throwyawayyyy

The story of the past 10 years at my FAANG has been one of making our key-value databases look as much like relational databases as possible, complete with SQL query engines (at least two of them, because what would a FAANG be without multiple slightly incompatible ways of doing things?). Honestly it's been a huge boon. Should we have abandoned SQL entirely, and come up with a new language? Maybe. But given that the primary initial motivation for this work was to allow analysts to creation millions of reports without bothering eng, it had to be a language that analysts understand. That's SQL.

I went to a screening of Vertigo in 70mm at the Castro recently. Its projectionist came out of retirement specially for the event (which was marvellous!).

To expand on why I think it's a bad question, "Yes, and I think they're right to do so, and here's why" is probably the best response I could come up with, and makes the interview adversarial for no good reason. It becomes an argument about the premise of the question. Putting the interviewer _or_ the interviewee on the defensive helps neither.

Added: I realise I'm being adversarial myself here too :). You are correct, in that the questions could be reworded in better ways. Agree on that!

> I think a much better question would be "how are information security and privacy controls implemented"

Agreed, that's a great question to ask.

It's a fair point -- and there are plenty of standard interview questions which fall squarely into that bucket. E.g. "Tell me your greatest weaknesses" is a horrible question that I for one never ask.

Sorry for being a bit snarky here, but I did chortle when "You might also note that Google does give all their developers root access to their own dev machines" (which is true) is followed by things like "Anything under 10 minutes is good" for running the CI pipeline (not true anywhere I've been at Google) or "The steps should be 'do a git clone...'" (also not true at Google).

Being slightly less snarky, this is a very prescriptive list that includes questions which, were I asked them as an interviewer, I'd consider red flags. "Does this team or any of the related teams have a person who actively rejects proposals to improve the code base?" is a BAD question to ask in an interview. What answer could an interviewer give? Yes? No? It depends? An example: a junior engineer comes in, says we should rewrite the server in kotlin, starts working on it, then is shot down by a senior engineer. Is the senior engineer "actively rejecting a proposal to improve the code base"? Arguably, yes. Are they wrong to do so? Again, arguable. It depends. Code health is a means to an end, not the end itself...

Is expertise the means, or the end? How would be an expert in x or y improve your day-to-day life?

Counterpoint: on a whim over Christmas I bought a flute. I don't play a musical instrument, I've no particular musical talents, but I've been working at it consistently if not deeply, half an hour a day, every day, since. I will never, ever be an expert at the flute. I will be better at it though; there are pieces I can play in August which I couldn't play in July. It adds to my life. If the goal were to become an _expert_ flautist then a) I would be delusional but b) it would no longer be a nice little interlude in the day. Were I to magically mature into a concert-level flautist, _would I enjoy giving concerts?_ Pretty sure the answer is no. Expertise is neither a realistic nor desirable goal.

In a sense, I don't disagree. But when the only Labour politician of my lifetime to win an election is Tony Blair, you have to consider that the UK is a pretty Tory country, and you have to work with what you've got...

There's an alternate history in which it was David Miliband who became Labour leader, not his brother. Who knows of course, but there's a decent chance it would have prevented the disaster of Brexit (and the related disaster, for Labour and the country, of Corbyn).

Ah, no hello! There's a lot of that where I am. Seems... a bit much? Like, I can't spare a second to say hi back again?

Many others predicted excess deaths owing to people skipping regular checkups/missing out on cancer treatments, etc etc. This was widely reported and debated as a cost of lockdowns. It's implausible that there would not be excess deaths owing to this effect. In which case, the question shouldn't be: "what is causing these excess deaths?", but "are there _excess_ excess deaths?". I.e. are there deaths which _can't_ be explained by several years of significant numbers of people not seeing their GPs?

Added: I do agree that we shouldn't assume that mRNA vaccines are safe just because we want them to be, and large scale studies are required. But then large scale studies are, of course, happening. There'll be NHS reports on the long term effects of these vaccines for decades.

Being only semi-serious, but: wouldn't an auto-generated Netflix look pretty much like Netflix?

> "b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments."

After reading this profoundly ungenerous article, I am inclined to be ungenerous here and assume that the "activities" the author refers to would be, by most of us, considered anti-social. "I'm just playing my music, why is everyone on my case? I'm a better driver when driving fast..."

I didn't realise this until going through JFK recently. Cabs: no wait, fixed price, professional driver. Uber: long wait, twice as expensive, driver and car a complete crap-shoot.

Feels like the economies of scale only work when you own the taxi fleet itself. I.e. you have dedicated mechanics etc etc. As soon as the consumer has to pay the true price of a taxi ride, Uber crumbles. There's another world in which Uber was a whitelabel app for cab firms, making millions but certainly not worth billions (so, making millions rather than losing billions!).

That begs the question: it assumes that that _is_ the "established" male approach. Moreover the premise of the article is that he's discovering that it is an approach that, increasinly, isn't working for him, and is a road to a lonely middle age.

"You might be a laugh, but you have a vibe where other people aren’t going to share their innermost personal stuff. They get a feeling that you’re not able to give it back."

Or, you know, rip the piss out of them for sharing anything that matters.

Anyone else find this piece curiously unreflective? There appears to be only one way in which men can interact with other men, drunken banter. It's a never-ending episode of Men Behaving Badly. And the answer, it turns out, is _not_ to try and go beyond what amounts to a juvenile way of interacting with people, but... be better at organising activities where that "belligerent way of occupying space" can happen?

I'll check that out! And I should say, Grim Fandango was great.

This is definitely part of their fall. Everyone -- from producers to players -- _thought_ they needed 3D. But it's poorly suited to adventure games. Shadow of the Templars is an excellent example of this: new enough not to be pixel art; old enough not to be 3D. Perfect.

Even the Monkey Island games turned 3D with the fourth installment. Having played through them all (again!) over lockdown, it's that game, Escape from Monkey Island, which now looks and plays the worst.

I'm unpersuaded. To begin with, _is_ it such a waste of time to study programming problems, as, you know, a programmer?

Also, more specifically on this piece: can anyone explain how Theranos fits in here? I don't get the connection. One the one hand we have a massive fraud, and on the other... people studying techniques that are rarely used by normal software engineers? But that nevertheless are, still, programming techniques.

And please no more "considered harmful" titles! It's painful to read at this point.

+1 to that. I don't want to be in ultra HD in meetings. I mean, I also don't want to look like a character from a 90s CD-ROM game -- but that's a matter of bandwidth, not the camera.

In a way, 720p or below is a non-vain version of applying a filter, smoothing imperfections away.

Well, sure, it's probably legal to fire them.

But it smacks of "one rule for me, one rule for thee" from Mr "free speech absolutist" Musk, right?

True. And I'd go further: once the campaign stops becoming "get rid of the monarchy" and becomes "set up exactly this system X", support will go down even further. It's a very useful fiction that the monarch isn't political.

> A drawn out conflict favors Russia

Probably true. But there's no situation in which Russia ends up richer for having gone to war than had they not bothered in the first place. Which is to say, everyone has lost already. It's a tragedy for all parties -- and it's Putin's fault.

Similar! I'm British, so the weight of everything is in kilos; unless it's very heavy, in which case it's interchangeably tons or tonnes; or it's a person, in which case it's in stone. Except that now I've been living in the US for years, I still think of everything in kilos, but people in pounds.

As this timeline points out, _under the hood_ everything is metric and has been so for a very long time (and this is true of the US too). I find it hard to get worked up about.

Not directly related to your comment, but from the linked piece:

> “A cousin of mine was a broker for people looking to invest in these pyramid schemes,” explains the CEO of Tirana Business University, Artan Hoxha (no relation). “She was advising people to put some money in scheme A, some in Scheme B. Some in Scheme C. One has high interest but is not so secure; the other has low interest but is more sound. In her mind she was building a balanced portfolio. She didn’t know they were all the same shit!”

Graeber spends a lot of time arguing against exactly this assumption in The Dawn of Everything. I.e. that agriculture must come before civilization. Pretty persuasively, IMHO.

This does feel familiar -- except that in my case, after a couple of years in that position, all-of-a-sudden I realised I wasn't that good a developer any more. That I had stopped learning a while before. The solution for me, and it worked, was to leave, and work for a company with a more serious engineering culture.

I LOVE Danger Mouse. It still totally holds up.

Also Count Duckula! David Jason (who is very English) did an American accent in that. Which I don't recall finding odd at the time, as a child.

I think that's right!

Incidentally, I was recently very surprised to discover, via my young nephew, that the Turtles are still very much a thing. Who'd have thought of the Ninja Turtles as a piece of 90s culture that would endure?

I'm surprised. I only know the US and the UK, but in the UK it can go down as far as a 5% deposit. Honestly US deposit requirements seem high.