28,228 karma · joined February 20, 2007
It's little different from letting an 8 year old child take the wheel. Sure, it'd be fine most of the time but regularly, certainly, and randomly fail catastrophically.
Just why?
It'd be great of WordPress supported SQLite officially but I don't think I'd recommend this approach to anyone for a real site, even a personal one.
Caesar had by this time been at the very top of the social hierarchy in Rome for years. He had achieved his lifelong ambition of being considered one of the greatest Romans of all time. He had nothing left to prove to anyone. He was simply too smart not to have not considered the fact that that he had very little to gain and a lot to lose.
My feeling is that his own health, a lack of strong motivation, and a concern about tainting his reputation would've added up to a desire for a glorious and early death by assassination.
My read on Caesar is that he's the kind of person that would absolutely never commit suicide directly, because it would be too undignified, but might expose himself to danger with the hope of dying gloriously as he did.
Napoleon was deliberately modeling his life after Caesar and seemed to have made multiple attempts at letting himself be killed, using similar logic. He was just too damn "unlucky" to ever take a fatal shot.
It's safe to assume Caesar would've gone on his expeditions if he hadn't been assassinated. But it seems very plausible he hoped something like the Ides of March would take place.
That, to my mind, is the best explanation for why he exposed himself to such obvious danger.
It makes a lot more sense than the idea that he became lazy, stupid, arrogant, or incompetent about his own personal security. Something he had previously been incredibly meticulous about. Of course it's true that we'll never know for certain.
The core premise of this counterfactual seems highly dubious. Caesar spent his entire adult life under incredible amounts of toil and stress. He likely suffered from various serious ailments. He was a hard mid 50s. We know what happens to all humans at this age and under these conditions.
I've read a lot about this period and always come away with the impression Caesar seemed very burned out and done with it all. He had achieved everything he had set out to achieve and more. There was nothing much left for him to do, even if he was a "workaholic" that would've surely kept going by default.
It's not unreasonable to accept the theory that he might've even dismissed his bodyguard, and ignored the assassination plot rumors, in hopes of the glorious suicide-by-assassination exit he received. He was clever enough to do something exactly like this and clever enough not to tell anyone about his plan.
The man rolled deep with bodyguards for decades, was highly paranoid about his own safety, and then dropped it all while surrounded by people that we know that that he knew wanted to kill him, and had even tried.
Even the distant German king Ariovistus received messages from Caesar's peers in Rome offering rewards if he was killed. Caesar reported this in his commentaries, and this was years before he had defeated and humiliated huge numbers of powerful people.
Even if the plot had failed, and even if a burned out Caesar is impressive compared to any of his contemporaries, and even if it's unlikely anyone could've beaten him. It still seems very unlikely he could've kept up the pace for another decade, which is what any serious expansion would've required.
But I also really don't like using cgo, for all the reasons stated elsewhere. So these days I generally avoid SQLite in my Go programs, which is unfortunate.
What I think I'd like best of all is if there was an out-of-process SQLite network daemon mode that could run over Unix sockets. So one could run `sqlite3 daemon unix:///run/sqlite.sock` and then communicate with it like a traditional SQL database, but with most of the simplicity and power of SQLite intact.
I know there are at least some attempts at creating network daemons for SQLite, but my impression was that none of them seemed up to the (very high) bar set by SQLite itself. Also, there's no SQLite network driver for Go. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong about these though.
Most elite celebrities, politicians, and businesspeople simply put a lot of effort into pretending to be perfect, mostly out of vanity. They lie, hide, avoid all controversy, and employ teams of PR people to craft their public image using publicity stunts, bribery, philanthropy and all kinds of tricks that have been proven to work for thousands of years.
If Elon Musk followed the elite PR playbook, a lot more people would like him, probably a lot of the haters in this thread. Which says more about them than him.
Elon Musk offers a glimpse of what very powerful/successful, and basically good, people are often really like.
I'd argue that:
1. Anyone who completely denigrates and dismisses Elon Musk is a blind hater.
2. Anyone who claims he's without flaws is a fanboy with rose colored glasses on.
3. And only people who agree with his own assessment of himself, that he's a "mixed bag", are assessing him clearly and with intellectual honesty.
But c'mon. You're really just playing dumb. We all know what SpaceX/Tesla and Apple have done, and (I think) we all know the role Musk and Jobs played in their success. And the reason we all know these things is precisely because of how important what they've done is. It's self-evident.
So, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that you're not acting in good faith. And that's why I answered indirectly.
But, okay, what "proof" would you find convincing?
I doubt you or anyone else would bet significant money that Starship won't reach orbit. If so, I'd be happy to accept.
For the record, I don't think you can point to any project even remotely equivalent in terms of capability or progress from Boeing, Lockheed, or ULA. I'd be happy if they were doing nearly as well as SpaceX.
My other examples: Starlink, Tesla, and Dragon have clearly been "built" and shipped. Starlink is the hands of consumers, is actively helping Ukraine for military and humanitarian purposes, Tesla has shipped millions of vehicles, and Dragon Crew had another successful rendezvous with ISS days ago.
I could spend a lot more time providing examples but consider these to be more than sufficient to disprove the claim that Elon Musk's companies haven't "actually built anything he announces" in "years".
What kind of evidence would convince you? Wikipedia has summaries. Of course, they necessarily lack the context required to deeply understand the topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Innovations_and_des...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Business_career
> Apple has an almost negligible ratio in that regard. Musk has achieved even less.
I challenge you to give evidence for these assertions. I would be convinced if you explained how you came to this conclusion and explained how you calculated the terms of this ratio.
That would presume we're talking about people with approximately equivalent knowledge that simply come to different, but reasonable, conclusions.
But this is not the case. What I see in this meme is people betraying their ignorance and motivated reasoning at every turn. There's nothing knowledgeable or reasonable about their assertions. It's always highly vitriolic and dismissive toxicity. It's not that they're simply mistaken about certain facts, and can be corrected, it's that they're transparently ignorant and/or acting in bad faith.
For example, it's extremely uncommon, maybe even unheard of, for someone with a deep knowledge of technology history to agree with these kinds of dismissals of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. I've never seen someone able to discuss the topic at a high level that won't readily acknowledge their contributions, even if they can be very critical of them in certain ways. As one example among many: historian and professor Walter Isaacson wrote well respected books about Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. He is currently writing one about Elon Musk.
There's a popular and cynical meme that people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are just marketing bullshitters that don't actually do anything useful. It's laughably false and easily disproved. And yet it seems to comfort cynical/pessimistic/unhappy/ignorant people, of which many exist, and so it prevails.
I have no idea how real the risk is, and it all seems less risky than drinking unfiltered water in most areas.
But it's no headache for me to mix RO water with bottled spring water, since I prefer the flavor and it takes seconds.
2. FIND MOTIVATION: Get excited about why you started in the first place. Go over the plan from scratch with a co-founder, talk to users, visualize the end goal, use the product, or do whatever it takes to get back some of the initial excitement.
3. BUILD MOMENTUM: Be as self-indulgent as necessary at first. Don't worry about doing the highest priority tasks, just get going. Do whatever part of the project seems most fun/easy/interesting, however trivial. Do whatever it takes to start building back your speed. Once you're at speed, the hard stuff won't be so hard.
Now you're relaxed, motivated, and have momentum so it's full steam ahead!
Fall off the wagon for some reason? Don't waste time feeling bad, just accept it. Then repeat steps 1-3.
It's true that wealth begets wealth. Zuckerberg's kids are billionaires without having to do anything. Bill Gates would've been rich even if he had not started Microsoft, just through inheritance.
But Steve Jobs led the creation of the most valuable company on the planet. There was no blocker to him being richer than Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Larry Ellison is among the richest people on the planet. John Carmack and Palmer Luckey have generational wealth.
Creating a massive company is what makes someone as rich as an Elon Musk or Bill Gates. They had more opportunity to create a massive company than a person from a lower class, but it's got nothing to do with network effects. The main driver of these people's massive fortunes is technology that scales globally.
But almost every person with even greater levels of privilege manages to do so much less than them. Which proves that one can't rightly attribute their great success to privilege alone. If one wants to be correct (and not just feel good) one has to admit that they did some amazing things based in large part on merit.
And that's the rub. Merit alone is often not enough. Privilege alone is often not enough. And luck always plays a role in determining the magnitude of anyone's success.
It takes extraordinary merit to be a John Carmack, Palmer Luckey, Larry Ellison, or Steve Jobs. People who had no privilege (in the traditional sense) and yet their merit (and luck) was so great that they did big things despite the fact.
Many people use the privilege argument to try to dismiss what people like Elon Musk have done. As if they could have done just as well had they been privileged. Envy is clearly clouding their thinking and confusing them. It's totally understandable for people to feel this way but ultimately and obviously incorrect in most cases.
A goal for modern societies should be to give everyone the kinds of opportunities that only the privileged historically had. But this won't prevent some people from doing much more with new opportunities than others. Merit will come to dominate outcomes instead of privilege. This will make the world much richer but won't solve everything.
Sure, but that's a matter of judgement. Pessimists predict failure where success is possible and even likely. So one reasonable definition of a pessimist might be:
A pessimist is someone that is bad at predicting the future.
Reddit apparently has 700 employees today, and they haven't done anything significant since they had far fewer employees. Scaling these services just isn't nearly as hard as it used to be, especially given how many more experienced engineers and good technologies exist today.
Twitter should re-build the product to be almost purely software driven, with as little employee intervention as possible. Give users the tools to self-moderate content however they want. For the good of their users and long-term success, they'd be wise to make self-moderation easier to do in a "healthy" way even if it's worse for short-term engagement and revenue. Again, Reddit did this fairly well for years without a huge team.
What Twitter lacks most of all is someone with the guts to risk breaking the product in order to fix the product. The team at Twitter has been visibly afraid to make significant changes, which has left the product weak by modern standards. It's a lot like Apple was before Jobs came back.
We're usually comparing modern populations to industrialized populations that lived nothing like ancient populations.
It seems plausible that some ancient populations might've had sufficient nutrition (particularly Egypt at various times) and lower pollutants (less lead, for example), and maybe come out net ahead in terms of average general intelligence.
Would be fun to know if anyone has come close to answering these questions, but it seems like a challenging problem.
Which was that, as a nerdy/shy but big/tough kid, I could protect other kids by telling bullies that they'd have to deal with me if they messed with anyone else in our class or anyone else I knew. I probably had to back up the threat maybe twice in minor ways. The end result was a very peaceful class for the last couple years of middle school. I was voted "Most Amiable" by my 8th grade class.
And that's how I view NATO's role: the anti-bully that is completely ready to fight if forced.
I don't have the interest in doing the legal research. I could be just wrong about the requirement. Or it could be that in practice HR lawyers advise companies to make a token effort of recruiting U.S. workers as a precaution. It doesn't change my fundamental point in any way. Either way, the loophole is absolutely massive and exploited at great scale.
The intent of the law is extremely clear and it is being violated. Just read the statement of intent and then work for any U.S. tech company in a hiring role, and you'll soon know for yourself.
> If someone can't hire enough domestic workers when offering $300k/year, I think it's safe to say there aren't enough domestic workers.
Or is it more likely that they'd have to increase the offering to an even higher number? In other words, it's a de facto subsidy for tech companies, to prevent them from having to increase wages. Text book wage suppression.
It just doesn't make any logical sense why FAANG would have to use H-1Bs at all, except for a few roles where their may truly be a lack of candidates. How do the other thousands of U.S. tech startups have any U.S. workers at all then, if FAANG is in good faith trying to recruit U.S. workers?
I think I've explained the situation clearly, and don't believe any reasonable judge could disagree with the main point that the program is not being used as intended.
I'm done with this thread now. Have a nice day.