david-cako

Who was it again that has the most effective intelligence community and military in the world?

I suspect for many of us, our phones and computers keep us better connected than we would be without them. Apple has always been more of a tools company than any of the other guys; they aren't telling you how to live your life. Even social media companies aren't telling you how to live your life, they're just providing a (addictive and at-times destructive) service to do it.

Steve saw the iPhone as the best and most innovative computing device in the world, and that's exactly what it was, and perhaps still is.

Having crazy ideas seems to be a prerequisite for taking over the world with an idea. The alternative is having familiar ideas which are already pervasive, or having no ideas.

Microsoft has been around a long time and they seem to adapt pretty rapidly. I wonder what percentage of the company today was around during Ballmer days, and how the culture has changed over time within the company. Naturally it's going to be driven by the market, but I wonder, are older MS folks moving with the culture shift? Or is it newer hires that are pushing for the open source ethos?

As a Mac and Linux user, I really like Microsoft these days. VSCode, WSL, Rust, containers, Surface, .NET Core, all are pretty sweet.

Linux is pervasive because it's free (gratis) and flexible, but customers aren't necessarily seeing the core benefits of the Linux philosophy in terms of liberty and privacy. These examples of Linux succeeding are where some sort of application stack is very non-libre and often non-gratis, but maybe that's just one example of how to commercialize Linux. It's a generalized and well supported base for commercial products and services that is less restrictive and costly than other OSs, which is why we saw it replace server Unix distributions and even Windows Server in some cases. Many companies are embracing open source and extensibility more and more, though, which is definitely a good thing.

I'm interested to see a stronger focus on privacy and liberty in consumer Linux products like smart devices and IoT. Somehow iOS/MacOS, a markedly closed system, is the only one that really seems to be going in that direction right now.

So customers that want a more secure system should have no option?

Isn't it a fair assumption, based on how consumers see Apple, that all software running on an Apple device is approved by Apple? The App Store always had that concept built in. On your Mac you can still run anything you want outside of the App Store, but there's always going to be security instrumentation and app review that costs real time and money. Apple is your antivirus company when you buy Apple products, and the way they position the products means that they hold themselves accountable for privacy and security issues in a way that other vendors don't.

I think the fees are too high, but I wouldn't want app review and verification to go away. If they could make it free for any independent developer, great, but that doesn't seem to be the case yet.

There's a lot of lines you can draw like this. Do you own your money, or do you own an obligation made by the fed to all participants in the US economy? Okay, so maybe the US dollar is so pervasive that it's "inert" for all intents and purposes as a store of wealth.

The less tangible a good is, the more difficult it is to tell who owns it. People do like streaming services, but Apple has to keep the service running, right? There is a non-zero cost to Apple continuing to service relationships with studios and with customers, and they can't really say "this thing in your Apple account will, necessarily, live forever". I think Apple is the most likely company to make good on this sort of promise; in spite of the way they deprecate APIs (which I actually appreciate), they have an immaculate track record of supporting their services and devices.

If you buy a DRM-free movie or rip a physical copy, you're getting closer to owning the bits and bytes themselves, but still, really, you own the right to watch the movie in a non-commercial setting, and you now have to figure out how to make it available on your devices.

How long am I obligated to continue supporting software I've "let go" to the folks that contracted me? When will my car stop receiving kernel updates? To me, this is a more difficult issue than whether you have to re-purchase (or pirate) games and movies that you already bought.

Power is self-reinforcing too. A revolutionary stands a chance only if their ideas can be subsumed into a vision of greater prosperity for a nation; they can bring a narrative of greater freedom and liberty, but they must also show how it fortifies the institutions that already exist.

Sort of relevant is the Euthyphro dialogue, and the nature of piousness. "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma

5G allows for more granular management of network capacity, so you could think of a stadium deployment as somewhere between existing LTE and a WiFi mesh network. The carriers can look at dashboards and maps, and figure out where people are getting slowdowns so they can put up some more 5G nodes.

This granularity can mean more precise location data/telemetry and some interesting opportunities for edge caching and edge compute.

Existing GPS, in my experience, is far from perfect for geocoding more dense areas, so the idea that 5G can reliably put you out in front of a restaurant, or even in a particular floor and room of a building is promising (and a bit scary).

What if your games were streamed from a local edge node, and you only played with people on the same node at near-zero latency? Or maybe you're at a stadium, and your phone is streaming replays of the game directly from the stadium without going over the internet. And your phone knows exactly where the nearest vending machine is, and the vending machine is used as an edge device to give you live stock data and process the transaction.

I think it's a good supplement to LTE. People are going crazy because it's not an in-your-face speed improvement, but the reality is that it can mature to keep dense urban areas connected in a way that LTE wasn't really designed for.

In terms of it replacing WiFi/fixed line, I think one good reason it might is that it's simple. Down the line, some people might look at the process of "getting internet installed" and setting up a modem/access point as archaic, when you can just buy a device and have it connect. I kind of like having a separate fixed internet line though, because if one goes down for some reason, I still have the other.

This can't go on! Phone Tool awards for all workers!

Now they can't send all 6 of Andy Jassy's assistants important emails surrounding on-going unionization efforts in the retail org. Andy's in the dark, he needs our one-pagers!

The issue right now is how wide the surface area is. People stand up on global soapboxes, and in turn, something you say on Twitter (or said 5 or 10 years ago) comes back to bite you in places where you never even came close to saying something like that. People take snapshots of what you say and assemble them to try to make unequivocal statements about who you are as a person. And the goal is not usually to "rehabilitate" the person, offering lenience and good-faith, and questioning what they meant to say; instead, people seem to want to see bridges burnt.

There's permanence to what we say on the internet, but there's not permanence to what the culture says you are allowed to say. People are getting retroactively canceled for things that were fine at the time, which I think can be an issue. Remember how people behaved in video games as little as 5 or 10 years ago?

It's stifling, and frustrating. It makes you afraid to have a personality, but at the same time it makes having the courage to have a personality more meaningful.

To illustrate, in Silicon Valley, I might be fired if I mentioned in the break room that I think "pronouns" are unsexy.

And yet, it is a matter of my individual and sexual identity that I would want to say this, because I find it funny and I enjoy the risque. In fact, it might even turn some people on, even if they do have their pronoun in their Slack bio. Why is my declaration of identity less meaningful or less protected?

My hope is that I can continue to say silly things like this out of personal context, and still be accepted and valued as a person in society.

Looking back, I wonder what we will think of our current trend towards political correctness; to me it seems fragile. For instance, what do people gain from teasing or being risque? It seems like we're doing so much to be inclusive, that we're reducing the space where the risque exists; precisely the idea that something "shouldn't be said", but that boundaries may be pushed by virtue of where or how it is done.

I wonder a lot about why some things are deserving of being teased or excluded. Should anything be? It should, right?

If we were all truly accepting, we could tease each other gently and not want to take each others jobs and Twitter accounts away. That would be an "antifragile" social ethic.

sounds like the fundamental dilemma in existence, that an individual is a free agent in a prescriptive system. can businesses be free agents? certainly someone is excited about laser missile defense, and certainly the economy of ideas is in play.

The complexity is about the bare minimum to express concepts like concurrency, pointers, and interfaces, in my opinion. The ways Go seems complex are because it doesn't try to hide how memory works as much as other memory-managed languages, and in turn, as an engineer, you can write application and web-level code that performs almost as well as C and gets you thinking about things like a C programmer. I think Go just seems familiar to people that come from a variety of languages.

For me, the simplicity, batteries-included, and minimal primitives are a breath of fresh air, whereas in many languages I've felt like I have to learn "a whole new thing" each time I plug in a new library or try a new framework. Go has a web server, JSON, SQL, crypto, compression, and more built in, and it's all stuff you'd want to use directly in production. In Go, code and docs are just easier to write and navigate too. Compare, for instance, the prevalence of Reader/Writer types to how all-over-the-place implementations of buffers and asynchronous code are in other languages and ecosystems, or how many different build systems, dialects, and frameworks most languages have. The locality of most Go packages means you'll find better docs and help, and more canonical examples of how to do something.

Swift is another "deceptively simple" language to me. Swift has quite a few features, which means more prerequisite knowledge to read code "in the field". You're less likely to understand code by looking at it because there's more ways it can pan out while the developer is thinking about how to write it. I found that to be an especially big problem with JavaScript; I generally tell people to start writing JavaScript with a particular toolchain like React/TypeScript so they can set up a project and get on the right track fast. Go's ecosystem is opinionated but still just flexible enough, as I would say most of the features are.

or let them keep it and love them for it :)

The race for AI supremacy started when people started doing CRISPR in their basement. It's not "ideological" for the US to go first, it's the only option.

Salaries are an information game (that employees aren't winning), so it's limited, the extent that I'm willing to bottleneck my income at whatever Glassdoor/Linkedin horseshit a company is working off of. You can easily quadruple your income doing smart contract work, especially if you can reuse code across projects, whereas for salaried roles, you are mostly going to get incremental raises over your past salaried jobs.

There are different ebbs and flows to each type of work, so it's worth trying both for folks to see what they like. Job hopping for raises works for some people, but it also seems to lead to a lot of churn and lower expectations of trust and loyalty for salaried employees in the tech industry. Not my style. A business cutting edge-to-edge with another business is a more reciprocal arrangement, but there are some downsides and more stress.

true, the first thing I thought was "wow, I didn't realize you could do this with C#"

You could also argue that going into law enforcement or military is an above-and-beyond commitment that people of faith excel in. Conservatism is a focus on whatever may be conserved. Mormons are generally raised to commit themselves to the world around them in an act of faith.

People are talking a lot about "neoliberalism", which is interesting to me; sometimes it seems like a reversal to the British definition of liberal, where in the US we typically say conservative to mean "less programs", but in some ways "more federated power".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-war_consensus

wait, what's conservatism??

Neoliberals in the US are now saying we can have a deregulated cake that is also able to make social guarantees. This is compelling to me, because it's clear that businesses have an overwhelming amount of influence in the US; if there's too much distance from their accountability, it's difficult to measure it. If it is also a business's responsibility to do shit right and make favorable agreements with the government and the US as a whole, maybe they're onto something.

The LDS church seems exceptionally "neoliberal", by some definitions. "Owned and operated", "disaster-recovery-by-default".

Maybe a randomized serial number will allow Apple to sell you a product made in America or Europe without you needing to know the difference. Maybe it also grants Apple greater liberties when negotiating with existing suppliers.

What was the story with Fountain (FC) and Fremont (F) anyway?

https://beetstech.com/blog/decode-meaning-behind-apple-seria...

https://9to5mac.com/2013/01/25/apple-lists-quanta-computer-i...

Amazon is super metric-driven. It would be interesting to see unions come back with a metric-driven approach that helps workers, gives power to individual warehouses, comes across as "Amazonian", and makes corporate cream.

Replit has touched on this idea, @tylerangert on twitter

put up the rock

Anecdotally, if your parents treat you like an adult and someone who deserves responsibility, you quickly grow to fill those shoes. I think you live a very different mental life as a child when are taught to evaluate situations and make decisions.

how do you opt out of the Visa Advertising Solutions Opt Out list?

corporate culture is all built on this attitude. Amazon leadership principles are akin to NLP on a corporate mission statement level. they're good, too, if you just take them as simple pieces of advice, but you should also consider the value in doing the exact opposite of a lot of these things in equal measure.

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles

github is great, both web and mobile (especially mobile). and their new homepage is great too.

target's item pages are really good right now. I love the information density and layout on their site, which to me is suggestive of thoughtful human-oriented design rather than amazon's (highly effective) a/b test shit shoveling.

amazon has "ship-it" UI standards and a lot of variance in page section order (could be a/b testing, or just discrete developer teams).

they have lots of really interesting ideas scattered around for how they can reach customers with unique contextual information, but I have a hard time with how dynamic the layout is and they also don't know how to make good hero pages. too many over-compressed image banners and image tables.

amazon and github both have crappy search which is kind of interesting to me. amazon sort basically doesn't work either, for price or for rating. not sure why.

/ecommerce rant lol

As a kid it seemed like I got sick a lot (as perhaps many kids do) and I became a germaphobe. Now, as an adult, I am/was traveling semi-frequently, I don't really think twice about touching things in public, washing my hands, eating food off the floor, etc, and I am basically never sick. COVID has changed my habits, naturally, and perhaps I unknowingly kept habits that limit my exposure.

I'd be interested to know how different levels of quarantine impact someone's infection and illness rates separately; being a healthy carrier among a community of healthy carriers might be a good thing, as it indicates people are getting exposed to new pathogens at a safe gradient.

big news. this was a pretty big issue for a customer at AWS that was using S3 for their analytics platform.