gemstones

Out of curiosity, why shouldn’t his personality come into it?

There’s no moral or ethical basis to not consider his personality when evaluating Twitter, and even if you have one I’m not obligated to share it.

You don’t have to understand things for them to still be valid! To me, he’s an offputting guy doing a bad job, and those two things are valid to consider when thinking of his company according to my moral values. That’s subjective, but it’s clearly a view that many share with me.

You can have this, I’ve used it in Rust before.

I can vouch for it being worse than JIRA, which I was absolutely not prepared for when I moved to a company that uses Notion for its ticketing system.

I know that this is a stressful time and it’s all hindsight, but there are two different contact methods that don’t rely on email available to you in migrations like this:

Going read-only, waiting 2 weeks, and then deleting. The contact method is peoples’ alerting systems as writes stop working.

Putting a message on your service dashboard indicating the upcoming action. The contact method is exactly what it sounds like, and it’s the only other place you can stick text and know for sure all your customers can access it.

It will probably help customer relations if you don’t hide behind the defense of only having email - there are a few strategies for this that you can use in the future. Best of luck on the road ahead - I know this must be a particularly stressful time.

I wonder if they’re open in other EU regions? If you wanted to shut down a region, as a database provider, is it even possible to send snapshots to another region without user consent?

It feels like that could be a good practice, or not, depending on the laws in question.

When Elon told the whole world that making Twitter is easy and requires a lot less people than they had, it was inevitable that competitors would take that to mean that they should develop their own versions.

Use your current job, if you’re actively hunting already! I don’t mean try to be a manager there - I mean, get their feedback on why they haven’t already made you a manager in your next 1:1.

Your boss may not know you want it, or they know you want it and can provide insight on what you have to do to get there.

Among the many lessons for Elon to come out of this -

If you publicly announce that making an app is easy and could be done with a fraction of the engineers when you buy it, perhaps it’s unsurprising when a competitor decides that they should make the same app to take your revenue? After all, if it’s so easy to do, maybe it’s the next thing you should do.

Looks like some anti-scraping on day 1, and really twisting the knife for Twitter:

https://www.threads.net/t/CuVZfoihkcF

Text follows for those without the app, RT from Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram (original tweet from Jesse Chen):

FYI for everyone, we’ve set our rate limits to “generous” bc we believe you have the right to see more than 600 posts in a day here.

if you encounter a rate limit block and you’re not a scraper, please let us know. thanks!

Could it be that you don’t understand Instagram? My circle of friends all rely on Instagram for announcements (mostly local) in addition to seeing updates/photos/etc. Twitter just underserved this market, and Meta realized that Instagram does serve this market, badly. Right now my local politicians have to put their text posts in a square image on a story, but it would be more convenient for them and me if they could post in a text format to their existing Instagram audience.

What I expect to happen is for Instagram to expose how bad Twitter was at converting potential users, rather than for Twitter to expose that Instagram users have no overlap with their use case.

As a counterpoint: I don’t use Twitter. I don’t tweet, but I care about reading other people’s tweets. But I never made an account on Twitter, because I would have to curate feeds and create an account, and it’s friction for something that’s ultimately not worth that much to me.

But: I’ve already curated Instagram. My alderman posts things there, the sports teams I care about announce things there, local businesses have accounts there. If they suddenly gain the ability to tweet, great! I’m a new customer that Twitter couldn’t convert before. I’ll check it, and they can serve me ads.

When journalists realize that a broader audience of people are reading stuff there, they will follow the eyeballs. The fact that they are on Twitter will cease to matter.

As a vanguard customer, good on your PMs for implementing SMS fallback. I have needed it for account recovery. I hope they keep it forever.

qlmanage is super useful for converting SVG to PNG easily, too! I use it like this:

qlmanage -t -s 1000x1000 -o ~/Pictures/foo.png ~/Pictures/foo.svg

To turn an square SVG into a PNG without installing anything extra or using an online image tool

I think of this essay every time I hear of someone researching how to live forever. Imagine the sheer variety of misfortunes that could befall you when you live long enough to walk the whole earth, taking one step every billion years, and it’s a meager dent in your overall timeline?

If you want a term to be used the right way, it helps to pick a term that won’t be immediately confused to mean something else.

Interestingly, this is a plot point in a very popular Chinese-language sci-fi novel called Death’s End. Humanity is deliberately nudged to take on more feminine qualities to make them a less effective fighting force against a colonizing species.

The author had to run his book by the CCP - you get the sense this hints at an accepted strategy in the Chinese mainland. It’s an interesting read.

This has empirically resulted in bad hiring, at multiple companies I’ve worked at. The best predictor of senior performance on the job has been the take home test or coding challenge. We frequently have seniors who suggest that the technical discussion would be enough for senior roles. We always have to let them down a bit when we tell them that the discussion is less predictive than they’ve built it up to be in their mind.

This is explicitly what bootcamp graduates are asked to do. It’s possible, they were just filtering out candidates that can’t work that fast.

In the past when I’ve given take homes (I don’t anymore) I genuinely would have wanted you to stop after the time limit. It would definitely mean that you weren’t the right candidate if you can’t do it in the time limit, which is OK! It’s meant to signal that it’s a bad fit. I wouldn’t want you feeling like you have to work after hours in the actual job, either.

These are fun examples - do you think it would be hard to find 2 examples of students who were kicked out of school and did not reach the PhD level? Perhaps these examples don't necessarily inform good policy?

I’m otherwise liberal, but I am sorely tempted to vote for anyone who expands school vouchers in my area - that idea sounds amazing.

If you have 30 teachers, need 5, and could find 25 better teachers if pay was better, then that’s 20 people up for replacement.

Yeah. I’m all for paying teachers better to get the best and brightest. But to be honest, the thing the teachers union doesn’t seem to get is that getting the best and brightest strongly implies that most teachers would have to leave the profession to make way for the best and brightest.

Schools comprised of smarter teachers would look a lot more like charters. They would prioritize removing disruptive students because they recognize that it drives away the critical mass of kids that can behave well enough to learn. They would know that public school systems have an insurmountable reputation problem, and champion a solution that gradually sends kids who have a chance to make it to a different school over time. The fact that they don’t see it, and still think they can fix the public schools, tells me we don’t have the best and brightest in our education system.

I'm not the original poster, but I'll share an anecdote from tutoring in a bad public school district. The kids, in the first 5 minutes of class (and these are the supposedly good, motivated kids - in an elective CS class) make more trouble than would have been allowed in an entire school day in a class entirely composed of the biggest class clowns from my private high school.

No amount of money fixes that culture problem. Better parenting does. I'm convinced that the only way to spend money to fix schools is to not give money to the actual school and put it towards social programs (which I am in favor of.)

In this case, you are the senior that needs to bypass the ORM and just use whatever raw parameterized query support exists in your ORM of choice.

Yup, this right here. This aspect of SQL is overwhelmingly why I insist on ORMs, too. Any efficiency gains you get by having a senior dev write raw SQL for a complex query are immediately negated by a junior turning what an ORM would write as a single query into three DB calls. All because SQL insists on a flat result set you have to turn into a nested collection yourself, without an ORM doing it for you with eager loading.

For sure, but I'm not sure how that's any different from any other particularly risky investment. If you're not comfortable with that risk, put your savings in T-Bills.

It really depends on the timescale, right? There are a couple of extremes.

One extreme: At some point far in the future, perhaps dollars aren't a thing anymore - the last people holding dollars are the greater fool. (Note I still hold dollars and ETFs and conventionally safe investments, that's not a knock on the dollar.) But over a long enough timespan, there's a greater fool. There are just a lot of people along the way who got a lot of value out of dollars.

Another extreme: There are things like beanie babies where there is a very short amount of time to find a buyer, and the last one to buy the beanie baby before the fad stops is the greater fool. This is over a much shorter timescale, and there are only a few people who get a lot of value out of beanie babies.

Crypto is somewhere in between. I think the black market use case means crypto is closer to the dollar side of the spectrum than the beanie baby side of the spectrum. I think there's a decent chance there is always a greater fool in decades, well long enough for me to get out while I've gotten value out of it.

Sounds like a great theory, TBH! Seems like you can make a lot of money that way, not sure why I should view it as a bad thing.

I think you might be missing some people in your reasoning, there. (But I agree that your two types of people both exist and are the loudest in the room!)

(Some) crypto is a deflationary store. There are not many deflationary stores, and the ones that exist (like precious metals) either require a lot of effort to store and secure, or you hold a claim on some precious metal somewhere and not the thing itself. Lots of people want a deflationary store, especially in a time when inflation looks like a fact of life!

Crypto has no inherent value, unlike precious metals. It can (and depending on the crypto, often does) go to zero. That is a risk of the currency. However, if I were to buy a claim on precious metals, I would still have the risk of going to zero (maybe if things really go sideways, no one wants to honor my claim to the metals?)

Crypto will not be useful as a currency for everyday transactions, it is useful only as a thing to hold and store, or useful as a part of black-market transactions. I don't want to make any black-market transactions, but I do want something deflationary to hold and store.

So the target market for crypto you're missing are people:

* Who want a deflationary asset

* Who are comfortable with the idea that the actual trading activity attracts a lot of criminals, but don't intend to do anything criminal themselves

* Who view the risk of a Bitcoin or Ethereum going to zero about the same as their contacts for gold going to zero in a true financial crisis