lsc

Do you have a good reference or example or explanation of the FTC for folks who are learning calculus?

>The Tesla truck thing has always surprised me a bit since it feels like a misreading of the audience.

I watched the stream. My impression was "someone made a truck, designed and marketed it based on my preferences when I was 19."

If they had done this in 1999, I totally would have bought it.

But then I wasn't the sort of guy who bought pick up trucks. I was the sort of guy who got beat up by the sort of guy who bought pick up trucks. (I mean, by 19 I had a real job in a much larger city and was away from all that, but... the memories were very fresh.)

But that's the thing, even if this is totally unappealing to the sort of people who currently buy pickup trucks... this is appealing to a completely different group of people who currently would not consider a pickup truck.

This might explain the bad goth 'neuromancer' cosplay. to get someone like 19 year old me to buy a pickup, you need to overcome the associations with pickup trucks. and... yeah, that's going to alienate the existing pickup truck drivers.

>it is almost beyond belief what high quality engineers can earn by simply changing jobs.

(and not just top engineers; just about everyone benefits from competing offers. If you haven't gotten a competing offer in the last year or two, you have no idea what you could be getting, and you are probably underpaid.)

This, I think, is one of the major advantages of silicon valley; I can walk from my house to tens of big name employers; hundreds of smaller ones. I can switch jobs and I don't have to move. I can pretty easily still get drinks with the same people after work (if that's what we all want) - and the culture is such that it's okay to go work somewhere else for a few years and then to come back. it's not even a little weird.

>The noise has gotten bad enough that I'm considering quitting my job and running away to a small town.

so, uh, my own solution? requires money, but is probably cheaper than giving up the big city wages (depending on your situation and remote-work opportunities.)

1. giant yellow passive hearing protectors at work with soft music.

Personally, I still kinda suspect that active noise canceling is just placebo. (I'm joking a little here, but passive noise dampening is a thousand times better than active, if you ask me.) Give me passive muffs. You still need some soft music, or your ears will adjust, but getting hearing protection earmuffs with bluetooth means the music can be soft. The other advantage is that nothing says "Don't bother me, I'm working" like giant yellow industrial earmuffs. (I like the '3m worktunes connect' - not exactly audiophile grade, but even with really soft music, it makes the office silent )

MMm. you say you find headphones 'heavy and constricting' - perhaps I should take back my advice. the passive earmuffs are both heavy and constricting. I find it kind of comforting? but if pressure is a problem, you probably won't like them.

2. at home: my own room with a solid door with weather stripping and walls with offset studs and triple pane windows. (weather stripping is super cheap and helps a lot with interior noise. A solid door is rather more expensive, and probably helps more, but as for relief per dollar, weather stripping is hard to beat)

Key here, I think, is that construction is more important than location.

3. I show up and leave work late. I get mornings (well, afternoons) for talking with people, and lots of evening time mostly by myself for actual work.

#2. is obviously pricey, but without it, I'd go insane. Personally, I find newer, well-built apartments to have less noise than older single-pane suburban housing. (but then, I think I have a lower tolerance for traffic noise than most; the neighbor warming up his junker in the morning always super bothered me when I was living in an older SFH. some people are okay with that.)

I've talked about building a sleeping box with noise dampening, but... eh, just paying the money for an apartment with proper noise dampening is doable to me.

>half of the breakage in modern cars seems to require interfacing with the computer to at least clear an error flag.

Yes, you need an odbII tool. they are not expensive by the standards of decent '80s automotive tools (the cost of 'minimum viable analog tools' has dropped precipitously during my lifetime. )

The cheapest ODBII tools are bluetooth, and there is a cornucopia of apps to interface with them in the app store. You can get one that is easier to use that doesn't require a phone for $100 that will work for most problems on most cars.

(Of course, the more expensive ODBII tools are better, I'm given to understand, and allow you to do more, but you can do a lot with the cheap junk; and resetting the codes is generally the most basic functionality; unless you've got a fancy car, even the cheapest one that fits your brand should work for that. )

Having come of age at a time when I was driving and repairing (older) carberuated vehicles, I personally think that fixing a carb is like a thousand times harder than interfacing with the ODB system. Modern injection systems just solve so many problems without trying.

My experience of the modern diagnostic systems is that it's actually way easier. The scan tool saves you so much time and effort vs. the old manuals "go to page 5 if it doesn't X, 32 if it does" A lot of the time, the cheap scan tool gives you a code and description; you punch that into a search engine and you get a goddamn video of someone doing the repair. It's amazing compared to screwing around with an exploded parts diagram. (I mean, from the perspective of someone who isn't really a car guy) - I mean, there's always problems the scantool doesn't catch, but... I mean, I'm talking about all this from a shadetree perspective, there have always been a lot of automotive problems I couldn't fix, just 'cause I'm not an automotive specialist.

Fake books are a problem too. I mostly see publishers complain about it, but that probably has more to do with my social circle than with the proportion of people complaining

https://twitter.com/billpollock/status/1183094406573748225

and of course, nobody buys CDs anymore, but I do remember people complaining of unauthorized copies/burns of various quality.

>For many products and people that will just be the visual appeal, and advertisers target their widest audience.

I... think this is usually unwise. If you attempt to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. I personally think one of my advantages when I ran prgmr.com was a consistent brand? At the very least, it was very recognizable. (I don't run it anymore, and I'm not claiming to have done a great job when I did. But I can point out several mistakes I made where I would have gotten... big at least by my standards if I had zigged rather than zagged. I think I did a memorable, if not a good job at branding, and "just get my name right" is... well, it's halfway there.)

Personally, I think that if you want to appeal to different markets, you should use a different brand with a different customer-facing layer, even if in the bowels, the product is produced on the same equipment.

>This is a case where tracking can actually be seen in a positive light

I'm not sure? I mean, I think that the connection between the advertiser/brand values is important, and you destroy some of that if you tailor your advertising to the consumer... if different people get different views of the same brand, well, it's really different brands.

(Also, the decision to track/not track is a brand value decision in and of itself- a rather big one, if you can credibly communicate that to your customers.)

>This is more complex than financials - displaying an advert leads to a bi-directional association in the consumers mind between the entity being advertised and the entity advertising it. It is beneficial to advertise products that have Brand values similar to yours (or ones you want to appropriate).

I agree, and I think that's part of why I disagree so hard with you on the primacy of images.

I mean, i'm not saying that a preference for text vs. a preference for pictures is objectively right or wrong, it's just a really good example of your aforementioned alignment of brand values between the content provider, the brand doing the selling, and the consumer. pictures are a way of associating your brand with values, but eschewing the (possibly extraneous) extra data in that picture, you are also associating your brand with a set of values.

I am also a consumer of protein powder... but you are way better off appealing to me with text. Ingredients, (tell me what the stuff is made of, and don't add any sweeteners) purity (Test for heavy metals or the like!) and then price are probably the attributes you want to bring forward, if you are trying to sell me a protein powder, approximately in that order. If you instead show a nice picture of the can or have a model preparing some in your ad, I'm going to see that, at best, as an irrelevant distraction. (again, I'm not saying those are the objectively most important attributes of a protein powder, but if you want my protein powder budget, that's how you get it; At a cultural level, the more I feel you focus on the things I care about and the less you focus on things I see as irrelevancies, the more I feel you align with my values.)

I mean, I'm not saying that pictures are good or bad in general, just that advertising with pictures and advertising with text have very different cultural connotations, and that advertising with text only can be a striking alignment with a consumer's values.

huh. I will look more into the Oura ring. In budget, but not in "buy without research" budget.

I'm mostly concerned about reading in bed 'cause I assume if it can't detect that, it can't detect, you know, staring at the ceiling. (though I guess I'm a lot more likely to fidget while staring at the ceiling.) I mean, I could get out of bed to read, but in my experience, that's even worse for sleep than reading in bed.

Do you have a source? Like, I'd pay money for good sleep tracking, (especially if it's fitbit-level money... I would pay more) but everything I've seen thinks that if I'm in bed and quietly, say, reading a book, I'm asleep until I move.

Eh, it sounded like the person I was responding to was trying to avoid flames? I mean, if you are trying to get into it about religion, that's a different thing.

I'm just saying this was something I stepped in by accident and that you should be aware of it.

I actually had no idea that the catholic church permitted an english translation so early.

so, uh, you probably weren't aware of this (I know I wasn't until fairly recently when I made a similar comment and a jewish friend pointed this out) but many jewish people consider speaking casually about how the new testament is good/ the old testament is bad to be pretty offensive. The gist I think of what my friend was telling me was that if I took the time to understand the jewish scripture, all of the stuff about loving your neighbor, feeding the poor, etc... is already in those jewish scriptures that prefigured the new testament- I mean, that's just scriptural interpretation, which I am not really qualified to get into - but the offensive bit is that casually dismissing the old testament as bad while praising the new testament as good can come off like saying "the religion my ancestors had has a more moral holy book than the religion your ancestors had" and it's pretty easy to see how that could give offense.

(I mean, I'm not a bible scholar; just... it was, you know, one of those times when I unintentionally gave offense, and seems like something you should be aware of if you are trying to avoid flame wars.)

I think you can do a lot worse than random meetups. I have enjoyed the toastmasters debate club[1] though I haven't been going lately. I think work friends are good sources of friends, too. I mean, work friends are work friends, and that's a different thing, but once you leave that job, there's nothing wrong with sending a few texts, and heck, work friends can be a lot of fun even when they are still work friends.

Back in the day, the Hacker Dojo was really great for meeting people. I personally think it's not nearly as good as it was (social stuff, I think, isn't going to be as good during boom times. a lot of the interesting people are just too busy and/or schmoozing less randomly, and we're in a boom time, so the hacker dojo looks like a regular co-working space rather than the coolness it was in the late aughts.) - I mean, I think it's still pretty neat, and still a good place to meet people, just not as good as it was.

A lot of it takes time; I mean, I've been here, more or less, since the late '90s. And a lot of it is just asking. After you leave a job, pick one of your work friends, send them an email and see if they wanna get drinks or something. Like, my experience is that it's okay to be a little weird. just make sure you go away when people tell you to go away. I mean, I know one guy who was my roommate and business partner like fifteen years ago, who is a super introvert. Maybe once a month I send him a text and see if he wants to get pizza. Maybe twice a year he responds in the affirmative.

doing projects with people is... super expensive, but in my life, doing a project/business with someone has been a little like how combat is in the stories, like you have gone through heck with that person and so you will forever have a connection.

[1]https://www.meetup.com/Agile-Articulators-Toastmasters-Club/

Maybe... but can you get world-class universities without a culture that values education? I mean, I guess it's one of those chicken and egg things, as a world class university both requires and attracts people who value education.

But, I mean, could you greenfield start a world class university in a place where people see reading in public as something to be ridiculed? would that be easier than bootstrapping a major tech company in some low cost of living area?

> A tenet can easily do $100k worth of damage in less than a year.

A whole lot of the housing stock in silicon valley (and it seems most of what is owned by this type of landlord) is essentially teardowns; stuff built more than 50 years ago to working-class standards. the structure itself represents the right to 'remodel' into something someone willing to pay a million bucks for a house might actually want to live in; and by 'remodel' I mean to leave the 'minimum legal structure' standing (I think paul graham made some joke about it on twitter some time ago, with a photo of a remodel that had one interior wall standing and the rest demolished. The joke was thought to be problematic, if I remember, for some reason I don't remember.)

I mean, sure, if the landlord wants to keep renting out a shack built in the '60s, the wrong tenant can make that quite expensive, but it would be difficult for the tenant to devalue the market value of the asset by 100K.

I suppose that might be another part of it; there certainly is some demand for these older units at market rates, but certainly for people willing to pay full freight, the nicer units go first.

so, uh, I thought the kjv was... not recognized as valid by the catholic church? Like, the KJV was authorized by the church of England, a, uh, rather different body from the Vatican. I thought a lot of what made the KJV important was that it was early in that split.

I mean, i suppose that the Vatican would probably still have a pretty interesting opinion on it.

I think there's a big social component, too. I personally would pay rather extra to live here in silicon valley - extra even net additional earnings, just because I fit in ways I don't fit anywhere else I've been. (I mean, I'm not claiming that silicon valley is more inclusive than other places; a lot of people say the opposite and I have seen some evidence corroborating that view. I'm just saying, for me, for who I am, I feel like I fit here; I feel like I'm treated better here because of who I am than I am treated anywhere else. I suppose you could say that I feel like I have 'privilege' here in ways that I don't feel like I do in, say, the place where I spent most of my childhood.)

(because of the things I described above about how california privileges long term residents, I actually don't pay much more here than I would in any other place of similar density, and net earnings, I'm way better off financially here than anywhere else because I have that granfathered housing deal. (of course, my housing here is a lot less flexible.) Nobody else in the world will pay what silicon valley will pay when you have my skills and no degree. But in theory I would pay a premium to live here.)

Before I die, I want to try living in New York, partly 'cause I really enjoy the car-free lifestyle, but also 'cause I think that it's good to sometimes go to a place where you don't fit in as well, where you interact with people who have dramatically different worldviews about what constitutes an interesting problem. But for me, someone who fit in really badly where he grew up? Finding a place where I fit in was supremely important, even if I don't think it's great to spend the entire rest of my life in that place. Just having that experience of fitting in is transformative, I think.

My guess is that actor/entertainer types have similar feelings about LA; I mean, I think there's a lot of stories about that; about young theatre types running off to LA to find themselves (which I assumed meant "find people who value you") I mean, people talk about shared values; and it's not about voting the same way, mostly, or anything like that, at least for me, as it is about finding the same sorts of problems interesting. I mean, acting and entertaining is a deep sort of thing. I certainly don't understand much of it, but I can at least see that there's a lot there to understand, and if that's your bag, it seems like going and living near other people who also find that sort of thing could be important.

I think educational infrastructure is almost a trailing indicator... Silicon Valley is special 'cause it prizes the sort of education required to do this sort of work. Especially when I first came here in the '90s, it was amazing - going from the place I grew up, where reading in public felt like it was risking physical violence (well, that's not really fair, I was 17) - to silicon valley, where that sort of thing was the sort of thing to do.

>Wouldn't this mean that landlords are effectively leaving money on the table?

Yes.

>If it's not rent controlled, couldn't they just jack up the rent whenever they felt like it?

I was talking with a guy who I work with who is a landlord on the side, and he seemed to have this real labor-theory-of-value sense of fairness, like he says he jacks up rent every time his taxes or insurance or what have you goes up, but it sounds like he's like 5 years behind market (which is a huge amount)

And this is super common in California, small-time landlords, if the tenant is not causing issues, tend to raise rents rather less than market.

I think some of it is that the vast majority of your ROI, in California, comes from property appreciation, (while in many other markets, as far as I can tell, you usually get a lot more cashflow; all the places I looked at in cleveland or in new mexico would be positive cashflow out the gate; all the places I've looked at buying in California only become positive cashflow once rents go up rather a lot) - so I guess maybe some landlords feel that if they don't jack up rents too much on easy tenants, they won't have to do as much work, and as most of their income is actually appreciation on the property which happens either way, they don't see giving up some of the rent as that big of a deal?

I can tell you that if you rent from a professional property management company, your rents will go up way faster, but they are also way more responsive when it comes to fixing things, and there is a strong feeling that if the rents haven't gone up on you in a while, you want to deal with any problems yourself; you don't want to call the landlord, which is evidence in favor of the "landlords avoiding work" theory.

The thing that this theory doesn't explain is that a lot of these landlords seem to be below market by a lot more than what a property management firm would charge. (I think. around here property management companies charge more than usual and usually have really big fees for replacing a moved-out tenant)

>But I wonder if a city could ever follow the model of Atlanta and try to build a "new Silicon Valley" from scratch with aggressive policies that lure companies/employees from existing tech hubs?

It's totally possible. I think the problem right now is that for profitable tech companies, right now engineers are still super cheap (like most of big tech makes rather more than 500K per employee, and pays less than $250K.) - from that perspective, it doesn't really make sense to try to save money on employees... the opposite, really. If they have to pay another $100K/head 'cause the cost of living is so high, that's a smaller bite than anything that might disturb the massive profit. (this is also the root of the argument that we should unionize, even though we make silly money compared to most other workers. Facebook captures a lot more of the surplus value created by labor, say, than Walmart does, even if by any other reasonable standard, we are treated so much better than a walmart floor associate. I mean, I'm not arguing for or against unionization, I'm just saying that's why some people want to unionize even though we already are better off than nearly any other class of worker.)

The other thing to think about is Detroit. Detroit was totally one of these cluster cities; it was the place to be if you were working with cars in a period when there was a lot of innovation to be had in cars. And then the industry changed (or rather, innovation slowed a lot... like, there just wasn't that much more you could do with cars; just small incremental improvements) - automobile manufacturing scattered to the wind and Detroit is kind of a husk.

Will that happen to the software industry? will innovations start being small and predictable? will the P/E of Facebook drop to match the P/E of Ford? I mean, silicon valley has already been through one of these changes; silicon valley is called silicon valley 'cause they used to make the silicon here, and they've really successfully switched to writing software.

I mean, I'm personally long silicon valley (and while I think it's overvalued now, I think it's a good long term bet) - I think it will turn out more like New York than like Detroit, but... who knows?

> Is there some hidden reason that companies like this insist on staying in the same area despite the many potential advantages of looking elsewhere?

the long term root is that there is a huge productivity advantage to clusters of workers. (or, at least many people believe so) Around here, if you strike up a random conversation in public, it's very likely you will do so with someone who does something relevant to what you do, and this is good for getting new ideas and really good for getting new contacts. Right now? there's a huge concentration of programming know-how in silicon valley and san francisco, and building that sort of cluster somewhere else would be really difficult. (I think Los Angeles has a similar situation, only with the movie industry.)

I literally found someone to buy my company at a (non-industry) party. (I mean, I did a bad job of it, I was drinking too much and complaining loudly about how much it sucks to run a company and how I had fucked up like three really good chances to sell the thing and generally being a downer, which is rude, I think, at a party, but also not how you maximize the value of the company you sell. Still, I got an impactful amount of money, and more importantly, I got someone else to run the damn thing so I could go get a job that paid without dumping my existing customers.) I've solved technical problems in similar sorts of ways; it's completely normal to go hang out with friends and actually solve problems over drinks or pizza or whatever. (which yes, is a culture some people hate, and I totally understand that, but some of us like it, and like it or not, it's certainly effective.)

Another bigger microeconomic factor that people who don't live here don't understand is that California laws and cultural norms are set up to privilege people who have been here longer. If you bought a place here in '08? Silicon valley isn't very expensive at all; our property taxes are largely fixed based on what we paid for the place when we bought it. This is kinda true (but to a much lessor extent) for rents; I know a lot of people paying under 2/3rds what they'd pay in rent if they moved in today, even without rent control. with rent control, paying under 1/3rd what they'd pay if they moved in today is not uncommon. This means that the sticker shock you get from the outside looking in isn't actually what most of the people who have lived here long term are paying.

I've been working in industry since '97... and I've dodged so many layoffs. That doesn't mean I wasn't impacted, though. There's always at least as much work to be done, and fewer people to do it, and a a lot of people get super stressed out and hard to work with (or work for... this is especially bad with management. Working for someone who is afraid of getting fired is miserable.) Usually, there's a lot more work 'cause the boss expects me to figure out how to make the systems work just as well without spending as much money on them.

Several times, I've quit after the layoffs because work became a lot more stressful. At least once, I quit without another job lined up, just 'cause it was too much. (In my defense, I was like 21, I was the only technical person who hadn't been laid off (or left for greener pastures) and my boss, I think, was driven insane by the stress of keeping things going during the brutal dot-com bust. It was not a situation a reasonable person would expect a child to be able to deal with.)

In a lot of ways, I think the people in the first round of layoffs have it best; that's when the severance packages are sweetest, and in my experience, after the first round of layoffs, the people who have the best options (which aren't necessarily the best people at doing the job? but there is some correlation) jump ship, and that makes things harder, too, just 'cause you have lost all the people management thinks are the worst, and all the people that management (at other companies) thinks are the best, and you have to then do the job with just those in the middle. (the downside, of course, to being in the first wave is that it's a lot easier to get a new job while you have a job, vs getting that new job right after you got laid off.)

My own personal rule is that when the first layoff hits, start looking hard. I mean, if it's an industry-wide downturn and you happen to be at a company that is well-placed to weather it better than most, maybe you stay? but usually the best thing to do after dodging a layoff is to find another job at another company, one that isn't in as much trouble.

Huh. that's an interesting point I hadn't thought of; I always attributed the difference in quality to just, you know, the stricter housing code and better building tech in general... but that's not the only factor at work in Silicon Valley.

In Silicon Valley, sure, most of the housing stock was built rather a long time ago, yes, but it was also built to the expectations of people who didn't make a lot of money. The newer stuff around here is built for people who are in the top 5% or better of incomes, so it's likely they use more expensive construction techniques, too.

for me, i personally find that the construction of the apartment matters a lot more than how noisy my neighbors are; I moved from a duplex in a very quiet neighborhood in sunnyvale to an apartment right under the SJC flight path, but the old place was last updated in the '60s and had single-pane windows, while the new place was built in the '80s and upgraded pretty significantly in the aughts. It is rare that I hear noises loud enough to notice over a running fan or air purifier when the windows are all buttoned up.

Double/triple pane windows make a huge difference (as does offset studs drywall standoffs)

Huh. It wouldn't occur to me, really, to connect the two, but I also am a huge fan of Jablokov.

>Granted I prefer hard sci-fi, but the novel’s focus is really on style over science fiction. It’s IMO somewhere between space opera and fantasy.

How I looked at Gibson's work changed completely after I read "pattern recognition" when it came out in my early '20s - It was very explicitly about style, and I went back and re-read the older stuff which I read as a child, and yeah, you could also say that neuromancer is about style and fashion. It was interesting just how much reading the later book changed how I thought about the earlier books.

(Note, I still really enjoy Gibson.)

>I would slowly acquire a recommendation network of people like me, effectively crowd sourcing the content-finding to a bunch of clones!

But I don't want recommendations from people like me. I want recommendations from people with good taste.

makes sense. I've been reading Gaitskill's "little hammer" - it's a collection of essays, but... like half of them are book reviews, so now I'm pausing to read some mailer. For that matter, it is pretty common for me to read books because they are mentioned in the front matter of other books.