chadash

My ideal is somewhere in the middle. I don't necessarily need a private office, but a shared space with a small team. This way, I'm privy to all conversations relevant to me. Knowing what's going on often trumps the productivity gains of a quiet work environment.

The issue is large open offices where I'm also privy to all the other distractions from other teams that aren't relevant to me.

Except the parts that don’t scale. For example, some banks specialize in servicing specific communities (e.g., Chinese immigrants). Other banks understand local geographic areas well. For example, they might be able to give you a better rate on financing a gut remodel because they know your contractor does good work and your plans for the remodel will be desirable in a specific neighborhood. It’s hard to do that when you are behemoth national bank.

> Here the value proposition is to pay 10-50% less for an inferior product.

OpenAI just went through an existential crisis where the company almost collapsed. They are also quite unreliable. For some use cases, I'll take a service that does slightly worse on outputs, but much better on reliability. For example, if I'm building a customer service chat bot, it's a pretty big deal if the LLM backend goes down. With an open-source model, I can build it using the cloud provider. If they are a reliable host, i'll probably stick with them as i grow. If not, I always have the option of running the model myself. This alleviates a lot of the risk.

I pay for hosted databases all the time. It’s more convenient. But those same databases are popular because they are open source.

I also know that because it’s open source, if I ever have a need to, I can host it on my own servers. Currently I don’t have that need, but it’s nice to know that it’s in the cards.

You can 100% do this in many states. But solar, create your own energy and the state will force the electricity company to buy the excess capacity away from you.

> I'm even getting my cooking gas as 'prepaid' (i.e. I buy bottles) and I wish I could do the same with electricity and so on.

Gas and electricity do have small fixed components (“hookup fees”) but for the most part these aren’t strictly subscriptions since you pay for what you use.

> So I'm totally fine with getting a gift card or whatever you call those thingies in the supermarket where you can throw a lump (20€, 50€) at some provider (Google Play, whatever) and then get to eat up that amount (over the course of at least one year, hopefully).

So you are okay with subscriptions as long as they won’t charge you more than X? You might like privacy.com. They let you create credit cards with unique codes and defined spending limits. You don’t need to worry about cancelling anything since your billing just won’t go through after a certain amount is spent.

The Romans actually had a difficult time beating the Carthaginian navy. They tried to copy their ships, but without the ship-building experience, they didn't have much success. To level the playing field, they invented the corvus (AKA the "crow") [1] which was a boarding bridge designed to pierce the enemy ship and allow combatants to board. This played to Rome's strength as a land power with much better hand-to-hand combat troops.

The Corvus had much success in battle, but it is thought to have significantly weighed down ships and offset their center of mass. So at one point, the Roman Navy was stuck in a storm and is thought to have lost over 350 naval ships (and 300 cargo ships) and 100k men at once. It is thought that the corvus might have been responsible for making the ships more likely to capsize during this storm, as the Romans stopped using them after this disaster [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_withdrawal_from_Africa_(...

I didn’t realize this is on YouTube. I see it provides a little bit of visual context, but I listen to this as a podcast and I agree, it’s absolutely fantastic quality material. The Greenland Vikings was my favorite of the four I’ve heard so far (Greenland, Carthage, Nabateans and Byzantium) but they are all very good.

I don't understand why there has to be such a divide. There can be a world where some companies are remote and it's a competitive advantage (ability to recruit from a wider pool of people) and other companies that are in-person and that's a competitive advantage (better social dynamics among employees, easier collaboration in certain ways). I personally like working in person. And I completely understand people who like working remote. I think it's great that we've gotten to a point where people can pick and choose what is best for them!

I mean, it's not really dead. It has just flatlined in the short term, which makes sense. We are long past the point where most people are concerned about getting sick from COVID, so if your company hasn't called in workers yet, then it seems unlikely that they are going to in the near future.

The question is where things shake out in the long term. What percentage of young and growing companies will start remote and remain remote, start in person and then go remote, or start in person and remain in person (it's hard to imagine starting remote and then going in person, but I guess that's possible too)? The long-term outcome is still unclear, and it will take a long time for the dust to settle.

I'm gonna play devil's advocate even though I agree with your point.

Firing people sucks. As a manager, it's a terrible feeling to tell someone they are out of a job. Not only that, but often times my own pay might be tied to how many people I manage, so in some cases, it's better for me to have people around doing nothing than to let them go. By having a forced ranking/culling, you somewhat alleviate the tendency of people not wanting to fire non-performing staff.

Companies should have a culture where this isn't the case. It should be encouraged to let people go with nice severance. You should be judged on your teams' output, not on how many people you manage. You should be rewarded for doing more with fewer staff. But enforcing this is very hard in a big company while enforcing a 6% cull is easy, so that's what happens.

> For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates

In my experience, this isn’t always true. If you ask the person who interviewed you they will often give you feedback. The issue is that often you do an interview with person x, but then get a rejection email from person y in HR. Person Y doesn’t know enough detail to give you feedback so they don’t.

I’ve also conducted hundreds of interviews. I generally don’t give feedback unless asked because a) it takes time and b) some candidates will push back and argue even though I’ve already made a decision and c) sometimes it’s just awkward. For example, a team might reject someone because they find the candidate doesn’t communicate well, but that’s awkward feedback to give someone, even if it’s useful. But if someone reaches out and asks for feedback, I usually try to schedule a five minute phone call to help them out.

> * there would be no debate about UI mistakes if it was Iran shooting down a US plane*

If Iran shot down a US plane and then immediately admitted it was a mistake and helped investigate, I don’t think this is true. People would still be angry and a UI mistake doesn’t really exonerate you from that anger.

> "Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."

Wow. Anyone have any insight into what happened?

Yes, 5am Pacific. Texas is mostly Central except for a sliver containing El Paso

> That's a terrible and destructive practice.

Harsh words :) Care to elaborate on why?

For what it's worth, I don't literally delete... I mark it as "backlogged" and then it goes into the vast pool of backlogged tickets that are searchable, but no one is going in there just to look around because there's so much in there. And I think that's healthy... if you are working at a successful company, priorities are likely to shift over time. Something might be top of mind today, but you look at it two years later and it turns out it was never important. Or there's a bug that came up once but wasn't a big deal and doesn't seem to be re-occuring.

I have a rule. If something has been sitting in the ticketing system for more than six months, I close it out. People will bug you about things that are important and you can make a new ticket. And if you are in a position where the highest value thing you can do for a company is to look back and fix the things that were never high priority, do yourself a favor and look for a new team or a new company… It’s not good to work on low priority work.

I think that this largely comes down to company culture and how comfortable people are pushing back at senior leaders (the onus being on senior leaders to make it comfortable for people under them to push back). The best leaders, in my experience, show humbleness and a willingness to listen.

That said, sometimes working on bullshit is just part of the gig. If there’s too much of it, by all means look for another job, but don’t be the guy who is always second guessing management.

The NOA predicts sea level rise of 2 feet by 2100. There might be small chunks of the Everglades on the Southern tip of Florida that are 2 feet or lower, but I believe the vast majority of the Everglades are 10 feet or higher. We probably won't see that in our lifetimes.

This isn't to downplay climate change or the risk of rising sea levels. These are very real, but I think that many people overestimate it. Even for Miami, which is very elevation, I don't think we will see it underwater... but we will see lots of flooding since the sewage systems won't be able to drain when the ocean level gets too close to the land. This already happens, but it will get worse.

College is about signaling. Yes, I deeply enjoyed my four years there and want the same for my kids. But at the end of the day, the most valuable thing I got out of it is a diploma.

Peter Thiel investing in you is an even better signal for the specific task of trying to build a unicorn. Not only is he a billionaire, but all the other people who invest in startups know who he is. But getting a thiel fellowship is out of reach for most young people.

Judging by the number of coworking spaces near me, many of which seem to be pretty full, I'd be surprised if the business model is the issue. It seems like WeWork just got stuck paying long term leases originated in 2010-2020 but is now operating in a new world where commercial real estate is much less valuable.

I know WeWork has plenty of haters, but the idea of an international chain of coworking spaces makes a lot of sense. Where I live, I see lots of major companies opening up small satellite offices in WeWorks. I assume that they work out large deals for a bunch of small spaces around the county (or world) and that's preferable to negotiating with lots of separate locally owned coworking spaces. Meanwhile, if you are a fortune 500 and want to open a small office in Houston or Dublin, you don't need to sign a long-term lease and you can scale up or down as needed. That seems like something that'd be worth paying a premium for.

They might be able to find a lawyer to take this on contingency. Meta has very deep pockets and will pay plenty of money just to save the embarrassment .

Switzerland has a similar service. For about 25 Swiss francs they’ll take your suitcase from the airport to your hotel, I think pretty much anywhere in Switzerland. I didn’t use it personally, but it’s a very nice option to have.

I agree with the sentiment of the article, but I'd advocate a balanced approach. Sometimes inefficiency is perfectly fine.

> Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? With computers, we do that all the time.

A more apt analogy would be, "would I buy a car that gets 100,000 km/liter over a nicer car that gets 1,000 km/liter?".

Seeing as a I drive about 12k km/yr, the difference in cost in absolute terms is negligible for me (it would be about a $25 Euro difference), even if it's a huge improvement percentagewise. Sure, there's no cars that get this kind of performance, but for computers, the cost of running my laptop for an entire year is less than what an hour of my work-time is worth. If energy were 10 times the price, it would still be negligible.

Just look at the quoted example:

> I have a Python program I run every day, it takes 1.5 seconds. I spent six hours re-writing it in rust, now it takes 0.06 seconds. That efficiency improvement means I'll make my time back in 41 years, 24 days :-)

So this person took six hours to write code that saves 1.44 seconds/day. So it will take 15,000 days to make back that time (I know, I know... they probably did it for some intellectual satisfaction rather than to actually save time).

But as I said, I still agree with the sentiment of the article. There are so many cases where making code more performant wouldn't even mean a significant amount more work... it would just mean watching out for very heavy libraries, doing some negligible performance tweeks, etc.

> Marriage is not a magical thing that fixes economic problems, even if you want to keep turning the clock back and make certain acts outside of marriage illegal. The only thing that fixes economic problems is money.

Speaking as a parent, I’m not sure this is true. If I didn’t have my wife, then I would need to take twice as many sick days for my kids, which would be very tough on my career. I wouldn’t have an extra salary (or if she didn’t work, then a full time person caring for my kids). I wouldn’t have someone to split school pickup/drop off with, which again would be very taxing on my career. I’d still need the same amount of space in my home with or without my wife. And all of this also means that we have more time for child/parent interactions at home.

So yeah, I think there’s huge benefits to having a spouse around while raising kids.

> Are you seriously suggesting that before the internet no one published or wrote about highly niche or uninteresting subjects? That you couldn't find mundane facts from history or nature written down somewhere?

Yes and no. I'm suggesting that before Wikipedia, no encyclopedia could have published an article about Jack Wade, Alaska, an incorporated community of probably < 100 people (I picked this place somewhat randomly off of google maps). If you put even one sentence about every town similar to that in an encyclopedia, you'd have an encyclopedia set that no one would be able to afford.

> What we'd then have is a social network of people competing for some kind of points or popularity, or to prove who was the most expert or most interested in the subject.

This really depends. For example, maybe I'm an American with a grandparent from Volosianka, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine (again, I picked this semi-randomly). Population is about 1500 today. There's probably a handful of people in the world who speak English and who have a particular interest in that town. Maybe my grandpa is from there and i'm looking to learn more about his life and i'd love to chat with someone else who knows more about the place. I think that there are a lot of articles on the long tail of wikipedia where there's probably only a few people in the world who care about the topic and if I'm one of them, I'd be interested in meeting with others. Obviously, there's plenty of topics where this isn't the case. I don't know how you'd implement this feature, because I don't think you want to turn wikipedia into a meeting room for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict [1]. But for these very very niche things, it could serve as an interesting meeting place.

[1] In other words, I am stating a problem here... not a solution

Yes, but in my experience, this applies more to people than to some of the topics discussed in the article. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a city, town, village or hamlet in the US without a wikipedia page (as an example, take a look at Jack Wade, Alaska [1]), for example. And I don't imagine that rare moth species articles get taken down. But you have to have some kind of policy in place so that every individual on the planet doesn't have a wikipedia page.

[1] On Google maps view, i can't maybe 8 houses there? https://www.google.com/maps/place/Jack+Wade,+AK+99732/@64.15.... But it's on wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Wade,_Alaska

It is so fantastic that we have a single resource where I can find information on an unremarkable Peruvian moth, a random small town in Iran, or a type of reading material designed for Sunday reading in Victorian England. Before the advent of the internet this stuff wouldn’t be worth the paper it is published on. But now the cost of storing it in the cloud is effectively zero, so we get this amazing long tail of information that is just incredibly valuable. Thank you to the people who contribute and maintain this stuff!

Edit: what would be really cool is if I could leave a note on a page saying "hey, I visited this page and I'm looking to connect with other people interested in the Peruvian Foovius Barivius Moth"... ping me

thanks! this is great reporting.

I think that this list might be talking about unsecured claims though. I think that secured claims might be separate. So, for example, if an individual declares bankruptcy and they owe $500k on their house, that claim would come before child support payments. I am definitely not a lawyer and bankruptcy law strikes me as particularly complex.

The third priority is tough to parse. From looking over it quickly, it seems like this might be claims from doing business between when i file bankruptcy and when i go into foreclosure. Again, not a lawyer, but my guess here is that if I'm a store and I file bankruptcy on Monday, but don't have a trustee until Wednesday, and I put in an order for a palette of water bottles on Tuesday, then the distributor of the water bottles might have a priority claim.

Because trucking is an enormous industry and $3.8b is a tiny slice. Sure, it's a tough nut to crack, but if someone does crack it they can be worth a lot more than that.