538 karma · joined October 23, 2020
I'm hoping to use his WiFi debugging guidance from the readme at my in-laws: I was just experiencing remote desktop problems despite having a strong network connection. I suspect the culprit is Comcast's supplied router.
Cool article - thanks for sharing!
People write Twitter threads because Twitter gives them distribution for what they want to say.
Sure, it may not be the perfect soapbox for what you want to say. But if you write something insightful, a zillion people may see it as opposed to your mom and best friend who read it on your blog.
In short, "it gives some signal, it's easy, it requires less infra, and it's common so people won't criticize you for it".
- It gives some signal: I can generally rule out people who are clearly unable to write basic code (loops, good variable names, not getting lost while retracing code). In my experience, this camp accounts for some 80%+ of the people coming in for interviews, even at Google.
- It's easy: the up-front costs of asking a Leetcode-type question are low. As an interviewer, I can prepare for such an interview well with 2-3 hours of question searching and an hour or so of doing the question myself. Contrast this with "closer to real" interview questions, where you may create an entire "fake project" for candidates to work in which may get leaked. It could easily take 10-20 hours to think of a "right size project" with natural extensions for candidates, which is an eternity as a hiring manager that's hiring because they're strapped for time
- It requires less infra: you don't need any sort of "shared environment to see and run code", timers to ensure that people don't spend too long on take home questions. All you need is a shared notepad or white board
- It's common so people won't criticize you for it: "Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft". These types of things have a self-perpetuating nature where people cargo cult what works for large successful companies.
I don't at all endorse asking these types of interview questions and agree that there are better ones, but I do think it's important to acknowledge there are real reasons why they get asked.
My understanding is that Chainguard offers Docker base images (Chainguard Images) that contain just what's necessary to run the binary (commonly referred to as distroless images). This is in contrast to "regular" Docker images that contain an entire Linux distro baked into the image.
By reducing what's included in the image, it becomes far easier to basically generate an SBOM (software bill of materials, i.e. list of all the software in the image) and "prove" that there are no known vulnerabilities in the stack. (I think this "proving" is what the Chainguard Enforce product does.)
- Is this overkill for startups, and something that companies will only consider if it's required for something like SOC2? - Is this a role that a company should fill, or should these distroless images be more community driven?
A few additional comments:
- If you're not trying to build the next billion dollar company but still want to raise a little money to get your company off the ground, TinySeed (founded by the well-known blogger Rob Walling) is an interesting option these days.
- Aaron recommends seeking out local angels, but doesn't go into many details on how to find them. I've had good success looking up local startups on AngelList and seeing who their listed angel investors are. Definitely not comprehensive, but it gets a few names on your list.
I no longer work at Google, but whether I want to go into the office is probably heavily influenced by the fact that I have a ~15 minute door to door bike commute through a nice town (Ann Arbor) to my nice coworking space.
I think that the scary part to me about the idea of all jobs going remote is that "going remote" seems an antidote to:
- Bad office designs (no privacy, poor light, etc.) - Bad urban planning (long commutes, poor transportation options) - Bad coworkers
Of those three, only the "bad coworkers" one seems inevitable that some people will have to deal with. (After all, those people need to work somewhere.)
If I had to commute two hours a day to work in an office with no privacy, my opinion on this would surely be different. One of the people on my team at Google lived in Oakland and commuted to Mountain View every day: that sounded awful. But we also don't have to design offices to offer no privacy and we know how to design better cities that don't offer horrific commutes.
I think that the fact that there's more variety now in whether you can work remotely or in an office is awesome, and I hope that's not going away. (And don't think it will.) And no job should ever give you hell for staying home one or two days per week if your job is totally doable at home.
With that being said, there are a lot of people in the world that genuinely enjoy having in-person interactions with their colleagues every day and I'm one of them. I've been lucky enough to work in jobs with awesome colleagues and I don't want to be put up digital barriers between me and them. I also like the fact that I have some forcing function for getting more than 2,000 steps a day.
The main thing that I'm worried about is that companies are going to see dollar signs in remote work because they can cut office space expenses, only for employees to not be able to backtrack.
Your suggestion is noted, though!
I'm 99% sure Hugo can do this, I've just learned to be wary of putting things in between myself and actually hitting the damn publish button.
I work primarily on B2C software, whereas it sounds like you probably work on the B2B software. It seems like consumers tend to mostly accept the platforms as they are whereas businesses feel (perhaps rightfully) entitled to ask for changes in the software they use.
Each have pros and cons, but the marginal cost of B2C software does seem a lot lower than B2B due to the expectations in service.
The beautiful / fun part about having a blog is that it's your own little garden: you can adjust things just like how you see fit, and footnotes were just a case where I figured I'd do without until I could implement it in a way I was happy with.
(For example, one key selling point is that you can leverage all of the existing financialization tools that exist for that blockchain, even if your allocation of those tokens is centralized.)
Noted that my numbers for Ethereum are almost certainly not correct, but I think the point still stands that "the carbon footprint of crypto and blockchains depends hugely on which blockchain you're talking about"
> If there’s a way to reduce Bitcoin’s environmental impact, it’s certainly above my paygrade.
I think it's a really hard problem. I guess I'm not sure what "rallying against certain kinds of sites" means in practice - encouraging regulation? Social media campaigns against those sites? It seems like bitcoin mining has proven resilient to regulation because as soon as one place regulates the miners slip away to somewhere else. Getting ~200 countries to collectively agree on a set of regulations in such a quickly shifting landscape seems near impossible.
As for social media campaigns, it might shame some people but not others.
I don't have much of an answer for what to do here besides "hey, if I want to do a crypto project, I'm going to choose a chain that I feel like is being ethical".
Bitcoin is an impossible-to-dislodge behemoth that in my opinion fails to meet its original goals and has had ample chance to prove its worth, but has largely failed to do so.
Stuff like Solana is still "wasteful" in the sense that leaving a Digital Ocean droplet running in an infinite loop is wasteful, but it's on such a different order of magnitude that it certainly deserves a chance to prove its worth. It's also had much less time to do so than Bitcoin.
As mentioned above: I'm a noob at all of this and reserve for myself the right to flip-flop in the future :-)
One of the things I'd like to work on is silly, local, small crypto projects that will be appealing to people that don't give two craps about blockchains or crypto. I think if you can make projects like that, then you could be onto something. (I have some interesting-in-theory running club stuff, local scavenger hunts, etc.)
I can confidently say that it seems not-too-difficult to tweak certain assumptions about mining (e.g. have a central authority that can issue tokens in response to offline proof, like proof of capturing X amount of carbon). With that in place and assuming you now have $CARBONCOIN, you can leverage all of the existing financialization that exists within the crypto ecosystem and you have a functioning carbon capture marketplace having only implemented a fraction of it.
Like I said - I'm a noob and I'm trying to learn more to understand what the problems with stuff like would be. But I'm really interested in "what rules of crypto can you tweak to accomplish real things".
More than anything, this post was written as a defense to myself, family, and friends about why crypto is worth digging into deeper even if there's some bad stuff that goes along with it. I wanted something I could link to and say "hey, it's a little more complicated that it seems - if you're interested, you can take a look here".
I do think that any discussion of Bitcoin has to be evaluated through the lens of "did Bitcoin meet Satoshi's original vision of a digital replacement for cash", and I just don't think that Bitcoin has the transaction throughput to justify its cost to society. I feel like if you were to ask Satoshi if he thought 7tx/s was high enough to achieve his vision, his answer would have been an immediate "no".
Even if it uses no energy to do the actual mining, it still has used huge amounts of computing resources (CPUs, GPUs) which have a very real carbon cost to produce.
Call me a skeptic though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Weirdly enough, though, I do think that's a superpower of crypto: it encourages people to recruit others to a team that's trying to achieve something. Figuring out how to co-opt that superpower for good is the hard part.
Ideally, that portable setup would have no boom arm, no pop screen, no huge microphone.
The best candidate I've found so far is the Audio Technica ATH-G1 Gaming headset (reviewed by the excellent Podcastage here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMgyh7Ne5ng).
In my opinion, the sound quality isn't quite comparable to high quality condenser microphones like the Blue Yeti (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2BNAF3u5lc) or dynamic microphones like the Samson Q2U (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjCJbhjFYiA&t=6s), but it's 90% of the way there and significantly more portable.
I'm a lot more excited about low latency and high-resolution desktop-layer sharing like screen.so and having a great purpose-built editor than I am about having this built into my editor and be another potential source for bugs or slowness.
- How far does the average household have to walk to a play structure? - What's the median distance that a parent feels comfortable allowing their child walk at each age? 90th percentile?
And placing play structures in the areas that would most meaningfully move the latter number seems like a great way to make cities more livable.
(For what it's worth, I think doing the same for public transit could also be powerful.)
The big problem here seems to be figuring out a way to capture the value from doing such an analysis: lots of value is generated if smart actions are taken, but it's relatively difficult for any company doing a good job in the space to capture that value.
As an engineer, it satisfies all of my urges to understand how things work and see other people work who are both highly skilled and who enjoy coming to work together. If you haven't ever watched before, I'd highly recommend it.