gandalfgeek

"Jugaad" is a cultural attitude that is hard to explain outside the Indian context. (Even literally, as the "d" sound in the word has no counterpart in English phonetics. It's similar to "dh" but not quite.) The closest literal translation would be "somehow, cheaply, without deep thought".

There are class connotations. Jugaad is something forced onto people by poverty. It's hallmark is messy, janky and easily breakable setups that have been cobbled together by both necessity and lack of resources. Wealthier Indians would not turn to a "jugaad" solution for their needs.

While the principles in the post (humility, openness, frugality) jive well with the Agile philosphy, I'm not so sure that "jugaad" is the idea I'd want my software to embody.

Back in the early 2000s, Sun ("the network is the computer") had a similar solution that worked seamlessly for most of their software org-- the Sun Ray. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

It was a network terminal. Your files and entire session were on the server. Your “local” terminal consisted only of a network interface and enough compute power to display your session. The way they had it set up was that you could insert your Sun employee ID – the same card used to get into the building – into a slot in the terminal. That authenticated you to the server and displayed your session instantly. Want to show a colleague something you’re working on? Just put your ID into their Sun Ray and show them exactly what you were doing. That was cool! It was a frictionless way to demo and collaborate.

Every service has the risk of introducing a new point of failure, of course.

But compare dev productivity lost due to service downtime with that of each new SWE in your org burning time to A) setup their own unique snowflake of an environment and B) futzing and debugging it when it breaks or there's a software update.

Eng mgr at a FANG, was IC previously. The following is assuming the senior folks (managers or senior ICs) around you are acting in good faith. If you actually have toxic senior people, that's a whole different scenario.

Managers have to balance two priorities, which are sometimes competing: promoting engineering excellence on their teams, and delivering value for the business. The most common example of a conflict between the two is taking on tech debt to release something earlier.

If you disagree with a leadership decision, try to get more background on the thinking behind it. Good managers will be more than happy to get into it in detail. There are always tradeoffs to be made, and the inputs are not always purely technical. There often are business and organizational constraints too.

This is often a barrier that ICs have to break through to get to more senior levels (even they choose to stay on the IC track): making sound engineering decisions, but also being able to understand the business and make appropriate tradeoffs.

Isn't it a searing indictment of the entire Intel laptop chip lineup that a MacBook Air M1 has half the battery capacity (50Wh) while giving easily twice the battery life with as good or better performance -- and with no fans!

I first encoutered this story well into adulthood, and could never quite articulate why it struck such a chord in me (and clearly, many others).

Later in life, after becoming familiar with the work of Joseph Campbell (Hero with a Thousand Faces) and Jordan Peterson (c.f. his lectures that unpack Pinnochio, The Lion King and his Biblical series), I began to understand the underlying elements in the story that make it reach so deep into our psyches.

Theme 1: pure love as a purifying crucible. Love as the ultimate goal and the ultimate sacrifice. The boy loves the rabbit, but it goes from being new and shiny to being torn and ragged. But love makes it "real". In that sense it is not a sacrifice, but the achievement of a higher ideal.

Theme 2: rebirth and redemption. The Phoenix story. The rabbit is burnt, shedding everything but its purest essence. The tear symbolizes the remnants of attachments to its past self.

This line of reasoning needs to be stopped. If you haven't lived or grown up through India's pre-capitalist era you have no idea what you're talking about. Ask any Indian about it and I think they'll tell you that urban pollution is a small price to pay for the distance they've come in terms of overall quality of life and wealth.

I grew up in India in the 90s, saw first hand the transition from the disastrous socialism of the Nehru era to open markets, capitalism and deregulation. (The end of "license raj".)

It started with PV Narasimha Rao as PM and Manmohan Singh as his finance minister in the early 90s. Thankfully Singh himself had a fruitful tenure as PM later. All it took for India to take off was the shackles of govt control to come off.

Sad to see that the lesson hasn't been learned and even today there is a strong strain of socialist reasoning calling for more govt control on markets.

Concrete example: before deregulation one had to pull strings (e.g. have family or friends in the civil service) to get a phone to your house, then wait a few months after approval to actually get the wire to your house. That was also the era that there were two channels on TV, both state controlled (Doordarshan) that broadcast maybe 5-6 hrs per day.

Self plug but in case you don't want to read the full paper here's a short 5 min video summary:

https://youtu.be/pwYRVnmnnQc

This kind of Malthusian thinking has a horrible track record. Imagine if we drastically altered the course of technological progress every time a cabal of "experts" declares that we're going to destroy the planet.

I'm not arguing that we should be reckless with the environment, but there are massive existential risks to humanity with this kind of self-limiting belief system. It's not obvious that one side of the argument is right.

If we even slowed down to linear growth from our current exponential path, life on Earth would probably suck within a generation.

That's what happens when journalists think their primary job is activism for their obviously correct worldview, rather than, you know, reporting.

I can’t relate at all to that sentiment. California has got to be one of the most bloated and wasteful state governments in the entire US. High taxes and nothing to show for it. The entrenched far left seems bent on destroying the middle class, driving out business, regulating everything to death and displacing merit as a selection factor.

Whatever glory Cali has— tech, entertainment, farming, weather, natural beauty— is in spite of govt rather than because of it.

Science does not work by popular vote.

There’s a crucial difference though. Applets required you to download and install the JVM, and it was never part of web standards. Wasm is a w3c standard and built into browsers.

But I see the similarity in terms of compiling your software down to another (supposedly universal, we’ll see) intermediate instruction set.

Shameless plug, but here's a short video covering the paper: https://youtu.be/Ow9yMxJ8ez4

This paper [1] takes a systematic look at many families of algorithms to see the effect of Moore's law vs algo improvements over time. tl;dr -- for families that see algorithmic improvements, they get faster by orders of magnitude over simply riding hardware improvements.

I made a short explainer video if you don't want to read the paper: https://youtu.be/R0k80fSRLts

[1]: https://ide.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/How_Fast_Do_A...

Why is "reducing anxiety" such a paramount goal?

Shameless plug but I've been making videos covering CS papers: https://youtube.com/c/VivekHaldar

Motivation is to get more people into it, and also give enough of a flavor of the paper for those who aren't used to reading academic papers, or don't have the time.

Short (~5 min) video summary, if that's your thing: https://youtu.be/YoOFJApmPKc

Short video explainer of the paper: https://youtu.be/EU6Hqk193ws

If you're into short (10 min) video summaries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF5tRQb0Dpc

This is an out of context mischaracterization.

For age < 18, kids are 3-5x more likely to die of activities such as riding in a car and going to the pool (not to mention the good ol' flu). Virtually nobody even thinks about behavior adjustments when it comes to those activities.

You're needlessly trolling when you're labeling parents and kids speaking up against all this as right wing.

Unless exit criteria and offramps for restrictions are explicitly specified, they are essentially saying they want to do this forever. They're just passing the buck to some other govt agency to tell them when it's ok to exit.

Judge lays out rationale very well. One of the main issues is whether a federal body like OSHA can mandate such a broad thing, and how that infringes on “state’s police power” which is a fundamental principle in the constitution limiting federal power into what is up to every state to legislate locally.

One cannot say “because COVID” and indefinitely suspend the constitution.

“… remains STAYED pending adequate judicial review of the petitioners’ underlying motions for a permanent injunction.

In addition, IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that OSHA take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.“

This is the decision from the judge staying implementation of the mandate. Read the whole thing.

Such a non-sensical argument. Every technology humans wield has consequences. We should also count all the lives saved and the billions of people lifted out of abject poverty, largely due to a web of modernity built on fossil fuels.

Of course, we should be pushing for cleaner energy sources that pollute less than fossil fuels, but the headline makes it sound like an unmitigated disaster, which is not fair.

Link to full paper: https://ide.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/How_Fast_Do_A...

If you prefer video, I've made a short summary video: https://youtu.be/R0k80fSRLts

Short explainer video for those who don’t want to read the whole thing:

https://youtu.be/eCYkzciF28E

Quick explainer video: https://youtu.be/5bk4Wc5Op2M