I did NOT do well on this quiz. Remind me to run any time someone says they invent programming languages.
611 karma · joined October 25, 2013
Google's entire business model is predicated on the fact that they and only they know who I am. As soon as they sell "me," they lose the value of my (so-far) collected data. They have to sell me in bundles, anonymized, otherwise they make no money in the long run.
That being said, it's been proven over and over and over that behavioral ad sales don't actually result in more clicks or sales for the advertiser.
I've been using FF with some privacy extensions and settings as my personal browser for a few years now, I'm definitely not going to change that now.
I do not know how much longer I have in the world. It may be 1 year, it may be 20. What I do know is that for my current mental health, I work to get to a place where I can greet death as a long-lost friend.
I have lung cancer, stage 4.
My cancer has a mutation that is uncommon in lung cancers (< 2%), but common in breast cancers (> 25%). All of the treatments for my mutation are breast cancer treatments. It has been alternately not too bad and hellish getting insurance to agree to give me medications that could be saving my life. That plus a previous steroid-treated pneumonitis disqualifies me from about 90% of clinical trials, so the tip-of-the-spear treatments (CRISPR-T, CRISPR-NK) are unavailable to me.
So yes, lots of advancements are being made...in common cancers. Uncommon cancers, we have to wait and take the older stuff, or stuff that's just been approved.
And even through all of that, it's a crap shoot as to whether it will work or not. I took 2 conjugates, in the same class of medication - each had a slightly different chemo med. One worked fabulously, about halved the size of my main tumor. The other did nothing, and ended up giving me neuropathy in my feet (it can be numbness, but in my case it felt like my feet were on fire, 24/7. I am on a medication now to fix that, and my feet feel totally normal). Fun fact - the neuropathy chances for that med were stated as 0%. I guess someone rounded down from 0.1%, because I got it.
We were supposed to be auditioning the RE agent but we walked out saying “this is the house we’re going to buy.”
I know this interview is from 1962, but are you fucking kidding me?
Chemo every 3 weeks, all the quarterly CT scans and the waiting for the results that will tell me if the current regimen is working or not (current one is "working" in that nothing's growing...but nothing's shrinking either). All the MRIs which will tell me if anything has metastasized in my brain, and waiting patiently for -those- results (we caught one last fall and radiated it out). The never quite feeling like I have enough energy to do "normal" things like mow the lawn. Being the dad who has to take a nap every day while my kids slowly grow up. All the worry about what happens when this chemo medication stops working (they all do after some time), will I have enough warning that it's not working or will things double in size before they can find out. All the people who get you alone and then it's "but seriously, how are -YOU-?" The well meaning people who say "well attitude is half the battle!" (hint - it's not). The overall feeling of complete helplessness, like there's nothing I can do that's going to influence how this goes, when it decides it's going to go sideways. Knowing that they'll never do surgery on me because the numbers say in the time I'd need to recuperate, something somewhere else inside of me that didn't show up on a scan would have time to grow.
Does any of that feel like a battle? Like I'm courageously fighting?
(I apologize, this isn't exactly what you asked about, and I'm not writing an angry response here to anything you wrote, I promise).
The metaphor I prefer to use, that is not original to me, is that I got on the wrong fucking bus, and now we're headed somewhere I never asked to go, and there's no getting off. I am scared shitless, doing whatever I can to slow the bus down. There's nothing courageous about taking the next chemo, wishing not to die.
Good luck with the surgery!
Yes, there is a whole lot of jockeying to be a chokepoint (an artificial barrier between business and customer where even more money can be extracted for minimal service). I can't stand chokepoints, it's kind of like a man-in-the-middle attack on your money.
That being said, "I've created a chokepoint" seems like about 75% of all startups - finding a way to get between customers and something they need, creating a way for their startup to get money for basically delivering something that was already being delivered another way. "We do it better than the other guy" is basically bullshit.
So the cynical part is right - "if I don't get in on this cash grab, someone else will," but it seems like the nature of capitalism, really
A messenger which you type what you want into, and it translates it into friendly-speak before sending it to (your mom/your ex/your coworker)
Just give me 2% of the sale price once you sell out to google or WhatsApp or whatever
Meta/FB dedicating so many resources to this as-yet-truly-defined thing seems silly to me, I'm not sure how they expect to recoup their losses even if a metaverse is established. Disney, as an entertainment company, is actually well set up to see results pretty quickly.
I'm no metaverse fan. I think the simplest question one can ask any corp type talking up the metaverse that cuts through the BS is "what is the metaverse, and how do you get there?" I'm fully aware of the hardware limitations - someone on HN in the last few months has described the hardware challenge as on par with "build me a completely see-through phone," and while not perfect it's a pretty good comparison. I don't see this as something people will decide to enter and remain in for extended periods of time.
But there are definitely use cases, and Disney, of all companies, is placed to take advantage of those use cases, and they decide to drop it.
Look, I think they're useful as a general idea, though I'd never use them to tell me anything concrete, even with the caveat that all people in the situation are acting honestly.
I'm just most interested in the companies who require the tests as part of their onboarding. If me taking the test is a prerequisite for me working there, what does that say about your organization?
Any long-term software, really. What you're building will, if it's big enough, essentially be a snapshot of a moment in tech.
It sounds like your company is more worried about someone's work product than the person, which is a shitty thing to manage. You shouldn't have to "check on others to ensure they're working as they should." You shouldn't have to "..sit with someone for a couple hours to explains how I'd like things done, or having to fix something they've done wrong." That's a sign that you either micromanage, or you don't have good employees, or both. Daniel Pink's Drive is a good starting point - give people Autonomy, Purpose and a desire for Mastery, they will give you good work. It's not the be-all and end-all, but it's a good place to start.
I didn't like management, until my company offered a management course. Now I actually enjoy it. To me it's about making people the best versions of themselves. It's about learning to listen to people, and see the situation for what it really is rather than the words coming out of people's mouths. For the company, it's so you get the best work out of them, but "getting the best work out of them" doesn't have to be your focus as a manager.
There's a lot more I can say here, but for now I'd suggest reading this article which was on HN yesterday: https://longform.asmartbear.com/docs/fulfillment/ - and ask yourself if this is really what you want to be doing, regardless of any financial incentives to do so.