longdustytrail

Tacoma has gotten much much nicer over the past 20ish years and the aroma jokes are mostly vestigial at this point.

My best friend moved down there a few years ago (a family member sold them their house under-market and the price was too good to pass up). We all made our jokes but I’ve been down a lot and I actually really like it. It’s not that much harder to get to than west Seattle

Also not accurate. I have a 2 year old in daycare in Seattle and the ratio is 8:1. I believe it’s 6:1 or maybe 4:1 for infants. I’ve never heard of 2:1 that would be absurd

An interesting precedent for sure but it’s worth noting that a company tried and failed to use this precedent to argue that spam filtering is a violation of the first amendment

This is absolutely not true in my experience (MLB, NFL, NBA). It’s very very common for one person to buy tickets for their whole party (this is how you make sure you’re sitting together) and there’s no part of the purchase or checkin flow where you’re even asked for the names of the people in your party.

Maybe for Taylor swift tickets or something they have stronger rules but it’s definitely not true as a matter of course in American major professional sports that each ticket holder needs to have their identity on file

It’s true that all money is made up, but not in the same sense OP means.

Like I could give you 20 dollars and it’s made up in a sense, it’s just a piece of paper, but also you can go to the store and buy things with it.

Whereas if you’re an investor in a company and the CEO does some self dealing which nominally values your shares at 20 million, you can’t go spend that. It’s even more made up

I agree with a lot of your top 5 so I’ll try to continue

5: I enjoyed sections of this book but as a whole I didn’t like it

4: had some cool ideas and there were moments when I got excited but the execution wasn’t there. Basically an amateur with a good idea

3: readable but unsatisfying. I finished it but was roasting it in my head the whole time

2: garbage. Bad story idea and bad writing. Nothing good to say except that it seemed like the author was trying

1: offensive. Celebrity cash grabs, polemics, etc. no artistic value whatsoever, author was not trying to write a good book. “Book” is just a format here

When I started at Facebook one of things everyone did during orientation was to put up a diff changing the default text of the search bar at the top of the homepage. This was a good way to familiarize people with the end to end flow of making changes. They didn’t say this explicitly but I think it was also intended to give people a “holy shit” moment when you realize that your silly code change is one button press away from 10 figure page views.

The idea was you make the change, take a screenshot of the result on your dev instance, get it stamped by your “mentor” and then abandon it. AFAIK this had been going on for a while before I got there.

Fast forward a few months and I see a sev pop up. “Default text on www.facebook.com search bar says ‘I am a search bar!’”

Ok but you’re gonna have a hard time convincing me that (morally) HBO should have been able to make game of thrones without cutting a check to the guy who created it

This doesn’t seem that wild to me. Zoom already prompts me to unmute my microphone when I cough.

I “read” cars and trucks and things that go for my 2 year old every night. He recently found out that goldbug is on every page and now he won’t let me turn the page until we find him. It’s genuinely a lovely book. We got ours from buy nothing, it’s very old and taped up and it has a bunch of writing in it by a kid named Max.

Anthropic

There are many people who don’t get asked about their regrets when they’re older. And there are many people living lives of quiet desperation.

Etymologists use it a lot. I went down an etymology rabbit hole a while back looking for the origin of a phrase and google books was immensely helpful

I think patio11’s blog is exactly what you’re looking for. Probably scroll back to the earlier posts to find more fundamental stuff like what you’re asking:

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/

Is he a Russian puppet or isn’t he? If he can’t speak on ukraine for fear of being killed by Putin then everything he says should be viewed through that same lens

First off yes I (and I think 99% of people) would be totally fine with your closing hypothetical. Why would I care about CNN’s ad revenue? Never even enters my mind.

But more fundamentally your frame totally omits brand safety, which is kind of the whole ball game. A group that exists to evaluate brands safety thought that changes to Twitter made it less brand safe and said so. It’s like suing a bond rating agency for downgrading your rating

I happen to be on vacation with a former crowdstrike employee right now, they said none of their old coworker/friends are saying anything. I’m guessing internal comms went out to lock everything down

This is just generic speculation

Judges don’t run campaign ads

The same thing happened to another one of Paul’s wacky passion projects, the Cinerama theater. That ended up being taken over by the Seattle Film Festival after being shut down for a few years.

My impression is that Paul died somewhat suddenly and simply didn’t make arrangements to keep these things going. His sister is not interested in them so she’s winding them down.

It’s too bad he didn’t set up some kind of endowment before he passed. Maybe he didn’t want to or maybe he just didn’t get around to it.

I wonder what will happen to MoPop/EMP. AFAIK that’s always been a financial black hole.

Presumably if you own the car you can act as your own “assistant”

There’s a passage in there about Nagel’s “what is it like to be a bat” which has fundamentally changed my worldview ever since I read a shitty OCR version on a blogspot. I ended up buying the book and enjoyed it even more.

I just googled it and it’s still up, the formatting is terrible so it’s kind of hard to follow but i recommend it anyway: http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-l...

I think there’s a distinction to be made between people who are working on stuff that doesn’t end up providing any benefit to the company to the company and people who are straight up not burning any calories.

When I worked in big tech, I spent a lot of time working on stuff that didn’t ship, or shipped but never got traction, which ended up providing no benefit to the company. This is IMO largely the responsibility of management, although there’s certainly an idea that line workers have a responsibility to find impactful projects/teams to work on.

These are all great, another good one is

“This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t”

https://www.theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entir...

In the jargon of philosophy this a friction point between Deontology (rules-based ethics) and Consequentialism (outcome-based ethics).

Deontologically there is a strong case against seatbelt laws, but the consequentialist perspective is rather compelling.

I’m generally a deontologist but find myself supporting the seatbelt law. It’s just such a small price to pay when stacked up against the consequences. I guess that means I’m not really a deontologist.

He just banned posting the identity of pseudonymous accounts which is definitely not illegal. He also banned posting public information about the movements of his private jet which is also definitely not illegal.

This stuff would easier to take seriously he was consistent about it. At this point it’s kind of insulting

I see where you’re coming from. But it’s a fascinating window into the nitty gritty of managing a 20+ year, $1 trillion+ government construction project.

Some of those silly seeming acronyms, like MSC for “milestone C”, probably are included because people who actually work on and around this project have naturally adopted them. I bet there are senior level employees in and outside the government who's whole career has been spent on this one project.

To those people, MSC and ADM are like k8s and MVC