shalmanese

Did you really name your breakaway republic Sealand'); DROP TABLE Countries;--?

For a different visa, not the ETA.

The Australian ETA process, on the other hand, actually can only be done via an Android or iOS mobile app: https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-li...

I was so stunned I was like, surely this must violate some government rule around universal access and service? But I guess not.

What's more, the app is so buggy reddit is filled with support cases of people not being able to complete the process in time and sometimes having to forfeit hundreds of dollars worth of tickets: https://www.reddit.com/r/AusVisa/comments/1jh2olm/having_an_...

The advice literally boils down to, some models of iPhones don't work so go borrow a friend's phone of a different model and pray that they can process your application for you.

Sure, if we’re in the business of making arbitrary requests, how about every data center operator has to bring 1 Epstein accused to justice for every data center they’re allowed to build?

The hard part has never been the “what”, it’s always been the “how”.

> The argument I'm seeing most is that most of us SWEs will become obsolete once the agentic tools become good enough to allow domain experts to fully iterate on solutions on their own.

That’s been the argument since the 5PL movement in the 80s. What we discover is that domain expertise an articulation of domain expertise into systems are two orthogonal skills that occasionally develop in the same person but, in general, requires distinct specialization.

Eh, it is what it is.

Another area of hidden complexity is doors in video games. Almost no game has life sized doors because they introduce gameplay issues, almost all doors in video games are at least 30% bigger than in real life and you see an overabundance of sliding doors vs swinging doors because of the complexity swinging doors bring to video game physics.

https://lizengland.com/blog/the-door-problem/

https://www.ign.com/articles/putting-doors-in-video-games-is...

Yep, that it's AAI.

> or if you prefer, there is a cycle between the two states

Yes, what I mostly emphasize with this mode of thinking is that the act of building software is primarily there to transform people (you try a thing, it doesn't work like you think it would, that inspires you to try another thing) and the software at the end of it is largely a byproduct.

If you have the right people-state, producing the software is trivial, it's how do you port the right knowledge into their brains in the first place and and software should be just another tool in your toolbox towards that aim.

At the end of the week, if you suffered a hard drive crash and all of your recent code got erased, how quickly could you recreate it? That's how much of your week was spent coding. The rest of the week was spent transforming you into the person who could code the thing you coded.

Contrast this with a chair maker. If at the end of the week, their chair got thrown in a woodchipper, some significant fraction of the next week would be in unavoidable labor making the exact same chair.

This is the fundamental difference between these two activities that gets abstracted away when we both think of them as "labor".

Early on in Uber's life, I went to a presentation they held where they showed there was a U shaped curve by income of who used Uber. Upper middle class people used them as discretionary entertainment vehicles but Uber had a substantial lower class population using them as necessary transport when working graveyard shifts in locations public transit didn't go.

So yes, there's a surprising contingent of people who commute to work every single working day using hire cars.

> Common sense product could be something smaller than Model 3 for Europe and this car would eat Chinese for lunch.

Yeah, that would be the Model 2, which Musk cancelled, then denied he cancelled, then has made no effort to review whatsoever so it exists in a limbo state of zero people working on it but it not being officially cancelled. Either way, it didn't come out in 2025 as planned.

https://www.cbtnews.com/tesla-execs-raise-red-flags-after-mu...

For a normal company, this would be disastrous. For a meme stock, this makes total sense since anyone claiming the Model 2 is dead can be shouted at by fans saying Musk himself disputed it was dead.

> consider four of them not previously studied: Letter Boxed, Pips, Strands and Tiles.

Statistically, approximately zero people play Letter Boxed and Tiles.

Another common mistake I see "thoughtfluencer" bloggers make is they think they need a brand new idea per post. This not only isn't sustainable, it's bad for the audience.

Instead, I think a successful blog is really about finding your, at most, 3 - 5 big ideas and instead showing the audience how they apply in many different context. For example, Matt Levine returns to a few commmon catchphrases across years of his writing: "People are worried about bond market liquidity", “Everything Is Securities Fraud” etc. that crop up in odd and wonderful ways in totally new contexts across years of writing. Forming a relationship with his writing is deepening your appreciation of these concepts.

“For another, the term has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, especially by left-leaning types who call you a fascist if you oppose abortion or affirmative action.”

The left was right too early. Whereas I, the enlightened centrist was right and just the right time.

There is content you write for acquisition and content you write for retention and my #1 tip for writers who want to engineer growing an audience is be clear before you sit down to write a piece which it’s going to be.

Content for acquisition, the reader’s relationship is to the topic, they have to be convinced the topic is relevant to their life goals but it’s valuable despite who the topic.

Content for retention, the readers relationship is to you as the writer and the topic is merely there as a MacGuffin to help illuminate some aspect of you that is unique.

Business Insider had this down to a science over a decade ago. They started a series called “So Expensive”, detailing why various things were expensive, the first 4 videos in the series were: Caviar, Saffron, Rolexes and Horseshoe Crab Blood. Statistically, some tens of millions of people have organically had the thought of why the first 3 were expensive but zero people have even wondered why horseshoe crab blood was expensive. The 4th video was a way to test, of all the people who were willing to click on the first three, how many were willing to follow along to the 4th because of a trust in BI? The next 4 in the series was Vanilla, Silk, Louboutins & Scorpion Venom.

Creating all content for acquisition is both too exhausting and also sub optimal for the reader because they want deeper stuff to follow as well. I suggest up to 1 in 3 acquisition articles if you can manage when starting out but then ramping down to no more than 1 in 10 fairly quickly or you burn out.

Even if that is the instinct, this is a mistaken way to deal with narcissistic bullying.

It’s writing the piece in the first place rather than what you put in it that raises the ire. There’s no way to compromise or mollify the wording in a way that makes them give you like, half the punishment.

What’s more, the attempt to mollify signals weakness that just invites them to feel even more vindictive. Being more forthright and decisive is what earns their grudging respect. China understood this, Zohran Mandani understood this. Meanwhile, Europe and Democratic leadership, universities and large law firms refuse to understand this.

As always, Matt Levine has a readable, insightful take that covers many different ways of seeing the world from the same set of facts and several inconvenient distinctions that various biased parties would prefer to be left out of the retelling: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-07-26/andrew...

You're going down the first question of a deep rabbithole that eventually lands you to where every major tech company has landed.

Not really, reliably detecting a user's preferred languages has been a persistent Hard Problem in tech since the start of the internet. Every proposed alternative solution ends up having vastly more false positives due to browsers/people incorrectly setting of default preferences so companies begrudgingly default to geographic heuristics knowing it is a terrible experience for an outlier group of people.

It's very easy to construct strawman examples where the worst ways to travel are compared to some abstract "best" way of learning as if that proves anything.

Reading up on something is a great way to discover the "high order bits" but it's very hard, apart from being in person, to ever pick up the "low order bits". I recently had a friend visit Australia and notice that attitudes towards mild speeding were very different from the US, not something you ever could have found from hours of trawling on the internet. One of the hundreds of different observations he made on the trip.

Every travel opportunity for me has used these low order bits to propel huge amounts of reading to fill in the missing high order bits that mesh with it. On a recent trip to South Korea, I became obessessed with the South Korean presentation (or rather, the lacuna) of the country's history 1955-1987. I went to countless history museums around Seoul just so I could see what they wanted attendees to know about Korea between the day-by-day recap of the Korean War and the miracle of K-Pop and industrialization. It was interesting the degree of frankness each museum had but all of them made me delve much more into the scholarly writing to see what was pointedly omitted.

The distinction is, if there is room provided for one, is it expected to be provided by the landlord or the tenant, not whether a typical apartment has one as an amenity.

Well, that and the housing market.

Youtube search does a baffling thing where it shows you 5 SERPs, then a bunch of unrelated things it thinks you like, then another 5 SERPs. It used to only show you the top 5 SERPs before switching to "suggested videos" for the rest of the scroll. Truly a terrible product when that was the design.

I've said for decades that Google is terrible at search in every area except Google Search. Youtube search? Terrible! Chrome history search? Abysmal! Gmail search? Atrocious! Google Maps Search? At some point, standing in a middle of a mall searching for "coffee" returned only 3 SERPs despite me standing in front of a coffeeshop that I could not get to show up.

I never understood why the "collaborative filtering" approach never took off with most review options. Google Maps shows you what the average person thinks is a good restaurant, meaning the rich get richer faster and tiny statistical noise converts to durable competitive advantage.

Instead, I'd love for Google to understand me well enough to show me which restaurants I would disproportionately love compared to other people based on its understanding of my taste profiles. That way, the love can be shared amongst a much wider base of restaurants and each distinctive restaurant could find its 10,000 true fans.

On top of that, it actually gives me an incentive to rate things. Right now, you only rate from some vague sense of public service instead of "this can actively improve your experience with our product".

It's not just Google Maps, Netflix used to operate on the model of deep personalization that they've slowly de-emphasized over the years. I'm still waiting for Letterboxd to introduce a feature to give me personalized film recs based on the over 1000 ratings I've given it over the years as a paying customer but they seem in no hurry to do so. Amazon used to take your purchase history into account when ordering search results but I think that's also been significantly de-emphasized.

About the only arena this is widespread is streaming music services like Spotify.

Rename the name of the light to "the".

> mispredictioms

If mispredictioms is not canonical yet, it should be!

Because if you can't sell launches on the open market, your own launches become exponentially more expensive. Cost sharing allows for the economies of scale that let governments piggyback.

> However, I do strongly agree with you that setting a boundary to "normal" and therefore implying these states to be abnormal and something that needs to be fixed is not helpful. We should be able to label a wide spectrum of neurological wiring quirks without nudging people towards changing them, unless it actually negatively impacts their ability to live a fulfilling life.

Except I don't buy this framing that the two are in conflict. The more general awareness there is in the general population around neurodiversity, simultaneously the less shame there is about medicating and also, the greater willingness there is to accommodate each person's individual diversity.

Accomodations initially rolled out for diagnosed neurodiverse people: Like being able to control the lighting in your workspace, or being issued noise cancelling headphones no questions asked, also benefit neurotypical people who are also on the further end of the bell curve for things like that.