1,776 karma · joined September 30, 2014
Artists use their medium to communicate. More often than not, everything in a piece is deliberate. What is being communicated here? Who deliberated on the details?
Those videos are as much "art" as Marvel's endless slop is "art".
That said, the RFD does say this:
> Candidates may well respond to a rejection by asking for more specific feedback; to the degree that feedback can be constructive, it should be provided.
Even just replying with refusal to provide feedback would still be more humane and decent.
I had a very similar experience, except I got the automated email after two months, not three — you sound like a stronger candidate, so maybe that's why I got rejected sooner, which'd be fair enough. Still, spending about a week's worth of evenings between the suggested materials, reflecting, writing, and editing 15 pages for one job application and having zero human interaction feels uniquely degrading.
I disagree with your point about that being fine. I think it's not good enough to replicate the bare minimum of what the rest of the industry does while asking for so much more from candidates.
A standard custom, well researched cover letter takes an order of magnitude less effort. When it's cookie cutter rejected by someone spending a few seconds on the CV, it's at least understandable: the effort they'd spend writing a rejection (or replying back) is higher than the amount of effort they spent evaluating the application.
With Oxide however, Brian made a point that they "definitely read everyone's materials" [1]. Which means reading at the very least five pages per candidate. If that's still the case, having an actual human on the other side of the rejection would add a very small amount of time to the whole process, but the company decided to do the absolute least possible. It's a choice, and I think this choice goes against their own principle of decency:
"We treat others with dignity, be they colleague, customer, community or competitor."
I wish Oxide best of luck. They have lots of very smart, very driven people that I'd love to work with, and I love what they are doing. Hope this feedback helps them get better.
[1]: https://youtu.be/wN8lcIUKZAU?t=1400
P.S. Don't you dare, dear reader, consider the emdash above an LLM smell.
I adore VyOS
Bun genuinely made me doubt my understanding of what good software engineering is. Just take a look at their code, here are a few examples:
- this hand-rolled JS parser of 24k dense, memory-unsafe lines: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/c42539b0bf5c067e3d085646... (this is a version from quite a while ago to exclude LLM impact)
- hand-rolled re-implementation of S3 directory listing that includes "parsing" XML via hard-coded substrings https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/main/src/s3/list_objects...
- MIME parsing https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/main/src/http/MimeType.z...
It goes completely contrary to a lot of what I think is good software engineering. There is very little reuse, everything is ad-hoc, NIH-heavy, verbose, seemingly fragile (there's a lot of memory manipulation interwoven with business logic!), with relatively few tests or assurances.
And yet it works on many levels: as a piece of software, as a project, as a business. Therefore, how can it be anything but good engineering? It fulfils its purpose.
I can also see why it's a very good fit for LLM-heavy workflows.
Also, if you have that option, filler + sanding + paint can hide the layers completely, but preserve the overall shape.
I gave that object to a dozen people without explanation. Only one of them was a designer. All of them preferred G3 after comparing corners by look and touch for a few seconds. Honestly, I was surprised that it was this unanimous; I deliberately made the difference small.
You can read more here:
https://controlmad.com/en/training/10h-grasshopper-g-code-fo...
https://interactivetextbooks.tudelft.nl/rhino-grasshopper/Gr...
However, by far the biggest browser is funded by a corporation that wants tracking data across the web. I'm not very surprised that the corporation haven't made it easy to refuse just once.
Thanks Google.
This is already complex and fiddly enough. Just having a stable 2D drawing environment that uses a constraint solver but also behaves predictably and doesn't run into numerical instability issues is already an achievement. You don't want a spline blowing up while the user is applying constraints one by one! And yet it's trivial compared to the rest of the problem.
Having 3D features analytically (not numerically!) interacting with each other means someone needs to write code that handles the interactions. When I click on a corner and apply a G2 fillet to it, it means that there's now a new 3D surface where every section is a spline with at least 4 control points. When I then intersect that corner with a sphere, the geometric kernel must be able to analytically represent the resulting surface (intersecting that spline-profiled surface with a sphere). If I project that surface into a sketch, the kernel needs to represent its outline from an arbitrary angle — again, analytically. Naturally, there is an explosion of special cases: that sphere might either intersect the fillet, just touch it (with a single contact point), or not touch it at all, maybe after I made some edits to the earlier features.
Blender at its core is comparatively trivial. Polygons are just clumps of points, they can be operated on numerically. CAD is hell.
The tricky bit is having a G2 (or even G3) fillet that intersects a complex shape built from surface patches and thickened, with both projected into a new sketch, and keeping the workflow sane if I go and adjust the original fillet. I hope one day we'll see a free (as in speech) kernel that can enable that, until then it's just Parasolid, sadly.
Parasolid is powering practically every major CAD system. Its development started in 1986 and it's still actively developed. The amount of effort that goes into those things is immense (39 years of commercial development!) and I don't believe it can be done pro-bono in someone's spare time. What's worse, with this kind of software there is no "graceful degradation": while something like a MIP solver can be useful even if it's quite a bit slower than Gurobi, a kernel that can't model complex lofts and fillets is not particularly useful.
3D CAD is much harder than Blender and less amenable to open source development.
The government is trying to focus on boring, annoying things and is getting rubbished for it. Doesn't bode well for other governments trying to do the same, does it
This remarkable result was achieved by the backdoor: successive conservative governments obscured the stagnation by constantly increasing the personal allowance far in advance of the inflation. This bought them votes [1], but as a result we have a baroque tax system that tries to squeeze tax from less visible, often counter-productive places, and still doesn't collect nearly enough to cover necessary expenses. After a decade of cuts, every public service is cut to the bone, and there's no money to invest into hospitals, roads, or trains to increase the overall productivity.
PIP bullshit is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/HENRYUK/comments/1jsyzip/tax_rates_...
We are punching way above our weight in arts (disproportionally many Hollywood actors and directors are British), complex engineering (off the top of my head, Rolls Royce, Sheffield Forgemasters, and BAE are good examples), and recently building alliances (Japan's JASDF just made their first European deployment in 71 years). We are unusually constitutionally resilient, still maintaining control of the legislature over the executive, which is becoming rarer and rarer in the west.
But below all of that is bubbling energy and drive to fix and improve things. I saw it at startup meetups, I saw it in thinktanks, I saw it at Labour Conference. I see it in your comment.
There are massive risks to navigate, but I'm optimistic about this country's future.
That's not how "enthusiastic support" looks like: https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/commons/division/1416
- too many immigrants
- too many small boat arrivals
- the existence of billionaires
- too much tax
- too little tax
- UK membership in NATO
- UK being too weak in NATO
- too much smut online that kids can see
- too many attempts to control the web
Agreeing on which of those "need to be fixed" is the essence of politics. There are no universally accepted answers.
The current government, for all its failings, is focusing on fundamentals: get building again; repair public finances to then invest into infrastructure; repair international relationships. To that end, they are calling projects in right and left, pushing the planning bill through the parliament, rising taxes (which is utterly necessary!), reforming the NHS (online appointments are coming), talking to businesses, building nuclear power plants, striking deals with allies (Norway just ordered £10bn worth of frigates, AUKUS is steaming ahead), and forging new alliances (Japan has just deployed their air force to the UK, their first European deployment in 71 years).
This is the opposite of populism, in fact a lot of that is making them unpopular in the short term. Yet it's the first time in more than a decade when we have a government that does those things. We got populists out and let's-do-serious-work-on-fundamentals people in, and now people complain that they aren't populist enough.
Take this case: the law was enacted two years ago by a different government, the regulator follows the law as enacted, and yet no one cares about this little nuance.
In reality, it's a decent technocratic government trying to reverse a decade of mismanagement and fighting about five hundred fires at the same time. It's OK to good.
Public transport brings a lot of value to other businesses and communities it operates in that can't be directly captured in fares. Which means that if a public transport system is profitable and the goal is maximising total economic (and social) value of the area as a whole, the system either under-invests, or is too expensive, or both.
The classic economic solution to this is subsidies: capture some of the generated value in taxes, re-invest back into the transport system. However, this makes the business part of the whole arrangement almost meaningless, because the amount of optimal subsidy can't be objectively determined. It's impossible to distinguish a bad business losing money from inefficiencies from a good business asking for subsidies to optimise its total impact.
There are some peculiar arrangements that some countries and systems were able to create, like direct land value capture through transport companies buying and selling property. But those cases are pretty exceptional and for practical purposes don't scale.