erikpukinskis

> why would a good person stay at the company after all she has witnessed?

Wait, is the angle of the book that she’s a good person? That can’t possibly be right… it’s a book about all the horrible things she tried to help Facebook do.

The title of the book doesn’t suggest she was disappointed in their morals. It suggests she was disappointed in their ability to do their jobs.

The lawyers and the PR team don’t talk to each other.

I’m normally quite skeptical of these kinds of “Tesla More Dangerous Than Other Brands” headlines since they tend to be B.S.

But this seems like a pretty legitimate accusation, and certainly a well researched write-up at the very least.

Is it really necessary to highlight the heading at all?

I’m a passionate frontend engineer, but I do think we are often busy “asking if we could”, and ignore “if we should”.

Worth noticing, on mobile you can’t even read the conclusion in the “it’s beautiful” demo, because the navigation covers it.

I understand that it is just a demo, and that issue could be solved independently…

But I think it also points at the observation that when you try to do these kinds of unusual things, you open yourself to unintended consequences.

And while you can mitigate those consequences one by one, my experience is that you generally won’t have a chance nailing them all, unless you are also minimizing their number… by not getting too fancy.

Is that possible? Can you describe the chain of events that would lead to that?

Seems vanishingly unlikely to me, on the face of it, but I admit I am not read up on all the possible doomsday scenarios.

I love that eye tracking is built in this bodes well for my VR hypothesis:

The killer app for the VR platform is eye contact.

In my opinion Zoom should be investing heavily in this, and Zoom’s market is the one newcomers stand to gain.

The giant feature that Real Life™ has and teleconferencing lacks is the subtle baton passing, engagement reading, and tone modulation that is enabled by eye contact. A square of video just isn’t the same.

My corollary hypothesis for why this hasn’t been done yet is that the Mark Zuckerbergs and John Carmacks of the world are on the autism spectrum, they get by without this information, and therefore don’t realize how much the rest of us rely on it.

I just saw an interview w/ Nadella where he said straight up: Open Source takes half of every market, and this will happen with AI.

That’s such a refreshing change from the “DIE OPEN SOURCE DIE” attitude that Gates/Ballmer had.

I also love GitHub, TypeScript, and VSCode. These have become the foundation of my development toolset. That was something Gates did well, and Ballmer gave lip service to (“developers! developers!”) but for me only recently has Microsoft actually been maintaining good quality developer tools again.

That’s where my goodwill comes from anyway.

Google makes a better Office Suite (Gmail, Docs, Maps), ironically. But it’s hard for me to get too excited about that. It’s been pretty stagnant for 10 years.

There’s no need for a PCB in a toaster.

For what it’s worth, I’m a “crypto believer” and I have never considered ease of use to be one of its selling points.

What you are describing are the systems of power which create a stable financial system. That is, one where you can put a nickel into a bank account and expect it to be there in a year or a hundred years.

That indeed requires a complex web of power structures, because its top line goal is to be stable and dependable. And stability within a complex landscape requires an equally complex network of power.

Crypto provides the exact opposite value: it cannot be controlled, no matter how robust your power structure is. It can be insured, at a significant cost, but not controlled.

That means in the face of even totalitarian powers someone could still move crypto across any boundary that is permeable to information, which it turns out is a set that roughly approximates the set of all boundaries.

This is a terrible way to pay for candy bars, because candy bars are not worth insuring.

But what I think the crypto opponents miss is that there is a set of transactions—some criminal, some legal, some immoral, some righteous—which cannot be made in a state controlled financial systems.

And that these transactions are what gives crypto value as a currency.

To me, where I would like the debate to go is not “is crypto a scam?” but “how does society protect people from the violence facilitated by crypto?”

Yes, financial “violence”, which can be insured against, but also real violence: human trafficking, extortion, etc.

We anarchists sometimes like to pretend that without rulers we will be freed to care for each other. But in the shadow of a history of violence, there will be more violence too.

And the “crypto is a scam” argument I fear is a red herring that distracts from this, the real issue.

Can anyone recommend a journalist who is reporting the facts of what’s happening on this subject?

From what I can tell, it’s widely been reported that

- Elon Musk was allowed into the Department of Education

- “Big Balls” accessed Treasury computers

- etc…

But I have not been able to find any first person testimony that confirms those statements.

From what I can tell Tom Krause is actually the one who was given access by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. And Tom Krause is an employee of the Treasury and has security clearance.

I see a lot of people claiming there was some sort of illegal access, but I would love to read a source that explains exactly who accessed exactly what system improperly.

Can anyone point me at that source?

> a bunch of kids now do not even know that HTML is what gets rendered in the browser. They think that React is itself what browsers render.

Ironically, they are right and you are wrong.

HTML is a serialization format, which browsers use to construct a DOM in memory.

React renders directly to the DOM without ever serializing anything to HTML.

The fact that you got this wrong and are so highly upvoted really drives home the “old man shakes fist at clouds” nature of this thread.

> the SF Bay Area, which is known for being one of the most accepting places in the world for LGBT people

I live in the Bay. Maybe that is true, but in absolute terms the level of acceptance is still very low.

Like, if Denver is 10% accepting, the Bay might be 15%. Or something like that.

And Vallejo, while part of the Bay Area is a very different place than, say, the Castro. Culturally, it’s probably more like Detroit than San Francisco.

So I’m not sure if you can really draw any conclusions from your premise.

What’s wrong with the users?

I also prefer cooking with the flakier stuff because I can grab a pinch of it and sprinkle it in a controlled way.

I try to use iodized salt when it’s convenient: when salting pasta water, in baking, etc… but I wonder if my family is getting enough.

If you’ve got a lot of working years left (and therefore can survive losing a large % of assets any given year) it’s generally a good thing to drastically raise your risk profile. Assuming you’re also raising your expected returns.

> Bitcoin, the most popular cryptcoin in the world, is far from quick and cheap to exchange

Compared to what?

Let’s say your goal is to get some wealth out of Tibet into India.

Is it “quick and easy” to do that with dollars? Or Yuan? How about gold bricks? Maybe goats?

I’m not sure what the Chinese authorities at the border would have to say about those things.

With Bitcoin you can memorize a phrase like “witch collapse practice feed shame open despair creek road again ice least” and with that information in your brain you can move any amount of money anywhere your brain can go.

That is one _utility_ of Bitcoin. Just like one _utility_ of a dollar bill is I can put it in a Coke machine.

Right, so gold has a financial use and a material use.

So, if I were to print bitcoin keys on firewood and sell that, would it become a “good investment” in your mind?

That’s basically what gold is. A commodity with some limited material value, whose price has become completely detached from that value due to its use as a financial instrument.

Well engineered code that closely models the business is an asset.

Only a small percentage of code that’s ever written matches that criteria.

That asset also requires you to have good relationships with people who know how to maintain it properly.

I mean SMS media.

In any given place there are 3-4 Starlink satellites visible at a time. The bandwidth on each is somewhere in the 20 Gbps range.

So if you have 200 people using one satellite that’s no problem. 800 people using that whole cluster of visible satellites is also no problem. With 8000 simultaneous users you’re all down to 10 Mbps which is starting to get a bit limiting.

Each satellite covers an area about 15 miles across. About 100 square miles.

So… that works out to… something like 100 simultaneous users per square mile max.

That’s all back of the napkin math obviously… 1000 users packed into a small city surrounded by corn fields would be fine. 1000 users around every subway stop in NYC wouldn’t work even if the density is the same.

I live in California. For me, group chats are predominantly iMessage. FaceTime for video chat. I only know a handful of people with Android phones and they just suffer with poor quality media.

I suspect it’s both regionally and class dependent however.

A few that come to mind:

React Laag

Apollo client+server

Vanilla Extract

Visx

Downshift

React Router

Tanner builds libraries with a huge amount of functionality. But IMO he is not great at API design. His packages often have leaky abstractions which need to be patched over time.

React Table and React Query are powerful but end up simultaneously doing too much and not doing enough, because their boundaries are in the wrong place.

What’s wonderful about React is that it’s _not_ a framework. It does one thing well, and then stops at a well thought out, well documented, well tested boundary.

I try to only adopt libraries that also meet that standard. It means you have a lot fewer libraries you can lean on, but it means the API surface you build on will be more stable for longer.

That’s my read too, if I’m being generous.

I also think OP is missing the point saying the target applications are too small of a market to be worth pursuing.

They’re too small to pursue any single one as the market cap for a company, but presumably the fictional AI chip startup could pursue many of these smaller markets at once. It would be a long tail play, wouldn’t it?

They said something like “you’re allowed, but we’d prefer you didn’t.”

So it’s a “you’re not wrong you’re just an asshole” situation.

When do you need spacers in flexbox?

> You can take just about any vegetable, add salt and pepper and oil, and shove it in the oven

I eat a lot of vegetables and I want to encourage people to eat them, but I think you’re over-selling it.

You can literally grab a hunk of 80% ground beef, slap it on a hot skillet, smash it, flip it once, and it’s done. Sprinkle a little salt and that’s a very tasty very easy to eat very nutritionally complete food.

Same is true for eggs and a handful of other non-vegan things.

Vegetables are just not the same. I am a pretty lazy cook and still, if I want to cook broccoli I need to get out a cutting board, chop it, throw away the parts that are too tough to eat, then put oil in the hot pan, add the broccoli, turning it several times so it cooks evenly. I’m probably putting a lid on at some point, and/or adding a little water.

It actually requires quite a bit of finesse to end up with broccoli that’s as easy to eat as a burger.

And that’s not a complete meal. You could live off plain burger patties but not plain broccoli. So you’re going to have to add some other stuff: nuts and grains, rice and beans, etc.

And I wouldn’t say any of that is hard but I think we need to be honest about the effort involved. It doesn’t solve anything to pretend it’s easy and then have people give try it and get completely lost.

I see what you’re getting at, but technically the virtual DOM is what makes JSX declarative.

JSX doesn’t actually write anything, it’s just a templating language over React.createElement.

It’s the virtual DOM that actually syncs those structures created by createElement to the real DOM. So it’s the virtual DOM that allows you to write your code declaratively.

That’s evidenced by OP’s project, which is JSX without the declarative piece. You just get an Element and then you have to update it imperatively if you want to change anything.

You might be confusing JSX for something else. In JSX you also don’t need new syntax for loops. JSX Is JavaScript, as people like to say.

But to your point, JSX doesn’t really do much. Your h function is basically what React.creatElement does. Google “React without JSX” and you’ll see how it looks.

JSX is just syntactic sugar over React.creatElement. And that is what makes it so nice… there _are_ no special constructs for loops, or variables, or components. They are actual JavaScript loops, JavaScript variables, and JavaScript function.

It makes JSX easier to reason about than most templating languages.

Ya… according to the article we don’t even know for sure that Google offered that amount. It says the number could’ve been lower, or Google could have found something in due diligence that caused them to back out…

To me this reads like “Wiz wants us to think it walked away from a $23B offer from Google”.

That said there’s a ton of money in this space, so it could be true.