1,420 karma · joined November 22, 2012
Even though I agree the policies here apply to a small fraction of the world's area, it affects a sizable fraction of the population.
If we're going to pick a means of collecting the same amount, encouraging good use of land and discouraging excess consumption seem like nice side effects.
For context: I've done 3-4 full job searches ranging from new grad to Staff+ that included FAANG companies, and received offers each time from some but not all of them. I've been fortunate to have other offers I preferred each time, though until recently this has meant accepting compensation below FAANG-levels.
One of the primary reasons I haven't taken a FAANG offer is because of the over-scoped nature of most of the work they offer. The positions at these companies often involve squeezing more profit out of existing successful business surfaces by fiddling with the knobs. If you're working on a surface that produces $10M in revenue each year, and you can improve it by 10% each year, you can justify a good wage. That kind of straightforward investment is exactly what middle managers like.
However, jobs like that will seldom see you architecting or changing systems at a sufficient scale where these skills become relevant. There are undoubtedly exceptions at these companies. I'm not making a universal statement. But having watched the careers of people smarter than myself both inside and outside of FAANG, I've seen a considerable gap emerge in the technical abilities and accomplishments in favor of those at leaner companies.
I think this explains the experience of most engineers going through this. To be Jeff Dean, you need all of these skills. Because of this, OG engineers like him made it part of the recruiting rubric. But you are unlikely to become Jeff Dean by joining Google now. If that is your goal, my advice is to seek out companies with the highest ratio of users to engineers. A value of 1e6/1 is a good target. These places probably look like dumpster fires because of their scaling problems. But they need these skills and have no alternative than to let you work on the problems that require them. Make sure there are a couple of people there who have done it before that you can learn from and hold on for as long as you can.
I admittedly don't shave every day, but I've been using a safety razor since 2013. I went back and tallied up all of the purchases for materials, including my razor, and I believe I've spent a little over $200 for that entire period, so maybe $25/year.
The first reason is retail margin. If you can manufacture something for $X, it will probably retail for $2.5-3X. When it's really cheap to make, that might be a reasonable price, but when you are making something that has 3-5x the BOM of the cheaper versions, that high of a markup can make the product inviable. When you start to look at the absolute dollar values, you realize you might be able to do your own marketing and sell direct at a lower price.
Second, with such a price premium, retail isn't as appealing because your buyers are going to be high intent. If your underwear is 5x the cost of everything around it, you're not going to sell the average Walmart shopper just because they're already there. So the other value prop of retail, exposing your product to their captive audience, isn't going to be very valuable either.
So we're left with a lot of DTC business, generally selling quite premium products at high prices, but what are often very reasonable margins. The economics can be shaky because of the high cost of user acquisition, but unfortunately there aren't really any better alternatives at present. Some people do take advantage of this general ecosystem to try to sell cheap stuff in the same manner. I think long term this is hard to due because so much of the business relies on word of mouth, but these sorts of entities definitely do come and go.
All changes in complex systems have tradeoffs. In-person whiteboard sessions can be exhilarating. They also tend to produce imprecise (or no) artifacts that rely heavily on the context of the meeting for interpretation.
I noticed that when our team went remote during COVID and ideation was done by async contributions to design docs, the completeness and reliability of our designs went way up. But again, it's never all positive. If there was a design that was underspecified or not fully understood by the team member leading it, the siloing could lead to analysis paralysis.
The reliance on theatrical releases is a bit of a mixed bag. It is another mechanism for content generation that can add to their library, but it also comes at a loss of some value to users of Disney+ if they care about seeing stuff on release. Additionally, it's dependent on a distribution channel(cinemas) that is currently hemorrhaging money. If moviegoing doesn't recover to pre-pandemic levels before the apes' money runs out, it might prove to be a vulnerability.
This conclusion is actually pretty obvious when you consider it from a testing/dimensionality perspective. If you have 2 components with N inputs, an interesting application using both may have close to 2N inputs. Sounds pretty tame, but the size of the space grows _exponentially_ with dimension. And for a bounded space, almost all of the volume will be near the surface, which would mostly correspond to non-trivial combinations of the inputs. I think we tend to lump most of the code needed for this complexity into "business logic".
""" We decided to do this due to the heavy cyber component to this war and the chance of manipulated content. Even seemingly innocuous links could be hosted by someone that is less benign. We certainly recognize that this is a pretty far reaching decision but there are generally other ways for most people to share the type of content that is being described.
As to why this wasn't communicated, there is a lot of things going on right now and sometimes moving fast means missing steps along the way (like sharing with mods). We did not intend to hide this decision. """
So it has little to nothing to do with attempting to censor.
A few things I've noticed:
1. A lot of conversations happen before that many people are interested. Subreddits tend to attract mavens, and they often discuss things months or years before people really care (or the marketing team for whatever is being discussed is even looped in). Pay attention to when the posts you're looking at occurred. In a lot of cases, they were there earlier than you'd expect.
2. There is incredible dispersion in where conversations on a topic occur. It's not uncommon to have 10s or 100s of different communities discussing the same thing, and its not clear which is going to end up being the place people trust. Many of the sub-communities are also somewhat mutually exclusive(geography, android vs ios, etc), meaning it's going to look incredibly insincere if the same account is posting in a bunch of them.
3. Reddit posts allow negative feedback in a way few other venues due, especially not pages optimized for SEO and controlled by a single entity.
4. It is one of the few platforms with an appetite for long-form content. It is almost an anti-Twitter. Meaningfully moving a Reddit discussion on a single popular post could take hours if it could be done at all. For communities with more lasting artifacts like a wiki, it could be practically impossible.
5. As others have pointed out, the subreddits aren't controlled by and don't have the same incentives as Reddit Inc. Optimization tools aren't going to generalize well since what it takes to get to the top of each is different.
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/30/15-of-auto-sales-in-eur...
"YC are some of the kindest, most egalitarian people in SV. They've treated me well even after my company they invested in closed down. They give people a shot who wouldn't otherwise have one. If I were an investor who just handed this guy money at 250x revenue, I'd be nervous."
Every time I see things like this, I look back at an email Trevor Blackwell sent me about a month after we closed down our company. YC was above 100 companies/batch at that point, and he wasn't one of the partners assigned to our company. He took time out to tell us he thought we were special and hoped we would try again at some point. That vote of confidence got me through one of the darkest periods of my life. Garry, Michael, Harj and Geoff have been equally kind. Maybe YC has changed since then, but I doubt it.
In the alternative, the CPU might reasonably represent 1/5 to 1/3 of total costs. How much higher could Intel price their chip while still being competitive from the TCO perspective? The answer is nearly 2x on a per unit basis using those numbers.
That calculation was relatively easy when all of the chips had very similar number of cores, and the advantage was squarely in single-core performance. It's slightly harder now, in a world where there is considerable divergence in things like number of cores and energy efficiency in addition to single core performance. But the implications of those equations have obviously swung strongly against Intel for large parts of the market. There are AMD/arm chips that are probably 2x or more the current multi-core performance of the Intel chips that were at similar prices last year. Intel has advantages around lock-in and brand, but the economic incentive of transition now can be quite staggering, and people are waking up to it.
Whether Intel will be able to make chips that would be competitive in that market, even with no margin, is yet to be seen.
From inception, container shipping has been plagued by oversupply because of the economies of bigger and bigger boats. That was still true 3 years ago. Shipping businesses were going bankrupt left and right. It is a commodity good with a relatively low cost of entry. If the existing companies don't feel like lowering prices, others will step in and happily take their market share.
The problem historically has been the distribution of that additional wealth. It's common to see cycles of increasing rent seeking, followed by de-urbanization/migration, and then a gradual return to cities.
I totally get the desire to live alone, but I never have because having roommates/cohabitation always seemed like such an obvious economic decision compared to other ways to reduce living expenses.
The Onion put out a video[1] in 2009 about an economic recovery plan that amounted to boyfriends finally agreeing to move in together with their girlfriends. I've spent a lot of time researching the housing market and macroeconomic reasons for its current distortion from historical norms. That video often pops into my mind when I do. The overall housing stock in the US has more than kept pace with the growth in population, but the reduction of household size and related growth in housing space per person has created a huge amount of incremental demand.
I don't think those are purely bad trends. My parents' generation paired off young and quickly, and the long term effects are easy enough to pick out in divorce statistics. But I do have to wonder how much of the economic woes 20-40 year olds face right now might be alleviated if the pendulum swung back a little in that direction.