Or starvation. Again. Russia killed 3.5 million Ukrainians that way, likely within the lifetime of your grandparents.
1,074 karma · joined October 9, 2021
The Russian invasion force is 200,000.
If every Ukrainian had a gun and instructions for a Molotov Cocktail, Ukraine would be unconquerable without general genocide.
I'm not sure how close they'll get, but that's what the Ukrainian leadership is aiming for.
I used Google Workspace for a startup. Startup went idle for a while. Google sent a message to me warning the account would be terminated unless I logged in on some short timeline. GMail filed its own email as spam. Boom. Everything from that startup was gone.
I used Google Workspace for my family domain. Google decided to discontinue GSuite/Free. Now, I'm SOL.
I've had similar experiences with Youtube. I build a major startup with Google as a partner. Videos were on Youtube. Google had 4 engineers assigned to us. Youtube has a bug which took us down. There was no way to resolve the bug, even with a team supporting us (in a different part of Google). We had to migrate off.
I've more recently been involved in businesses integrating with Workspace. On the API side, Google suddenly required a security audit for our business integrations to keep working. That's tens of thousands of dollars. Many small businesses went under when Google introduced this. (https://www.prescientsecurity.com/google-oauth-api-verificat...)
We also had an extension, which is in the process of breaking with Manifest V3 (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...). Again, many Google partners are going out-of-business over this.
Each time I've done business with Google, I've eventually been !@#$%.
These are all true stories, but they're not all the true stories I have. I have a much longer collection of stories of being !@#$% by Google. Some I can't talk about have to do with Workspace security issues. BOY was that a rabbit hole. If I could talk about it, you'd never do business with Google either. Google has excellent security for their data, but not for your data.
Google doesn't mind killing your livelihood with random changes like these. It happens over, and over, and over. Everyone thinks it won't happen to them, until it does.
I got railroaded on the difference between i and e. My chi and my che sound basically the same. This is little enough that people seem to understand well enough, but it's sometimes a bit awkward.
1) You don't see spaced repetition working until a few weeks in, once you're on a schedule.
2) You can't have gaps, so you can't just start in the middle.
3) If you know stuff, you need to keep with it until it gets into new stuff.
From there, it has to be done daily. If you miss 2-3 days, it's a chore to get back onto the schedule. I did it when I had a commute, so investing 30 minutes per day was easy. It added no time to my day, and by the end of 3 months, I knew /a lot/ of Chinese for not a lot of time invested. I was on-par with people who had roughly 2 years of college classes for speaking (but not reading or writing, which Pimsleur doesn't touch on). My accent was better too.
Once I finished, there was nowhere to go. Nothing else was nearly as efficient. I kind of plateaued. There are better tools now; this was many years ago.
I did the library/CDs route, so it was free.
I highly recommend the same path.
I haven't found anything good for writing Chinese. Does anyone have recommendations? Ideally, it'd leverage a pen tablet or iPad pencil or similar.
None are effective in isolation. If your CEO / tech lead is an idea people, your COO / project manager an "execution people," and the team "tell me what to do people" things work pretty amazingly.
I think the problem is that people like to hire people like themselves, so a balance is hard to find. Each group is self-perpetuating.
I'll mention: I stated my career in roomfuls of idea people, and was deeply surprised the first time I ran into a "tell me what to do" person. That person worked hard, and was possibly the best software engineer I've worked with, but:
(1) Deeply didn't care about much beyond coding.
(2) Valued having people around him who can structure his work so it has meaningful impact.
Personally, I really benefit from having a watchful project manager to keep me on track. Once I gave up on doing that myself, my productivity skyrocketed. I tend to empower project managers (and admins and similar roles) to boss me around much more than the job description entails.
If I were running a meat processing plant, and there was:
- Sexual harassment
- Racism
- Violence
- Etc.
I'd have a huge liability on my hands. Unfortunately, prison convicts would be much more likely to expose me to those types of liability. If an employee catcalls another employee, that places a lot of burden lands on the employer.
This happened largely due to progressive reforms. I'm not claiming to have any solution here, or to even have a semblance of idea of cost/benefit. People need jobs. People deserve to be safe.
I was intimidated into signed an NDA which says I can't talk about the NDA. The threats were serious, and I don't talk about that NDA.
Unless you're at senior levels of your university, you wouldn't know about sketchy stuff like this going on.
The way to solve this would be to extend restrictions on federal grant funding and financial aid to only encompass institutions which don't use tools like this.
The strong incentives to cheat is very new in academia. I've seen academia for about a quarter-century, and at least MIT went from a pretty honest place to a shark tank full of crooks.
That's not a general "the world was once better," but a very specific "academic fraud has grown out-of-control in the past 25 years."
* Facebook seems to be a bunch of smart people working on pet projects. Monopoly profits drive a political empire where people at the top think up something random, and it gets built.
* Google has customer contempt. They started with brilliant people who were used to being smarter than everyone else. They also started in algorithm-driven markets like search and ad-words, where everything was statistical and individuals didn't matter. They've lost the smarts and the ethics, and they're in a bit of a hole. I think they've reached the end of the growth line.
* I know nothing about Apple. Too secretive.
* Microsoft has a bunch of cut-throat teams, competing with each other. Their technology is middling. However, they're the only one of the bunch you'd want to partner with for B2B.
* ... except for Amazon, which is hyper-customer-focused, and has a track record of successful forward-looking projects. AWS has been rock solid. On the other hand, I'd never want to work there; they treat employees like crap. But it somehow works out for them.
I think the major driving force is machismo and competition. People I've met have into this sort of thing have an image of themselves as Matrix-style hackers. It's easy for business types to exploit that.
Be the best hacker working with the best hackers in the world.
https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/5745167867576320
I think all this is good until an adversary decides to brick every iDevice, Android, Windows, MacOS, and Linux machine in the US. And by "brick", I mean overwrite firmwares, disable fans, and run at maximum load.
> If you don't have worms, ivermectin will not help you
This makes sense and is supported by some data.
> COVID outcomes are better without parasites
This dramatically understates interactions in the immune system. I can go into a longer essay, but:
1) Parasites suppress the immune system (they release chemicals to moderate immune response; otherwise, the immune system would destroy them)
2) There is some evidence that the immune system evolved to operate when suppressed by worms. Autoimmune diseases and allergies may be a symptom of worm-free life.
3) Most of the damage from COVID19 comes from the immune system and not the disease (that's true of most diseases, for that matter).
4) ... and so on.
We have absolutely no idea how ivermectin, worms, and COVID interact. It's too complex a system.
(That's a serious request, not a cynical one -- I'd like to see those updates)
Wired is still more reliable, and consistency at high speed is more important than super-high-speed, but at least average throughput is a lot higher on wifi.
It's not a small number.
- A US intermediator can know the climate in India and navigate the cultural differences because they do this day in day out.
- A US tech company can properly vet whom they're subcontracting to because they have engineers in-house
- A US tech company will have a contract in US jurisdiction. If there is e.g. a data leak, there is liability through US courts. A step down from that, a US company can have US-based oversight and escalation mechanisms
- Social networks and relationships matter too. If you're working with Bob from the golf course, and his company messes up, you'll see Bob again next month at the golf course and chew him out.
... and so on.
I'm not suggesting you or I (personally) should subcontract through IBM, but for a US-based non-tech firm, it can make a lot of sense.
To flip this around, whom would you rather hire to do your accounting (presuming you're not an accountant and know nothing about accounting):
- A US company which outsources to India
- A random company in India
I would go for the former, since I know there would be liability if they messed up, and they'd make sure the US tax code was properly complied with. There's nothing wrong with the latter, but I'd have no way to vet them, and if they messed up, no recourse.
The whole rest of the universe needs software too. Most companies are grossly incompetent to develop it themselves. Most are things that SWEs of the type which visit HN would never, ever want to work on. IBM does that adequately well. That's "services."
If I need a tool built which will manage workflow at a management consulting firm, a custom tool for managing cases at a law firm, or some custom supply chain kludge -- the 99% of other "boring" software -- and I happen to know nothing about technology, who do I turn to?
IBM isn't a bad choice. It's a major step up from Indian firms in terms of both price and quality. It has significant in-house technology to leverage. It's a safe choice. It will usually do better than in-house IT.
I recently evaluated the business of a company which builds ships. They developed software in-house with an IT staff who weren't qualified to tie their own shoelaces. They had huge military contracts. They didn't subcontract to IBM, but it wouldn't have been a bad choice.
This assumes risk neutrality. If rents go up to where someone is priced out, their kid lose their school, and all sorts of other Bad Stuff happens. Home ownership with a mortgage is stable.
Home ownership once the mortgage is paid off means your life is stable even in a crisis, job loss, or economic downturn; you can rent out a room, and so long as you bring in enough for food and taxes, you stay alive and you're not homeless.
For most people, home ownership is a rational choice. It doesn't maximize expected future $$$, but it does maximize expected future outcomes.
I'm not sure which reality you're living in, but it seems... disconnected.
(Yes: I do know the amount of time and effort required; I really hoped to learn to fly and did deep dives, but wasn't rich enough at the time)
1) False advertising. A lot of it....
2) All those Google purchases....
1) It's an integrated implementation. For example, RPL makes sense when you have the brilliant HP48 keyboard, and one-key access to many of the commands. It makes little sense if you're manually typing things. The number of keystrokes would go up 3-4 fold on a PC keyboard, and correspondingly, the number of stupid errors. You can't mistype a command if it's one button, or two keystrokes through the menu system.
2) Getting all of that integration, synergy, and polish requires a huge engineering and design effort and brilliant people. One-off projects can't meet it. A lot have tried.
3) The newest HP48 has a 4MHz 4-bit CPU, 128kb of user RAM, and a 131x64 pixel display. This isn't competitive in 2022.
I'd love to have a modern HP48, with an 800MHz CPU, gigabytes of RAM, and a high-res display, but to be at all worthwhile, it'd need to have the same quality keyboard, the same level of polish, the same community, and otherwise. I don't think that's gonna happen.
Unfortunately, HP calculators peaked with the 48GX. Newer models were faster but gradually lost the polish of the older models.