vgel

Backlinks are links to your website used by algorithms like PageRank^1 to weight how important your site is. Roughly speaking, more links, especially from sites with their own high pagerank = higher rank.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

> More specifically, although not everyone in semiconductor manufacturing requires a PhD, pretty much everyone has to be of above average intelligence and many will need to be in the top echelons of IQ.

The entire article is predicated on this asspull. Where's the evidence? Has someone done a study on the average IQ of TSMC workers? This assumes so many things:

1) That semiconductor manufacturing is more complex than manufacturing commonly done in the US. We make rockets! Complex pharmaceuticals! Nuclear weapons! What's the complexity factor of semiconductor manufacturing to those processes? 1.1x? 2x? 100?? 1000x???

2) That just because the manufacturing process is more complex, the skill of a line worker in that process must be higher than a line worker in a simpler industry. Maybe ASML makes very user-friendly machines? Again, it's possibly true, but it's just asserted as ground truth with no evidence.

3) That the higher skill required of workers must correlate 1:1 (or roughly so) with IQ. "A single speck of dust"--that sounds like workers must be detail-oriented and follow processes to the letter, and any veering off that path would have disastrous consequences. Does that sound like an environment where Feynman or Einstein or Curie would thrive just because they had "high IQ"?

And instead of justifying the central leap of logic the entire article is premised on, the author instead spends their time on such insights as "half the American population is below 100 IQ"...

Out of curiosity, I just checked: ~/goatcounter-files on my VPS was created 2021-03-12, and that was also the last time I thought about it beyond checking the stats. Great, very stable piece of software.

> It makes me throw up every time I see corporate messages speaking of family and employees being their most important resource.

Relevant joke:

An engineer is messaging with her boss on Slack after hours. The boss is talking about how his brother is in the hospital.

The engineer asks "What are you gonna do?" and the boss responds "Well, he is family..."

The engineer says "You're gonna make him come in on weekends?!"

Athenian democracy worked this way--you had to opt-in to the candidate pool, but then the candidate was chosen randomly from that pool.

(Also, if people are interested in randomness in antique decision making, me & my wife made a simulator of an ancient lot oracle unearthed in modern Turkey: https://sortesalearum.com)

Some relatively simple things I've repaired around our apartment. Not all of these people would replace, but they might call a professional when it's quicker and cheaper to DIY:

* Top-loading washing machine. If it spins really loudly, or stops spinning, pop off the front panel and check the belt. Ours had just slipped off. Just make sure you get it really tight when reattaching--I had to redo it a couple times until it stayed on. As a bonus, I found a bunch of clothes that had fallen inside, including my wife's favorite skirt :-)

* iPhone battery replacement. Just bought the iFixit toolkit and followed their guide, it was pretty simple. Extended the life of my 6s+ another year (so far).

* Clothes repairs are pretty simple. I've patched some pretty big holes in jeans with new fabric which is a bit more involved, but things like sewing buttons back on or patching small holes is really simple, just look up mending stitches online. If you don't have the right color of thread, you can use hidden stitches, or go for a kintsugi approach and make the mending visible which can be pretty stylish.

* Stove burner covers -- these literally pop out and are (usually) dishwasher safe.

* Dishwasher cleaning -- this isn't hard, but can be pretty gross if it hasn't been done in awhile. Look up a youtube video, take all the parts out and thoroughly scrub everywhere you can, then run a cycle with a couple dishwasher cleaning tabs. Night and day cleaning difference for old dishwashers.

No. If your instance defederates from another you can still link to it (though you might get banned if you link to something nasty, depending on your instance's rules). Defederating simply prevents your instance from automatically pulling posts from the other instance, aka the status quo for non-federated platforms.

tl;dw: It's hard to get SBF to admit to fraud involving Alameda because he can fall back on the excuse that he wasn't the CEO and didn't know what was happening (even though there's every chance he actually did). So the youtuber hit him with a more targeted question: if FTX guarantees deposits are not traded, why were deposits not able to be withdrawn -- where did they go? He gets SBF to admit that they were commingling regular deposits with funds from customers doing riskier things like margin trading, and during the run those riskier users withdrew funds that should have been deposits that were set aside in a separate pool. That exposed regular depositors to risk contrary to what was laid out in the TOS. SBF gets mad and lashes out.

Funnily enough, this is actually a millenia-old way of writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

I put in an old business idea (that I started working on and parked a domain for) and it suggested the domain I had parked (in red to show it was taken). Nice! :-)

Talented people have intrinsic motivation and don't need artificial incentive systems.

Extrinsic rewards or punishments are at best poor substitutes and at worst destroy intrinsic motivation.

Worth noting that open-source projects where your password store is saved locally are vulnerable to the same attack.

tiktok's search sucks and doesn't seem to interact with their algorithm much. it's kind of silly but to bootstrap it you need to flip through the feed until you happen upon something you like, then like that video. you can also follow the person and scroll through their profile to like other of their videos. it takes a little while (couple days) but once it starts spinning up it gets really good at showing you what you want. i ended up uninstalling it since it was too tempting to waste time on (now i waste time on twitter, eh)

In a system at $WORK I recently optimized a structure from String to Box<str> (similar optimization to remove the 8 byte capacity field) and saved ~16Gb of memory. Granted, the program uses 100-200Gb of RAM at peak, but it still was a nice win for basically no work. It's also a semantic win, since it encodes "this string can't be mutated" into the type.

"lit review on condensed matter physics"

...

The most common state of matter at room temperature is solid, but the solid state is only one of many. There are liquid, gas, and plasma states, and the liquid and gas states are further subdivided into the liquid crystal, the superfluid, the superconductor, and so on.

...

I may not be a condensed matter physicist, but even I know that's not quite right...

They clarify later on that Godsey changed his mind and allowed the author to publish it.

twitter has hundreds of millions of users and 7,000 (less now, unfortunately) employees, not all of which have production access. i don't know anyone at twitter, so them accessing my data would need to be a random choice from the whole userbase. they'd need to evade internal checks (which, however weak they are, are infinitely stronger than the average fediverse instance). could it happen? could i be eaten by an escaped zoo leopard during my morning walk?

having my data "read" by a non-sentient advertising model, while irritating, is nowhere near the same as having it read by a human being. that is a false equivalence.

i made no argument about the absolute merit of twitter vs the fediverse. this is simply a downside of small communities that people excitedly migrating to the fediverse with little understanding of how it works or experience with its predecessors will soon run into—twitter is neutral ground, on mastodon you might be arguing with the instance admin's friend and find yourself retaliated against. anyone who used a forum or IRC in the 90's/00's knows what i'm talking about.

yeah, but on twitter you're probably a nobody, the staff have no incentive to read your dms. on mastodon, you're at least a friend-of-a-friend of the operator unless you're on a huge instance.

The first thing you mention is a common problem in marketplaces: used cars, online dating, etc. Term is "market for lemons"

categorical imperative: if everyone did that nobody would do the actual work. there are problems in the world that must be solved with software engineering. software engineers need to work on them, and highly skilled ones, too.

disclaimer, i guess: i work at a sister project of the NAO

What has Mastodon improved on this process, though? It seems the same issues are in place -- difficult to administer technically (this post) and hard to deal with spam (have heard before, don't have a link on hand unfortunately). This is a genuine question -- I wasn't around for USENET so maybe this is a "quantity of difference becomes quality of difference" issue where the degree of effort for maintaining it was just way harder than it is now.

I had a particularly funny result: Trying sample #3 (put a record into S3) from Typescript to Python, it reliably... outputs a completely different program, which instead downloads an image from S3 and resizes it in /tmp. Weird.

The argument isn't that they did evil stuff for no reason. The argument is they "bet" that growth would continue at pandemic levels, and hired to support that growth, with the plan that if the growth didn't continue and the new people weren't needed, they'd just lay them off.

The opinion is that, if that was the plan (which Tobi's layoff post seems to confirm), that it's a crass way to operate. People uprooted their lives to work there. They quit old jobs, maybe moved cities or countries. Of course layoffs happen and companies make mistakes, but deliberately setting up a strategy with a high possibility of failure ("a bet") and then hiring people knowing that they'll be laid off if things outside their control don't go right in the near future--that's sort of crass.

Obviously no exec was twirling their mustache and saying "find me Jim, we'll fire him first because I hate him". It was just a plan set up, seemingly, without regard for the outsized risk it placed on new employees relative to the possibility of the business itself failing. New employees that would disproportionately be affected by a layoff, by nature of being new employees.

I agree that Shopify is a business. My point is exactly that a business decision made for the profitability and stock price of the company is presented as an emotional story.

> that messages from a CEO are not meant to be treated as blogposts or emotional diary entries.

I don't understand what you mean by this. Do you not believe the original post is written to elicit an emotional reaction? How do you interpret it?

> Those lines of code started a company and sent it on a fascinating journey full of wonder, toil, success, failure, ambition, and above all else comradery. Being on a journey, surrounded by great teammates, doing difficult things is what it's all about.

> Our customers are merchants, entrepreneurs, and small businesses owners - the bedrock of our economy and precisely those that are typically hit hardest during recessions. Most are already feeling it. We again have a clear objective in these challenging macro economic times, and we will use everything we’ve got to help them succeed and come out stronger. That’s our core mission.

etc. It reads far more emotional and blogposty than the typical dispassionate corporate layoff announcement ("Corp corp is reducing 10% of our workforce today. This change will allow us to be more agile and do more synergy.") The whole point of this comment chain is that despite the tone and better writing, it's essentially the same message.

If, OTOH, your point is "well obviously it's the same message but you should know that", well of course I know that. That's why I wrote my comment. I just find it sort of frustrating, and the author's response tone-deaf to the issue with it. It's a layoff announcement. Drop the beginning and end about the incredible journey and Shopify's crucial mission. The middle is mostly good.

It isn't not-PR just because you wrote it. It's PR because it's disseminating information to the public for the purpose of image management.

The information is that the company thought it could grow more during the pandemic by hiring new people, and "bet" growth would stick around and those people could stay on in the long term. Is that wrong? Well, that's business. (I have absolutely no doubt, of course, that the "bet"-nature of the employment was carefully communicated during hiring.)

The PR is that this business decision is presented as a story of Shopify's brave history of taking on daring bets, its decision to take on another, its defeat at the hands of unflinching (completely external) factors, its kind treatment of employees that there is no option but to let go in these difficult times, and the new, refocused, decisive organization that will be reborn (after some people who joined 6 months ago get laid off).

It's not all bad. 16 weeks severance seems generous to me, letting people keep their chairs is kind of random but nice, the job referral stuff is a nice gesture, etc. I know all the nice things you did! The P was R'd!

It's just, at the end of the day, it's an obviously-business decision that's being told as something else. People got fucked over by a confluence of factors after the higher-ups decided to take a risk. There's no story here. There's no arc of Shopify History. The job of PR, regardless of the letters after the name of whoever writes it, is to make it seem like there is one when bad stuff happens.

I think another way to phrase what the author is trying to say is that EA is too "comfortable" for people who, for the world to really get better, might need to give something up.

There's a great Scott Alexander (who may be an EA , I'm not sure, it doesn't matter) quote about complex disagreements that goes something like "the true answer will probably be the one that's complex and doesn't quite fall into any camp and leaves everyone feeling somewhat annoyed". I think the same is true of doing good. If doing good was easy we'd have figured it out in the last 3,000 years of moral philosophy. But instead, the some of the greatest minds of their times have beaten their heads against the problem and come out with solutions in complete contradiction with each other.

EA strides into this tradition with a seductive promise: you can basically do what you already wanted to do and have it be the most moral thing! Do you love computers and/or having Amazon helicopter piles of money onto your front lawn? You aren't a "techbro", you're a goddamn Mother Teresa. Just give away a small share of it. It's easy! Just a direct deposit away and you're good.

This isn't necessarily all bad! A lot of people do nothing and just feel guilty about it. They see the world is screwed up but they don't feel like they're in a situation where they can do much of anything about it. Maybe they donate $20 a month to whatever charity managed to get an ad onto their Facebook feed at a moment of particularly high guilt. EA is a highly tuned machine for getting to these people and extracting commitments of recurring funds to charitable causes -- some good (bed nets) and some less -- but probably net-positive.

But let's not fool ourselves. I work at a place that's on the 80,000 hours website as a recommended ex-risk workplace. Honestly, it's 20% because the work is far more interesting than CRUD dev, 20% because I like my coworkers, 20% because I needed a job, 20% because it pays pretty well, and 20% because it's good for the world. Compare me to a volunteer doctor working somewhere without adequate healthcare, like rural Ghana or West Virginia. They gave up a large salary, comfortable living conditions, high status, living close to their family. They put themselves at risk of contracting malaria, ebola, or other diseases that could seriously injure or kill them. Would any reasonable person say I'm doing more good for the world than them? That the world would be better off if they were more like me?

But, that's probably just appealing to emotion and the romanticized image of heroic self-sacrifice. If that doctor performs a highly effective intervention, like cataract surgery, they may only seriously improve the lives of tens of thousands of people, curing them of preventable blindness and preventing knock-on health effects at the source. If we instead shut up and multiply, I believe my contribution of 0.0000000...00001% improved chance of the survival of the human species, while somewhat small, will prevail when multiplied against the sum happiness of 1 yoctobillion potential future space-serf ecumenopolises. It's quite convenient that instead of needing to seriously question how I could do good in the world and give something up, young me's thought that "modding videogames is fun, I wonder if I can get paid for this" led directly to the mathematically optimal way to do good in world.

It's just a little too convenient.

Since the article didn't specify and I had to go to the original paper: the "aerosol" substance is sulfur dioxide

> I kind of wonder if repatriation only matters when the artifact came from non western countries to western ones.

No. There's also been a lot of noise over the Elgin Marbles (stolen from Greece, mentioned in the article). The Koh-i-Noor has just been in the news lately because of the death of the queen and it being part of the crown jewels.

Sent, thank you. I also made sure to mention the "consumer harm" (keyword) of forcing consumers to engage with Adobe's predatory pricing model ("annual subscription billed monthly" bs)

Some people have argued that indexed access is a wart, but it would be quite heavyweight to always have to unwrap an option when accessing a known-good index:

    let foo = [0_u8, 1, 2];
    foo[0].unwrap(); // really?

Instead, indexing on arrays / vecs is (essentially) sugar for .get(index).unwrap(), if you don't want the unwrap behavior use get. This is very similar to Python, though Python throws an exception which obviously isn't available to Rust.