fullsend

Might appear like that at a glance. I wonder…the additional costs in terms of time, ongoing expense, etc. might make $10 billion to cut it off seem correct in some paths.

Writing isn’t there for Marvel sure. But to me the achievement is reliably producing B grade movies. Entertaining, worth a chuckle, easy on the eyes. None deserve an Oscar, but none (or few) are really very bad. Even if that were easy to do with one movie, and I’ve watched a lot of real garbage, doing it with a string of 20 interconnected films? Culminating in Endgame? That required the steady hand of a few really solid people. It was the first of its kind by an absolute mile, a totally new achievement in cinema. Spielberg and his ilk have been obsessing over all the CGI and sleeping on the real achievements.

For reference my favorite movies would be No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Fury Road. I like The Wire, Breaking Bad, True Detective season one. But I think Marvel is a different sort of thing altogether. The sheer reliability of it is unrivaled. Which is why I say that’s what Rings of Power lacks for me. The writing doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. Just keep the thing competent despite all the cooks in the kitchen. Many pieces of media seem to fail at this.

Lately I will say the formula has worn thin. I consider their run to be from Iron Man to Endgame.

I enjoy content that adds curious new information and different views to topics full of cliches, while still being relatively respectable or well researched.

Coming Apart - this book described the coming separation of the US into two “classes” long before it was widely talked about. Today most talk about it as a political divide. This book tackles it as a divide between knowledge workers and the rest. A controversial take that adds much needed food for thought to the conversation. If you’ve lived poor and you’ve also lived in a place like Palo Alto, you’ll be astounded by how readily you can point and say, “that’s me”. Lots of fascinating statistics.

Bowling Alone - a great book about the collapse of US social life. Dense, lots of statistics, but a clear picture is laid out of increasing isolation and alienation. Read it alongside something like Consumer’s Republic to understand how so much of this stems from the selfishness and individuality encouraged by consumerism in post-war America.

Triumph of the City - an excellent take that can be used as food for thought when people are talking about how dirty cities are. In truth, the author argues, they are our greenest “invention” ever. Lots of good evidence. Imagine collecting the trash if every human lived on their own acre of land. The sewage, the energy usage. Cities are incredibly efficient and clean.

The Man Who Solved The Market - everyone interested in finance needs to read this and it’s precursor More Money Than God. The Bogleheads and their index fund ilk are often correct when they say “money managers all lose to an index after fees”. Beating the market is nigh on impossible for all but a few. Most of those few work at Renaissance Technologies. Their Medallion Fund has made 36% after fees every single year since 1989. The fund does its best in market crash years. Closed to outside investors. A story of mathematicians essentially building models that can predict the future reliably. Utterly fascinating, the most successful money printer ever built. As a bonus, we learn that Jim Simons originally controlled this printer and spent the money helping US math teachers. He then ceded control to Robert Mercer, who used the printer’s output to fund Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon, Trump, etc.

The Snowball - a biography of Warren Buffet that tells an incredible story. The story is one of total obsession. Of a human who literally started from a few dollars, learned about some principles like compounding at age 6, and applied the exact same principles every day for the rest of his life with very little deviation. The craziest part of this story is how every 10 years, he’s surrounded by people saying “times have changed, you’re missing out”. Then those people get blown up by whatever black swan, and Warren’s snowball just grows and grows. He didn’t become a billionaire till he was in his 50’s but the snowball is still growing and he’s one of the richest people alive.

The executives and producers. There’s a fascinating leaked email thread from Marvel where a couple random execs are hyping up each other’s terrible ideas, saying they could kill off characters and reboot Iron Man and other self-indulgent nonsense. Then Kevin Feige, all hail and hallowed be his name, joins the thread with a simple sentence - “We don’t need to reboot, we can make infinite stories in these universes.” With a stroke of the keyboard he stopped that garbage in its tracks.

There’s also a great speech by Kevin Smith where he describes being hired to write Superman and he goes to the producer’s house to read the script. The guy is coked out, ranting about how there needs to be action every 10 pages in the script or the audience will get bored. He’s talking about spiders and says the main villain should be one. Then Smith says Superman’s kryptonian name, “Kel’al” or whatever, and the guy is like, who?

That’s the people making these calls sometimes. Most companies do not have a Kevin Feige.

Amazon especially is going to be an overly cautious and bureaucratic behemoth. Inexperienced as a whole despite whoever they hired. Meanwhile HBO just bought a Channel 5 documentary produced by Tim and Eric and A24 with total creative freedom. Risky. That’s the difference between shills and artists.

Airbnb has allowed hosts to ratchet up cleaning fees ridiculously. They look for any excuse to remove your negative review so they can keep that property (income stream) producing. And the hosts have become more and more draconian now that they are people whose sole income is being a property manager, as opposed to when they were just people getting some money for an extra bedroom.

I would short the stock but I don’t know what’s going to bring it down, where’s the competition. Hotels?

I wonder if losing this income stream will ironically just make them even more beholden to their corporate masters for succor and sustenance.

What’s so fun here? How is it related to insider trading?

In my layman’s view it’s obviously a balance, like all things. Look at the top athletes - Michael Phelps has more upper body than he does lower. The best UFC fighters often have insane wingspan for their height (and therefore reach for punches). Usain Bolt is not a short man. Certain people are tuned for certain things. Then whether they combine that baseline with total obsession and hard work is up to them.

The mental sphere is where it becomes super vague for me. Did John Von Neumann just study really hard? The anecdotes told about Feigenbaum of Chaos Theory make him sound like a savant among savants. They just kept that childlike curiosity? Doesn’t make any sense to me. It seems they are tuned differently.

Users click more on big brands. The average internet user doesn’t want to browse hobby websites, they use the top 10 sites and never leave them. Accept it. Some of them never leave only Reddit or TikTok.

As if the world was brimming with integrity in the past? We have the internet now, and can see how the powerful have been behaving this whole time.

How do you solve a senior management problem? They won’t fire themselves.

A good point but you were quite literally the opposite of what most people mean when they talk about food cravings. You were starved!

Perseverance! Very cool.

I love the example of ancient texts that decry how the youth don’t listen to their elders any more and the lords are getting stingier with the taxes every season. It’s a universal feeling.

Reminds me of Alan Watts - the way is to go with the flow. Instead of building a motor, hoist a sail. Instead of sending a rocket, build a telescope. Etc.

They already are. The Merge refers to the fact that the PoS chain has been running parallel to the main chain for one year now. It has been thoroughly tested live and so now will be merged back into the main chain like a branch of a git repo.

I was a big Uber eats user out of laziness and the rewards program actually cost me something like $10 per month and saved me $50 or 60 per month.

If you believe any of what Bob Lazar described, the government may know enough to get craft to liftoff and maneuver but not actually understand the power source yet. Like dropping an electric car into the Middle Ages. Someone will press the power button eventually, and even drive it, but they won’t actually be able to re-use that technology for a long time. Again, if you believe.

I am a fan of this talk. Working on the sysadmin/devops/sre side of enterprises, I originally found the transition from manual installs to things like puppet and then to docker containers and surrounding tooling refreshing. Building your own services, monitoring error budgets, and all the other principles like infrastructure as code seemed to be “the way”. I have recently become severely disillusioned. On the development side, one need only spend time in the JavaScript ecosystem to get a taste of some of the worst of the baggage we are building for ourselves there. You could spend more time learning toolchains than writing code. On the infrastructure side, it seems we never bother to deploy even a dead simple web service without a full build out of a multi-region Kubernetes setup with ci/cd services, secrets services, auth services, logging, monitoring, pipelines for the data stores and image builds, networking, etc.

At a certain scale these things seem necessary. But I’ve had the most success actually getting things done with small, competent teams where I replaced many different tools with as few as possible. For example I recently turned a complex spinnaker setup into a set of bash scripts that perform helm installs. It makes debugging, knowledge share, and development of the “system” so much easier. Why was the choice made originally, what features does it lack, there are tradeoffs certainly. But I feel we as an industry are losing the thread somewhere.

I often see people holding up StackOverflow and their few servers model as a bastion of sanity. I see them say, “I could run your whole company’s SaaS stack on a single box with systemd”. While I find it hyperbolic, more and more I am considering this not just a casual topic but a vital one.

Sometimes I find people asking - what about disaster recovery, high availability, scalability? When what we need is to slow down and ask, does it work? Is it usable? Or we’re so focused on isolation, deploying security tooling, the systems get complex, and no one understands them to the point they seem much less secure.

Simplicity seems key. Sticking to as few tools as possible, at lower levels, and only growing or adding as really well thought out requirements arise. This isn’t exactly what Johnathan Blow was talking about (abstraction and losing knowledge) but feels strongly related to me.

I appreciate your comment about pay. Recruiters will often tell me "it's finance so of course the pay will be substantial." Then when we get to talking numbers they're like "300k a year". Oh, you mean the going rate at a FAANG? And I have to move to New York or Chicago, work more hours, and actively work for people who I know are taking home paychecks with 7+ zeroes on them? Come on. Sometimes it's 400 plus bonus or whatever, which is based on fund performance and yada yada. But it feels way off. I had heard so much about the staggering paydays at these places but it seems you need an ML PHD or some trading chops to be part of that.

Interestingly, Breath demonstrates that what we used to think is an O2 advantage is actually a CO2 advantage.

These are good questions and I think it’s nowhere near as rosy as OP described.

People who write these articles will talk for an hour straight about their favorite window manager, why it should actually be called Gnu/Linux, or why it’s “free as in beer”.

Everyone should consider Victoria Metrics anyway. It scales better performance wise, and they broke out components to improve scalability (vmagent, vmalert, etc) when Prometheus was just one huge process that did all the things. The two work closely together, and even did a good talk together about the differences.

Honestly I would guess part of it is that streaming is supposed to be a performance increase. So during a performance related outage, it might be easy to overlook. Am I really going to turn off a feature that I think is actually helping the problem?

Strongly disagree. The playful nature that Alan Watts conveys ideas with completely blew my mind. He combined so many influences. Entertaining or not by his own admission, it’s a hundred, a thousand times more accessible. At its core it is also so much more transmissible back to the day to day life as an organism on this planet. I still have yet to encounter anything like it. The stuff you list right here reeks of long study in a library to me. There are gurus who sit for hours every day meditating, eat their single bowl of rice, clean the temple, sleep on hard stone. And there are gurus who drink, smoke, and laugh, wandering the countryside. A thousand ways indeed. I know which path I prefer. I think of Alan as the latter, whatever he may have said. Play is at the core of the deep lessons, for me. So him straying towards that side rings much more true.

I would start with this short series of animated Alan Watts lectures by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VvrfnE7Q-0w, listen to some of his lectures (the ones where he’s drinking are often the best), read The Book, and then just have fun with all the other books/content he put out there. Alongside it, dive into the deep texts, Zen, the Vedanta, etc.

How would you remember all this in life without todo lists? I have a list full of tasks for upkeep on my living space, cooking, work, side projects, family. So many of what I call administrative tasks - mail a check, file car registration, on and on. You can’t just do everything the minute it comes up, although I think that’s a good goal.

Just as an aside, anything using x509 certificates is a nightmare operationally. I sure don’t have an alternative, but it murders me every time. Now when I architect clouds I consider it a core service, not an afterthought - an absolute minimum set of services and some strong runnooks to generate certs, distribute, and renew/rotate them. All applications these days support them, but don’t support managing them well in my experience. There’s glue needed for each app to request a cert and install it.

Yeah it is a skill set in and of itself. To pass a modern interview in my experience you need to take a week or two on Leetcode to brush up and do a run through Cracking the Coding Interview for concepts/terminology. In my opinion this is fueled by an abundance of excellent sheep (a good book) among hires at tech companies. If you’re trained for years and years (middle, high school, and college in the US) to study for SAT style tests (cracking the coding interview is full of test taking tactics) then when you’re asked to design interviews this is stuff you gravitate to because it’s easy to reproduce and understand. An excellent sheep appears to be a high achiever but only knows how to be given hurdles and jump them, not how to identify creativity or get nuance out of an interview process that is already woefully shallow. So it’s all people who spent lots of time studying for algos and data structures class asking each other those same questions. Asking “Are you one of us?”

True. Unfortunately many large corporate websites through which you pay bills, order tickets, etc. are becoming infested with JS widgets and bulky, slow interfaces. These are hard to avoid.