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Well I mean, look back to the Covid mandates - if employees were compliant than, I see no reason why management wouldn't think they would be compliant now. Having worked middle management in the corporate world - corps are self-selecting, all the people I have met there who have been around 10-20 years already internalized their state a long time ago. My direct boss was quite transparent about this, once referring himself as "a slave for 18 years".

I think between Invidious and Freetube there are enough alternative feeds to to Youtube these days.

Often times you will find cash only businesses, especially in Chinatown and restaurants that will give you a discount on the final bill if you pay in cash. I have been to some mid-range restaurants that will knock 10% off my bill if I pay in cash instead of credit. This is the merchant fighting back using their own stratagems.

In many cases in my experience the vendors who can successfully pull off this strategy have a high quality, high value product and operate in a no-frills store front and are often family owned, maybe a generation or two already. There is a Vietnamese banh mi sandwich vendor where I live who has been around for 30 years only accepts cash - they have the history and patronage to pull this off.

I have a colleague at Amazon who mentioned this last point as the explicit reason he planning to leave Amazon. He was (is) a people manager and every year, having to cut off a member of his team for no reason was not something he wanted to do on an ethical level. He described the process with me and in the end his solution was to give the IC a tip off that a PIP was coming and in that case that person was able to move to another team quickly enough to avoid the chopping block.

It's all about the money, the writer himself mentioned he had 100k's of stock that would vest. When you get into the 100k range of windfalls, people will do all sorts of things, even people you have known for years. That's why sometimes you only see people's true nature when their parents die and estate settlement comes into the picture.

If you don't want to deal with this kind of stuff, don't allow the almighty dollar to control your life.

I am somewhat reminded of Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk world where corporations effective own the nation state's that they are headquartered in.

  Location: Toronto, Canada
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Would consider relocation to US
  Technologies: Python, C++, experience in machine learning, 6+ years of exp as a data scientist
  Résumé/CV: https://www.kuhanwang.com/static/KWANG_CV_NA.pdf
  Email: kw@ownmail.net

I have a lot of experience as a data scientist, I was trained as a physicists. I consider myself a good generalist and sleuthing, rough around the edges. I am currently taking a career break and working on an indie isometric game engine. If you care about that sort of thing you can look at the latest prototype here: https://kwgames.itch.io/macrocosm. I am looking for new opportunities in the near future. I am generally agnostic as to the role as long as I can be intellectually challenged and valuable to the effort.

I think there is an additional issue here - which is if you want to pay to remove ads from youtube you have to have an account and that by definition provides your analytics and browsing history to youtube no? There is no way to remove ads without turning over your behavioral analytics to youtube.

Hi, I am a generalist, with a strong specialization in Data science and machine learning. I have an academic background in physics and over 10 years of programming experience in C++ and Python.

Location:Toronto, Canada Remote:Yes Willing to relocate:Depending on location, could consider it. Technologies:Python, C++, Machine Learning Résumé/CV:www.kuhanwang.com Email:kw@ownmail.net

I can't believe in a lot of these countries this is enforced or obeyed to any degree. The closer the empire is to collapse the stupider the laws.

I have heard of someone (on a talk show) crossing over with a large amount of gold coins. Since the coins (the Gold Loonie) has a nominal face value of something like 200 CAD - he just told the customs that he was bringing over the nominal face value of the coins. This only works with coins not rounds, as rounds are not legal tender and maybe that is why rounds trade at a discount to coins?

The entire Covid years and the way government and society responded was the most cynical thing I have ever witnessed in my life and it completely altered my worldview and the way I see government, society and people in general. Some reckoning on this is in the future is small catharsis.

I don't know if you looked into pursuing academic career and running the post-doc circuit (maybe that doesn't happen in ML) but academia is ultimately a business and academics are overwhelming pressured to publish and increase the stats.

Several actually but here is one:

I learned passing reading comprehension of Chinese in high school. My parents were immigrants and I left China after kindergarten so I never could read or write Chinese - this always rustled me the wrong way because I didn't like the tone my mother used when she called me "illiterate" and I was too proud to go to Sunday Chinese school (also video gaming took its toll on my social development).

What I did was try to memorize five simplified characters a day - I would write them down in my little notebook, copy them out by hand 100 times each. I have stacks of paper with nothing by Chinese characters written on them stashed somewhere.

I based the curriculum on the Chinese language grade school textbooks. At that rate I would still remember maybe 1-2 of the 5 after 6 months, so factoring the attrition by the two year mark I had enough to figure out the meaning of newspaper articles or simple dialogue. From there it was possible to fill in the gaps of unknown characters by logical deduction. Although even today as a grown man reading in Chinese is a pain.

Can long covid be considered post-viral fatigue? I remember being knocked out with Mononucleosis years ago and being tired out for over a month afterwards. Or is long Covid something entirely different?

It's very honest of him to breakdown how he makes his living on SerenityOS - really enjoyed that blog post, helps give people an idea of how a very technically saavy person can make it in today's world as a "nomad".

I always wondered where the talent and technical expertise inside China for manning and refining the GFW comes from and how many people it feeds - it seems at this point like family planning, an agency so big it exists simply to perpetuate and provide livelihood to a host of people. Also how much truth is there to the statement that Cisco helped setup the GFW for China in the 90's?

This might be okay with me if it weren't for the fact that browsing through an account means Youtube can track my viewing habits.

This is pretty cool, what kind of noise algorithm is allowing you to generate the the height map? Is this Perlin noise? I have been working on a game where the map is procedural generated.

I started my first industry job in 2015 well after this and I was still wined and dined the night before the interview. The cocktails were $12, I had three, my future manager assured me that there was nothing to worry about the next day. In my last job, there was still lunch at a "$$$$" restaurant (at least according to google reviews) after the on-site interview.

I once got flown out to Shanghai from NYC, all expenses paid for 3 nights to interview for the China operations of an European tech company.

I guess everything is now different with remote work but before the pandemic companies, especially your prospective manager, would go out of their way to make you feel good if they really wanted you. Those were the places you wanted to work, even if the salary was higher somewhere else, because you knew you would be privileged and respected before even stepping in the door. That meant getting more resources, having more leeway and freedom to do what you want.

I also get the feeling hackers and "creative programmers" are not as valued as much in today's market. Managers want "I" shaped as opposed to "T" shaped hires.

If you could build a sufficiently sensitive neutrino detector you could look past the ionization era of the Big Bang. What you can see in the sky is limited to that era in the cosmic history as before that period the scattering distance for photons was too short (since everything was just a free floating soap of ions) so the Cosmic microwave background (CMB) we detect is like a snapshot of the "last scattering".

But since neutrinos are only weakly coupled they fly right through without interacting most of the time. That "NMB" would presumably let us see all the way back to the big bang itself.

Midjourney has been really helpful to me as a one man dev. I can mockup art much faster then what I can do in photoshop. I still intend to at some point do a complete pass using a professional artist (or learn to draw myself) - because generative art is not consistent thematically from asset to asset. But if I just want to see what my tile assets look like if they were all done in 30's art deco style, I can do it in 20 minutes.

As placeholders or to create little bits and doodles (like a mouse cursor in the style of an armored fist), there are lots of little graphical icons in a game that would other have to be created by a graphical artist. Generative art is really useful in my experience.

It's reduced the work to the point where I can toy with it in my off time and spend most of my effort in the actual programming and development.

The other idea I have toyed with, coming from professional ML experience - was to build my own generative model and use it to create my own art assets. Here I wonder how the copyright rules would work - would the assets I train on be subjected to copyright? This is a much bigger conversation at that point and I wont be the only one affected.

What's that saying? Something like: "It's not that Einstein was so brilliant, it's that so many more Einsteins spend their whole lives in the farm fields" and in between is there is a whole spectrum of talent vs opportunity and recognition going from brilliant and unknown to famous and undeserving.

In my experience running your own business is all about relationships. The fact is someone with capital to spend can deploy it to anyone, so why should they deploy it to you? Are you their cousin? Did you go to the same school? Met at a mixer? Before there is even a discussion about what you know and what you can do, or what your product is there is the question of who you are.

I have been doing some Data Science consulting on the side and last year we did some analytics work for a government lottery and that contract came to us because one of my partner's girlfriend had a relationship with the team who needed the work done. Otherwise you would never hear about any of this stuff that is constantly flying around in the airwaves.

The problem with this advice is that it's not any advice. Saying business is about nepotism is unattractive and doesn't really help you, other then to say, either you are social and good at forming relationships or find a partner that is. And moreover, you can't sell this advice in a coaching class.

If you aren't a social butterfly the only way is to build those relationships over a long period of time and create trust.

Getting a faculty job at 25 is extremely impressive, the mistake he made was using violence to spread his message - in his manifesto he even states that he uses it to make sure message heard - but if he had just held on, resisted the urge and played the long game he could have had a much bigger voice in the world - even if he never became an academic, outside of the system as a pundit, youtuber, hacker, etc. The world was gotten more technologically authoritarian but the tools and means to live outside or even in opposition to it also has vastly increased.

The point being, if you want to fight and be a rebel, it's better to do it from a position of liberty..

I am really interested in the social-political dimension of this. Was the initial hypothesis of a lab leak suppressed during the initial part of the pandemic primarily due to Western government's fear of a diplomatic breakdown (like Russia) with China? The economies are far more interdependent than compared to Russia and there is a far more economically important Chinese diaspora in the West.

What would it take to get a honest investigation within China? Presumably not under the current regime - if it were true, the magnitude of the disaster would be 100x what Chernobyl was for the Soviet Union, it wouldn't just be an accident at that point.

Would it totally legitimize the Chinese state in the eyes of its people and the world? And for that reason, could we ever expect a honest accounting? Too much blood (literal and metaphorical) has been spilled and with the lockdowns, vaccine mandates, passports, school closures, etc and everything else that has happened, most elite institutions, state actors, businesses, media, corporations have become complicit in some way in abuses, lies, deliberate obfuscation of one type or another.

It feels like a breakpoint in history to me.

My old man purchased a Huawei smartphone from China a few years back, I took a look at it last year as a potential hand-me-down and I noticed that a "Covid health" application system had been installed into the OS itself and couldn't be removed.

I had no choice but to junk it despite the excellent hardware underneath the hood.

The site is definitely slow, but not so much that it is intolerable (at least in my experience).

It's a interesting idea but I think 4chan, as the internet watering hole, has the core audience captured already and has done so for the last 15ish years. I am curious as to what the marginal value is here.

I recently put out in public the prototype of the game that I have been slaving on for the last 1.5 years - despite all the bug checking I did it, it's still filled with bugs and the gameplay is basic. But then I realized - at this stage very few people care and the ones that do will forgive your stumbling starts. As long as you manage expectations you can just continuously iterate on it and patch.

Now that I know I can just fix a few bugs, add a some small content here and there and push it on a weekend - there is actually a mental peace.

In my experience usually it means you are not solving the right problem - that problem you feel has "no solution" is like the outer appendages or surface of something else which is where the real problem is.