walkabout

Layers aren’t viable as a meat crop anyway, you’d spend more trying to engineer some one-off effort like that than you’d make and nobody would want the resulting meat. Your competition is freakish mutant birds that get so big in a few weeks that if you don’t butcher them they’ll soon be unable to walk and start to suffocate under their own bulk, and that taste like the almost nothing that grocery store buyers expect.

I assume egg layers are typically either fed back to the flock (chickens love eating chicken) or turned into e.g. dog food, but I kinda doubt they do even that with a disease-cull.

Never bought eggs before covid, or never shopped the sale ‘fridges at the grocery store and/or regular-priced eggs at Costco? Under $1 wasn’t uncommon.

Not quite that fast, but not too far off. Certainly a lot faster than building a new factory. Laying chickens start producing in a matter of weeks. Time for breeding to scale is also needed (but very fast), and they’re not producing at max rate for somewhat longer than that, but still, in the scheme of things egg production has got to be among the most-responsive products in the market.

> Let me just add I don't think backyard eggs are cheaper, even at the height of price spike, because when externalities like feed and enclosure are calculated the resulting product won't have the economies of scale

The math checks out if:

1) You build your coop and enclosure basically out of junk or otherwise for near-free (good luck with the, ah, “spouse test” on that);

2) You lean heavily on kitchen waste for food;

3) You place no value on the time spent on anything chicken-related;

4) You butcher and eat each chicken after ~3 years when their rate of laying drops off (you stop wasting food and space on an unproductive layer, and gain “free” chicken meat);

5) You raise more than you eat and sell the excess (ten chickens aren’t much more effort than four chickens, and the extra may cover feed and replacement costs for the flock);

So yeah it doesn’t really work out, just buy $5-$8/dozen backyard chicken eggs from someone else who’s bad at math or has different priorities (loves the smell of chicken shit, maybe?), you’ll come out ahead. Or get them from the grocery store if you don’t care much about the chickens’ diet and conditions.

They’re trolls. They’ve been doing this for years. It’s just trolling.

I would have to think a really long time to come up with an answer to “describe a hard problem you’ve solved” at all. I might have to consult notes. After that, to make it an interview-friendly narrative, I’d have to fill in a lot of details with plausible speculation because god knows I don’t actually remember (and I don’t really trust memory very much, anyway)

The joys of age plus extremely-poor autobiographical memory.

It doesn’t help that what I think of as actually hard, day to day, is shit like documentation from FAANG companies lying to me and wasting a whole fucking day of my time, terrible error messages, mismanagement of upstream projects, bureaucracy making a two-day task take four weeks, and, in some common ecosystems, awful design of core tools and major libraries, or horribly wasteful library churn. “Hard problems” are nothing next to bullshit problems.

The largest tech companies could also implement a shared cert program via some kind of industry group, with periodic re-certification requirements. This’d surely be far cheaper than all of them running multi-stage leetcode and system design interviews, and they already basically publish study guides so this isn’t even that different, just cheaper for both the businesses and candidates.

It’d also make job hopping far less painful (see above: cheaper for the candidates) which is why they don’t.

So we may conclude: the point of leetcode interviews is wage suppression.

Yeah, I’ve seen those criticisms before and been convinced-enough that it’s contributed to my not bothering with that podcast. IBCK has been accurate enough when they’ve covered books I’m familiar with that I’m less worried about that being a problem with that show (though I’m sure they do sometimes get things wrong)

I mean, a bunch of his book is stoic epistemology, physics, and metaphysics, all of which is of dubious value. Anyone reading him is definitely going to be picking-and-choosing what they pay attention to, almost nobody today is going to go all-in on the entire edifice of the stoic system of philosophy, and nearly all readers are likely to disregard half or more of his book—as far as the pop-cultural life of the book, these large portions of it are practically invisible for a reason.

I do think it’s remarkable that there’s much salvageable at all in it, given the age of the work (though a fair amount of ancient philosophy remains relevant, or at least functions as good reading and exercises along the lines of koans for developing philosophical ways of thinking, an awful lot is effectively obsolete and only of historical interest) and that it came from one of the most powerful people on the planet. It’s not often you get something with much enduring value at all from someone who also happens to be at or near the pinnacle of human hierarchies of their day.

Though, in fairness, he’s mostly repackaging stuff he learned from others, it’s not exactly original thinking in the same way as the chain of works from Socrates-Plato-Aristotle, say.

Still, it’d be like, I dunno, Franklin Roosevelt penning a philosophically-inclined self-help book that was still widely read and referenced beyond the year 3,000 and in languages that didn’t exist when it was written. Pretty distinctive, very few works at all in that class, and almost none from the perspective of someone that highly placed politically, despite a strong bias in general toward works from the rich and powerful being created at all, and surviving. I’d say the only way it’s likely to permanently fade is if/when “western culture”, to perhaps include near-east and Maghreb Muslim culture, fades (there’s so much overlap of the parts people like, with forms of thinking from the East, that I expect it’d have trouble co-existing with them in the same body of thought, as an actively-read item of interest)

Stoicism specifies that one needs right acts, in addition to right thoughts. It’s far less passive than e.g. Russell (though I love Russell, and I even love The History of Western Philosophy in which he levels these criticisms, while many others seem to dismiss it) describes it, though treating it as purely an internal-mindset thing is certainly easier and I think a lot of people in-fact only apply those parts.

Notably, Aurelius (at least—I’m less well-read on Epictetus and others) allows that there are automatic reactions that we can’t, realistically, control. It’s the unintentional, but controllable, maintenance of negative feelings that Stoics aim to consciously tamp down, mostly by breaking the habit of falling into those patterns of thinking in the first place. I think triggered feelings and reactions due to PTSD would tend to fall under the former, though surely a stoic approach might help reduce ongoing harm from those, as it does with more mundane things like being angry at other drivers on the highway. I mean, something in one’s attitudes and ways of thinking must be able help, and if not, guess we better stop bothering with therapy, so it’s not outlandish that stoic practice might improve even that kind of problem, though it may not be the right tool to attack the root of it.

The idea that stoicism even aims to eliminate all negative emotions, or that it blames all of them on the person experiencing them, isn’t really what I’ve found.

One of a couple varieties of books covered by the If Books Could Kill podcast is this category, the Surprising Truth That Explains Many Things type.

They do indeed seem to almost always be bullshit, including the very-popular ones (and including ones that get popular among crowds like HN)

They’re basically markov chain text generators with a relevance-tracking-and-correction step. It turns out this is like 100x more useful than the same thing without the correction step, but they don’t really escape what they are “at heart”, if you will.

The ways they fail are often surprising if your baseline is “these are thinking machines”. If your baseline is what I wrote above (say, because you read the “Attention Is All You Need” paper) none of it’s surprising.

Oh, agreed, they don’t get points for failing the task but accidentally reporting something more-correct in the process.

They’re intended to derail every thread that includes them into discussions about this stupid date format, thus wasting lifetimes of person-hours.

It’s surely an effort by misanthropes who want the worst for humanity. If it’s coming from any benign motivation, then it’s totally misguided.

I’m pretty sure the loyalty-card thing has become so big because they’re selling the data.

So many things are like that now. Like Roku sticks and TVs are subsidized by selling user data. You want to make a Roku competitor that doesn’t spy? Your product will struggle to get on shelves and to stay there, in part because the price for your product will be higher even if you get just as good a price on your components as they do, because you’d have to price them at-cost to match Roku’s pricing. Meanwhile 99% of people looking at the products don’t realize that one’s cheaper than the other because it’s going to spy on them and sell the data.

Calling out shitty behavior doesn’t mean you felt “entitled” to anything.

Not all shitty behavior is governed by contracts and licenses. You can be an asshole without violating the terms of a license.

I have relatives who’ve been concerned enough about the “[democratic candidate] will take your guns!” thing that they’ve made and displayed signs about it. For multiple election cycles.

That these same candidates, when elected, haven’t even attempted such a thing, even when they have an aligned Congress, doesn’t seem to register at all. They hear their lying talking heads say it again the next time, and believe it whole-heartedly. It’s so weird. You’d think at some point they’d start to wonder why it never happened.

The good news for our collective investments in stupid technology is we’ve apparently decided never to let the market drop significantly in absolute terms ever again, even to let the air out of an obvious bubble.

The bad news is we’re accomplishing that via high levels of inflation, so pretty soon $5m will be the new $1m.

I decided about a decade ago that McLuhan was a prophet, and that the “message” of the Internet may not include compatibility with democracy, as it turns out.

Relatedly, I wonder if we count misrepresenting a misleading news article such that it becomes more-accurate as misrepresenting news content…

Kinda… but between credit cards (and any cards serviced by them—debit cards aren’t safe) and widespread facial recognition with cameras everywhere in stores these days, and things like “loyalty cards” being required to just get what should be normal prices on things, we’re pretty heavily tracked in physical space now, too. People just don’t realize how much, and don’t see this stuff being sold and aggregated then re-sold.

We really need to crack down on stalking-but-automated.

This would be a pretty hilarious board for anyone who likes the em-dash and who has had many fairly active accounts (one at a time) on here due to periodically scrambling their passwords to avoid getting attached to high karma or to take occasional breaks from the site. Should there be such people.

K. But from what I’ve seen most people have to be taught your way of thinking.

Oh, some ideas can be crazier than others—I just didn’t get why a misinterpretation is necessarily evidence that a belief based on the Bible is crazier than one that’s not a misinterpretation. I can easily imagine misreadings or misinterpretations being a lot less crazy than a more-correct interpretation of something like that.

Why is a misinterpretation of the Bible any crazier than a non-misinterpretation?

Nope, it works both ways, at least for lots of folks. The other attitude often (in my experience, most of the time) has to be explicitly taught or conditioned in from getting fucked enough times and deciding you may as well be fucking people too.

“Their own” can and often does mean something hosted on a major cloud provider (whether they manage it in-house or pay a vendor for their system)

> Isn't it everyone using multiple cloud providers nowadays?

Oh yes. All of them, in fact, especially if you count what key vendors host on.

> Why are they affected by single cloud provider outage?

Every workload is only on one cloud. Nb this doesn’t mean every workflow is on only one cloud. Important distinction since that would be more stable.

My experience is that kids have to be taught “‘fair’ is what the market will bear” because they start out feeling quite strongly that it’s not true.

Tons of kids aren’t taught that, some of them start businesses, and they may struggle to make ends meet (or at least to thrive like they could be) because raising prices to market rates feels so unfair to them that they won’t do it unless prodded to and told it’s ok by someone else (and they still might not)

I definitely am not convinced market-rate-is-ethical-and-fair is natural thinking for most people, or the kind of thing they want to do.

(I’ve been the one telling people they should raise prices and I still can’t shake the feeling that it’s kinda wrong…)