erikpukinskis

> Rocks are mostly an off-piste issue

*laughs in East Coast*

> * Imagine taking a train from LA to NYC in 30 hours.*

Who is the customer for that ticket?

HTML version in case anyone prefers that to PDF: https://cacm.acm.org/research/why-google-stores-billions-of-...

… and one of these things hurts engagement.

Life expectancy is basically flat for people over 80.

Lots fewer babies are dying, a good amount of young adults are staying alive, some middle age people are living longer, and a handful of older folks are too.

But once you get to 80, 90, your life expectancy is within a few years of where it would have been 100 years ago.

There’s absolutely no evidence that medical technology has made any impact on the maximum age humans can live.

And any impact it’s had on the raw numbers making it past 100 are utterly dwarfed by the kind of factors affecting global population. Like tiny, tiny percents of the population are in this “ nouveau old”.

Maybe.

But they do reference “product” alongside “management”…

If you just have a bunch of engineering a design ICs “doing stuff” and no one is doing any form of project management (making sure you’re building things you can afford that customers will pay for) or product management (making sure they team is building what they said they would), that is, in fact, a recipe for disaster.

And saying “we hired some product people and project managers and we think that will correct our course” is not a bad hypothesis IMO.

Valve isn’t “done” they are working on their next gen headset, codenamed “Deckard”: https://youtu.be/YVkbcZ8JH2E?si=0-URGXYlsFGMZvGO

This is all speculation, but I get the sense that Valve understands better than anyone that 1) the VR market is a long game, 2) there are a number of minimum requirements for a VR system which are not ready to be commercialized yet (120hz, 10+ million pixels, eye tracking, etc) so no one is going to “win” in this round, 3) the developer platform and general developer relations matters just as much as the hardware.

It’s not so much “build it and they will come” it’s “build it, and the market, and the developer community, and land them all at once and they will keep coming”.

Valve has the luxury of having absolutely no one to answer to for their cost structure, so they really don’t have to show any particular traction metrics, nor do they have to put on any annual developer conferences to impress their shareholders. They can just focus on goals that won’t bear fruit for 10 or 20 years and they’ll be totally fine.

Valve is the definition of skate to where the puck is going not where it currently is.

What disservice?

Good data point, but a little bit biased.

> What is the meaning of life?

…is unanswerable not because life has no meaning, but because the answer is personal.

Part of growing up is to answer the question for yourself.

For me, part of the meaning of life is to walk in the woods and see as much as I can. Part of the meaning of life is to understand the trauma of my family of origin and take steps forward with my daughter. Part of the meaning of life is to be ambitious and creative and build something lasting and useful, but to not do so in isolation, to be integrated in culture and people I respect.

Exactly zero of those may apply to you or anyone else. I’ve been here for 42 years and those are things that seem steady to me.

But another person could find radically different meaning.

That’s what I think these attempts to define life’s meaning in an essay are doomed to fail. The meaning of life is not a thing in the world. It’s a process we each can embark on, if we so choose.

I can picture a black woman at a desk in a nicely pressed dress coming up with this one on pencil and paper.

AI stands for “artificial intelligence” and I think an algorithm which decides how easy a book is to read qualifies as some sort of intelligence.

As a side note, I think I am adding “render” to my list of words which are meaningless and therefore banned from using in code:

- render

- container

- context

- base

- model

- action

- component

- bake

- build

- generate

- view

- control

- process

- resource

Any I should add/remove?

I mean, it’s not even in the middle. It’s on the edge. On the opposite side of the airport is “The Museum of Aeronautical Sciences”. I don’t see any particular moral reason why that should exist instead of this persons farm.

No, the rebuttal is, “I’d rather take my own word for it.”

That perspective seems arbitrarily tied to the first billion years of evolution. What of the next billion?

That’s why you buy a cyber insurance policy.

Im curious for anyone who has done this: what’s the point of going all the way from one-db to one-db-per-customer? Why not just split the customers to 2 databases, then to 3, etc? Seems like the same level of system complexity but you avoid the lots-of-databases scaling problem.

You probably don’t even need to be able to migrate people between shards… just put everyone on one db until you hit 50% utilization, then spin up a fresh db and put all new customers on that one. Repeat whenever you run out of databases under 50%.

This works if people also have very clear boundaries for where their responsibilities end and where their teammates responsibilities begin.

Someone who cares obsessively about things that are closer to their coworkers area of responsibility are a liability to a team IMO.

Caring obsessively about your own responsibilities is great. It is a pain in the ass from time to time, but that pain is worth it.

Ideally when you automate yourself out of one job, you are then available to take on another, and also to have more flexibility and higher compensation as part of that process. This is pretty much what “leveling up” is. Either literal automation, or automation through establishing process, culture, and hires around you.

If you want to automate yourself and then stop working you need to be an owner.

What makes you say it’s a losing direction?

Their content.

How is that relevant? The voting public will typically delay expensive cost-saving measures. Because the majority of individuals will do the same.

Also forced public expenditures are a huge money making opportunity for the capital class, so they will tend to encourage delay as well.

I doubt there’s any reason why trains couldn’t run on batteries. Anything that either stops and then starts again before refueling, or goes down and then up again before refueling, should be compatible with batteries due to regenerative braking. Trains have both of those properties.

Planes have neither of those properties which is what makes them hard to run off batteries.

Cargo ships also wouldn’t seem to have a problem. My understanding is that the drag on a hull increases sub-linearly relative to displacement. So a 10% increase in displacement might only increase drag by 1%. So it’s unlikely the weight penalty of batteries would be prohibitive.

> it is impossible to feel sorrow and gratitude at the same time.

I would’ve said this too, until 12 months ago. I lost my dog suddenly. And then some weeks and months later I started to feel her presence running up alongside me when I would walk in our familiar places.

In those moments I felt elation in her presence and also utter despair in her loss all at once.

It was a strange experience but also clear as day.

There’s nothing fundamentally destructive about climate change. It’s the pace and scale of climate change which is potentially catastrophic.

Ecosystems experience “disturbances” all the time. Trees fall. Animals dig up plant beds. Extreme fire and ice kill flora and fauna. These “disturbances” aren’t truly often destructive though: they encourage succession and biodiversity. Seed banks and migration allow new life to be expressed and fill the disturbance.

The problem is when disturbances are coming so fast and on such a wide scale that migration can’t keep up or the seed bank is destroyed. In such a situation, biodiversity and overall living mass can nosedive. You end up with a desert which will take millions of years to come back to life.

In the power plant example, the heat “pollution” likely killed off or drove off some species within an area. But it was isolated enough that surrounding ecologies and latent genes could fill the hole, and in fact drive succession and biodiversity further forward than it had been. That’s fine and good, and not true “pollution” in my mind. Or at least not the bad kind.

I’ve said many times, eye contact will be the killer app of VR…

… but it will be ironic if 2D beats the VR companies to it, using technology like this.

What an utter failure on the part of Meta that would be. With such a huge head start and they still don’t sell eye contact (except on their Pro device? Maybe?)

Not trying to be crude, but is someone passing away after a long, rich life of 89 years something to mourn? Isn’t that kind of the best case scenario?

For me something like a black banner signifies a tragedy, not merely a death. A bunch of children being shot, a war, a disease ravaging a country, etc.

I’m curious to learn others’ perspectives however.

Canola oil is one of the healthiest oils there is, assuming you don’t have a dietary sensitivity to bogeymen.

I find the Express 5 situation hilariously wonderful.

It’s basically done. Any other project would’ve slapped a major release on it and fixed any issues that came up in a patch. Everyone who is using it says it works great.

But the maintainer won’t release it because they don’t feel it’s gotten enough testing. So they’re just waiting. And no one really cares because Express 4 is great and works fine.

It’s a beautiful example of mature software development.