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derex

33 karma · joined July 15, 2018

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derex··on Fastmail Down?
Their ios app is inaccessible at the moment too
derex··on Switching to a four-day workweek (2021)
I have a close friend who got Sr Engineer offer from Bolt. The 500k yearly TC is somewhat misleading because it’s assuming more than 2x growth in evaluation. While they may very well achieve that, you’re not gonna see the full 500k for an uncertain amount of time. More people should be aware of the nuances in these compensation figures.
derex··on Apple acquires classical music streaming service Primephonic
I’m also a Primephonic subscriber. Been using it everyday for the past 8 months. Let’s be honest, their mobile app sucks. I’m using iOS but willing to bet on their Android app sucking equally.

That said, I’m paying them for the giant catalog, good curation, and a dedicated streaming service just for the classical genre. Realistically I think these will stay with Apple’s acquisition. So in the long term I’ll probably be happy.

On the other hand, their decision to shut down the app before the alternative is launched is disappointing and unacceptable.

derex··on Travel websites are down? Airbnb.com, Expedia.com
Internal politics. Anecdotes are that org leaders face potentially serious consequences if the products they’re responsible for are down per status page. So they find ways to cover it up. This culture is passed top down as everyone is incentivized to downplay widespread outage.
derex··on Changes at Basecamp
From what I see, lots of people who object to this policy change raised a (legitimate) concern: where is the evidence supporting the claim? It’s not like corporations have ever had any problem firing people over productivity issues. If people argue over political topics all day at work and that turns out to affect their productivity negatively, it’s much less controversial for the company to act upon it from a performance angle.
derex··on Changes at Basecamp
In other words, “some political advocacies are good for our business and some are not. As a result, let’s ban all of them.”
derex··on Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime
g is not gravity, it’s a constant that quantifies the force that gravity impresses on a mass in Newtonian mechanics
derex··on Trump’s WeChat curbs halted by judge on free speech concerns
Can you link reports on this or the source where you obtained this information?

In the US at least, the claim that “all Chinese companies are controlled government” is thrown around way too often without evidence backing it up. People seem to accept it as common sense that doesn’t need fact-checks anymore. I’m not saying you are one of them; I just wish we all verify non-obvious claims for our own benefits

derex··on Amazon sues former AWS marketing VP Brian Hall after he takes Google Cloud job
How does it work if the former employee is on work visa? Do they still sign a no-show contract with the former employer?
derex··on We reduced the AWS costs of our streaming data pipeline
In some sense this is a good problem to have. With on-prem you used to have very limited resources to start with, so cost efficiency is a baked-in requirement. With cloud providers you seem to have limitless resources and the new problem of cost optimization arises.

Admittedly there’s difference between optimizing fully-controlled resources and cloud provider managed services. For one, low visibility into cloud service internals makes such optimization harder.

derex··on China’s new plan to seize the world’s tech crown from the U.S
The Chinese general public don't value information privacy as much as the Western counterparts. Mass surveillance could become a huge problem if the tech keeps evolving while the public awareness lags behind. And that is assuming it's not already a problem. If you think about how much tracking data you hand out when all your social activities are facilitated by one app (wechat), and the fact that giant Chinese tech companies are known to corroborate government surveillance...
derex··on AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS
I don’t have revenue breakdown on AWS orgs to back this up but I suspect CloudFormation isn’t one of the money printing products so it’s hard to justify investments as large as acquiring Hashicorp.

This is despite the obvious role of CloudFormation as a productivity multiplier inside the AWS world

derex··on Zoom Acquires Keybase
Can you elaborate on what concerns you so much that it warrants deleting your account right upon hearing the news?
derex··on Philosophy as Math-Like Thinking
> You learn to find an isomorphism between the concepts in your brain and someone else’s.

Coming from a math background myself, this is a really great way to relate philosophy to something I'm used to thinking about. So many times in conversations I've noticed that people talk about the same fundamental ideas but use different language and constructs to express them, and end up thinking (mistakenly) they disagree with each other.