papito

It's hit and miss, but the good episodes are worth listening to.

And of course there is the Steven Seagal two-parter, which is not only one of the best episodes of Behind The Bastards - it's one of the best podcast episode sets ever.

People should read that lawsuit. It's insane.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90898558/twitter-lawsuit-new-det...

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THE TOILET

The lawsuit alleges that Boring Company CEO Steve Davis told plaintiff Joseph Killian, a 12-year Twitter veteran who oversaw office design, that Musk wanted to add a bathroom next to his office, so he didn't need to wake his security team (who escorted him everywhere in the building) when he needed to relieve himself in the middle of the night. Killian says he promised to jump right on that, but warned it would take time to get the permits approved.

Davis, the suit alleges, told him not to get the permits saying, "we don't have to follow those rules." When told no licensed plumber would do the job without a permit, Davis allegedly told Killian to hire an unlicensed plumber instead, which would have been a violation of the lease.

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There is acknowledging that many tech companies are bloated - and then there is Elon Musk.

Well, there WAS Deja that Google bought - and then shut down.

What happened to "freedom of speech, not freedom of reach"? It's like Musk is sitting there proactively trying to destroy his investment.

Think of it as writing in a natural language. You are writing a story that someone else has to read and follow. The compiler will know what you mean if you use the the right words, but you are really not writing the code for the compiler - you are writing it for other people.

Clarity is more important than performance, and in many cases the performance gain is imaginary in the first place.

Every time I write code and tell myself "I will just keep in the back of my mind why I did that", I know I am writing bad code. There should be no open loops, you should not have hidden knowledge in your brain about how the code works.

If it was all just Capitalism, we'd still be working six-day weeks without health insurance alongside our kids. There has to be a trade-off between satisfying some people's hunger for profit and, well - civilization itself.

Of course not, I was going to say that, actually - they live on protected, isolated compounds. Logically they should not care about what is happening elsewhere, right? But they do, just not the stuff in their backyard. There are woke people in New York, you see! And they are the real concern.

What amazes me is that the Valley gazillionaires are not spending their fortunes to fix their own habitat. They can just BUY the city government they want.

Instead, they are shoving mountains of cash to turn the United States into some perverted libertarian fantasy, where the government is weak, paralyzed, ineffectual, and out of their way OH WAIT.

There is a solid case to be made that many tech companies are ridiculously bloated, trying to show "growth" to VCs by increasing the headcount and not the users (who are defined in rather shady and morally/legally questionable ways), but, uh, this is not it.

The argument is that basic human decency is "woke". Did I get the gist of it?

I once installed Win 98 SE for funzies in a virtual machine, around 2016 - couldn't browse the web because Internet Explorer could not do HTTPS.

So why the tantrum? Georges Soros really sticks in his craw? What happened?

Musk literally said on CNBC a few hours ago that he doesn't care if his antics cost him money. Soros divested from this wildcard, and now the wildcard is hysterical that he is losing money?

And now Musk is spewing nonsense about Bellingcat. The guy is diving really deep into the dumpsters of the Internet to dig up this garbage, but then again - he is looking for confirmation of what he wants to believe in.

As the guy who has kids with female employees in the office outside of his relationships, I guess I know why he wants employees nearby, eh.

Also - very RICH about the moral thing. The Edgelord who prides himself on spitting on rules and norms has something to teach us about morality, you see.

Are you positive that the massages disappear from your device AND from the servers?

These companies notoriously do not delete anything ever. I am sure that even the things they are required to delete by law are removed, compressed and stashed somewhere.

It's not "move fast and break things", he is just a horrible manager. Musk is a "big ideas guy", and he is good at pushing people to the breaking point to achieve those, but you have to keep him away from the important dials - like they do over at SpaceX and to some extent at Tesla.

Him micromanaging a business is a death knell. The guy is probably awake all the time from uppers, and you don't make good decisions where you are sleep-deprived.

Don't get attached to your code, ever. You are not building the Pyramids of Giza, no one will study your work 3000 years from now, or 15, for that matter.

ALL of your code will be dead in a few years. The company goes under, or some punk CTO comes in and commands a "full rewrite ASAP!". Even with normal evolution and refactoring, your original work will be unrecognizable.

Either way, you take experience and friendships from your employment, you are not going to be the Picasso of software engineering.

I support the right of businesses to make decisions of that kind, but I do not have to agree with them.

As opposed to shrieking "bloody murder, the commies are coming for our tweets, are they going to shoot us next, we are being muzzled." The drama that came with a business decision was just over-the-top.

So if you think is fine, okay, but I don't want to hear an outrage ever again about someone being deplatformed. It's not against the law or the Constitution.

I used it to write a cover letter. Saved me a whole day! I hate writing cover letters. And of course I had to read it to make sure I was not a COBOL expert.

Non-native speakers use ChatGPT to fix the grammar, for example, but you would have to actually read it and check it.

If you are going to use ChatGPT for writing, you would have to hire an army of fact-checkers, because it can literally fake citations.

The courts ruled that a bakery can deny a gay couple a cake. Trump was denied his gay cake. What is the problem?

All that outrage and righteous indignation, and for what? to do a 180 and claim that "Twitter is just a cold-hearted business, free speech or not"? Really? Any reflecting on THAT?

I don't think that saying vile and racist things is helping his business. The only motives he seems to be having are those of a 12-year-old craving constant attention.

Right. It did bother me. Jerry is just NOT a good actor, but the rest of the cast carried it.

On how the endings converged:

"I’d like to say it worked organically or it worked from going backwards, but it worked and didn’t work in all of those ways. It never really happened the same way twice. A couple of times, I would think that I had it down pat, like in the episode with Teri Hatcher, “The Implant.” I had stories, but I also started off with four or five really great scenes. They had nothing to do with each other, but I knew they would make great scenes, so I started finding a way of mating them together. That episode came out great, so I thought that that was the way I would always do it. It never worked that way again. The process of that was pretty much a struggle every time."

https://www.vulture.com/2014/07/classic-seinfeld-episodes-wr...

On reading The Contest:

"David: As soon as the read-through started, the laughs were huge. Big, satisfying laughs. I would glance at [the executives’] faces and they seemed to be enjoying it. You could sense it was a very special show. Then we all walked back to our office afterwards and I think one or two NBC executives were there and they had nothing. They just said, “Very funny.” And I was shocked.

Littlefield: They read it and it was hilarious. And Rick, as an executive for NBC, knew, “Uh-oh, shit’s going to hit the fan.” The broadcast standards executive who was there, was like, “What the fuck?” And Rick was like, “I didn’t know!”

https://www.vulture.com/2017/10/seinfeld-the-contest-oral-hi...

GORDON BELL, ADAM! That was a great episode. The most amazing thing to me was how this guy was just messing around, a compression hobbyist, if you will - and then he is being courted by FAANG companies. He just walked into it, almost by accident.

I work in VMWare Fusion on a Mac, in a Mint guest OS, and zipping these huge instances for backup will take forever with a single core. Pigz punishes all 12 cores on my Mac mini and saves me a ton of time.

Perhaps everyone should stop complaining and be thankful for a chill morning. You can't create a PR right now - go get a pastry and some fresh air. Be in the moment for once. It's beautiful outside*

* Where I am

One way to run out of cash is to hire 50 expensive devs to build a microservices hairball with Kafkas and all the latest toys, as opposed to having 5 devs just knock it out, faster and better, with a single Python app and a Postgres database.

We used to build real-scale systems with a stack of this kind when we had fewer features and less CPU power.

Most companies severely underestimate the complexities of a distributed system and the work that goes into a truly resilient, scalable setup of this kind.

An infrusctructfre of this sort is meant to solve very hard problems, not to make regular problems much harder.