tarr11

Consider wearing a product hat as well; is doing undifferentiated work the best use of your very limited engineering resources?

There are less expensive alternatives to PagerDuty that might have fit your budget, and wouldn't have put your engineering team on the hook for managing this custom built service forever.

The professor recommends across the board pay cuts as an alternative to layoffs.

> One thing that Lincoln Electric, which is a famous manufacturer of arc welding equipment, did well is instead of laying off 10% of their workforce, they had everybody take a 10% wage cut except for senior management, which took a larger cut. So instead of giving 100% of the pain to 10% of the people, they give 100% of the people 10% of the pain.

Curious if there is research here on how this impacts the company? Seems like it would also increase stress and encourage top performers to seek new opportunities.

He also recommends hiring during a recession:

> He actually hired during the 2000 recession and saw it as an opportunity to gain ground on the competition and gain market share when everybody was cutting jobs and stopped innovating.

I suppose this works when it works, and then fails completely when it doesn’t. In essence, this increases the risk profile on the company which seems problematic too. Would be curious if there are studies that show the outcomes of these strategies.

Perhaps there are no “good” strategies- just those that favor employees or those that favor investors.

See also Magic3D from Nvidia, which generates mesh models.

https://deepimagination.cc/Magic3D/

I asked chatGPT to respond as me (tarr11) to your comment:

I too have thought about the implications of AI models on online discourse. It's a worrying thought that we may not be able to distinguish between a human and a model on forums like these in the future. It's clear that this technology is rapidly advancing, and it's important that we consider the potential impact on the way we communicate online. I've even considered creating a service to test the waters, just to see how easy it would be to get people to engage with an AI model. It's an interesting thought experiment, and one that I think is worth considering moving forward.

you prompt with “rewrite this code, but use React Hooks”

This is overly simplistic. Some hype cycles are real, and drive real long term value, like mobile and cloud. These technologies rendered many businesses obsolete and created many new opportunities.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a new AI version of every SaaS out there, followed by a consolidation cycle in a few years.

The kind of work solved by leetcode will be solved by AI. Testing for it interviews in a few years will make no more sense than testing for people to generate optimized machine code. (Unless you are a super specialized systems developer who actually writes such things)

This will enable engineers to focus on higher order problems, similar to how compilers and programming languages allowed engineers to be more productive than having to write assembly.

The way that this play out for software development is we may include gpt prompts to our code repositories and treating them as library functions or macros which could be compiled as regular code, or interpreted at runtime.

you aren’t immune from these problems just because you aren’t taking VC funding.

Most bootstrapped companies need some initial funding which usually comes from the founders bank account, with the idea being that’s it.

But it can be tempting to accelerate your bootstrapped growth by taking debt financing (credit cards, mortgages and other personally guaranteed loans)

The difference is that in most of these cases you are personally liable whereas you can walk away from VC funded businesses.

TouchDesigner is very popular in this space.

https://derivative.ca/

I’d really like to understand how people managers who work on teams / corporate environments use Obsidian.

I find that most of my work meetings are shared docs. It often feels like double work to put some things in Obsidian and move them around.

I also don’t use Obsidian as a task list - I use Todoist which is totally fine for that.

The birth replacement rate in the United States isn’t sufficient to fill all the jobs, and automation is still decades (or more) away from replacing them as well.

I suppose when the pain gets too great than we will consider expanding our immigration policies, as the USA is still considered a favorable immigration destination.

If you are going to join a big tech company but still have interest in startups on the side, consider doing it from a state that has strong IP/Noncompete protections for employees, such as California.

Are you upset by the profit margin, or something else?

I just searched on LinkedIn. 52k people whose status has “career break” in it. So, you aren’t alone.

As a principal SRE at a FAANG you are highly desirable. I can’t imagine that would change too much in a single year.

Take a break for your health. You can always get a new job but you only have one body and one mind.

https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/search/results/all?keywords=...

Curious about your project - you have some claims that your engine is multiple times faster than Postgres. You also mention that you are “using all the cores” in your system.

Is it correct to assume that the core innovation here that you are parallelizing your queries? If so, have you tried benchmarking with parallel queries enabled in Postgres (eg., one test would be to increase the number of workers allowed per query)

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/how-parallel-query-w...

SOLR is using Lucene’s approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) implementation.

This site has some nice information on how ANN performs for vector search.

http://ann-benchmarks.com/

Can someone explain to a lay person what they accomplished and what it means for nuclear fusion as an energy source?

Why do you need a creative director? Just let viewers create their own movies to suit their tastes.

There is a guide for "macOS integration"

https://minimal.guide/Guides/macOS+configuration

Curious what was stopping you from writing more notes in Obsidian?

I use a daily note as a starting point and then extract those into lots of other notes - maybe 20-30 each day.

Amazon recently lost a lawsuit on counterfeit products in the US.

https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/articles/maglula-beats-...

Not quite a blog, but Obsidian Publish has been scratching the “easy publish” itch for me.

https://obsidian.md/publish

It also means Amazon increases spending on automation.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/22/amazon-debuts-a-fully-auto...

argument by analogy is so frustrating. Half of the comments here are about bus drivers and cliffs.

> You won’t read my code because reading code takes 10x more time and effort than writing it.

> Particularly in DevOps, my specialism. There is no test for debugging SSL certificate chains in production at 3am.

> We can’t replicate having no answers as to why production is down at 6pm on Christmas Eve or how we will stay at our desk until it’s fixed.

So, I’m getting the sense that this person enjoys devops. I wonder if they are trapped between engineering and ops - good at both, but not great at either.

if this person wants to work at a larger tech company, maybe this person should apply to be an SRE?

They have very valuable skills and the pay for SRE often exceeds the pay for engineers. I’d not expect an SRE interview to be as focused on whiteboarding, but have a much deeper understanding of a systems toolchain, eg how to use Linux tools to diagnose a network issue.

His brothers are doing the programming and music.

I spent a lot of time during COVID learning Houdini as a hobbyist, because I really liked the concept of procedural modeling and node based development. However, with the continued iterations on Geometry nodes, it feels like a foregone conclusion that Blender will replace Houdini for hobbyist procedural artists. Cycles is a really nice GPU renderer and I don’t have to pay a subscription like I do with Redshift.

Houdini still has some strong advantages built over decades such as dynamics and KineFX and is the industry leader for FX. But I wouldn’t be surprised if these tools appear in Blender in a future version, though.

“We don't just release publicly available bands. The transparency continues internally; every employee knows how much everyone is getting paid, including equity.”

Can someone provide a link to these publicly available bands?

I'm having trouble understanding what the author means by "context" in this article.

It seems to mean "your location within your network of people"?

Some databases also have the ability to be instantly portable, like a sqlite file.

You can tar up your flat files as well, but that is a separate process and can be time consuming for larger directories.

Perhaps there is a use case for a file system backed by portable database like sqlite, such that you can just mount the volume and send it around without pain, but can prefer to use normal command line utils (ls, rm, grep, etc) instead of interacting via SQL.