cvwright

Sure, for sufficiently advanced definitions of “growing up”.

Opportunities to push yourself all the way to the limit don’t come around every day. Nor do a bunch of smart, experienced people who are willing to give you brutally honest feedback.

You definitely can get that in industry. Or the military. Or lots of places.

However I think where you go in industry matters a lot. Doing a PhD at a serious program is more like starting a startup than like writing CRUD apps at a megacorp. More like going to the SEAL teams than being a supply clerk.

Or it could be both.

Personally I struggled, had tons of stress, no time for relationships, and all that. But it was also an intense time of personal development. I learned a lot about myself and a lot about how to work hard and get stuff done.

I used to tell people that if you don’t regret starting your PhD when you’re halfway through, then you’re not doing it right. I’ve since moderated that stance - a lot - but there’s still something to be said for so-called “character building experiences” even though they suck at the time.

I had a few run-ins with fellow academics that went something like what you describe.

My main take away from the experiences (plural!) is that the most practical definition of “academic ethics” turns out to be “Never criticize the work of someone who is more famous than you.”

If this is the end of FB and Twitter, it can’t come too soon.

Thank you for illustrating my point so clearly

Agreed that this is a problem.

But there have been calls to violence on Twitter for a long time. Just in Portland, we had 100 days of street violence, a prolonged attempt to burn down a federal courthouse, various attacks on the city mayor, and the attempted murder of a gay immigrant journalist. It wasn’t hard at the time to find Tweets planning and celebrating all of this stuff.

If it’s truly about violence, why are the advertisers just now getting cold feet?

That makes sense. Thanks!

Why is “not subscription software” necessarily a good thing?

Don’t you want to be the customer rather than the product?

We don’t have European comforts because we pay for our own national defense. We also pay for Europe’s defense.

We should work out a deal where we continue to provide their security, and they provide our healthcare. Even Stevens.

Those are the most famous people who have been kicked off of social media. I will admit to not knowing the details.

The other area you could investigate is the various controversies around Covid.

Nobody wants to answer this, because to mention a controversial topic is to risk being accused of supporting it.

You could look at what famous people have gotten into trouble over. Alex Jones or Kanye West. I assume there have been others, but those two were in the news recently.

I think the idea is that it shifts the incentives. Sure, a rich nation state could buy tons of bot accounts at $10 a pop. But is that still the most rational path to their goal? Probably not, because there are lots of other things you can do for $100M.

Yes but how many Twitter accounts are truly in that category?

One former president has kinda sorta managed it, and he was in the news every single day for years. Who else could achieve even his limited level of success? Maybe Barack Obama?

We were talking about Twitter.

Twitter needs LeBron James and Taylor Swift and the latest Kpop stars.

It has a sort of symbiotic relationship with world leaders and journalists.

But it does not really need people like James Woods and Kevin Sorbo (to pick two from the other end of the political spectrum). Same goes for 90s grunge bands or 80s hair bands. I fully expect those guys to pay to try to stay relevant. And I would put famous authors from the 70s and 80s in the same category.

He wrote his best works before most of his readers were online at all.

He’s highly culturally relevant, but not because of anything he’s done lately.

Are you referring to the second It movie? That was based on a book from 1986. Nearly 40 years ago.

Massachusetts was a power player too, at least in the earlier days

Brought to you by the same people who spend a lot of money to combat inflation

I really enjoy working in Swift these days, and async/await has been a huge blessing.

But the whole way that Actors were rolled out leaves a funny taste.

Apple’s main illustrating example for using an Actor was to update a database. But if you try to do that, you run into exactly the same reentrancy issue described in this article!

While your Actor function is await’ing on the database, you can have another call to the same function start running, trying to write a different value to the DB. Now you have a race condition — exactly the kind of pain that Actors were supposed to save us from.

WTF Apple?!?

It would be ok if the first version was presented as a stepping stone to greater things. Instead they piss on our heads and tell us it’s raining.

Twitter is full of awful people too. They’re just on the other end of the political spectrum.

What is it about that guy, that makes people unable to stop talking about him?

Was it not enough for him to be the top story in the news every day for 4 years?

Because federation is seriously difficult — look at all the effort the Matrix team has put in, and it’s still not quite 100%.

Plus yes Signal has a bit of an NIH complex.

Don’t give them ideas

Which of course explains why the rest of the Americas have also been so peaceful and prosperous.

No intelligent person thinks that we got 250 years of relative peace and prosperity by random luck.

Pretty sure AWS offers that feature too

I used to have students who would write answers like that on in-class exams.

Every answer was at least one full, complete sentence, even for yes/no or true/false. And the “short answer” responses filled all available space when one sentence would do.

My only conclusion is that some undergraduate institutions around the world must be intentionally drilling it into their students to do this.

Big Tech keeps winning because we all hate our political opponents more than we hate the abuse of our privacy.

Maybe you were spared because you also use other browsers.

They really don’t like Firefox though. Had a coworker get bitten by this recently.

Mozilla should sue them. Or start suggesting matrix.org when the user tries to visit Discord.