what_is_orcas

I guess what I'd really like to see is a demo of the different effects and filters and whatnot. Nothing extreme, but show how they can make the same pictures into a different experience.

Is the metaverse they mention in the article the same metaverse that Zuckerberg talks about?

Also, how is this different than any other digital asset? Don't some online games rely on "whales" to be profitable? How is this different than selling items or whatever in those games?

Are you talking about the anime girl?

If so, does it do other things or just anime girls?

Are there any demos available? Like, examples of what the music videos look like?

I'm a little wary of downloading what appears to be closed-source software and running it, especially if I don't know if it's something I'd be interested in using.

Otherwise, it's a really cool idea (I LOVE the old winamp visualizers).

Hey thanks for the explanation. That makes a ton of sense.

Why the physical logbook?

> I have always considered "hard-working" an undoubtedly good thing, like "being kind" or "not stabbing random people."

But stabbing random people can be hard work. What I'm trying to get at is that, under the current conditions (at least here in the US, and maybe most of the aggressively capitalist world) we don't work for the virtue of it, for the intrinsic value of the work (or the result of the work), we work because survival & security (food, shelter, etc.) are tied to it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with work, but there is a lot wrong with coupling it with survival & security.

A few months ago, around the time that the extended unemployment benefits ended in my area, there were articles in the news about local restaurants struggling to hire. In one article (that captured the before/after of the unemployment benefits), a restaurant owner was arguing that the benefits needed to end so that people would have to go back to work, but once the benefits ended, he complained that while the number of applicants had increased, he didn't like the quality of applicants--he said they didn't want to work for him.

Now I'm going off on tangents, but I think the applicable point I'm trying to make, or rather the question I'm trying to ask you is: would you feel that your work is virtuous if it was exhausting, not in a field that had significant opportunities for mobility, and didn't pay well? What are the boundaries of work's virtue? Sometimes bad things (the opioid epidemic, for example) are the result of a lot of "hard work". Are those efforts virtuous?

Yeah, I have no interest in being a "hero" or whatever. If they want a lead, they can hire a lead (I wasn't hired as a lead).

Ha ha.

This is why I used to throw things into simple kubernetes setups (that I just ran the same terraform scripts to create) and just tell the management "yeah, now it's ready for all of your features".

I argued for a while, then realized I didn't have to.

The one thing that I'd challenge about this line of thought is that the product isn't necessarily "done", there are expectations to add features & fix bugs.

If the product is poorly crafted, and especially if it's also poorly tested, adding features can introduce bugs, and fixing bugs in one place can cause issues elsewhere. Development then slows to handle these occurrences, which can then impact product viability.

There is also some of this.

Some of it makes sense when the reasons were explained (e.g. "we figured this would make it easier for [business unit] to do [thing] which turned out not to be something [business unit] actually has interest in doing").

Other examples are purely of this sort (e.g. "we'll be glad we have this in place when we finally hit [x] users or enter [market]").

I appreciate this sentiment until I am assigned to maintain and add features to this product.

I don't disagree, but I think that the reason that this fits here is because the poorly engineered software is unnecessarily complex (not in the "someday we might need this" way, but in ways that I'm having a hard time articulating without giving away the product because I know my coworkers are on HN). In fact, it was the ridiculous complexity that drove me to discover the disparities between the original developer's mental-model and the working-model. It just so happens that I've worked on this sort of thing before (as have thousands of others) that I was pretty quickly able to understand where the original developer went wrong (trust me, I'm just an ordinary developer, not a 10x elite hacker or anything).

I politely disagree.

I'm currently walking away from a code-base (and the company who let it be built) that was obviously built by someone who's mental model of how the code works was incorrect. At some very basic levels, it under-performs compared to literally every other example of this sort of code I've ever seen (and it's extremely common), which results in a subpar user-experience and an EC2 instance way bigger than necessary to run this sort of code. A lot of code running doesn't need to run in the first place, and due to the incorrect mental model, there's a substantial amount of code that doesn't run.

Nobody really understands how bad it is, though, because it's barely tested (and the engineer who wrote most of the code has argued that we don't need tests, for various reasons) and all of the engineers on the team who didn't build it initially, have told me that they're not familiar enough with how this sort of product should work to understand that it doesn't work like that (again, this is a super common kind of product).

There's a lot of other anti-patterns (I started keeping a list in my first week) but I think these are the most damning. This code is in production. Nobody at the org brought up these issues earlier in development (like saying "hey, nobody else's product does [annoying thing that doesn't need to happen], why does ours?"), which leads me to believe that the whole technical org is at fault.

It sucks and I can't wait to be done with this experience.

> Often these differences don’t manifest until more code accumulates and the goals begin to drift further apart. By the time it becomes clear, the dependency is harder to undo.

I think correct abstractions reduce dependency issues.

Hard agree. I'm actually wrestling with whether I stay in my current position for this exact reason.

You're asking me to believe that the income/wealth gap and climate change are media-created?

I know what CRISPR is.

Like I said, I worked with it in grad-school. I agree with you in general, though I will say that if I was in a position to get CRISPR as a treatment, I would probably have a lot of questions for my doctor, but I wouldn't dismiss it outright.

I interpreted the comments about CRISPR in the parent comment to be more or less cautionary, and I used "question" as a way to say "not sure about the benefits". Sorry if I was unclear, I will work harder on my communication.

No, you're saying that racism can be bi-directional and/or against those with power (or "positive racism").

Nope.

Racism is a power-dynamic and a set of systems to maintain that power dynamic.

It's always been about group power. The idea that it's about individuals is, to use a term you might be familiar with, fake news.

A few years ago, the right was blowing up about "reverse racism" or racism against white folks (I'm speaking exclusively about the US now, because that's really all that I know) but that's not possible in America because whites are the most privileged race. Are there some poor white people? Absolutely. BUT (and this is the integral part) the systems of power don't work to keep poor white people poor in the same way that they work to keep poor black people poor. There's no assumption of guilt when it comes to white folks. Despite equal rates of drug use, white people are less likely to wind up in prison/jail for drug offenses than are black folks or other minorities.

Racism might be different in China, I'm not sure.

Also, while I'm on the subject (this isn't directly related to what you said, but it's related), the reference to race isn't racism. I've seen the attitude that to acknowledge race is racism a lot here on HN, and it's just false. I've seen it used to essentially silence people who say "as a black person, I perceive this as..." which is an extension of racism: the false idea that the victim of racism can't identify the racism because to identify the racism requires that they bring up race in a conversation in which race wasn't overtly called out.

> But is our goal to destroy the rich (so poor can consume more) or is it to lower overall consumption?

Both?

I'm not an economist, but I'm curious about this topic.

If, say, an iPhone cost $20k (because of emissions and slave/inhumane labor), obviously us normal folks (or poor folks) wouldn't own one, but would they still be produced for the grotesquely wealthy among us or would they just be scrapped or would the supply chain optimize for the new cost-structure and stop using slave labor to bring it down to a more reasonable price?

But I think it's a good argument for reconsidering how we do wealth-distribution in America.

Who is this for? "Architects"? Developers? CTOs?

I'm curious why you question CRISPR. I've worked with CRISPR; I've seen some very unexpected results from its use; I've also not really kept up with the science in the past few years.

Do you have experience working with CRISPR? Is there a study or set of studies that concerns you, or is it the reality that negative results don't get really get published?

Huh... TIL, as they say.

The main issue we had, and a big part of why it didn't get picked up, if you ask me, really came down to defining our user. The design team who requested it originally made it sound like it would be a tool that product-owners would use to build their sites, get approval from the design team, and push to go live, but I later came to understand that it was for the design team to design the websites so that they could hand the designs off to developers, which raised the question of what the developer would actually want from a designer to make their lives easier. I (the only developer in the conversation) requested an internal component library, but when I left 6 months later they were still wrestling with the question of how to give developers designs...

I hope y'all don't have anything to learn from that experience... at least y'all have gone to production =)

Wow, I built a prototype of something almost exactly like at my last job. It didn't go anywhere after that for a variety of reasons, but I remember asking myself "I wonder if this sort of thing would be worth releasing/open-sourcing?" Looks like I won't have to wonder forever, I can just watch y'all and find out.