fardo

Anecdotally from prior play, most diplomacy wins have two broad forms:

1. A second place player has fallen behind in a low or no hard betrayal alliance and is no longer capable of a meaningful backstab, and has decided they don’t plan to backstab their partner because through their ongoing cooperation they’re the second biggest player and you’ve had a good game together. They work to cement your win, because picking the winner is often as fun as winning is.

2. Two main players and their side henchmen who are no longer serious contenders are forced into teaming to prevent the other side of the board’s leader alliance from running away with the win. There’s been a massive amount of betrayals and the table is about to have the crucial fight that will collapse one or the others’ line in defense. One disgruntled player who is on the dividing line of both alliances picks the winning coalition by lashing out against the closest player that screwed them over hardest, ruining that side’s coordination. The winning coalition breaks through, then the biggest coalition’s leader backstabs and eats its subordinates for the win.

In both cases, honesty and cooperation primarily decide the winner - either because other players have deemed you “deserving of the win” or “designated winner by dint of having successfully avoided leaving one or more key players disgruntled enough to tip against you”

You _always_ need cooperation in these wins, but you don’t always per se need to backstab people to win. Insofar as you do, those backstabs come in many flavors and often don’t feel stabby, stuff like “I’m just consistently benefiting a little more from our mutual arrangement than you are” or “I have no plan to personally screw you over, but I’m pretty sure Gary is going to do it for me and I’m not gonna stop him.”

>It's incredibly refreshing to know that the company providing my search results has an incentive to make things better for _me_ and not a legion of advertisers

Cable television and netflix have made it quite clear that payment does not mean “no ads”, it just means “no ads, yet”.

It still might be a better alternative in the short term, but the moment growth starts to peak, companies follow where the incentives lead them.

Context would matter here, but the above question on its own wouldn’t typically rise to bad faith, even if phrased as written.

The job of the PM often demands creating project schedules, delegating assignments, spurring their team to deliver assigned tasks on time, and managing the team. It very much is their business to have some sense of how long things take, why they take so long, and get a sense whether the bottleneck is a personnel skill or motivation issue or the technical nature of the problem space.

A good faith answer would likely include an explanation why shipping a button took 3 weeks, would likely explain the relevance of those HTTP calls in your use case, and would help to give them a better sense of the work involved so they can better mentally cost out new interface items without creating expectations you’d be unlikely to meet.

If one's goal is to be as correct as possible, either at producing truth or making moral prescriptions, there is little reason to think an echo chamber is more likely to be correct, and many reasons to believe it's likely a strong impediment.

Echo chambers don't ideologically clean house, and vibrant merged discourse is anti-fragile. Weak or bad ideas can linger for a long time in an echo chamber, because of conflict avoidance, social pressures and the apathy of "sounds right, I guess" in an environment without any challengers willing to raise opposition to support their elimination. A vibrant discourse aggressively tears apart weak ideas of both sides, and creates an arms race to have good, hard-to-tear-down ideas which can pull people over.

Echo chambers struggle to agree on base realities and in doing so ultimately polarize in a way that is harmful for society's core fabric. Research seems to indicate that the partisan polarization we're experiencing today was very strongly correlated with the rise of cable television [1], which allowed people to self-segregate into bias-catering echo chambers. Regardless of your view, I feel most would agree it is a bad thing to live in a democracy where 30% of the electorate believes the seated president won by voter fraud [2] as disagreement on this point being split on these growing partisan lines is a powder keg.

Echo chambers in real life duplicate local conditions ideologically and morally, which is often bad. Ethnic cleansing, lynching, slavery, and other horrific abuses were at many points in history "how things were done around here", and while these are extreme examples, there's no reason to think that your local area "gets things right" just by nature of its proximity to you - the same social pressure towards conformity in these groups will likely apply at all levels, big and small, giving you opportunities to be wrong about all kinds of things.

For someone who wants to be right or in the right, echo chambers are a losing formula.

[1] https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/papers/...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/poll...

> In my current company there are 7 or 8 levels (depending how you look at it) for ICs. Why?

Promotions tend to represent some combination of four things to most companies:

• more expected impact and workload,

• more status,

• more money, and

• more expected industry experience and seniority

The three level system you propose might work if the company using it is in fact actually flatter in its internal hierarchy on those traits - but if it’s not, from the perspectives of the workers, all you’ve done is intentionally obscured the mechanics of the actual hierarchy you’re using in a way that even further obscures pay disparities, denies workers who are motivated by externally visible status a route to progression, equates high performing “just below architect” and “barely above software engineer” workloads in a way likely to incentivize many seniors to coast, and surrenders an easy tool for gauging performance by measuring how successfully someone is progressing at the company and in the field based on their level vs. years of experience.

>I've never seen "less bugs" on a product comparison sheet, for example.

Those show up, your sales department just uses the more formal names for the actual customer demands that “less bugs” encodes.

That will look like some combination of

• “We have an SLA for an annual 99.9xx% uptime and average sub x00 latency!” (so if a bug causes significant annual reduction in service, your business gets penalized),

• ”We guarantee regulatory compliance!” (so if a bug or business use causes regulatory issues, it’s your ass on the line),

• “We guarantee 24/7 same day chat or email support!” (so if a bug causes an outage, they have a warm body they can yell at, demand an explanation for their customers, and ask questions)

• “We guarantee backups, data redundancy, and worldwide data replication!” (so if a bug blows up one of your data centers somewhere, or the intern fat-fingers an accidental deletion of the production user database, the customer doesn’t even notice something went wrong)

• “We guarantee API backwards compatibility or a service maintenance guarantee until 20xx!” (So you’re forced to fix bugs, and the bug isn’t ‘your PM team might try to #KilledByGoogle’ the service you invested in building infrastructure on.)

Teams that believe in the health, care, and security of their design are far better equipped to offer the above valuable terms to customers to gain competitive business advantage, and teams with bad engineering hygiene are likely to be scared off.

I think the more realistic model of the future of programming given programs like Copilot is what’s happened in the SQL and compiler domain.

SQL and Compilers changed the goal of many programmers from writing custom extractors or serving as computer translators, to writing useful intents for extraction and actions. You still need to know WHY you’re extracting or adding your code in both cases, often need to understand the substructure enough to dive in and debug when results are unexpected or “not optimal enough”, and ultimately much of the cut content caused by the gained efficiency was ultimately boilerplate that, once eliminated, allowed programmers to take on more ambitious project scope than they did previously, because they weren’t spending their time rewriting a new data storage system or translating actions into machine language for the umpteenth time.

I feel we’ll see a similar progression - these code generators, very optimistically assuming a world where they work deterministically “good enough” to trust with even core business logic, will be treated as black box valid action generators, but in a world where action generation is free, but under-specification or incorrect specification is wrong, we still have something curiously resembling programming - the art of programming becomes one of maintainably chaining assemblages of black boxes into cohesive, maintainable superstructures.

I suspect we’ll say the same thing about code which was of simple and safe enough structure that we could trust it to black box generators that we currently say about SQL,

> Thank god I don’t have to redo all that work every time I start a new project

And, as with SQL, the project requirement boundaries will move to match your increased output capacity.

Much like the old saying “What Andy Giveth, Bill Taketh away”, it is perhaps modernized, “What Copilot giveth, Your PM Taketh Away”

Or, more likely, you can do what the supreme court has done in the past with the Roth test [1], argue “you know it when you see it”, and dodge the challenge of rigorously defining the topic while still allowing for some prosecutions to occur.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roth_v._United_States

>Do you think we will ever turn back to eugenics?

As the word is currently used, no, but mostly because it’s seemingly used to represent, in the public consciousness

> intentional genetic control we dislike

When we do things such as “screening for down syndrome” [1], we are already actively engaged in a eugenics project, but we don’t think of it as one because it’s the kind of intentional genetic control we like.

I expect many, many more “genetic controls we like” as medical and biological sciences advance, I think “eugenics” will always be viewed as a dead end.

[1] https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/womens-health/201...

Older analogues exists, but not exactly in this form.

Two puzzles from Logical Adventure of the Zoombinis are very close, though.

The first is Captain Cajun’s ferryboat, which you can see at https://youtu.be/_JlMcs_2xes. The constraint is that all zoombinis you seat on the boat must share at least one trait with at least one of their neighbors. It doesn’t really impose spatial dependencies of movement like your puzzle does though.

For one that does, but by taking on a cartesian grid, you can look to Bubblewonder abyss https://youtu.be/vx1yFKVdq9o, which on its hardest difficulty adds many, many rules to moving between nodes based on traits, plus re-use toggles (so if a node is visited twice, it goes two different places, “capture” triggers of glowing colored particles that holds one Zoombini captive, and a “release” button that lets it go.

Most people would probably agree an age limit of some sort makes sense. Very few people would want a 10 year old elected president.

Once you agree on the premise, it’s only a matter of asking what the limit ought to be, and while there may be some theoretical value to that discussion, it seems the average voter in practice is at most ambivalent about candidate age, and I definitely don’t think it’s a given that were the limit ever changed, that the number would be lowered, rather than increased.

By way of example, people in the last decade seem to currently have a preference towards significantly older candidates. Biden took office as this nation’s oldest president at 78 [1], and Trump was our nation’s second oldest president at 70. [1]. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s largest competitor for delegates in the 2016 primary, would have been 75 had he been nominated. [2]

America, for better or worse, seems to like old people.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Un...

[2] September 8, 1941 birthdate; +75 gets to 2016

Mostly negatively, as I feel education is currently completely unequipped to deal with the impacts of both.

For text-generation models like GPT-3, I think it's very optimistic to think students will content themselves with only generating an essay's outline, rather than most or all of its contents.

I fully expect these kinds of models to completely obsolete essays of the format "write 500 words on X topic", at least without further restrictions such as sourcing, which I worry is not a high bar to clear, since copy and pasting quotes from sources and letting the model write your analysis seems quite doable.

Anti-plagiarism software seems to have mostly evolved around detecting when students directly copy and paste each other's work or work from the internet, but AI generated text will likely be very, very hard to distinguish from standard student work after a single editing pass - besides possibly being of higher quality than average student work. By these models changing the labor of writing from being generative to an act of editing, I also fear the educational value of learning to produce one's own work will suffer.

For image generation models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, I think these generative models are likely to have a dampening effect on new artists pursuing a major or career in the field, particularly in subfields of graphic design, concept art, and character design, as the ability to generate dozens of professional-grade human-artist competitive images in these spaces instantly by quickly modifying a text prompt, is very likely to reduce jobs in the space - and in a field where it's already perceived as quite challenging to make a living.

It’s more like a tie-breaker for religious rules disputes favoring personal and societal freedom: something like

“if you don’t have a clear example indicating how something’s bad, it’s probably Good Enough™ “

You can instead enjoy the horror of creating a situation in which despite not losing, there is no valid direction of motion, so your immortal snake is forever trapped in a prison of its own making.

> Call it a forecast, not an estimate

Can you explain why? At least for predicting expected task finish times, I feel like people use them interchangeably.

> meanwhile, if my own government has access to this same data, i suffer direct consequences. my odds of getting arrested for nonviolent crime (e.g. political activism; buying drugs online) go way up when my govt surveils me

It seems like an error to assume these two forms of surveillance are mutually exclusive.

At any of

> the Starbucks you’re using for free wifi

> the ISP your endpoint is using for internet access

> the data centers in which Tiktok is serving you data

> the device on which you didn’t write the OS or any background programs written on it

Presumably anyone with the power and inclination to listen or influence the design of the above can intercept any non-encrypted or not-yet-encrypted data you’re exchanging (and if they’re a state actor, probably get access to whatever information they’d need to perform decryption) - including your government.

In the sense of

>“consolidated repository of encyclopedic information about basically all topics”

I don’t expect a sequel, it seems that fan wikis and Wikipedia pretty thoroughly cover the space.

In the sense of

>”large scale collaboration projects which haven’t been done but would be sea changes”

One I expect in the near future is the incorporation of all our modern tech to do user-friendly, VPN-less, encrypted, censorship resistant and decentralized cross-media piracy.

Torrents seem to have died because streaming got “good enough” and enforcement of anti-piracy got efficient. Streaming services have since then gotten fat and lazy and now want to collect increased rents from users on smaller libraries and with less in-house production. They largely stopped being worth the squeeze to the average consumer, and have split across too many endpoints to be economical.

Tech has greatly improved since the mass piracy die-off of the early 2000s, both in terms of digital privacy and user experience. I imagine a platform that aspires to be like Libby for E-books and audiobooks, Spotify for music, and Netflix and all its ilk - all in a single platform.

You press “download”, and in a fashion that validates the file is actually what you requested (no viruses) and completely masks your requesting it from hostile counter-parties (no legal fuss), simply retrieves the content as asked.

Facebook maintains “shadow profile” accounts for people who have not personally made an account [1], the answer to your question is “whatever information your friends and family exposed on your behalf and which is linkable to you”.

[1] https://medium.com/@SpiderOak/facebook-shadow-profiles-a-pro...

Programming doesn't really have a strong "Physical space" and "designing representations with meaning" component.

When you imagine a pinboard of information, for example, you can have all sorts of content on it, including

>Pictures,

>Handwriting on top of typed documents

>Pins and twine connecting documents to show relatedness of things

>Physical highlighter being applied to important or interesting document sections

>Physical arrangements in space that are able to indicate similarity, under physical headings

>Reference materials hung up for quick reference in the same space as the actual things you'd reference them for

>The ability to unpin stuff and instantly hand it to someone else for them to look at in their hand, at their desk, with zero hesitation or lag

>The ability to personalize and express oneself through stylistic choices and design that communicate information about the documents you have up (monospace bold documents tend to look like bills, times new roman documents like student essays, comic sans like you're making a non-serious presentation)

Now, considering al the above, it seems to me a problem that despite the physical expressiveness and interactivity possible on the above described physical pinboard, our in-text-editor flat programming IDEs and programming languages feel wholly unequipped to make it easy as a first-order task to interact, think, and expressively manipulate code bases in this fashion.

I suspect this ability holds us back as an industry, because if making clear the mental models which interrelate parts of our code and go into a codebase were explicitly elevated to the level of business-logic and implementation in terms of importance, the ease of onboarding and of system expansion by other persons who need to understand your project I believe could dramatically be accelerated by weeks or months of developer time, which in the real world can and does make-or-break projects.

Attempted solutions like having devs, in parallel with their normal work (and generally, with little reward or incentive from management) writing documentation in programs like OneNote or making slide decks or unrelated-to-actual-implementation design docs, the current state of windowed computers displaying disconnected programs all in a clumped pile most closely comparable to a stack of physical papers covering one another, and tree-based file systems as a first order representation of code base relationships between files and systems I suspect are all absolutely paltry by comparison to the expressiveness capable on the physical pinboard.

Solutions to the above I think would require a very different editor, possibly a very different viewing and interaction terminal (VR being one possibility), and probably a very different programming language than the ones I feel we currently have that would make all of this feel as natural as the current flat and isolated file-based IDE editing people are used to.

Any work in big tech or finance companies that would pay at least 100k per year.

This is because on what you've written, you've defined financial success for yourself as "a surefire way to retire by forty". Retirements, however, given a large and stable income, become primarily expense driven, when you run the numbers: reducing the amount you spend and consume when your salary exceeds most of your material needs is a far more reliable route and speedy path to retirement than making more.

This is because if you're already pulling 100k or more, are saving at least 30-40% of that (which for most people should be doable, as the median single person income is about $35,000, and the median family income, in total, is $75,062 [1]), and do that for 20 years, the interest on the 600k principal will exceed a 3% withdrawal rate and inflation for 30 years with 90% certainty [2], meaning if you can live on $18,000 (fairly doable in cheaper parts of the country), then you can retire at 40, if you so choose.

I would argue the above retirement plan is far more surefire than the startup-based one, because it only requires a single, disinterested employer willing to pay you at least that much for those 20 years, rather than getting repeated possibly-not-going-to-happen payouts from successful IPOs. Additionally, it assumes somewhat meager, defensive positions: The 3% withdrawal rate is aggressively low to account for bad downturns, and this plan assumes you never get a raise, never get awarded stock, never save more, never accrue interest on your deposited principal before you begin retirement, and never develop any income streams besides your job, despite being a programmer for over 20 years.

Additionally, Dan Luu argues with several salary increases programmers regularly get, you could pull this off in 8 years with my 30% estimate [3]. If you can, for example, increase your savings rate in my setup to 50%, you can have the above 600k based retirement within 12 years, in your mid 30s.

Families make this analysis more complicated, because of housing and the possibility of new income streams and drains, but assuming a two income family, I still would assert the fundamentals of the above situation haven't changed.

So for financial success defined as "able to retire", I would advocate for aggressive savings and living below your means - they're the surest route for high earners, and have comparable speeds and timetables as riskier options

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-12/u-s-house...

[2] http://time.com/money/4689984/safe-withdrawal-rate-retiremen...

[3] https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

There are strong political incentives, when a party wants to run on a platform of reducing taxes, to create as strong of a negative association with taxes as possible.

Here are some ways you might seek to achieve this, which you may have seen before:

> Taxes would be as manual of a process as possible, even for simple cases where the government already possesses the information needed to file from your employer, your bank, and from stock exchanges. You'd do everything in your power to ensure automatic filing, where no human even actually needs to be in the loop to run the manual computations, doesn't exist, is structurally hard, and if possible, is never allowed.

> Allow and support predatory ecosystems of tax-preparation software or force people to hire accountants in order to navigate the complexity on their behalf - the more odious, expensive, and memorably bad these measures and systems are, the better.

> You'd exploit your lack of need for simplicity in the tax system to provide kickbacks to special interest groups in the form of targeted reduced taxes for those who supported your election, as well as creating myriad carve-outs and deductions for key voting blocs, perhaps manual laborers and farmers in swing states. This incidentally also makes taxes more complicated - a bonus.

The last issue of rewarding constituents is bipartisan, which is part of the reason why this is treated as a low priority issue for one party despite the status quo the other party enables being pretty obviously bad.

Lots of things conspired to kill credit screens.

>The job market for tech went insane, providing companies a disincentive to give developers tools to transfer prestige between companies

>Source control and code review processes improved, making it much harder to hide screens

>Companies are much more security minded, and what seems like a funny joke credits screen someone might add as a prank may be the code surface that gets you or your customers hacked, causing potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

>Modern metrics tracking incentivizes devs to focus on their work objectives rather than working on unrequested bonus features like a credits screen

I’d love to see them return, but the deck seems stacked against.

>And yes, that means that your house is going unmaintained and your relationships are getting neglected. So what?

Your relationships and the state of the environment you maintain for yourself are important.

Together, they likely have more impact on your long term happiness and physical and mental health than any kind of ability “to take advantage of these market dynamics”.

Usually it’s one of three things:

>Your style isn’t up to spec

If you always smell crap, check the bottom of your shoes. I’ve found team style guides to be useless generally, but attempting to emulate team style by looking at existing code is a winning move. Coding is a team effort, and even if it’s a little extra work, a little beautification can go a long way towards readability.

>Code reviewers want or are incentivized to help

Many code reviewers make a point not to leave a nontrivial review without commenting. Whether this is because they want to help, or because in many workplaces, the code review metric optimized for is “comments closed”, some people will feel obligated. When there’s no substance to dissect, style is often substituted

>Someone’s giving you a hard time for irrational reasons

This is an interpersonal issue. You don’t, in my opinion, need to worry how others will view you if this happens since most people can tell when somebody is just being a dick in a CR. If you’re concerned about this, try to figure out why you two have beef by asking them and either resolve it, ignore/forgive it and move on (some hills aren’t worth dying on), involve management or HR, or change roles

>Quarantine only delays the length of time the cheater/spammer knows they've been caught, usually on the order of days

Days are crucially important in a game's development cycle. This is because the modern review style is structured around "first impressions", since interest in a game is an L-curve: the first person to get a review out can sometimes claim a lion's share of ad-revenue from possible viewers.

This means preventing cheating "on the order of days" can protect your game's review scores during the most critical review period.

As much as you are allowed, cripple your ability to work after hours.

This may include:

>De-installing email or slack clients from your phone or PC

>Never sending messages from your work computer or using your work computer during a weekend to reinforce to others that trying to reach you on the weekend is a waste of time

>Setting up “Do not disturb” on weekends

There may be limits to how far you can separate the two practically, but build a mental wall. Your contract presumably states you are paid and only are meant/expexted to work M-F, meaning everything on the weekend you do is free work which you don’t actually have to do.

You are salaried. Do everything in your power to avoid working for free, you are giving money and your recuperation time away with nothing in return

I think a lot of developers forget, perhaps due to their current annual salary and due to high costs of living, that a geography-independent $1K a month is nothing to sneeze at.

For example, rent in Michigan for a three bedroom apartment is about $1,200 a month [1], meaning your rent would be $400. Let’s say you spend $200 a month on groceries, and spend $400 a month on insurance, gas, bills, and other mandatory expenses.

Congratulations: you’re short term net financial neutral!

In theory, as long as your acquisition rate is neutral or positive compared to churn, you now live for free, without a boss and without an expectation of a 40 hour workweek. In theory, you can now retire. In practice, you can grow revenue, and nothing’s stopping you from starting business two and increasing your “retirement’s” margin.

For the right person, these conditions are life-changing.

[1] https://smartasset.com/mortgage/the-cost-of-living-in-michig...

Primarily because most hackers don’t practice or study design.

As a further reason, consider an instructive metaphor: if you asked a blacksmith why he sucks at writing, his answer would probably be “That’s not what they pay me for.”

>It makes you wonder what a private corporation is supposed to do.

Presumably, stop being a threat to national security, republic democracy, and making creepy patents, and if these issues are structural within the company, get destroyed.

Just because there be other bad actors in this space and similar technology spaces doesn't mean we shouldn't hold Facebook's feet to the fire on their flaws. The others, respectively, will and should ultimately get their turn.

As much as I’d like to buy into this interpretation, isn’t the fact that youtube is an ongoing developed and supported service that consideration?

As in, their consideration here is “we continue to, without any pricetag, host your videos for free on a website receiving ongoing updates and development, AND FURTHER allow you to continue to upload and store new content, despite either and both being complete deadweight cost for us?”

The consideration being the right to indefinitely add more to the platform and benefit from those updates