legerdemain

So, what are some software engineering conferences with a good "hallway track"? What are you excited for this year?

Upon receiving notice of intent to leave, one of my previous employers would walk you out the door same day. In their judgment, removing quitters immediately was worth the loss of organizational knowledge and team planning challenges that resulted.

Needless to say, their code was full of people papering over code no one understood anymore, duplicated features that interacted poorly, and so on.

I'll try it this weekend!

I see a 7T model from Siemens with a standard 60cm bore. Interesting!

What's the bore diameter for a 7T or a 10T magnet? All of the ones I've seen wouldn't be wide enough for an adult human.

I'm surprised that no one has said "work."

(Or maybe not surprised, since there is a vocal minority on this board that would rather just receive work assignments on a folded piece of paper shoved under their door and never interact with coworkers.)

I have dedicated the last 1.5 years of my life to finding "my people." As in, I literally quit my job and started joining meetups, hikes, groups, maker spaces, attending events, organizing my own, and just hanging out in public all the time.

Long story short, I am no better off socially than I was 1.5 years ago. I am looking for work again so I can make work friends.

I've become acquainted with a handful of people. Despite a lot of probing and chatting, I haven't clicked with anyone.

In sum, I consider the last 1.5 years of my life time mostly wasted. I should have either kept trying to make closer friends through work or done something more radical than just trying to be more social.

We agree, you don't need to keep trying to convince me.

I don't keep going to monthly events because I love the cadence. It's because the weekly event near me is "YC Startup Accountability Circle."

I apologize, but your response is a muddle of contradictory cliches. I am literally there to make friends, of course I care what at least some of them think. I'm not there to actually run.

I went. I sucked, to the point of it being awkward. I trained daily for three months before going a second time. I still sucked. I don't know how to create the conditions that would make it productive to attend again.

I have spoken to people in that group and attended some of their events. I hope you will allow the possibility that I know more about the group than their Meetup page says.

For example, the 3.5 miles on Wednesdays is on a track at a local high school. I was literally getting lapped over and over, just like in high school.

I mean stuff like pickup soccer or basketball that happens in parks and at gyms. I don't think we have much in terms of league sports around here, except maybe employment-based leagues (like Google, Meta, and Microsoft fielding softball teams).

Yeah, maybe. I never discovered the secret of sending invitations that radiated "please don't bring your partner." Brunch is, after all, an activity for mostly women and couples.

The traditional activity in Dolores Park is sitting on a beach towel while smoking pot.

Their shortest run is the 3.5-miler on Wednesdays. That's kind of the best I can do on a good day. Their other runs are at least twice as long.

I don't think this is my jam, and I say that as someone who ran a 5k every day for three months last year to be able to enjoy literally this group.

I concur. I'm at every local cafe, to the point that the baristas recognize my order, and I'm at the gym at the same time most days of the week. After gym, I go to the supermarket next to it to buy some fruit or a drink, and the cashiers recognize me. I'm also in a bunch of local meetups.

This has not led to any organic conversation that could lead to something deeper.

Weekly meetup? Goodness! All the marginally interesting meetups in my area are monthly or less. I specifically started a twice-monthly one myself because it was so grim. (And no, I'm not very happy with my own meetup, either.)

Pretty much the only exception to the monthly cadence is hiking meetups, which in my area are dominated by retirees and midlife singles. I've tried them, I wouldn't keep trying.

I have never played a sport outside of gym class. When I went to local sports meetups, I mostly found people practicing the sports they played in high school or college. I sucked by comparison, and it showed.

I relate hard to your last point. It's something I have repeatedly worried about now and again for the last 15 years. I'll be getting married and my side of the aisle will just be tumbleweeds.

I can relate. For a lot of people, "friends" is someone you might find yourself sitting with at the same table at a group dinner or playing the same board game with a bunch of other people. But meet up with them one on one and you will quickly run out of things to talk about.

That's 1.5 to 2 couples. I haven't had a lot of single coworkers who also do brunch instead of, say, DOTA.

I challenge you to find this in Mountain View, California.

IME, everything in SF that young people might want to go to is packed full of young people who made reservations a couple of weeks in advance. Not a lot of venues for drop-in occasions that accommodate 6-20 people dipping in and out.

Edit: I can sort of imagine this happening at a bar with an unusually big patio, like SF's Zeitgeist. Not that Zeitgeist has a huge patio, it's just huge for the area. And if this gathering was always at a bar, I wouldn't go much, because I have a ton of trouble hearing people in bars.

For a while, that was my strategy to cultivate a social life: organizing brunches with 6-10 former teammates and acquaintances.

As social occasions, the brunches didn't lead to anything in my life. The guests made extremely generic smalltalk. I don't know if anyone had fun. I didn't get invited to anything else in those people's lives.

I was kind of glad that COVID killed the brunches because of how fruitless they were.

I get the idea that spending time one on one can turn into giving each other life updates instead of a more intimate exchange. But group events can also be really shallow and demotivating.

Counterpoint: my parents came to the US when I was a child and they have none of those things. Their family ties weren't strong enough to last. Their ties to family back home deteriorated. There is no diaspora of extended family in other cities. Their own relationship was toxic and abusive, and they divorced. They are now living out old age alienated, isolated, and alone. They're not rare, they're just not nearly as vocal as the "my big, fat Greek wedding"-type people.

Sure, look at the Hmong in the US. Poor and rural before they came to the US, and still, on average, pretty poor and doing pretty badly in the US.

Meanwhile, I have a lot of Chinese, Hongkongese, and Korean coworkers whose families are well-off enough that they don't need to work for a living, have relatives who don't work for a living, etc.

So yes, lots of first-generation immigrants in US come from serious money overseas, and the ones who don't have worse outcomes on average.

This is the last year it will run.

At the "AI Woodstock" at the San Francisco Exploratorium last Friday, there was, in fact, a gentleman with a handful of real, live llamas in tow. They were shaggy and greasy, with matted wool dangling in oily locks, and they shit massive piles of excrement all over the Embarcadero sidewalk. I never did find out if it was a Meta publicity stunt or just a birthday party entertainer who found the opportunity of a lifetime.

   > The whole "pause AI or it will destroy the world thing" is just
   > a large pot of hype anyways, pushed by journalists lacking the
   > understanding of technology, twitter-bros who are building "AI
   > copywriters" and "profile photo generators" and owners of "AI"
   > companies.

Some signatories of the "pause giant AI experiments" open letter are below. I hope you trust the judgment of at least one of these people, instead of dismissing them as ignorant journalists and "twitter-bros"?

- Yoshua Bengio

- Elon Musk

- Steve Wozniak

- John Hopfield

- Gary Marcus

- Jaan Tallinn, Skype co-founder

- Evan Sharp, Pinterest co-founder

- Chris Larsen, Ripple co-founder

Kubernetes is often shortened to k8s, which is often pronounced "kates," which is further shortened to k3s.

We used to have that. It was called the Ghost Ship. It caught fire. A bunch of people died.

Not a particularly deep comment, but... matklad (the author) created, essentially, the entirety of the modern Rust developer experience. He is the original author and biggest contributor to both rust-analyzer and Intellij Rust. If someone this central to the Rust world has switched to writing Zig full time, and not for boring, pragmatic reasons either, a little seed of doubt about the long-term stability of Rust as a professional community begins to grow in my heart.