1,911 karma · joined August 28, 2018
"astrophysicist Ethan Siegel called Loeb a 'once-respected scientist'"
I'm sorry, but that's not his ideas not being picked up. That's bullying. If Ethan Siegel was talking about Loeb's ideas, that'd be one thing.
And yes, the peer review process is badly broken. The emperor has no clothes.
We're living in a post-truth era, and it's a problem we need to solve.
Where I'd like to land isn't: "Harvard astronomer gets bullied by peers" or "Harvard astronomer makes millions of dollars from half-baked theory" but "Harvard astronomer presents half-baked theory, we have a serious conversation about it, and we treat it as a potential hypothesis."
I like quirky hypotheses, and I've found I've learned a lot investigating them.
As a dictator, my goal is to fill my bank accounts for when I get deposed. In most cases, countries who have their resources fleeced have lawful means to go after former dictators. Bitcoin removes that.
Bitcoin? I'm not so sure. Bitcoin definitely stands to change the world, but I'm not sure for the better. Bitcoin would:
* By design, have exploding deflation
* Allow insane inter-generational wealth accumulation and disparity
* Block most of the controls used by central banks to stabilize the economy
* Allow a disk failure or hacker to wipe out someone's life savings
... and so on.
I'd actually liken it to the /early/ fascist, communist, and democratic regimes, which had a lot of good ideas for how to replace monarchies, a lot of bad ideas, and perhaps a 25% hit rate. The US worked out fairly well, at least once it got past the Articles of Confederation bit. France didn't work for a long time, but eventually worked out okay. Fascism and Soviet Communism /appeared/ to work better than what came before for a few years, and then imploded into horrors. The jury is still out on where the Chinese form of government lands.
At this point, we don't quite know which track we're on with Bitcoin. I was optimistic at the beginning, and now I'm more pessimistic, but it's too early to tell. In either case, we've learned a lot, and we could probably design a better system without many of Bitcoin's flaws.
1) By-and-large, I do call people by what they want to be called, but by-and-large, I have few ways of knowing before we've interacted. Over email, I typically mirror whatever they use (if they call me with a title, I use that back; if they use first name, likewise). In person, I mirror what their colleagues use. Of course, that's imperfect, since we're in different places in the status hierarchy and have different levels of familiarity, but it's the best heuristic I've found. But just because I do that, I won't fault others for not doing it. Lack of access to cross-cultural education is common. I accept whatever people call me, so long as the *intention* isn't to be insulting.
2) Real and perceived sexism and racism cause the same level of harm. There's a lot of both -- I'm not downplaying real sexism or racism -- but if people aren't given cross-cultural tools, there's a lot of unnecessary harm as well. If a British woman/minority/etc. comes to the US, is called by her first name, and believes she's placed at lower status due to her gender, real harm is done, unnecessarily. And if an American women/minorities/etc believes everyone in Britain is stand-offish, similar harm is done. I see this sort of dynamic playing out over, and over, and over across virtually all cultural pairings.
3) I didn't actually follow the "fracas over Dr. Biden." Most news gets paid by clicks, and most fracas become much greater than they are. The right runs articles cherry-picking left-wing wackos, and vice-versa. I'm not going to alter my opinion over a fracas.
Getting back to hierarchy, for the most part, I actually think it's better to leave up to the person higher in the hierarchy to adapt (which, in my current job, is usually me). Right now, the First Lady is just about as close to the top as it gets. If she goes to a progressive elite universities, she should go by "Jill." If she goes to Britain, she should use an honorific or three. I think most African American communities might go with "Dr. Biden." And so on.
The use of titles carries very different implications in different cultures. America is diverse. First name can signify disrespect or familiarity. Titles can signify high status, or stuffy pretentiousness. "Dr" can be reserved for medical doctors, can extend to PhDs, or even extend to JDs.
I spent 15 minutes, the other day, on an inane debate with a colleague, before we realized we were using a word with subtly different meanings.
There's a new form of strawman attack, where you point to a crazy on the internet with some opinion, and stereotype everyone to have that same opinion, and the linked article is clearly from someone with issues. But the fact remains tht there are cultural pockets of culture where all the terms are appropriate and don't convey disrespect, whether "Jill," "First Lady," "Dr. Biden," "Mrs. Biden," "Madame President," or even "Hey you." Conversely, there are cultural pockets where all of those convey disrespect.
If you're aware of it, and look for it, it's not hard to tell which is which, even.
In a multicultural society, we should try to hear what the other person is trying to say, assume good intentions, and not pick battles over semantics. Your words and body language mean something different than mine, and that's okay. We should try to communicate. Disrespect isn't about a title, but what's behind it.
I mean, it might be driving with the emergency blinkers on the whole time, at 10 miles per hour, and flashing the horn, or crazy stuff like that, but making a basic self-driving car just isn't out-of-scope for an amateur.
DARPA urban challenge was 2007, and 6 cars finished an urban course, with the fastest averaging 14MPH, and most developed mostly by students, with professor support. Today, I can get a lot of that stuff CoTS, open source, or read papers about what they did.
I couldn't sell millions of self-driving cars, because of edge cases, manufacturing, or what not, but it's not fundamentally different from biohacking. Technology moves forward.
Disclaimer: I'm not an MD, biologist, or similar, but I am pretty good at all the stuff that goes into a self-driving car. I'm not claiming a /typical serious amateur/ could build one. I'm claiming /I/ could build one.
Early vaccines were made in the scientific equivalents of modern basements and worked adequately well. Influenza vaccines come out each year like clockwork. There are plenty of vaccines which just aren't rocket science, including for virtually all major historical viral diseases which wiped out or crippled large numbers of people.
And then there are ones like AIDS.
With COVID19, as far as I can tell, virtually all reasonable vaccine candidates DID work, and it was mostly a question of how quickly and how well. I'm much more excited about a 95% effective shot than a 60% effective one. The Moderna one was developed, quite literally, overnight. Once Moderna had the sequence, they had a (later proven working) vaccine candidate more-or-less instantly, in January, long before they'd seen the virus live, let alone had a way to check that it worked.
Did you see many /failed/ COVID19 vaccines? I saw a few /worse/ vaccine candidates. A couple failed in some populations (e.g. Sanofi worked well for younger people, but not older). Some didn't have competitive effectiveness (e.g. Merck, presumably, but they didn't release enough to know when I last looked). Some had side effects (UQ/CSL would cause people to fail AIDS tests later). Etc. I think all of these will compete for some of the logistics chains as the winners, so it doesn't make sense to push with /less effective/ vaccines.
My general impression is that COVID19, at least unmutated, is not hard to make effective vaccines for. There are questions about longevity and mutations, but for now, I can see the sticking-peptides-up-nose approach potentially working. I mean, compare that to early vaccine efforts like variolation (which worked), or the whole flu of 1918 vaccine effort (which didn't).
Disclaimer: Not an MD or biologist.
In many cases, the hard part isn't so much making a working vaccine, as proving it works, scaling manufacturing, etc.
What a concept.
The owners are the shareholders.
GameStop was started as a side gig by Riggio, who was also the founder of Barnes and Noble. He has bigger things to worry about, like his retirement. It's been run by professional executives for the most part.
DeMatteo is still around, but I think that's it for the founding team. If you can call a series of merges a founding.
Yeah, if I own a company, I'll sweat and bleed to make it successful. That's the #1 founder / startup advantage.
That's not true for publicly-traded companies. Those are an abstraction. If a CEO is making $35 mil and someone offers them $50 mil, guess where they're going?
A lot of startups don't realize that as a source of advantage, but it's a big one. It's a lot of where the agility comes from too. A professional CEO need to first worry about keeping their job, then about their next job, and finally, the organization. For a founder, for the most part, those are one and the same.
If you gave me a failing public business as an owner -- with no accountability, no board to please, no existing executive team to back stab me, and all the upside -- I'd do better than most CEOs in turning it around. That's not because I'm more qualified or competent, but because I'd have the freedom of being an owner. The original CEO, if properly incentived, would usually do a better job than I would, in turn.
* CEO gets a golden parachute and finds a new job. A competent CEO will always find a job. A turn-around is risky, and a failed turn-around will have exposes and will ruin a career. Easier to stay-the-course.
* Workforce is laid off, struggles for a few weeks, and usually finds new jobs. The layoff sucks, but turn-arounds involve equal layoffs (and indeed can be harder to find jobs after; my employer went out-of-business is a mighty good reason to leave a company). Employees also hate change; in many cases, finding new jobs like old jobs is easier than re-qualifying.
* Shareholders lose a little bit of money, but are pretty diversified, and from a 50 trillion market, GME even at its inflated valuation is around 1/20th of a percent.
... and new ventures come in and fill the gap.
Capitalism is built on survival-of-the-fittest. If a company is not fit, it's sometimes more humane to kill it and replace it with a fitter company than to keep it straggling along. Companies aren't people; they're abstractions. There's no moral remorse to replacing a company with a better one. If you're running DBCorp which has a mediocre, buggy product, and a mismanaged workforce, and I run DBInc which takes your customers, hires your workforce, and has a high-quality product and well-managed workforce, in the end, everyone often ends up happier.
Turning businesses around is HARD.
I hope they do something, but I'm not optimistic.
There are claims of letting people know about products, or "driving consumer demand," but they fall apart as you dig deeper.
It's not clear how it ought to be regulated, but it ought to be regulated. It ought have been regulated a long, long time go, actually. When banner ads popped up on the Internet in the nineties was a much easier time than 2020, when we have trillion-dollar businesses pushing back.
Advertising is generally dishonest and predatory. It also tends to be AB tested and targeted enough that it doesn't feel dishonest to the readership of any particular venue. I just went to:
* Huff Post, and the first ad was: "Groundbreaking Device Exposes Greedy Internet Providers While Speeding Up Your Slow Internet"
* NYTimes, and the second ad was a sketchy "Bitcoin is the future/Invest Now"
* Wa Post: "Internet Providers Don't Want You Buying One, but They're Not Illegal"
Most venues don't have much control over the ads they serve. It's usually done through ad networks. I think Wa Post and NYTimes are top-notch journalism, while Huff Post is a sensationalist rag.
I don't tend to pattern match on speech/content patterns of groups I disagree with.
You have half the country distrust anything with ads for guns, and the other half distrust anything that uses words like "woke" or "white supremacy."
* Only when strictly necessary (there are no viable alternatives to Google login or YouTube for many purposes, and you need good search rankings)
* When absolutely necessary, use appropriate protection (don't rely on Google search for business, have fail overs for videos and auth, and do periodic Google Takeouts of my data)
If not for Google Takeout, I'd do a strict quarantine. It's kind of like the N95 mask for doing business with Google.
Note that this is on the B2B end. For personal use, I use many (free) Google services. It works great for things like maps, finding interesting videos on Youtube, using Android on my phone, or even sharing family photos. I am, apparently, a satisfied Google product (you know the old saying: if you're not a paying customer, you're a ....).
Consider:
* Most conspiracy theories are false.
* Many conspiracies do exist. I've seen people involved in a few.
In conspiracies, people keep secrets. Ergo, there's a poor mapping between actual conspiracies and conspiracy theories. People are speculating with no evidence. On the other hand, the conspiracies I've seen, you haven't heard of, and you probably won't.
The CIA is quite literally the US government covert agency set up to meddle in foreign affairs. It's raison d'être is to:
1. Collect covert intelligence for the US
2. Undermine enemies of the US / support friends of the US
A vague statement like "The CIA is involved in conspiracies" or even slightly less vague "The CIA lies and sometimes vilifies people" are almost vacuously true. That's literally what a covert government agency is designed to do.
A conspiracy theory is much more specific. "The CIA assassinated [leader] on [date] by [some action that looked like an accident] in order to [favorable outcome]." Most of those, with blanks filled in, are paranoid nonsense. If the CIA is doing it's job, I'll never find out about whom it assassinated or why. On the other hand, a blanket statement like "The CIA sometimes engages in assassinations" is obviously true. We have plenty of records from times the CIA slipped up.
As far as associating people with crazy by associating conspiracy theories with them, we're not even at the level of CIA. We're at the level of municipal politics, divorce cases, executive battles, and corporate PR smear campaigns.
If the CIA isn't involved in conspiracies, where are my tax dollars going?
My family has moved up these rungs, and someone seems to have unscrewed the rungs. They just don't seem to be there anymore. Public schools no longer have:
* Gifted and talented programs
* Or any other support for kids getting ahead of standards (even quality books in the library)
This is all done in the name of social justice. The only families who can get ahead are ones who are already educated enough to teach their kids at home, or rich enough to hire tutors and pay for afterschool programs.
I'm not opposed to reparations per se, if someone were to make a coherent proposal (I haven't seen one, and with each generation, it gets harder to make one, as there aren't clean lines between former slaves, slaveowners, people who benefited from slavery, etc.), but I'm not actually sure they would help. If my grandparents on my dad's side were slaves, and on my mom's side, owned slaves, am I paying reparations? Am I getting paid? How's this even supposed to work?
And how would we manage this so it wouldn't be like winning a lotto, where the money just fades into nothing?
But on the whole, I'm more a fan of fixing obvious problems, such as how public school funding ranges at least 4-5x between rich and poor districts, issues with criminal justice, and so on.
I'm also a fan of targeted subsidies. I wouldn't mind if my taxpayer dollars paid for subsidies for lower-income kids to have the same sort of access to at-home and out-of-schools supports as my child does (STEM resources, programs like RSM/AoPS, etc.). Or if we had entrepreneurship subsidies in lower-income communities. Or more equitable tax structures. And so on.
But yeah, it's a fair point. For some people, it's not living hand-to-mouth. For others, it's being able to have a mortgage rather than rent. [insert-my-definition]. For others, it's being able to live without working indefinitely. For others, it's being able to launch businesses from a personal bank account. I was vague.
In my area: The rent / mortgage eats the lion's share of your runway. If you're paying rent / mortgage, your savings don't go very far. If you've paid off your home, it's easy to stash enough away to live like a graduate student for a few years. If you own your home, you can also always scrunch together, and rent out a room.
The generational flip side is:
- Your kids inherit your house and your savings some day. That should be enough to cover much debt, or if you have many kids, at least down payments.
- Your kids can move in with you anytime, if they're laid off, launching a startup, going through a tough time, or just want to save some money. It's a safety net.
1) I'd expect a credible brokerage to treat me like a human being. Call me up. Talk to me. Allow me to add money to my account if need be. Simply liquidating my position with no notice with an automated script isn't how I'd like my money to be treated.
2) This is among a rather large number of sketchy practices.
I have no horse in this game. My money's mostly in index funds and mutual funds, with maybe 1% actively managed. There's a certain way I expect solid financial institutions to behave with my future. There's a different way fly-by-night institutions behave. This very much sets of my fly-by-night detector....
After a success under your belt, it's easy to keep going and get more funding. There's no shortage of capital looking for people to fund right now (it goes through spells).
The first time I got funded, it was through a rich elite idiot's social connections (CEO). CEO was a sleazeball, and got all the financial and most of the branding benefit of the venture, despite doing no work. I launched a successful business with CEO as the figurehead, and in the process, I got:
1) Connections and network
2) Visibility and branding
3) Stepping through the process once. Moonlighting can be enough time if you're efficient (which you can't be if you're muddling through figuring stuff out)
It was a stepping stone towards financial stability, and I'm much closer. Socioeconomic mobility is a process. Some people get lucky, of course, but for the most part, there's a pathway from:
1) Unskilled labor; to
2) Professional labor loaded with student loan/mortgage debt; to
3) Financial stability; to
4) Being able to launch high-risk high-reward ventures
That's possible, but it generally takes a few generations:
* It's possible for someone without an education to send kids off to college through public schools, but they'll have a hard time competing with kids who were exposed to advanced tutoring, math, STEM, makerspaces, etc. from an early age (children of professionals)
* It's possible for first-generation professionals to network into power networks and achieve financial stability, but they won't be in a place to quit a job and launch a new venture.
* And it's possible for children of professionals to then (finally) engage in a few high-risk high-reward projects until one pays off....
Good developer docs have source code, and are often interactive (you can play with code in a sandbox). Much of that stuff is either on personal web sites and blogs (often with unknown licensing) or behind corporate paywalls.
There ought to be a place this stuff goes, and is forever archived, searchable, and usable.
I'd actually extend that beyond software too. Educational materials. Service manuals for my car or vacuum cleaner. There's lots of stuff which ought to live forever for the benefit of humanity. And perhaps software itself. I ought to be able to pull up Netscape 2.0 or Flash and run it in a sandbox.
Archive.org is designed to archive everything on the web. I'm thinking something thoughtful and deliberate where people (even paying for it) stick content into a permanent archive. If I'm running a startup, and I'd like to give you a guarantee of long-term support, I stick my support materials there, and they can outlast me.
Hmmm... That was a bit rambling and not too crisp, but perhaps someone can think of ways to make it crisp?
* Robust systems shouldn't be tied to pinned versions. If your code works with PostgreSQL 9.6.19, and doesn't work with 9.6.20 or 9.6.18, that's usually the sign of something going very, very wrong.
* In particular, robust systems should always work with the latest versions of libraries. In most cases, they should work with stock versions of libraries too (whatever comes with Ubuntu LTS, Fedora, or similar). It's okay if you have one or two dependencies in a system beyond that, but if it's a messy web, that's a sign of something going very, very wrong.
* Even if that's not happening, as much as I appreciate having decoupled, independent teams, your whole system should work with the same versions of tools and libraries. If one microservice only works with PostgreSQL 11.10, and another with 12.07, that's a sign of something having gone way off the rails.
These aren't hard-and-fast rules -- exceptional circumstances come up (e.g. if you're porting Python 2->Python 3, everything might not land at the same time) -- but these should be rare enough to be individually approved (and usually NOT approved) by your chief architect/architecture council/CTO/however you structure this thing.
For the most part, I've seen Docker act as an enabler of bad practices:
* Each developer can have an identical install, so version dependencies creep in
* Each team has their own container, and it's easy for versions and technologies to diverge
* With per-team setups, you end up with an uncontrollable security perimeter, since you need to apply patches to a half-dozen different versions of the same library (or worse, libraries performing the same function)
The docker/microservices/etc. mode of operating gives a huge short-term productivity boost, but I haven't actually seen a case on teams I've been on where the benefits outweigh the long-term costs. That's not to say they don't exist, but they're in the minority.
For the most part, I use Python virtual environments and similar, but by the time you hit docker, I back away.
It's sort of the other way around. Typed languages result in most code being better, but completely prevent some design patterns. I have yet to run into piece of Java code -- beyond the completely standard use-case of a database-backed e-commerce / employee / inventory web site -- which doesn't go through one or two architectural contortions somewhere due to being forced into a specific paradigm.
The wins throughout the code from static take a back seat to the architectural contortions from not being able to express what you want.
Now, with incompetent developers, perhaps you want to prevent some design patterns, but those are workplaces I avoid like the plague.
> Java was sold to managers as "prevents cheap workers from making mistakes", but it was never about that and it's mostly terrible at it.
What do you think it's about?
I think that's a fair sale. If you're making a generic business system (you have things -- employees, inventory, customers, etc. you want to manage, which map 1:1 to objects, and which are exposed through a UX), it's nearly perfect, and you'll never hire qualified devs to work on those sorts of systems.
> 3) I would say that's a deceitful take, for only the absolute minority of systems have to care about scaling beyond a single server with failover (and a separate database if going with managed DB). For those systems that absolutely do care about horizontal scalability the answers should be absolutely obvious to any senior dev from the moment the requirements are stated. And for those cases where someone feels there may be a need for a complex scalability solution but there's not an obvious case for it yet, development will most of the time be better off starting with the simple solution and selectively optimizing as needed, just don't make it impossible to switch later down the road.
My experience -- having done a few successful startups and one or two failures -- is that it's critical to plan for success down the road. A major mode of failure is that decisions made early prevent success down the line. The system doesn't need to be scalable on day 1, but it absolutely positively needs to be designed for scale. The world is unpredictable, and you don't know the moment you'll hit exponential viral growth. At that point, you need to be able to refactor the system to hit scale virtually overnight. It doesn't always happen, but if you don't plan for it, it will never happen. It's the successes that define your career (and your bottom line).
The way I tend to design systems, they tend to run on 1-3 servers on a random cloud provider (depending on level of failover), but they use abstractions mapping onto scalable architectures (e.g. generic key-value stores and similar). If I do need to scale, it's a refactor away. A system I'm working on right now has an especially complex data pipeline. Thinking through scalability cost a few months time since it is complex, but without that, if we do hit scale, we'd hit a glass ceiling. As is, for now, we're sitting on top of a non-scalable managed RDBMS. If we do hit scale, I can migrate seamlessly to a horizontally scalable setup. At that point, we'd need to grow the team several-fold (esp. dev ops), but if you're scaling, that's okay; it's a fine problem to have.
I've advised startups, and ones which don't think through the long-term (and not just scalability; total addressable market, monetization, architecture to target adjacent markets, etc.) almost always fail, and if they succeed, it's by sheer, dumb luck.
- Good architecture beats good code.
- There are things I can express in dynamic languages which are hard to express in static languages.
- If you're not expressing those things, typed static languages win.
- When you're contorting your architecture to fit into static languages, dynamic ones win.
- Of course, if you don't have experience with dynamic programming, you won't think to express certain things or structure code certain ways.
There are, of course, academic languages which do both well (including optional static type systems for Lisp), but I'm not aware of any in widespread industry use (with an ecoystem of libraries, documentation, etc.).
I have Python code dating back to when I was an undergrad. It's sad to see the Python team decide to nuke that. My C code from then (mostly) runs fine still.
The team decided to externalize a massive cost on its community without much benefit. That was sad to see at the time, and it continue to be sad to see.
===
[Marine has been wounded]
Marine Private: AHHHH my arm, my arm!
Major Payne: Want me to show you a little trick to take your mind off that arm?
[Marine nods and Payne grabs the private's pinky finger]
Major Payne: Now you might feel a little pressure.
[Major Payne breaks the Marine's pinky]
Marine Private: AUGGGGH! My finger, my finger!
Major Payne: Works every time.
====
That's kind of how I feel about Docker. Before, you had a problem. With Docker, you have a new, bigger problem (and most of your old problem hasn't gone away; it's just been masked for a while).
(And yes, I know I'm in the minority here)
* Corruption runs to the top.
* The top is very careful to communicate verbally, through implications, or otherwise.
Dunno about Google.
1) Typed languages are worse, and you want people with high levels of competence.
2) Java actually IS terrible. You win very little by designing for incompetent coworkers. Plan for competence, and hire appropriately. Small elite teams beat large incompetent teams every time. See #1.
3) Thinking through scalability upfront matters in many systems. Not all systems. Many systems.
4) SOLID is one way to do things, and not always the right one. OO isn't always the right one either.
5) YAGNI is more complex... you shouldn't build what you don't need yet, but you should architect for reasonable changes to requirements. Scope out all possible features early in the system design, create an architecture that supports them, and then implement the minimum viable system which can be easily incrementally refactored into that architecture.
6) There are ways to interview well. When you figure them out, you'll notice they give you a competitive advantage (while sharing them doesn't make the industry more efficient as a whole, and makes them less effective, so if you're smart, you'll keep them to yourself).