starwind

Exactly, any investment that has a really high rate of return (moneywise or laborwise) will get flooded almost immediately, crushing the returns

This is demonstrably untrue. Louis Brandeis (late Supreme Court justice) and his business partner Samuel Warren published an article called the "Right to Privacy" in 1890.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Privacy_(article)

See also Katz vs United States

"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."

If you use an android, you can set it so that it does location just off GPS which is a lot less precise and doesn't seem to update as often. The other day I went downtown for a ballgame, sushi after, and then home, and the only place it picked me up for the day was the light rail station when I bought my ticket early that afternoon

I find the analysts still need ArcGIS, but on the geospatial software development side I've never run into something I couldn't use QGIS for

Is that how the colors of the maps actually looked in 1777? I always assumed that the colors had faded but I never really thought about it until now

That's fair, and not at all the way I've seen it used

Same. If they insist on HackerRank, that tells me they hire based on solving logic puzzles and not building software and systems. Not a place I'm interested in

Oh OK that makes sense. I thought "part of the club" as in "club of high profile authors"

> Does this mean Zadie Smith is a part of the club? Or that NYRB is just able to get high profile authors like Smith to write for them?

Uh, I don't see the difference

- What distinguishes a defense startup apart from just some nerds "blowing things up in the desert"?

Security clearances

- Aside from accidents in testing, what are the common pitfalls of this field of study?

The government can be very difficult to work with and slow. They may love what you do but vetting and delays and lazy people can sink you

- Are there stories that come to mind about notable contractors that encountered problems? Notable successes?

Yes. Bits Systems and Zeta Associates.

- What legal risks are there in the development and procurement process? I'd assume just by virtue of searching certain topics or even acquiring parts you'd be having some very serious conversations with officials. Do these startups have a formal way to announce their intentions ahead of time before trouble erupts?

Everything falls under a classification regime and even unclassified stuff is usually subject to ITAR

- What is the general consensus of this field when it is not war time? Is it generally feast or famine, or is the demand for defense tech relatively constant?

Depends on what you do. The IC is always looking for better tools, and there’s huge overlap between defense and space. Can’t build missiles? Build satellites

- Are these startups typically VC funded on the open market, or does your government typically fund ideas it needs/wants?

Both. The government may give a contract where they pay as development happens. But there’s also groups like In-Q-Tel which operates as a standard VC fund focusing on defense and intelligence.

- What are the limitations of the concepts that may be researched? Surely you can't just come up with an idea for a particle disintegrator and start vaporizing cacti in the wild. Are defense contractors generally limited to missiles and things of that sort?

No. Most of defense contractors do work on software in some capacity. For weapons, you leave it to the major defense contractors.

- What are the dominant traits that contractors generally have that make them a good fit for this field?

Understanding of the legal regime they operate in. Having an existing security clearance. An appreciation for the mission.

Just to note that a lot of this is not actually weapons. A lot of robotic limbs and medical R&D is commissioned by the DoD and specifically DARPA. Maxar may sell imagery to the military to track Russia troop movements and the US Forest Service to monitor wildfires. DoD spends a lot of direct healthcare too

In the post-WW2 era, military spending peaked in the 1980s, and it's been (mostly) declining ever since as a percentage of global gdp

OK, so it's not just me

I am working my way through this https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-c-with-free-31-hour-... and I enjoy it

It goes pretty fast if you've programmed before but covers a decent amount of the newer stuff. Once you get the fundamentals down you can probably figure out the C++20 features through the docs

"I need a 5% raise because inflation is 5%" and then stare at them and don't say anything until you hear what you want to hear.

If they give you 3% or something, say "so I'm getting a 2% pay cut" and tell your boss every couple days you're not happy with taking a pay cut. They'll figure it out

> You know what stops inflation at its root? People thinking that there won’t be inflation. Absent supply shocks businesses often raise prices to get out ahead of their competitors or to more gradually raise prices so consumers won’t notice compared to a sudden increase. After a supply shock it can take for prices to stabilize because people expect inflation.

If you don’t know what you want to do at 18, major in economics at a state school. It’s pretty broad so you can do as much math, writing, and finance as you want. It’s a respectable degree, says you’re smart and practical. Minor or double major in whatever else you think you might want to do.

A guy I went to school with did econ and acting. He was working as a producer for a while, and I heard he's going to be in a Netflix show

Probably should made it clearer. The email said it was an InMail from LinkedIn and the recruiter made a request to add me, but there was no message and no invite from them when I went to LinkedIn

There's a <starwind> in Australia so occasionally I get stuff for <starwind>@gmail.com. I got his golf club membership info sent to my email address. I've gotten his dinner reservation info sent to my email address. For like 2 months I got his paystub sent to my email address.

I really wish I could get his phone bill sent to my email address so I could call and tell him he could have gotten a larger raise

John Maynard Keynes did a lot of serious economic works and a lot of thinking about what economics means to daily life. One of his better points: you don't have to like your job, you need to like the life your job affords you

Whenever I’m talking to a pilot who flies a Lear I refuse to pronounce the company name as anything other than “Bomb-ba-deer” cause I think it sounds super cool and I can’t pronounce anything vaguely French

Reply All did a fantastic episode on this, https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/n8ho3a

AFAIK that case is still unsolved

yeah they end up routing their calls through some small telecom like "Crazy Eddie's" which give them some legitimacy in the eyes of the phone network

Something must have changed with AT&T because up until like 6 weeks I was getting bombarded with spam texts, like a dozen a day, then they just suddenly stopped.

I've heard that forwarding spam texts to 7726 ends up counterproductive because that system opens up any included links, letting spammers know they've hit a legit active number. Is there any truth to that?

Did you just compare Stallman and the FSF to the Abolitionist movement, and paid software to slavery?

> they provide a useful extreme endpoint such that there can exist a reasonable "Overton Window" of Free/Open Source/ Whatever Software

Or, ya know, they could just stake out reasonable, nuanced positions that organizations could adopt or at least be a starting point for further developments

Identities and financial information is worth stealing.

People, before you go nuts securing your computers routers and phones, talk to your doctors office about adding additional security to your medical records and freeze or add fraud alerts to your credit reports including NCTUE which I had never heard of until someone walked into Verizon and walked out with 4 unlocked iPhones after opening a new account in my name.

I worked at a cable company for a while and the guy who sat behind me managed gigabit connection roll outs. He always told the techs in the field to use fast.com because it was the only one they could rely on. He knew the cable company prioritized connections to people who were checking their internet speed

Hmm, interesting. I didn't know that

> so the mechanics failed but the electrical part still worked.

Electric cars use brake-by-wire. Push on brakes, computer processes signal, computer applies brakes. Glitch somewhere in that system