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wakawaka28

265 karma · joined January 4, 2024

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wakawaka28··on Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)
There may be such a thing as pure test-taking skill, but I think it boils down to two things: General knowledge/literacy, and knowing the specific format of the test. A well-written test should not have question context for one thing that informs the answer to another question, or have logical inconsistencies/redundancies/ambiguity that can be exploited. Questions should also not build off of each other in a way that causes cascading failure if you can't answer one. These things may happen in low-stakes classroom exams but they certainly shouldn't in a standardized test.

Practically everyone goes to school in our society, so they have very similar opportunity to learn how to take a test. Some of them never get good at it after many years. Maybe that is a sign that they also wouldn't be good at any academic subjects. You wouldn't have a reliable way to measure that, because test-taking is out. I guess they could try to practice test-taking by taking a ton of random tests and grading themselves, but then they might accidentally become experts in some subjects!

wakawaka28··on Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code
It's a generic license that doesn't say "by the way, if you've got a market cap above X then you have to host and distribute the code FOR FREE"... Putting such garbage in there would hurt small developers who made popular, nonprofit projects and probably anyone who isn't flush with cash. Imagine being legally obligated to host files in the middle of a DDoS attack, and pay the resulting AWS bill or whatever.
wakawaka28··on Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code
Regardless of whether these costs are zero (I doubt they actually are), these licenses apply to EVERYONE who uses them, not just very wealthy companies. It would not be right to essentially require unbounded free hosting or use of specific online tools/platforms, just to be able to comply with the license.
wakawaka28··on Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code
So? The license is for everyone, not just Google.
wakawaka28··on Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code
I don't know what "Red Hat model" you mean, but if you're referring to their code delivery: It's not a problem for their internal developers, because they can use git lol. You can theoretically go to the upstream projects individually and merge the code drop with their nearest branch, and THEN do git blame/diff to figure out the delta and history of some lines of code. There are probably a few upstream open-source projects out there with no public VCS, but those are rare.
wakawaka28··on Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code
It's an impossible stretch and also a bad idea. Insisting on that interpretation opens up other issues. Revision history may not be available in some cases for various reasons, such as if one pays someone for a large contribution. We could get into arguments about how granular commits need to be to comply with publication requirements. Digital achives containing source code files are certainly customary and easy to use, as opposed to reams of printouts. It would be just as customary and modern to publish on CD and mail the stuff out to anyone who demands the code. Continuous or timely delivery is not guaranteed by the license. One week of wait time is actually reasonable for a process like this, though I expect it might gradually get worse in line with their long-term objective of making the entire thing painful for outside developers.
wakawaka28··on Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code
I hate to be that guy but publishing source online for free theoretically involves unbounded distribution costs that can't be recovered. That isn't the issue here but it should be considered before changing a license.
wakawaka28··on Why your Amazon order confirmation emails have become so unhelpful
The website needs an actual orders/cancellations page too as well as a page that clearly shows which items were shipped together in the same box (rather than arriving on the same day). The "Your Orders" page is a stream of items, and that can make it difficult to figure out which items came from where, in case of an issue.
wakawaka28··on Who owns the code?
>What we have now is neither - owners are hugely over-rewarded for owning things and extracting passive value from everyone else, creators and inventors are kinda sorta rewarded sometimes if they're lucky and very much not if they're not. Just like other workers.

Creators and inventors are rewarded but obviously they cannot consume the whole pie. The people who invest in creative pursuits eat a lot of losses. People only seem to notice profitable successes, and forget that failures need to be paid for as well.

The same logic also applies to workers. The fact that your labor costs money is a guarantee, and it might not make money at all. We can think of a few examples where the work is directly delivered to consumers with zero marginal overhead, but most work DOES have overhead and liabilities, no matter how simple.

wakawaka28··on Companies promote incompetent employees to management tolimit damage they can do
I have never seen or heard of this happening. I have had managers who would not be able to do the grunt work, but they certainly weren't hired because they couldn't do that work.

For what it's worth I also think the Peter Principle aphorisms are wrong. These basically revolve around the assertion that many managers are incompetent because they got promoted based on competence at a lower role, and therefore if they have been at the same level for a while it implies they are not good enough to advance. Well, it's true that management is a different job function than the actual domain functions, but people can and do learn. It's also not mathematically possible to move up indefinitely, because there just aren't enough management roles for that. Unfortunately, some people take jokes too seriously, as I'm sure was done with this post.

wakawaka28··on Show HN: Grepathy – Claude made a decision nobody approved
Not really. That's like saying a design document should be pulled out of commit messages. There are a few reasons I can think of why this would be a bad idea. Maybe the biggest is that commit messages should be quickly readable and only explain the changes in the commit. To truly explain the reasons a path was chosen by a LLM you need at least a summary of what was asked for, and related discussions or "don't do" instructions. I've heard of people wanting to commit the entire chat logs as files before, but that is noisy and might only get you halfway there as far as explanations go. I certainly don't want this data bloat, snooping, etc. I would rather for important details to be curated. I can see why maximum details could be helpful sometimes but I don't want to bloat the repo with that.
wakawaka28··on Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth
Everything you're saying is reasonable but the ultimate conclusion of such views is that disagreement with "expert consensus" is not allowed. Your entire thread with me has been disparaging people and insulting their intelligence based on nothing but knowing that they don't want to take some vaccine. Some of the people you're smearing are actual doctors, PhDs, and people who have knowledge of their own physiology that nobody else can possibly know. Yet they get shouted down by smug jerks for various reasons.

Speaking of unscientific takes, the 6 foot distance standard and the mask mandates are both not supported with scientific evidence. The actual evidence for these is inconclusive at best. The primary justification is apriori reasoning. You might say "Oh it's better than nothing" but that is not guaranteed, and businesses went bankrupt, kids didn't learn in school, and people were let out of PRISON based on these mandates. So-called scientists set in motion extreme paranoia and tyranny upon all of us and I will never forget that.

wakawaka28··on Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth
>Yes, anti-vaxers are inherently irrational. Overwhelming benefits do not change their opinion because being anti-vaccine is a core part of their identity.

There are people like this but you can say the same about anything. Pro-pharma vax promoters definitely make "trust the science, don't do research or question anything from authorities" part of their identity too.

wakawaka28··on Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth
>I'm not free to take it, anymore. As you said, it's been taken off the market for most people.

Well, I meant that you should be free to take it if there is a reasonable argument that taking it is better than not taking it. There are multiple reasons why it isn't offered anymore.

>No, I like shunning people who are wrong and dumb.

People who refused the vaccine are not wrong or dumb. It is too laborious to explain it to you though. I think no matter how much I explain or provide contrary evidence, your mind is made up. What happened to "My body, my choice"? Do you seriously think that people would refuse the vaccine if the benefits were so overwhelming? If the virus and the vaccine were what they said, you wouldn't need to try to mandate shit. You'd have to break up fights as people fell all over each other to get the damn vaccine.

wakawaka28··on How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]
I'm not the guy you responded to, but I just wanted to say I think you misunderstood him. He wasn't prescribing a solution. He was describing a situation. If good people leave all institutions because of corruption, then only corrupt people will be left. There will most likely always be some corruption. We need to keep corruption and violations of rights from getting out of control because nobody wants to live through a war to restore order.

The US has been leaning toward the worse for years. I think it can be traced back to the JFK assassination or earlier. The Church Committee found out a lot and ultimately changed very little. We certainly have a theocratic influence but I think the Christians are played off the leftists masterfully to subvert the nation. If people weren't at each other's throats over random issues, they might start to think about where all the tax money goes.

It is pure arrogance to think that the US can essentially rule the world forever. Being in this position and having the reserve currency is why we seem superficially rich as all the production goes abroad. Instead of factory jobs, kids get to drive for DoorDash and stuff like that. If this trend is not reversed soon, we won't produce enough of anything to defend the country. We may already be in that position IMO.

Where does it go? I think we are in for a rude awakening. We might see severe economic turbulence and war, hopefully followed by peace and preservation of our individual and national sovereignty. I would count anything past this as a bonus.

wakawaka28··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
That depends very much on what kind of software you are writing and how good you are at it. I do not think math makes as much sense as CS for general software jobs. It might not count against you very much, but I wouldn't go so far as to say you're on the same footing as someone who dedicated their entire studies to CS. There are way worse backgrounds you could have besides math IMO. I would not want to be an English graduate who switched to software engineering. I've heard of some of those people.

Software engineering is unique among engineering fields in that it accepts people without the right credentials, and sometimes without any credentials. Other engineering fields not only require matching credentials but also have professional certifications. I don't think I would enjoy taking those very much, but after seeing some of the crap that people get away with I have fantasized about having such a process to filter people out.

wakawaka28··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
If they're not swappable, that supports my claim about scarcity even more. But I also have people here saying that you can swap in anybody vaguely technical, sometimes without credentials at all, to fill these roles even at FAANG.

I happen to think workers with minimum qualifications like a CS degree can be fairly swappable, at least more than FAANG types would have us believe. But they're very elitist when it comes to hiring. I have practically given up on being hired at FAANG companies, and these days I think their jobs are overrated too. Sign up to bust your ass 50 hours per week with backstabbing snobs, till you get laid off unceremoniously. I'd rather not.

wakawaka28··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
We can both "yeah, but" this to death. You make some valid points but I think my observation generally holds. The supply of workers is not so elastic, at least if you have real standards for the workers such as college degrees and so on.
wakawaka28··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
You may be right but it's not high pay alone that draws in people from other industries. Standards must be relaxed to accept people from unconventional backgrounds. When conditions tighten, many of these people are simply not competitive enough to get another job. When it comes to aerospace, defense, academia, etc., opportunities are more scarce in those fields than in software the past few years also. It is this, not just the pay, that drives people to software.

I'm not saying people with odd backgrounds can't ever make it. But let's be clear, these are not usually hot shots who can simply get any vaguely technical job they want. They get into software because it is traditionally very accepting of uncredentialled or non-mainstream individuals. The framing you put forward makes it sound like the people committed to software are chumps who have to take what they're given, and these interlopers are the real geniuses who leave for greener pastures with ease. That simply isn't true.

wakawaka28··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
That might be true but how many of these people are there, really? I'm not convinced that many companies are hiring these barely-qualified people.
wakawaka28··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
Of course the judgement about whether people overhired is subjective on a per-company basis. My point is, you can't hire people who don't exist, and the ways to get people into the industry are limited. All other things equal, we would expect massive overhiring to be matched with very low unemployment in the industry, and the correction should not go below some baseline.
wakawaka28··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
It is no doubt a campaign or at least a meme. It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly. So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered. The only ways out of the pool are basically retirement, career change, and death.

I know there are complications with this argument. For example, unemployment could double by basically doubling the average time to find a job. That kind of thing could support an overhiring thesis if the unemployment rate in tech got very low. To really test the "everybody overhired" thesis, I think you need to do a full accounting of early careers people, unemployed, retired, etc. I'm not gonna attempt that...

wakawaka28··on My phone replaced a brass plug
There are also targets with fluorescent backgrounds and special black paint that flakes off near the holes. There is a limit to how many holes you can see in the target but it is way better than plain paper.
wakawaka28··on GPT-5.5
Sounds like communist gobbledygook. This is not "destroying labor theory" any more than outsourcing did. Call me when we don't even need to prompt the shit ever again or validate results, and when the stuff runs unlimited without scarce resources as input.
wakawaka28··on Highlights from Git 2.54
I think you should consider a third option:

3. After years of refusing to learn git and making excuses for their hate, the goobers finally buckle down and read the manual for a tool that coincidentally does stuff a little different from git. They leap at the opportunity to further blame git for their difficulties rather than themselves.

If there is a way git can be made to appease these people without making it horrible, then we should try to do it. But I still think these people would be better served by buckling down for a few hours to learn git as it was designed, because it is designed very well.

wakawaka28··on Highlights from Git 2.54
That is an absurd straw man. The point is, rebase workflow is ergonomic enough for the amount of splitting or rewording anyone realistically needs. Furthermore, knowing rebase is essential for things that these new tools can't do. It's best for people to use one familiar tool for everything IMO.
wakawaka28··on Highlights from Git 2.54
I think this is cluttering git with a bunch of special-case commands when rebase is all you need. Next thing you know, people will say we need to drop git because there are 5 ways to do everything.
wakawaka28··on Highlights from Git 2.54
>It's very widely remarked that the Git CLI is pretty miserable, and as soon as a better (so I hear) alternative comes along they suddenly realise and start improving it... This happens all the time in software.

I don't think these claims have merit, for the most part. More often than not, people just don't take any time to learn git, then get on a soapbox about it.

If you think these commands are worthwhile, by all means use them. I happen to think git rebase is all you need. Giving people crutches to avoid using it just delays their enlightenment. But not everyone reaches enlightenment, it's true.

I don't think jj adds anything compelling over git either. But different strokes for different folks...

wakawaka28··on Highlights from Git 2.54
If this is meant to be a dig, you should keep in mind how much jj owes to git.
wakawaka28··on CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes
There are many cases where the EV busses have been abandoned. Busses typically do not do their route and stop, so getting a significant amount of charging for any busses requires extra busses that can be rotated on/off duty. If you design the system to depend on that charging then you need extra busses and you're effectively stuck with a sparse schedule. That is not a constraint to consider with petrol-powered busses. They can run nonstop as much as needed.

There is another thing cities should consider in all this: EV busses are totally unsuitable in emergencies. They cannot be charged fast enough, especially in extreme weather. You should consider this before buying an EV as well. At least, have a plan to arrange alternate transport with a reliable petrol vehicle.

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