nzmsv

An organization that treats their students with a "your feeble minds won't understand, so let me put some spin on this for you" deserves all the eventual backlash they get.

This is a little ironic...

  - We really don't appreciate bullshit, all it does is erode trust
  
  - No, no, let me explain how bullshit is actually good for you...

I actually think he has a point with the great man theory. What we call a great man is a carefully engineered product and is the result of work of many people. A Steve Jobs or a Napoleon is a head node of a massive computing cluster. Is someone like that necessary? Of course. Would they be powerful at all without all the resources behind them? Not really. And this is sort of what I took away from W&P: Napoleon was a product of his time, and due to circumstances people happened to connect themselves into this giant borg with Napoleon at the helm.

You probably mean War and Peace. You are right, it is an excellent book.

Nobody speaks out against this stuff. People just quit and go to a truly remote friendly place instead.

Next time you are in a conversation about remote work, see if you notice this: the only people who speak up are the ones who say "I can't wait to go to the office". The rest smile and nod. And yet online polls show a very different picture.

Understanding nature is something a lot of people talk about, but it's not obvious to me that it is possible. As in, not possible at all, at exactly the same level as what you are referring to.

Put simply: there are a lot more possible states in a giant universe than in an individual ape's brain, or even in a collective system made up of many such apes. Wouldn't information theory tell us that we can never represent the larger system inside the smaller one? Or if we do represent it, it has to be as a model that is necessarily incomplete?

Someone from Britain would be appalled at how unsafe German plugs are. So it's all relative.

Isn't this what we already do? We don't really understand how brains work, how what we call knowledge is stored, processed, and pruned. Psychology is a lot more immature than ML. Basically we hope that brains work well enough to define for us what "knowledge" means.

I suggest learning more about these western values, where they came from, why, and how long they have been around. I think you will be surprised and find a very enjoyable rabbit hole. One spoiler: most things people consider an inseparable part of their culture (any culture, not just western) are a few generations old at best, and are usually borrowed from another culture.

Shouldn't a company that has a process where a recently hired contractor can lock any phone in the world get some share of the blame?

This is exactly what I am talking about though. Most H1Bs work at sweatshops like Tata and this skews the statistics. For any place one would actually want to work at H1Bs are paid the same as any other engineer.

This is only true for sweatshop-type companies. For places you'd actually want to work there is no difference in comp based on the type of visa someone is on. It's more about, we want to hire this engineer, what legal checkboxes do we need to tick to get them here. Sweatshops do take up the bulk of the H1B quota though, which is what gives this impression.

Another use for these defensive patents is renting them out to smaller companies in licensing agreements should a smaller company find itself party to a patent lawsuit.

It's basically impossible to write any software without infringing on some patent, so it's only a matter of time once a company gains some visibility before a competitor tries to put a damper on their growth with a patent suit. Licensing a portfolio of a few thousand patents for a few years lets a smaller company fight back (since the competitor is almost certainly infringing on some of those garbage patents).

Naively: the price of Bitcoin on April 3 2017 when this blog post was published was around $1100, so the author could have bought 3.68 BTC with his $4050. Even if he sold BTC at the all-time peak of $64863 he'd only make a third of what GitLab options would make.

Cars are heavy things and can kill you even if they move at 5mph: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jun/22/anton-yelchin-d...

By the same token though, everyone on this discussion is jumping to "we must reduce speeds in cities" without doing any analysis of whether the collision would be survivable at the lower speed they are proposing. They just assume they don't need to because they have the moral high ground.

She is Russian too so she must be evil :D

The thing is, the argument against stacking rocks or playing music is intellectually dishonest. Other species have no qualms about modifying their environment. A crow on a tree won't shut up. A squirrel will not decide to carry a nut to a specific location in the name of sustainability. They are perfectly selfish and engaged in a war for survival. That is what species actually do, naturally.

The people who are against music and cairns in parks are not protecting any natural law. They are protecting their specific terraforming project, a park. It is driven by a purely human concept of "sustainability" and cannot possibly be something that existed in a world without humans.

Now, that is a nice terraforming project they are protecting (notice how "nice" is another human concept?) We also tend to spend a lot of energy protecting species that trigger the same neural pathways in our brains as human babies, even if the species would most likely go extinct without our intervention (pandas).

What environmentalism actually does is act as a brake on our other terraforming projects, allowing us to go on terraforming longer and not turn our environment into something inhospitable. But even that is entirely anthropocentric.

Sure, and I like my nature walks as much as the next person. I just find it weird that after pushing animals into what amounts to a reservation and doing as we please to the environment outside of these carefully drafted borders we worry so much about a stack of rocks. You know, a squirrel can carry an acorn around too and have an effect on where an oak tree will grow. The only way to not affect the environment is to not exist. The so-called home for these animals is as much our artificial creation as a factory or a nuclear power plant.

This concept is a bit weird if you think about it though. This is about Homo sapiens enjoying a model (according to Homo sapiens) of a world where Homo sapiens does not exist. This model world is confined to precise borders defined by Homo sapiens and other Homo sapiens are expected to play along and maintain this illusion. We Homo sapiens call that "nature" and love to drive there in our cars and walk around.

So only non-human animals are allowed to interact with the environment? Humans are not part of nature?

But sitting in a cubicle can be bad for you even if it helps your productivity metrics in the short term.

All you need to know about requiring work from an office is this: the people selling the supposed benefits of increased collaboration, creativity, and productivity do not themselves work this way. There is no CEO or VC who spends their entire day sitting in a cubicle, even if they have a token one.

In summary, we should replace one impossible and nebulous goal ("infinite growth") with another ("post-scarcity society"). Human societies seem to be organized around chasing dangling carrots like these as a method to steer resources, but make no mistake: the kind of carrot that is dangled makes little difference.

The article talks about Communism, but fails to mention that the USSR did not consider itself to be Communist. Rather, all the inhabitants were working on "building Communism" and once achieved everyone in the world would enjoy a post-scarcity society. Surely such a grand goal justified poor living condition - that are temporary anyway? Don't you believe in the vision of the party?

You clearly invented the second paragraph: I can point out that gig worker and WFH employees coexist presently, and they are on different levels in the "model". I'm imagining that it has to be viewed through a sliding window.

In any case, it's cute. Lighten up a bit.

I guess we have met different subsets of engineers :)

I wish people were more open to learning more languages. A good DSL can be amazingly expressive. But you are correct in pointing out that gluing languages together is a pain, and it's a good reminder. Lesson learned ;)

I guess it's all the standard trouble with DSLs: poor tooling integration, having to work at different layers.

An IDE that understood SQL would probably mitigate almost all opposition and yet nobody came up with one after all these years. So I guess the standard DSL defense doesn't really doesn't work.

All right, point taken, I'll take my downvotes and go home :) I don't use an IDE and most people I work with don't either. But this is a useful reminder that the world can be very different outside of one's bubble.

A number of specialists in the field of databases got together and designed a DSL specifically for working with databases. It's actually a pretty good fit for its domain and is reasonably well designed. It's also pretty simple (it's even right in the name).

Then a bunch of non-specialists said "we don't want to use more than one language" and came up with some hacks to write DB queries in languages that were never designed for that. The hacky stuff actually ends up generating the proper query language behind the scenes, poorly.

One would wonder why would anyone prefer the hacks, but the appeal of using one language for everything is strong. This is also why DSLs never took off in general despite promising to significantly lower the cognitive load due to being a better fit for the problem domain. At least with most DSLs there are usually additional reasons not to use them: the implementation is usually not as good as the popular languages. This is not true for SQL, and yet is suffers from the same problem.

Interestingly, this very question follows the same mold: it presupposes that Quora has failed :)

People interested in economics and earning more than 150k are increasingly not on Facebook much, if at all. The Economist actually has a much more targeted audience. FB caters to the lowest common denominator.