mrsilencedogood

I really don't think it's about common sense or user agency or anything like that at all.

These companies are just trying to make a trillion dollars. It will be hard to make a trillion dollars if your product is associated with sexual deviancy stuff (and by "deviance" i mean literally anything - like Disney's definition of deviancy). So they do anything they can to make it hard to do deviancy and easy to give them a trillion dollars, like automating away a huge portion of call center work or something like that.

Obviously from where people sit, embroiled in the political "debates" of our age, it's easy to assign political motivations to it. But really they just want people to stop doing shit that isn't giving them a trillion dollars because it's just distraction/cost center for them to manage the PR shit of someone who made a lewd chatbot and it got on fox news.

I don't know why I even bothered to try to push back, beyond the fact that these kind of "philosophers" plague the anime community. The pattern is very predictable. Tons and tons of ink spilled to try to explain why they're not a pedophile while not doing anything more than distracting from the original point and dithering endlessly. And nobody wants to push back because of it, so they take silence as complicit assent.

I don't even know what this show is, but I can guarantee you any pedo-related stuff in there is highly unlikely to be for the purpose of "depictions or explorations of psychology".

Come on, don't try to kid me. It's there for the same reason all the other seinen anime have a ton of borderline softcore porn tropes in them.

The whole "us vs them" being manufactured in "remote vs onsite" is really suspicious to me. I have never actually heard from a single person who wanted to force remote people in, or a remote person who wanted to force onsite people out of the office. It feels like the owner class is trying to build a fox-and-the-grapes narratives around the people they've forcibly RTO'd to try to get some kind of grassroots-shaped support for their forced RTO policies.

It's all about choice. I have 3 young kids. The youngest will be in school next year. At that point, I may find myself actually going to a coworking space from time to time (and if my company had an office near me, I'd go into that sometimes). I certainly don't mind the amenities and the company of my coworkers (all 2 of them that are actually physically located within a 4-hour-drive radius of me).

But for right now, being able to be full-time remote with a fully flexibly work schedule is ridiculously important and useful to me. My wife has a dentist appointment? I can sit here in the basement and pull up the kid's camera while he naps and she can just go. I can eat lunch with my kid. I can do morning drop-off when my wife needs a break from the morning kid-prep grind. It's absolutely vital and our lives would've been a mess the last 4 years without it.

Plus, besides the work-lifestyle thing, there's a question of equality of opportunity. As you can probably guess based on my above remarks, I live in BFE (five generations of my family live here, so I can't leave) and there's literally nothing that San Francisco-type SWE's would recognize as a "tech job" until you get up to Lake Michigan. My options, were I to work locally, would be to work in a place that specializes in government/enterprise contracting and "staff augmentation". If your nose is wrinkling and your brow furrowing upon reading that phrase, yes that's the correct facial expression to be making. And yes it pays what you'd expect.

But thanks to remote work, I'm working for a startup and actually getting to program an actual software product and engage with its product development and all that.

So did the year of the EUV lithography happen? What year was it?

(Genuinely asking, I don't know anything about chips - I'm the kind of programmer who is profoundly comforted by pretending like my CPU is like a really fast version of the thing I did in CompE 201, as opposed to reality which i gather is a bit more like a demonically possessed stone that glues together a bunch of barely understood physics that kind of "even out" at macro levels but seem pretty f'd up at quantum levels).

"it was an older and much cheaper model with the shroud replaced and flashed to call itself the newer model in windows"

I really though that anyone going to these lengths wouldn't be bothering to do this to scam on amazon and would instead be gainfully employed??? What the hell.

I guess I can't buy anything on amazon anymore. Oh well.

"Further benchmarking showed they were actually 2TB drives that reported incorrect size."

what.

ugh.

one less thing i can buy on amazon, I guess. gosh dangit.

Is amazon's model even profitable for these low-price high-volume parts without its binning system?

I literally do not buy things off amazon that fall into these "binning problem" categories, or anything easily counterfeitable. I'll buy from amazon for things that essentially cannot be counterfeit (GPUs, hard drives, things where counterfeits would be more likely to be a brick of the same weight rather than something that worked but was crappy or dangerous), or where i'm essentially trying to get "counterfeit"-grade stuff (stuff like plastic or metal garden spikes, where i just want the cheapest possible thing that will hold my irrigating tubing in place).

Everything else comes from target or the OEM's website store.

IME, it's based off of "performance", not performance. So what happens is someone 4 levels above you on the org chart has a google sheet of all their underlings, their most recent grade - erm I mean performance review result - and their total comp.

They sort by total comp, then go down the list and figure out a reason to let that person go. Was there literally anything in your performance review summary they can ding you for? Yes? Phew, that was easy. No? Well, keep looking. "Strategic mismatch for skillset" "too junior, want senior" "too senior, want junior" "role eliminated due to headcount allocated to team being reduced" etc.

So, in the layoff I was privy to, somehow everyone who still had the large lucrative 4-year stock-denominated grants was suddenly gone, and the people who had the newer cash-denominated grants were still there. Meanwhile, several cheaper employees who were perennially underperforming were retained.

Honestly it really soured me on equity grants. It's a game of "heads I win (my company didn't grow and i got to pay you peanuts), tails you lose (my company grew and now i can just fire you and re-hire someone with a cheaper grant so you can't vest those now-very-lucrative appreciated shares)".

"serve [seemingly] <50ms latency N:N coordination between thousands of clients, sometimes who are all literally in the same place (events, cities etc) expecting to observe their and other users actions ~immediately"

This still sounds like a really hard problem, I can't imagine trying to do it 20 years ago. (WoW turns 20 in Nov, and it wasn't the first, though perhaps the first to reach such supercilious scale?)

Same. When we say "virtually intact", I'm guessing that means, aside from the torpedo that went through the hull?

"It caught fire, exploded and then disappeared beneath the murky waters of the North Sea off north-east Scotland in less than eight minutes."

So I wonder how much there is

"“All the brass work on the wreck, like the portholes and the breaches for the deck guns, are all still shiny … it’s probably due to the fact that she was just built so well.”"

Seems to be enough left that resembles the ship that it still captivated the finders, instead of just being "we figured out where it went down."

Humanity is going to face a reckoning about free will and agency at some point, I think.

If the gambler is but a slave to their lizard brain, then isn't the murderer too? Surely no-one sits down and performs calculus and determines "I will gamble" or "I will murder", they both come from an impairment of our higher senses of reasoning by our baser instincts of rage or pleasure.

I'm obviously not advocating for murder, to be clear. But maybe if we better understand our position philosophically, maybe we'll end up with less brutal prisons ("they're not in here because they are ontologically evil, but because their hardware predisposes them to harm others and we have to contain them for the good of the many") and more sympathetic/realistic laws that focus on controlling harm and are less caught up in vague notions of "freedom" (the freedom to have your hardware bugs exploited by gambling companies?) that are too shallow in the face of a better philosophical understanding of what free will and agency look like for creatures whose programming is primarily informed by a billion years of evolution to crave orgasms and sugar.

The author mentioned significantly more notable prod/dev differences than the posthog API key, which I suspect is where they looked first and second. So no, not an obvious place to start.

This is going to come off as tangential at first, but I am beginning to think that the next great human progress will not be engineering, or science, but philosophy.

We discovered nuclear fission in the 40s. We can fix atmospheric nitrogen into industrial fertilizer. We communicate at the speed of light. We can manufacture things so absurdly complicated and with such small tolerances that we can do everything from microelectronics to spaceflight. We can and do literally farm in deserts and we do alchemy as a power source!

So how is it that our primary means of collaboration dates to antiquity and potentially into prehistory? Here I specifically mean the mechanism of prices and currency exchange.

We refined it somewhat at various points - we layered powerful abstractions onto it with the invention of the corporation and securitized ownership thereof; we gave it a macro structure with capitalism and free markets, to socialize the concepts we wanted people to engage with. But at the end of the day, the system works because it is the most accepting of reality - it is a system that reinforces itself when people are driven to try to exploit it, instead of falling apart. Indeed, it reinforces almost too well - most of our intervention into it takes the form of "nudging" local minima - breaking up monopolies, enforcing minimum qualities, etc.

So, we have this system that has been fundamentally the same. And to my perception, we have two ways out: we either Star Trek our way to complete abundance, to where the cost of everything is ~0 so everyone might as well be given enough. Or - we decide that even though it is not free, it is time that everyone has enough. And given we've managed to literally perform alchemy and actual biblical miracles of agriculture, and we're still not really much closer, I hesitate to say that anything but the conversion of energy to highly-structured matter - a la Star Trek replicators - will make notable progress here.

So I think that the next big step forward will be philosophical. We need to take this urge that the article mentions - where people see the 90 year old working in the street, say "this is wrong", and correct it - and we need to make it so that people believe and live it axiomatically. We need to say - even though I cannot see them, and they may not look like me or think like me, they should have enough.

>Amazon

Guarantee you these are lots of bootlegs and other-region copies behind resold. So probably Amazon is worst for the artists because even the labels are getting cheated there.

>Bandcamp

As I understand it, this is (was?) one of the few places an artist could still get a good deal. Bandcamp positions itself more as a marketplace and takes (iirc) 16ish percent. Let me check that against their website:

"when a fan buys something on Bandcamp, an average of 82% of the money goes to you" (https://bandcamp.com/artists?from=footer)

So yeah, they get a lot of the niche weird music. I buy a lot of NWOTHM music off there for this reason.

It's demonstrated in a very digestible manner in this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1732/

"Why is an async model better than using OS threads for an I/O bound workload?"

Because evented/callback-driven code is a nightmare to reason about and breaks lots of very basic tools, like the humble stack trace.

Another big thing for me is resource management - try/finally don't work across callback boundaries, but do work within a virtual thread. I recently ported a netty-based evented system to virtual threads and a very long-standing issue - resource leakage - turned into one very nice try/finally block.

"why does everybody here think that imgur is a failure"

Because what everyone on the internet wants is a place that will just friggin hold images and respond to HTTP requests with that image

"in light of OP's stated goals"

because op seems to want to build a sustainable business, but at a certain scale it just becomes unsustainable because you become a CDN that is paid for per-seat. So they will inevitably need to either not scale (which makes them not what the internet wants), or scale by either becoming Cloudflare or becoming a social networking site, so that they can either pay their bills via usage-based-billing or pay their bills via sweaty VC money.

Don't we pretty much understand stars though? Big ball of gas, hydrogen fusion, etc. Are there any unaccounted energy outflows that would leave room for something like this?

The main reason we look at black holes so hard is because quantum mechanics can't describe gravity (yet) and general relativity just shrugs and says "I don't do inside event horizons, buddy, but why do you care? You can't even experiment inside one". So it's one of those head-scratchers where the math isn't really helping us figure out _what_ is going on, and the darn things are really hard to observe.

There gets to be a certain point where we simply have to accept that while yes, technically one could simply not own a TV (increasingly difficult to find a DumbTV as opposed to a SmartTV with always-on microphone), any IOT things, a smartphone, etc etc, we cannot reasonably expect someone to not do this. Notably the smartphone, which of the entire list of probably the worst offender, second only to the TV perhaps because of the ick/literally-1984 factor of your TV listening to you.

We practically can't expect people to do without a smartphone. It's how people pay bills, bank, access weather information, etc. And since it's the most-used path, it's also the best-maintained path. Non-smartphone alternatives have already rotted. Have you tried calling into half of those bills you pay via QR code instead of just scanning the code? Try it sometime.

Instead of telling people to just go live on a mountain monastery in Tibet, we could instead simply eat our cake AND have it by just regulating this stuff. Pass privacy laws. Fine people who break them. Samsung, Google, etc will comply rather than not continue to bathe in our ad revenue.

Love the hustle!!! Consider this a successful HN launch my dude. There are far worse fates than the hug of death.

"often heard the narrative from hiring managers over the years that a prospect who's been laid off probably doesn't make a good hire"

While i'm unsurprised to hear that such a sociopathic and non-scientific narrative exists from hiring managers, I'm curious how they find out whether a departure was a layoff. For big companies, sure, you can probably tell that if someone left various tech darlings in late 2022 that it was probably a layoff. But like outside of that, how the heck do you know? Are you googling "$coname layoffs $year" for every entry on a resume you're screening or something? Or are you literally just asking them "tell me why you left each job" and people are for some reason answering honestly?

This just seems really hard to actually pin down unless employees are volunteering the information. Even if you did leave right on a publicly-known layoff date, it seems pretty easy to just explain that "uh yeah they were doing so poorly they laid off X% of people, I left for greener pastures". Or that general sentiment but passed through 1 or 2 layers of word-smithing.

It's clear that huge swathes of physics are deterministic! Or at least anything non-deterministic is on a small-enough order that we can still build rockets and keep clocks on satellites and earth in sync.

And I agree that a world completely free of causality would be a useless world. But I think that a world that is completely closed under physics and completely deterministic isn't compatible with a "free will" that could support a system of ethics, which I think is where a lot of people then want to take the "does free will exist" argument once they figure out the first part. So it's a matter of threading the needle.

Agreed, there are to "steps" we need.

First, we need the universe to not literally just be a function of the previous state and the current time.

Second, we need (and I'm quoting myself from above to illustrate what I meant): "some kind of metaphorical "door" for our soul, or our true selves, or whatever you might call it, to propagate through meaningfully into our consciousnesses".

Lacking the first means there's no way for the second to exist. Supposing the first exists, we then need it to provide some kind of way for the "us" that exists outside of physics or as an emergent phenomenon out of the nondeterministic parts of physics to meaningfully shape what our brain's electrical states make us do.

If we have all of that, we finally have the beginnings of a system in which we can start to try to philosophically assign moral designations to actions and people. Which is think is about 50% of the reason people want free will to exist: so we can punish others for their actions.

(And just to clarify, to anyone not familiar with how people usually debate philosophy. It's all about your presupposed axioms. Things you and your partner agree to be true. This kind of discussion is one that presupposes relatively little, so don't think I'm trying to make political claims about how crime shouldn't be punished or whatever. I'm simply saying that if we presuppose only that the universe is not deterministic, that alone doesn't bring us forward enough to start building a system of ethics.)

Is this not just soft determinism?

I've always felt like soft determinists were just people who really wanted "free will" but couldn't see enough uncertainty in the unexplored realms of physics to see how the universe isn't fully deterministic (if very difficult to simulate or make predictions that match reality beyond a few seconds). So instead they just redefined free will in a "this is fine [room is on fire]" kind of way.

Either the universe is fully deterministic and free will and agency do not exist, and we should be much kinder to people who e.g. commit crimes (they were forced to do it by their brain state, after all).

Or the universe is not fully deterministic, and we are going to eventually find some (or many) fundamental source of non-deterministic behavior.

Now mind you, whether that non-deterministic behavior actually happens in our brains in a way that it provides some kind of metaphorical "door" for our soul, or our true selves, or whatever you might call it, to propagate through meaningfully into our consciousnesses in a way that will make whether we are a sinner or a saint some actual function of whether "we" are "good". Now that remains to be seen.

Wouldn't it be funny if we found that truly non-deterministic behavior happens at the event horizons of black holes, or in the middle of the fusion of a star, or something crazily exotic like that. And definitely doesn't happen at standard temperature and pressure in our brains.

A big part of handling abuse is to recognize that you cannot win - all you can do is better. And a big part of abuse is just raising the bar of sophistication required to abuse you. We went from "any random script kiddie with a gmail account gets infinite accounts easily" to "now someone has to use a custom email domain" (which is easy for us to just banhammer the domain), which both requires sophistication and money. And it makes the banhammer-swing more on par with the amount of effort they have to put in to evade it - banning the domain means go find another domain and pay another registrar fee.

I work at a place that just recently clamped down on this. We decided to normalize the emails so that we have a column in the db like "email" and then also "normalized_email" where normalized_email has a unique key on it too. This way, people can still make their email look like whatever they want, but they also only get 1 per email inbox.

This was all because people were doing abuse more easily by churning lots of accounts while only needing 1 gmail address. Plugging this gap was a huge deal for us in reducing card testing problems.

No mention of `errors.Is` or error wrapping? IMO that's where the pain starts.

I definitely agree that in many programs, when an error happens, you're done, you just blast up the stack and then the error message goes into a sentry report or gets logged etc.

But it's also still quite common to want to treat some error conditions as soft errors, or otherwise handle them differently. Now you're doing errors.Is and engaging with the poorly structured world of error wrapping trees.

Here's one I hit recently. One of my pet peeves is error messages like "unsupported thing". Ok, what thing was unsupported? Very often people just omit this stuff because it requires you to now cat strings, which is sometimes hard or cumbersome depending on the language. So, I changed my code to have the error be "unsupported thing: <thing>".

However, up the call stack, I want to handle ErrUnsupportedThing too. Because maybe there's some reasonable thing I can do to help the user make the thing supported. So I'm calling `errors.Is`. But wait, now I need an `ErrUnsupportedThing` variable to refer to. But each call to fmt.Error creates a new error that isn't `errors.Is`-equivalent to each other.

I ended up reconciling this by making `ErrUnsupportedThing` just be "unsupported thing" and then I wrap it by doing fmt.Errorf("%w: %v", ErrUnsupportedThing, thingType).

But now what if I want to say "ErrUnsupportedThing: <A sub-error that occurred>"? Well, hope you're using a recent version of go, because "%w: %w" only works in go 1.20 and later.

Also the fact that all errors are just "error" instead of being typed errors tends to make people a lot lazier about their error handling in general. In java, if I get a ThingNotSupportedException, I expect to be able to find a getUnsupportedThingType() so that I can explicitly pull it off the string without needing to parse. That's easy in Java, it's a subclass of exception. In go, now you're writing a "subclass" struct to implement error's interface, tacking on extra struct fields and stuff, and since nobody ever actually types their return values more explicitly than `error`, you're now doing casting/duck-typing to pull that information out. Etc.

I guess let me put it this way. Go errors are good for 80% of errors and fine for 95%. That's great. But the easy code is already easy! What irks me is when it breaks down when I get to the code that's actually a bit tricky to handle errors for. The type system, the error system, and everything is just like "wow good luck you're on your own". Whereas python/java/etc have my back here.

If you're asking if sexism in the industry still exists, yes, it does.

I worked for a company that had 0 female programmers. "How curious", I thought as a fresh grad, "that while there were some women in my CS classes, there were none at the company". "Well, there are only 30-40 of us, so it must simply be a quirk of statistics."

Yeah no, the owner didn't think women could handle production systems so he only hired men. He told us this directly at lunch one day. He looks exactly how you're probably imagining he looks based on that statement. His wife made him give me a bigger bonus one year because at a company dinner, I made the mistake of sitting next to her because I didn't recognize who she was, and mentioned (over the course of dinner) that my wife and I wanted 3 kids and she was going to be a stay-at-home mother. I worked there for far too long because I was a new grad who hadn't ever left a job before.

It being so obvious at my first job was honestly a good wake-up call, because now that my generic white male illusion that it's all in the past was soundly shattered, I see it's more insidious forms. Like at my next job, how the one woman on our team was suspiciously the only one who took longer than 2 years to get promoted from [mid-level eng] to [career level / sr eng]. I don't think that one was nearly as explicit, but I no longer sit here and go "hmm how curious that the only woman is the only one who didn't fit the pattern". It's because of unconscious biases in the promotion review panels.

Same energy as sqlite using etilqs as their file extension for no reason other than to mildly amuse onlookers who "know" and to deter the uninitiated from sending them unearned complaints.