sakoht

Narratives that blame "greed" and other kinds of non-egalitarian behavior seem to forget that humans are animals. We should recognize that expecting organized forethought across a species, and organized ethical behavior is expecting something never, ever, ever seen before in nature.

There are no animals, besides us, that ideate about anything except benefit to themselves and their offspring. However "bad" we are, we are the sole species that has spent a full single second of its existence trying to be "good" instead of just eating and fing and killing our way to the next day, possibly feeding the animal next-to us to our lovely offspring. For every other animal, killing an adjacent creature to take what they have is exactly is routine, and they are unapologetic.

It is great to see humanity become more impact-aware, and I have high hopes for an even more enlightened future, but it is somewhat absurd to presume that honesty, kindness, and altruistic thinking are somehow the baseline because that is the way we would like it. We imagine that something is "wrong" when they aren't happening. These are the default conditions. Every time a human departs from "hand-to-mouth", and from rationalizing deaths of the weak is a valiant leap from natural instincts.

By these measures, humanity's response has been unprecedented. The coordination, however flawed, has never been seen like this in the history of this world or any other that we have seen. It is only the grandiosity of our fantasies about what we are that lets us tell these alternate stories.

The SBA has set the interest rate on the loans to a very low level. Low interest on a house isn't bad b/c it can go 15-30 years and has closing costs. A low interest rate short term loan probably doesn't cover the legwork for the banks to manage it. So they really don't want to. And even though the govt is securing them, it is even more paperwork when a bunch of companies default and need to be processed.

It's sad that even the BBC allows people who don't know what they are talking about to spread propaganda, not even knowing it. It kills everything the size of a virus because of its size, not some magical attributes the virus may or may not have. The other comments show three recent scientific publications in top-tier journals showing the narrow wavelength (222nm) that doesn't harm human skin or eyes.

The last time I moved a large codebase from git to svn the surprising thing for me was that a git clone was _smaller_ even though it had all of the history, than svn was holding only truncated history. Everything runs faster, and the tooling is better. They will feel like they traded their gocart for a Ferrari.

A lot of people can write code, but on the path to making a shippable product a ton of programmers don’t have clarity on “what to write next” to arrive at the finish line. It often seems like a product is 80 or 90 percent done, but by the time it is actually shippable as a product, 2x or 4x or more work will be done, and major revisions of the code will happen to reach that point. The real 10x programmers are the ones that have done this enough times that they don’t get distracted doing naive things that will be discarded and redone as often.

I wonder if this study looked at a lot of programmers who just fix bugs or add well-defined features to apps, or really distinguish between those people and people who can build shippable products from ideas.

Often when someone says they want more self-esteem, they want to stop feeling bad. You have an ugly idea of who you are and think that replacing it with a not-ugly version would be good. People try to solve the problem by building themselves up, in practical ways in reality or in their minds. Then they chase a bunch of external things in order to keep that esteem up when it seems to work for a while.

If you get into a healthy space, though, you realize you will always feel a little bad/good about circumstances, but your _core_ sense of "feeling good" doesn't need to be connected to that stuff. It's actually not. Mostly, you can shed the major part of depression, anxiety, and worrying about your "self" and whether it is esteemed, just by changing how you breath, how your spine is positioned, and a few other things that can be done pretty quickly. Quickly, but lots of practice makes it a lot better.

I recommend taking the Inner Engineering program at ishafoundation.org. It is basically meditation and "yoga", but there is not really the "exercise" thing that people do in the US. I'm not into New Age things, or trying to have "beliefs", and certainly not interested in following gurus or donating money to anyone. I spent 4 days at their ashram and got a set of skills over a year ago that makes everything in life easier. Nobody ever tried to sell me anything afterward. I know 4 other people closely who have done it, and kept with it for years afterward, and met a few dozen others from the class that I keep up with. I know they have had classes in the Bay Area in the last year too, if India is a bit far away. I walked out of the first day of class there "in the zone" and spent a ton of time there afterward. It's really great.

I am not a lawyer, so this is merely a speculative guess:

Currently, if they technically own the code, your open-sourcing it isn’t valid. You can put an Apache license in the repo, but you can’t legally give a license to others to use something you don’t actually own.

So the code is not really open source until someone puts that license on it with company authority. It is just public.

It sounds like this product competes with their other products. Even if they didn’t ask you to turn over control you would have problems working for them during the day, competing with them in the evening. Possibly liability even.

If you want control, and want to use it to do things they don’t want, you probably have to leave the company.

If you are going to leave, it seems you might turn over the repo to them to avoid legal trouble, and then be sure that someone else at the coming makes the open-source status official. Then you or others can fork it. But it seems you should only do further work on the fork if and after leaving.

Again this should not be construed as real legal advice as I am not a lawyer.

The exciting thing if you are a hiring manager is that, as long as there is talent that is being passed-over for the wrong reasons, you can beat your competitors in one of the most challenging ares of building a compay by being good at avoiding this error. A friend noted recently that a compounding benefit of hiring a gender-balanced team early is you won't lose female talent you find later when they refuse to join a team of all guys. But you have to be careful too, to not hire someone just because they fit a social profile you want more of on the team. Talented women don't want to be on a team where all of the women there were "tossed a softball". It's not only condescending, but it fosters the bias it intends to combat. Whoever is at fault, it is that there is a gender imbalance is worthy of debate. But addressing it is best viewed as opportunity, not an act of charity, if seen through the right lens.

Depending on your state, laws will work more/less in your favor. California law makes it hard for a company to sue you unless you explicitly steal IP and/or are a founder. Even non-competes don't hold up as well. If you work as a contractor attempt to get your contracts to be governed by CA law.

That used to be true before it was sold in 2016 to a Chinese conglomerate. As noted above, the Chinese removed VPN apps from the Apple app store, but they left this one. Which means it's compromised.

The real problem is that any app I run accesss all files I own with equal permissions. App1 and App2 shouldn’t write their data to my home, or read each other’s data, or, please, be able to write each other’s data.

A video game can read my tax forms. WTF.

Mobile & tablet OSs solve this. Everything has to follow.

Until then, basically every app should run in a docker container. Then it can do what it wants.

There is a natural repercussion for being a manager who passes on talent, and hires something less. You lose. Unless you are in a company where being good doesn't make a difference.

Working in a company that hires poorly is its own punishment. Dodge the bullet.

I'm 45 and I know a bunch of people far older than me who are highly-valued on their teams. Even in Silicon Valley I found younger engineers enjoy working with super-experienced people _IF_ those years actually translated to expertise. What you can't do is sit on your ass for decades then expect to be rewarded for treading water when the cozy job at BigCo finally dries up. All of the computing industry gets more competitive each year. Age gives you a head start if you are _actually_ using the time to keep growing, IMO. Often, people get older and get comfy and stop learning, or they lose the ability to related to younger talent on the team, which is just an essential business skill, like it was when you were young and had to relate to older people. And, if you actually have real skills, but a company won't hire you because the leaders think superficially, you should filter them from the list of companies you stake your future on.

Perhaps they can use their new found AI skills to detect and flag propaganda from the tech industry.

"Why are programming environments still so primitive?"

Try JetBrains tools (IntelliJ,Pycharm and kin). I still use vim to edit from a shell, but the JetBrians suite is higher-order coding.

Editing a function while debugging it was available in VB in the 90s. Drag the execution arrow to code you have already run, rewrite it, and step-over.

"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?"

Because we are lying about inflation. It's not a conspiracy, just a mutually agreed-to delusion. By pretending inflation is lower than it is, the poor feel like they are standing still instead of sinking ...though instinctively they know. And the people just keeping up get to feel richer. Since technology and efficiency improve, the people staying in the same place have cooler things.

If inflation were reported correctly, average would see their paychecks dropping as wealth and power consolidate elsewhere. There is no interest in creating alarm around this fact. Instead the public is distracted by social drama, and political discourse consumed by things that do not affect the real shift in power.

To have a moat, they just need sufficient software/human network/infrastructure/legal infrastructure that competing requires too much investment. All of these things are a PITA, and not immediately replicable by fresh local competitors, even without the self-driving cars.

The self-driving cars and consistent platform could seal the deal against the small players entering.

That's not to say their valuation is correct, or anything. :)

Get good at building excellent front-ends.

I have been doing scalable back-end systems for years and can tackle interesting problems quickly. But, with UI work, I am like an infant with crayons. It takes too long to go from desire to product.

Hah. Good to know how this happens. I thought it was an personal insider convo...