nameless912

I know this isn't what you meant, but "the grift that keeps on griving" gave me an excellent laugh.

This seems unsurprising? I'm sure you incur similar risks from smoking or drinking alcohol or large amounts of caffeine on a dailiy basis. The thing is, at least in my small sample size of 10 or so friends who use pot with any frequency, maybe one or two of them use on a daily or near-daily basis. Just about everyone else uses occasionally or socially. This study doesn't seem to make any strong conclusions about this usage pattern, and I would imagine that it's no worse than any other frequently used substance. Again, I don't have a lot of evidence for this beyond anecdotal, but I wouldn't take this as clear evidence that recreational marijuana is doing more harm than good.

Right, because it's the streamer's JOB to be an entertainer. There's no misaligned incentives here, it's just like how people playing pickup basketball aren't "playing to earn" and can still enjoy an NBA game.

Yik Yak was too good and pure for this world. Or maybe too bad and degenerate. Either way I guess.

But the reboot was just sad! Who in their right mind thought they would be able to revive that cultural moment and moderate the shit out of it?

Literally exactly this is what I keep trying to tell my (mostly former at this point) friends who are super into blockchain gaming. The fact that some silicon valley suit put $x million into a project doesn't mean that it has any viability to gamers, who are the most fun-seeking users in the universe. No one wants to "play to earn", no one wants to "invest in their game", they just want to play and have fun.

I think Decentraland is a great microcosm of this problem, as TFA states, but there are a thousand other examples of blockchain gaming where the blockchain integration is the main selling point, not the fun of the actual game. And when you talk to these weirdos, their understanding of gamers and the gaming industry is completely detached from reality. Most of the games in Decentraland are at best idle clickers that would have taken normal game developers a weekend of $SUBSTANCE-induced haze to develop, and yet they're getting millions of dollars of investment from two sources: ghoulish VCs who think that gamers can be reduced to skinner box robots, and crypto speculators who know equally little about gaming but a lot more about the human behavior of other crypto speculators. The whole thing just makes me sad, because gaming is a fascinating industry that I am privileged to be a part of, and I believe there is still a lot of innovation to be had in the space. But VC-driven nonsense like this is not it.

I think the meltdown would have been less dramatic had it not been for softbank inflating their valuation to gargantuan size for basically no reason.

I was in a WeWork in London on the day of the original Softbank-induced meltdown 4 years ago. It was surreal to be in a building that you weren't sure still operated as a business, with employees who were unsure if they were in fact still employed. We were all taking bets on how many days it would take for us to be kicked out of the office, and our company immediately found us a hotel conference suite to rent while the office situation was sorted out. Of course, we were never evicted and WeWork somehow survived, but it was weird.

I've worked with a "big brain type system shaman" before. If anything, this is a very kind and charitable analysis. People who are obsessed with type hierarchies are _insufferable_ to work with, and their justifications often live in the land of "well what if"'s and "but that's not _sound_"'s. A lot of the enshittification that's induced by type systems comes from folks who believe that simply with enough types they will be able to completely prevent bugs, and that's just not true.

I've never understood peoples' obsession with matching appliances for this exact reason. No, I don't want my fridge, microwave, stove, and dishwasher to come from the same manufacturer and make the same noises, thank you very much.

Lodge and Pyrex are probably not the best examples - Lodge cast iron has gone down the tubes recently, making thinner pans with worse factory coatings, and Pyrex switched away from the high quality borosilicate glass they had used for decades to a cheaper formulation recently.

Patagonia has even lowered their standards somewhat - I know a guy who bikes to work every day in Seattle and has used the same Patagonia waterproof panniers for something like 15 years, and I would be willing to bet that new ones are more cheaply made and less waterproof, while costing more.

As someone who works at a competitor of Apple TV, I truly don't understand the product. They don't go out of their way to make it clear you can watch Apple TV on most major devices,and they support fewer set top boxes/devices than their competitors. Part of the reason Netflix and Hulu have such good market penetration is because they make it clear you can use their product on your TV. Netflix (disclaimer: my employer, my views not company's, etc. etc. etc.) is particularly notorious for running on almost literally everything, including cable boxes and the like. Apple TV may or may not do this, but it is marketed as and feels like a much more exclusive service, hence the (erroneous, but totally understandable given Apple's hostility to other platforms) notion that Apple TV is only available on their devices.

I dunno, maybe it's a loss leader/retention play, but it's a deeply strange product to me. Right up there with HBO Max dropping the only part of their brand that anyone recognized.

That's fine, admirable even! But EVs have other problems: mining lithium and other metals for batteries is still terrible for the environment, and other battery technologies are not yet promising enough to replace them. Not to mention that electric cars are still cars, so we still have tire and brake dust, etc. Less than before, of course, but they still exist.

This is kind of like saying the bullet didn't kill you, the loss of blood did. It's a distinction without a difference.

You know what would save more lives? better public transit. Electric cars don't solve for car accidents and pedestrian strikes.

Yes, this is a bit of a non-sequitur, but electric cars continue to feel like an incremental improvement at best; as someone else mentioned - we're exchanging where the carbon production happens unless we dramatically reduce our fossil fuel usage for power generation. And that doesn't solve the accessibility and affordability problems of car-based transit.

> I don’t even hate the Go 3 that much.

What ringing praise. Yikes, this review is worse than if they had just said "I hate this thing and it has no redeeming qualities".

It remains extremely strange to me that we have our school boards be largely totally non-professional laypeople in the US. Obviously there's no absolute requirement that you be a "professional" for almost any elected position in the US, but school boards are one of those situations, like judges and comptrollers, where it seems like there should be some basic qualifications for running. Especially because many of the folks elected to school boards are either 1) crazies with a bone to pick with a specific teacher/administrator/school or 2) moderately ambitious ladder climbers hoping to launch their political careers without having to work too hard.

Not when the primary asset of the business appreciates on its own. The fact that the building itself is an investment that can appreciate in value irrespective of its usage means that the incentives are misaligned.

I always love this counterargument to penalty based enforcement in these sorts of situations. "The penalties don't seem to have the desired effect!" Then the natural conclusion is that they aren't high enough.

> No major real estate investor has a thesis of pure speculation

2007 called, they would like to sell you an amazing condo development in Naples, FL.

Another option that I really like is forcing rent control on landlords who don't have at least 80% occupancy. Don't want to reduce your rents to market rate? Fine, the law will do that for you.

One big source of apartments being too expensive to rent is investment companies swooping in to buy apartment buildings, hoping the _building itself_ will appreciate in value, so that they can then sell it later at a profit. In this model, it's actually against the owner's interest to rent apartments because renters inevitably cause damage that needs fixing, which cuts into the owner's bottom line and makes the building less resellable. So, the solution is to charge exorbitant, insane above market rents; a small number of fools with more money than sense will rent at that price, and that will help cover loan interest costs, etc. in the meantime. With enough starting capital, renting to a few tenants at very high prices is a much better investment than renting to many tenants at market rates. You just hope that the building appreciates by a large margin in the next X years while your few, wealthy tenants pay your interest, and then you can sell the whole building to the next investor.

Now, is this ethical? Abso-fucking-lutely not. Not only is it basically a bigger fool scam, it takes an extremely valuable and important commodity (housing) out of the market for no reason other than financial gain. I'm of the opinion that apartment buildings should be required to maintain 80% occupancy or risk having their apartments go rent controlled; if you aren't willing to rent at market rates in order to provide the service you claim to provide, you're taking housing away from people who need it, and you should be punished for it. Sure, you can argue that real estate is an investment and therefore these ghouls have the right to do this, but IMO becoming a landlord should come with the social responsibility to _increase_ housing supply and availability, not decrease it. If you're not willing to play by those rules you shouldn't be allowed to participate in the market.

I think I said this in another comment, but I'm not shitting on Spanner or DDB's right to exist here. Obviously, there are _some_ problems for which a globally distributed ACID compliant SQL-compatible database are useful. However, those problems are few and far between, and many/most of them exist at companies like Google. The fact is your average small to medium size enterprise doesn't need and doesn't benefit from DDB/Spanner, but "enterprise architects" love to push them for some ungodly reason.

Sure. Spanner is expensive, and your primary job as an engineer (if you work for an enterprise like most of us do) is to generate business value. So, if nothing else, you will run into the cost problems of Spanner. There are also other problems; iirc both DynamoDB and Spanner shard their key spaces, and each shard gets the same quota, and the key space shards all have to be the same size. This means that even though you might have paid for 1000rps, for example, that RPS volume is divided across all your shards, so if you have one part of the key space that gets way more volume than another you end up eating up the fractional capacity of that shard way faster than you intend and you have to either overprovision or queue requests, both of which are not ideal.

At a previous job, we ended up creating a very complicated write through cache system in front of spanner that dynamically added memory/CPU capacity as needed to prevent hot shards; our application was extremely read heavy, and writes were relatively low RPS, so this ended up working OK, but we were paying tens of thousands of dollars a month for Spanner plus tens of thousands of dollars a month for all the compute sitting in front of it. I don't think we ended up doing much better than if we had bitten the bullet and run clustered Postgres because our write volume ended up being just a few hundred RPS, even though the read volume was 1000x that. Postgres behind this cache system would have handled the load just as well and cost less than half as much.

The other thing that frustrates me personally about Spanner is that Google's docs are incomplete (as usual); there are lots of performance gotchas like this that exist throughout the entire service, and they aren't clearly documented (unlike, to their credit, AWS with Dynamo, who explains this entire problem very clearly and has an [expensive] prebuilt solution for it in the form of the DynamoDB accelerator).

I don't think the API you interface with fundamentally changes the point that Spanner is hard to recommend from an engineering perspective at anything except the absolute most massive of scales, and even then it will create nearly as many problems as it solves. I'm not saying spanner is _wrong_ or shouldn't exist, but it's very difficult to be in the position where Spanner is the critical key to your application's success and not replaceable by <insert other, cheaper database here>.

I said this in another comment, but I have seen _two_ applications in my career that actually had a request load that might warrant something like one of these databases. One was an application with double digit million MAU and thousands of RPS on a very shardable data set, which fit Spanner's ideal access pattern and performance profile pretty well, but we paid an absolute arm and a leg for the privilege and ended up implementing a distributed cache in front of Spanner to reduce costs. The other just kept the data set in memory and flushed to disk/S3 backup periodically because in that case liveness was more important than completeness.

In the first case, the database created as many problems as it solved (which is true of any large application running at scale; your data store will _always_ be suboptimal). A fancy, expensive NoSQL database won't save you from solving hard engineering problems. At smaller scales (on the order of tens-hundreds of RPS), it's hard to go wrong with any established SQL (or open source NoSQL if that floats your boat) database, and IMO Postgres is the most stable and best bang for your engineering buck feature wise.

My point is that I've seen very, very few situations (I can think of two in my entire career so far) where a "hyperscale NoSQL database" was actually the right choice to solve the problem. I find that a lot of folks turn to these databases for imagined scale needs, not actual hard problems that need solving.

Gasp, a shill??

I totally believe you, I just can't see how it becomes easier than chucking a container on Fargate or something. Maybe I've just been scarred by lambda rat's nests in the past.

But at low request volumes, either is a rounding error to a medium size enterprise, and for personal projects IMO Lambda is a huge PITA.

Like, I don't want to fanboy, but it's _hard_ to find a use case that postgres can't handle at small to medium (i.e. 90% of projects) scale.

Not to be that guy, but why lambdas? I'm genuinely curious. I've never found the "cost savings" (big air quotes) worth it in comparison to the increased configuration/permissions complexity. Especially when Fargate exists, where you can just throw a docker container at AWS, what do Lambdas add? The zero scaling?