lackbeard

This was a super-interesting read, but I'm disappointed there isn't a description of what, exactly, was wrong about what he did, and what one should do instead. The only thing that comes to mind is the obvious one: you don't want more than the FDIC limit in a single bank account.

This is a very interesting, very well written post. The part that stands out the most is:

> if you needed venture capital to produce a viable small-scale business, you didn't really have a viable small-scale business to begin with. Triplebyte's break-even status was an illusion, predicated on funding that would probably never have existed if that scale were the founders' only ambition.

I wonder if there's a way to build a viable business out of a product like FastTrack that does not depend on venture capital to get going?

Isn't ASML a Dutch company? I can't seem to find any evidence they've ever been sold.

Good comment, and, basically, I fully agree, except, I really dislike your attempt to appropriate the words "programming" and "coding" here. Like, can you just explain what you mean without trying to redefine terms that have broadly accepted definitions distinct from how you're trying to use them here?

(Sorry, this probably sounds more critical than I'm intending...)

I'm not sure what is meant by "data-oriented programming" (I know what "data-driven" means...) but, yes, "Data-Oriented Design" has a distinct (if somewhat nebulous) meaning which comes from game programmer culture. (And my guess is the difference between it and data-oriented programming is not slight.) Data-Oriented Design is, basically, the name given to the bag of techniques listed on the submitted webpage. I don't know if the term was coined by Mike Acton, but it was popularized by the talk he gave that is linked to on the submitted webpage. (It's an inspiring talk! You should watch it, if you have not, yet.)

As far as I can tell, Data-Oriented Design is a reaction to trauma experienced by game programmers trying to undo damage inflicted by the... inapt... application of OO techniques in game codebases by their (probably well-meaning, but ignorant) peers. (Hence the contrast in the names: OBJECT-Oriented Design -> DATA-Oriented Design.)

The keystone idea seems to be, instead of organizing your program's data as objects in an inheritance hierarchy, figure out which data will be accessed together in tight loops, and pack that data together in arrays. (I.e., prefer structs of arrays to arrays of objects.)

P.S., There's an interaction during the Q&A section of that presentation by Mike Acton which I love: one questioner asks, somewhat incredulously, (and I'm paraphrasing here) "If I were to follow the principles you have laid out in this talk, then, if I ever needed to alter the layout of my data--after having invested (perhaps significant) time already writing my program--I would subsequently be required to rewrite all the code which accesses that data." and Mike Action answers, basically, with a stone-cold "Yes."

I agree that "tiers vs. continuum" has no bearing on the question of whether or not Magic: The Gathering is pay-to-win. I was merely pointing out that what tedunangst was describing was a continuum, not tiers.

Obviously, I'm not articulating my perspective very persuasively. Here's some additional flavor that might help (probably won't:)

1. In Magic: The Gathering, the most expensive deck is not always (or even ever, really) the best.

2. Is Golf pay-to-win? I can spend more on a set of clubs that have bigger sweet spots & will give me more distance with the same swing than my opponent's set.

3. The term "pay-to-win" comes from free-to-play MMOs.

I think most people that claim MTG is pay-to-win are just frustrated by how expensive it is. I agree. Don't play it!

I would say, in that sense, there aren't really tiers; it's a continuum, and you can attempt to compete at whatever price point you're willing.

No, it's just a really expensive game with a subscription model. What's the price to pay to get four copies of each card in every standard set? That's your quarterly subscription fee.

It would be pay-to-win if you could do stuff like, pay a fee to take a second card at once during a draft, or tutor a card from your collection during a game, etc...

The time-honored (or "lindy") solutions here are joining a gym and going to church.

Accelerometers and IR sensors were advanced tech in 2006?

The Wii is actually a perfect example of that philosophy. It was built using outdated, underpowered tech, but in spite of that, was a huge success because they did something unusual and innovative with it.

Wasn't SVB an S&P 500 company?

I guess that's what you normally do when you're overweighted that asset class and you must cover withdrawals!

It's well known that long-dated treasuries are highly volatile. I think the lesson we've all learned here is that they didn't have a viable business. It seems like they were offering a product that was not profitable given their competition and reasonable risk management.

I wonder why that didn't happen in this case? Perhaps fear that would just trigger a run on the acquiring bank?

> the point of the FDIC system is for customers not to have to do this kind of risk assessment themselves

It seemed self-evident to me, based on the explicitly stated limit on FDIC insurance, that if you had an amount of money over that limit, you really need to have a plan to deal with that risk, and people who failed to do so should suffer the consequences of their poor decisions. As things stand, the people who did spend the time and/or money to provision for that risk have suffered for it.

I think what many people are having a hard time with (myself as well, sort of...) is how the rules were changed out from under everyone in yet another example of how the rules don't apply to the politically connected.

> YouTube Originals flopped

Maybe as a whole, but Cobra Kai was excellent and very popular!

Also, in the long-run, will having "missed" streaming & shorts necessarily be a bad thing? Time will tell.

I wish they never introduced shorts. Why do all platforms need to be everything to everyone? Why can't they focus on just being the best platform for user-created long-form video? I probably know the answer, but it makes me sad that that's the reality we live in.

>And why is it legal for Amazon to be the prime competitor of the economy’s whole retail sector while not having to make a profit?

I wish the author had elaborated on why it should be illegal. (Or maybe, how it is?)

Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses, but they were removed by the Roman Catholic Church because they determined it violated their community guidelines.

Menlo on MacOS, Ubuntu Mono on Linux.

Poker and 3d-platformers & first-person shooters.

Don't kids in Singapore and Taiwan only wear masks when they're sick? (Rather than the entire class at all times; at least, up until the start of the pandemic.) If so, it seems like a mistake to use that as any precedent for how kids in California will grow up under the present regime.

Start with Ziglings: https://github.com/ratfactor/ziglings and then after working through all the exercises read chapter 2 of ziglearn.org.

Assets are not a good protection mechanism if you buy them at the height of a bubble in asset prices!

The only advice I have to offer (which may be terrible advice!) is to keep a big chunk of your investment portfolio in cash (10-25%.) If you maintain your target weights in how you allocate your contributions and also by rebalancing a couple of times per year, you'll effectively be automatically buying low & selling high.

> When I came back to visit for a project later on, someone told me about a new thing called HTML, which was, as he described it, a derivative of SGML. Markup language enthusiasts were an occupational hazard at Interleaf and I ignored him, but this HTML thing later became a big part of my life.

This is hilarious writing!

What's wrong with that excerpt? How would you improve it?

That's interesting because I use DDG by default but I find it terrible for tech searches. I wind up using it for everything except tech stuff.

Example masters: John Carmack, Jeff Dean, Bram Cohen. What do they do? I think they're all extremely effective at getting things done. So be smart, hard working, and laser focused on shipping.

A long time ago I saw a good talk by Jonathan Blow wherein he made a point that really resonated with me. The point was that to get good at programming you need the experience of shipping a lot of programs and thus you should optimize your career around shipping as many good programs as you can. Contrast this with the common advice of being an expert in databases, or distributed systems, or OOP, or testing, or something like that...

Edit: found the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjDsP5n2kSM

I think the vast majority of JVM users won't even need Loom. OS threads perform well enough for most use cases. You can go a very long way with just a ThreadPoolExecutor.