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lixue

24 karma · joined December 17, 2018

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lixue··on Overpaid CEOs 2019
"assuming they had training on par with what you received" feels unfair: Generally, what makes someone a 10x engineer is exactly that most people lack that level of training, experience, and skill. It's not about innate talent, but it's still a valuable, rare, and therefore marketable skill.

Achieving 100x results isn't something you can guarantee, and it doesn't even involve writing a lot of code. It comes from blocking off a week to automate a task, and never having to deal with it again. It comes from having the experience and political capital to veto a project that would have wasted a year, because you've seen it go wrong before. It comes from improving some tools for the customer service reps, so that they're 5% more efficient (which then adds up to hundreds of hours a day if you're large enough).

Anyone CAN do this, but the people who have the insight, motivation, and skill to actually DO it are rare, and a smart organization should desire to keep them around for years just in case they do it a second time.

lixue··on Activision-Blizzard layoffs after reporting record results
Fair PVP and Personal Loot are both rapidly becoming genre standard, since the only people who complain are griefers/trolls.

I can't argue about the tonal shift at all. Acts 3+4 were a lot of fun, but nothing that held a candle to Diablo 2.

Both games are painfully easy when you're starting out. I think Diablo 1 is the only game in the franchise that was even slightly challenging in the first half?

Really surprised by the "locked down/narrow" aspect, though. Diablo 3 has the option to play the linear Campaign, or you can do Rifts (randomized dungeons), or Bounties (flit around to complete 5 mini-events across the act). There's also a ton of randomized and optional mini-events that will come up as you do the campaign. It was one of the few things I really appreciated over D2 :)

lixue··on Instacart paying 80 cents an hour because worker received a large tip
This was posted by "Working Washington", so it seems reasonable to look at Washington state law: It requires tipped employees to be paid minimum wage. So does the rest of the west coast, including California (where Instacart has it's HQ).

https://www.dol.gov/whd/state/tipped.htm

It is, of course, entirely possible that the worker in question is not on the west coast, but Instacart is still welcome to pay a fair wage even if not required to by law, and Instacart should certainly avoid lying about their business practices either way (from the article: "Even Instacart seems to know how messed up it is to pay workers less when they get tipped more — which is why they’ve denied the practice when speaking to reporters at Business Insider & the Miami Herald.")

lixue··on Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees
The problem is, "nothing but trouble" describes both genuinely problematic employees, and those that simply push back against toxic cultures or bad management. If you were already disillusioned, it's possible that it really was a bad atmosphere, and they were just less shy about calling a spade a spade.

I've also noticed that people tend to measure whether someone looks busy, not whether they're producing results. Some people will just start writing code, and they get called "productive". Others nip off for 2 hours to think it over and sketch out architectural diagrams, and then finish the whole task in half the time - but they're the ones that get called lazy because they weren't at their desk.

lixue··on Star Control II
I really can't think of any reason they'd be invalid.Keep in mind copyright doesn't need to be registered to be valid - the actual copyright applies since they created the work, this is just a formal registration of that.

There's also a ton of evidence supporting this copyright: The game CDs, manual, and box art all also say copyright Fred & Paul; there's email threads with Accolade discussing the possibility of merging the copyright and trademark; the fact that they published the game with no change other than removal of the "Star Control" trademark; and basically the entire team signing off on this.

If someone else was claiming to have written it, I could see a credible conflict, but literally everyone involved in the actual creation of the game says that, yes, it was created by Fred & Paul.

lixue··on Star Control II
"For example, available data suggests P/R didn't actually substantially contribute to SC1/2."

That's a pretty wild claim to repeat. Not a single person on the original team agrees with it, and they've filed the copyright registration in court[1]. There's basically no evidence at all for that conclusion, except that Stardock made the claim (not supported it, not provided evidence of it, merely made the claim)

Even if you do believe it, it's legally irrelevant as the team has signed the copyright over to them[2], and they released The Ur-Quan Masters back in 2003 using that copyright.

I was a member of the community back in the lat 90s/early 00s and this was common knowledge even back then.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6239751/71/6/stardock-s...

[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6239751/64/5/stardock-s...

lixue··on How the 0.001% invest
Assuming a 10% return, which is about the max I could find for a single fund over 20 years, it'd take 84 years to turn $1M in to $3B.

Conversely, plenty of funds do 15-20% in the short term. 15% only takes 57 years, and 20% brings it down to 44.

So, doable, but you'd be considered a pretty amazing investor. And this all assumes the money was invested from the day he was born.