new entity. Three seas works well in Slavic languages, and is neutral.

Austria should be replaced by Ukraine and Moldova, though. Austria definitely doesn't belong.

Ukraine and Poland really do belong together. Ukraine is more faithful to traditional Polish culture than Poland. Poland westernized a lot since joining the EU and NATO, and Ukranian cultural influence would be awesome. Conversely, Ukraine could use some economic assistance, where Poland's economy has exploded, for much the same reason of NATO/EU.

I would give one more potential explanation: In-fighting and a lack of unity.

If I were in charge of the air force, and Putin ordered large-scale air superiority attacks against Ukrainians, I wouldn't want to do that. Putin might not have the power to order his air force to launch strikes of aggression.

Dictatorships give the impression of being all-powerful, but dictators need to keep constituents appeased, but that's kind of an illusion. Key constituencies -- quite often the generals -- need to remain appeased.

I expect if this were the case, Russia wouldn't advertise this externally. There is every incentive to maintain a united external front.

Let's bring back to Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, only under a more inclusive name.

Russia wasn't always authoritarian, though. Before the Mongols, it was a bunch of independent, freedom-loving cities. Sort of like the American Wild West.

I feel like we need a new experiment in inclusive governance, and that Slavic countries are the place to do it.

Not very practical. India is among the densest countries in the world. Resources per unit population are pathetically low. Russia is among the least dense. India is 1.4 billion people, and Russia is 140 million -- ten times as many people.

Russia is 17 million square kilometers, while India is 3 million. Russia is 5-6 times as large.

That's 50-60 times the density.

Flow of natural resources out of Russia into India is the natural state of things. I do think India ought to decouple, but it's not that easy. The economic hit will be large.

The West should take some of that hit. Without the US and Canada stepping in, India can't decouple from Russia. Both sides ought to know that, and cooperate.

This would completely change the world perception of India, and it wouldn't bode well with regards to having any sort of international support in their troubles with Pakistan, China, or any other neighbors.

The West ought to work with India to help with alternative sourcing of fertilizer.

A destabilized situation is precisely what leads to Putin being overthrown. That's kind of the point.

I feel like this is the time for NATO to move, at least into Belarus, and not after they have nukes.

Seems like Russia feels it can get away with anything by threatening thermonuclear war. At some point, a line should be drawn.

As someone constantly behind on their email, I like bumps for important things.

Oversupply is just as much a crisis as undersupply. The lead time on ramping capacity up and down is long, which leads to a cyclic market which overshoots in one direction or the other. It's hard to predict the cycles.

However, an "oversupply" crisis means that either:

- prices falling, meaning costs aren't covered;

- equipment isn't running 24/7 as intended, leading to higher costs

This means businesses go under. There's a firesale which is nice, but the structural damage is far more harmful.

Personally, I'd like to see this industry a little bit more socialized. I'd like my chips produced in the USA, even if they cost a little bit more, so we're self-sufficient. I'd also like the supply chains to be in the US. I think the same goes for the EU, China, and hopefully soon, India and Africa. Having five independent supply chains costs five times as much, and I understand the efficiency argument for having just TSMC (and maybe Samsung or Intel), but I think both COVID and Ukraine highlight the risks of systemic failure.

We're just a little too over-dependent on each other.

I also wouldn't mind if my taxes paid for some excess, unused capacity, as they do with food production. That's also less efficient, but gives resilience.

We don't need to be self-sufficient everywhere, mind you. Most goods aren't essential. I do think each region should be self-sufficient for food, medicine, and now, ICs.

The problem is if you pay Google for "it," you're still treated as a statistic, same as the non-paying customers. It's deep in the corporate DNA. Google Workspace isn't free, and neither is the rest of GCP.

I've had multi-million dollar engagements with Google, and you're just as vulnerable to this stuff as the free ones. I've had things escalated through one of Eric Schmidt's direct reports, and I was still vulnerable.

And as a footnote, I do subscribe to Google One on my soon-to-be-terminated Workspace account. I'm not sure why Google is terminating a service I paid for.

If you pay Google, you can talk to human beings, perhaps, but they're no more empowered to solve your problem than their web pages.

Microsoft and Amazon have always provided real support. Things get escalated to engineers who fix things if need be. Things also don't get whack-a-moled for no reason; they're aware that bankrupting my business isn't good for their business, even if the short-term ROI on sustaining a legacy API or something is negative.