zer8k

It's always funny to see people touting the virtues of de-escalation and soft talk. What happens when that fails? I started martial arts long ago because soft talk and de-escalation failed.

I started training martial arts years ago. Of the brawls I've been in since then, usually with the homeless or drug addled while out on the town, de-escalation has never worked. I've been in bars where you can't talk someone down. Do you know how long it took for the police to arrive when a homeless guy started a fight with me for no reason? After giving the guy what he deserved I escaped to safety to call the police/medical. They never arrived. Sobering. He ran off eventually. Which, frankly is a testament to the power of street drugs.

You can't de-escalate someone who is determined to harm you. This is a fallacy promoted by people who have never had to fight. You are universally safer by knowing how to fight and never using it than not knowing how to fight at all.

The correct answer is understanding the escalation of force spectrum. Always start by trying to talk some sense into them. Then, based on their next move you either escalate to physical violence to defend yourself, or lethal force if they use a weapon. FWIW BJJ and Muay Thai are the only martial arts you should ever do.

Life is not a video game. The police aren't there to help you. There are bad people everywhere. It's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.

> If you're a professional athlete trying to be vegan, then sure, you'll end up with a weird diet

Professional athletes that are actually vegan are 4 sigma outliers. For most normal humans it's not possible to even be a more-that-casual athlete in any competitive sport eating plants. Animal meats contain more than just protein including things like iodine, creatine, vitamin D, etc. A quick google brings up numerous studies on the nutritional deficiencies of the typical vegan diet you would need to rely on external supplementation for. Keto diets and other fad diets are also not great for the competitive athlete.

If you're vegan because you don't want to eat animals there's nothing wrong with it. When the vegans start pointing to the outliers as evidence "it can be done" it's just a deep cope to make everyone as miserable as them.

> but it's only hell because of the individual decisions of actual people up and down each belligerent's chain of command.

If a 10 year old takes up an AK-47 and points it at you what are you going to do? If a woman carrying a child sets a suspicious package down what're you gonna do? This isn't a "decision by the chain of command" outside of ROE for the AO. Everything else is on you.

If your answer is "call the chain of command" your entire unit is now dead. Congratulations. The variance in the decisions is due to the fact you can't make decisions by debating the internal psychology of the moron who may be trying to kill you. Innocent people will die. That's war. I'm getting downvoted to death here because it seems the posh liberals sitting at their desks don't understand what an actual life or death decision feels like. To be honest I'm not shocked. The toughest decision most people make is what to have for lunch and even that is enough to give the yuppies anxiety.

I mean, that's not true. But you won't agree with me as it's en-vogue to be pro-hamas. You should actually be ashamed of yourself how little you understand about how these terrorists operate and how boldly you claim shit like "genocide" and "execution".

See the part where I said aiding and abetting a known target makes you a target. "What about the children" is a very poor argument. Would you rather a fireteam kick down the door and have to shoot the entire family when they all scurry to a room and grab arms because daddy told them to? Because that's what happens - all the time. There's no "put down your weapons" like you see in movies. You have about 50ms to make a decision to neutralize a target.

I know people who are very screwed up after having to shoot children carrying weapons because their parents told them to. I know people who've had to make the kill/no-kill decision on a woman and her child approaching a convoy. It's a fucked up situation. That's why we try to avoid war.

You can't just deploy operators when a guy goes home to his family. It's expensive, dangerous, and difficult. If you leave him alone he could be ordering people from his home to kill your people. Unconventional war is by definition unconventional. If they fought like a regular military their families would most likely not be targeted. I have no data but I can tell you absolutely no one wants to kill women and children. Except for hamas, that is.

> Killing innocent people is against international law and harms the country doing it. While killing terrorists is acceptable and even desirable to many people.

Enemy combatant has a very specific meaning and that _can_ include people aiding and abetting the enemy. Thus, "actual terrorist" is a fairly nebulous term along with "innocent people". War is hell for a reason. Except for in obvious cases like Mai Lai it is never clear whether to call a person "innocent" for allowing an enemy combatant to seek shelter in their home - for example. But you have to make a snap decision: is the woman carrying what looks like an oddly shaped baby actually carrying bomb? Groceries? Why is she walking so close to the convoy? Did we issue a warning? Did she heed it? A bad decision will cost you many more lives than taking one. War is hell.

> the targeting team has developed a far more flexible pretext for violence

Doubt. The kill order chain is most likely AI flags target -> fed to human operator -> operator confirms -> kill order. Of course, your counter argument is that the human is given pretext ("this is a target") and thus assesses it with the assumption but in theory it's actually a better situation. 80% accuracy is still better than previous generations warfare. You dont want to end up on the thermals of an apache carrying a tube you need to replace your broken sewage system.

The news is polluted with pro-Palestinian nonsense. It's very clear absolutely no one on social media has any idea what hamas does, or what the people of palestine have done to aid and abet the terrorists. This is not to justify just dropping bombs on people without cause but I would be pretty satisfied with a best-effort approach to the loss of civilian life given how deeply embedded hamas is.

> Keynes’s dream that we could all work for only 15 hours a week could finally be true – with only one small, simple (but transformative) change.

What the author fails to mention is Keynesian economics is how we ended up saddled with absurd debt. The "wealthy" are allowed to utilize this debt cheaply under Keynes.

For all the author talks about fixing the alleged wealth inequality caused by inheritance this single conclusion undermines a lot of work in the previous paragraphs.

My family matters more to me than any sort of baseless economic theory. If I knew my descendants would be forced to spend their inheritance I'd justify spending the money on exploiting any loophole available to avoid that. As it turns out, this is exactly what would happen under the proposed system and turning people into serfs with 99 year leases won't fix it. The theoretical "good citizen" doesn't exist and people will naturally do whatever it takes to preserve themselves and their wealth. The problem IS Keynesian economics that allowed such a disparity to exist. Taxing more won't fix it. I already pay enough tax as it is to wonder why the hell I even work. Imagine not even owning property your family can use in perpetuity. This is an absurdity that is advocating for feudalism where your lord is the government (which is already the case anyway).

> Not necessarily motivation in the sense of "why is this important", but motivation in the sense of "we are beginning a three page proof. Let me give you a paragraph to give you the outline so that you can fill in the details yourself, rather than having to read all of the details just to reconstruct the outline."

In graduate school this was the most frustrating aspect of paper reading (and writing). It makes sense why it exists however. Papers on mathematics in particular are laser targeted to a particular niche. As the science progresses you need more and more bespoke knowledge of previous work to even start the paper you're reading. There's an implicit assumption you've done your homework, so to speak, and authors likely feel there is no need to provide such a summary. Since, of course, if you don't have the pre-requisite knowledge the paper isn't targeted at you anyway.

Some of it of course is simply a pride thing. There have been many times I've felt the lack of exposition was a way to say "I'm better than you". I have no evidence this is the case but it would not surprise me.

SG&A is a cost on the income statement. This can only improve their quarterly earnings. Unfortunate it's the case, but stocks don't appreciate on goodwill (real goodwill not the line item).

The only reason I was on the radar is because I knew who to socialize with and what they wanted. After early senior engineer every promotion thereafter is typically political.

My first order of business at any company is to sort people into buckets of "they can help me" and "they cannot help me" and focus entirely on the first bucket. Those "after work beers" (or the remote equivalent) is where most of the work is actually done, imo. That is not to say I am without merit. But the assertion I am making is I could've probably bullshitted my way into even more positions if my moral compass was just a little bit more skewed.

I suppose changing the way you act around a certain person with power is a skill and the reward is the promotion. I know several people at or above my skill level that were promoted either later, or not at all, due to not realizing (or not caring) that merit means almost nothing. Of course, merit is what seals the deal - but "managing your manager" is more important than merit. Similarly, I've used a promotion of my own to put people I like on the right person's radar. It pays to know people. In this case, literally.

> Your skills and experience are what get you ahead truly

In a decade of working in the industry I have found this to never have been the case. Every promotion I've ever gotten except for maybe the first few gimme promotions was because I was on the radar of someone important enough to make that decision.

> commodities don't go up 100x like stocks do

This is entirely due to the limit mechanism that tries to keep prices approximately in line with supply and demand. There have been several instances of grains in particular locking limit up during a blight over and over again. In recent history oil going negative is another example. If it wasn't for the limit mechanism (and in some cases, the literal government) stepping in they absolutely could 100x. When you're a goods supplier you'll pay nearly anything once prices reach your "uncle" level. The dynamics at limit are somewhat interesting as it's a case where the entirely market has consensus that "I need to buy (sell) now or I'm hosed".

I wasn't suggesting you were saying you couldn't speculate on commodities. I was mostly suggesting that even removing traders the "speculation" occurring is due to the anticipated future value of that commodity. If it wasn't, then buyers and sellers would go to the cash market which while extremely volatile may also be a smart choice for at least some of the crop.

IMO limit mechanisms are not nearly aggressive enough and I've been caught in a few of them myself. One of the few rare nightmare scenarios for a commodity trader. But making limits more aggressive would imply some form of price control which also would not be great.

If you look at old crop/new crop spreads over other commodities such as corn and soybeans it's clear that the disconnect between the front and back month is entirely on the yield (and therefore the price) of the future harvest. In this case, the futures contracts going out to 2025 are pricing in a poor crop harvest (and therefore a higher future price).

By construction the future will "collapse" to the cash price at expiration (modulo carry costs) meaning that the future is exactly representing the market consensus on future price.

This is no different than a stock market where a stock's theoretical price is the consensus on discounted future cash flows of the company. If a stock had an expiration date then it would have to collapse to the "cash price" (e.g. the exact discounted cash flow) at expiration otherwise funny arbitrage things happen.

This is a lot of words to say you've never traded a commodity market. Blaming the liquidity providers while the fundamentals point to an exact reason cocoa is going nuts. Maybe do a little more than "clicking on random graphs" to find a spurious justification. Cocoa will go limit up until the situation in Africa improves. The "traders" don't move nearly the volume the large chocolate providers do. Are they also "manipulating" the market?

There is a dramatic, almost chasm-like, difference between "stupid" and rational.

Tactically it is a stupid decision. Remote work is by-and-large one of the biggest boons to an employee who would otherwise be jockeying for a house to start a family in a place that is too expensive. Studies have shown time and time again that even under threat of pay reduction employees will STILL choose remote work. The "stupid" capitalist pays them just enough to rent locally but not enough to buy. Companies that remain remote-only will likely absorb a large chunk of the best talent in the next decade. All of the middling and new talent will be forced to bend the knee. The actual bet here is that 200 middling engineers will outperform 100 of the best. When you look at the macroeconomics the conclusion is obvious. Those 200 middling engineers will likely be 50 local engineers and 150 foreigners.

However, it is a rational decision. These rich capitalists, in your words, are deeply invested in real estate. If they aren't, whoever invested in them is. Follow that chain long enough and you'll almost surely find Blackrock and Vanguard who, in my pet theory, is driving this movement. We aren't talking about Google/Facebook/Apple who have amazing self-owned beautiful campuses. We are talking about mandates from 100 person just-barely-not-a-startup companies.

All this movement did is show what kind of fraud the SV startup scene has been committing for the last two decades. Naturally, when outed, the fraudster panics.

> I have noticed a drastic increase in mental health and substance abuse issues among coworkers.

This anecdata is not realized in the actual data. So we can disregard this.

> An office job provided structure and meaningful daily contact

Of all the types of contact I had when I was in an office "meaningful" would not describe it. I have meaningful contact being able to go to my gym at a time that allows me to cook and relax afterwards. I have meaningful contact at the coffee shop I'll occasionally work from. I have meaningful contact going for a walk in the park over lunch. My health has improved because I'm not forced to go to company mandated fun-lunches or skip the gym because someone dropped by my cube and told me I'm working late. I'm healthier because I'm not driven to near suicide by the 2-3 hours I lose every day commuting. Let's not even talk about the risk adjusted lifespan I have driving every day to work and back vs. working at home.

This concept of "company culture" being an employee benefit is the pinnacle of narcissism. Everything I do and say is recorded at work. Coworkers will almost certainly rat me out to HR if I'm too honest and dont toe the line. If anything, the office is arguably the least "safe" space I have in my life and under RTO I'm forced under contract to spend 8 hours there. No thanks.

> Saying that return to office mandates are bad for all companies is just plain dumb.

Spoken like a non-developer. My job as a staff engineer does not require me to be physically present. Grow up. This is a power grab by people who want to gaslight employees under threat of their job. Same with "cameras always on" policies and all the other bullshit. A bunch of tin-pots with a modicum of manufactured power using it to make others miserable. Nothing new under the sun.

It's never a problem until it effects women, isn't it?

> So the unintended consequence I expect will be that censoring people for their political views will be the only strongly protected moderation actions.

That's entirely intended. Look at what happened during COVID, the race riots post George Floyd, the election in 2020 and 2024, etc. Social media platforms are defacto content curation websites and not "free speech zones" in the sense of a soapbox in a public park. It was especially egregious during COVID and the race riots because the platforms made certain that you could not so much as criticize the political zeitgeist even when it was deserved.

The law really should make it clear that, illegal activity excluded, if you engage in any form of censorship you are not given section 230 protections. Places like twitter are left-wing content curation websites. It's no problem to have these - except for the fact they are still given section 230 protections. Under no circumstance should social media, engaging in one-sided censorship, be given any protection under the law for their content they curate. This would go for a similarly censored right-wing content curation website. It just so happens those are extremely small in reach by comparison, and thus significantly less important.

As always, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. The chronically offended, terminally online losers tend to get what they want.

Speculating on the journalistic quality of a far-left magazine on HN: Taboo

Speculating on the journalistic quality of a far-right magazine on HN: "due diligence".

It's important to understand the standpoint of the magazine. If they're far-anything chances are most of the reporting is garbage. So what they ruled in their favor? It doesn't mean the journalistic integrity is worth actually wasting clock cycles heating your CPU.

Unions have their own problems that aren't often spoken about. Just recently, in fact, several hospital unions made concessions on employee safety due to COVID crises.

As for me, personally, I don't plan on working for a company my entire life and see a union as a roadblock to my selfish goal to financial freedom. Nothing would drive me off a job faster than getting my CoL raise after the union rep "fought so hard" for the pay. The reality is in most cases they're in bed with the C-levels and the "fight" was the three martini lunch at the country club. If you actually understand the balance sheet allowing a union almost never makes sense. In some cases it's cheaper to just fire everyone and outsource. In the case of Amazon they are large enough doing this in total is a little hard... but they're still working on it I'm sure.

The proper answer, I think, is if working conditions suck start your own thing and make the working conditions better. If you really do have a solution you will have an eternal wellspring of employees willing to do nearly anything for you. This, of course, would require the person to not go home and play video games or binge netflix. A path that isn't for everyone. Alternatively you could start a union and clear high 7 figures a year as the rep fighting for those "hard-earned" raises. A perfect example of this is the teachers and trade unions. Most of the time - a union is just an inversion of control that's designed to enrich the people running it. The socialist idea of a true trade union can't, and never will, manifest in a reality where humans are selfishly driven to improve their own conditions while sacrificing the comfort of others.

Did they send a formal cease and desist to entire countries worth of scammers? Otherwise, this is yet another piece of feel-good legislation that will do nothing to stop my phone from going off.

Yes, I use RoboKiller. No, it doesn't stop everything. The text spam in particular has gotten crazy and it's not even close to election day.

Using your real identity anywhere online is a terrible idea. I'm not sure exactly when it happened that it became normal but I'm guessing social media is why.

I see two problems:

1. You can never be truly honest. Everyone has a side they don't project when their reputation is on the line. With a pseudo you can project it, and dump the name if things get too hot. Maybe your opinion is en-vogue today but worthy of real life harassment later. Maybe you are a person who belongs to a group of people that are not well liked. Maybe alphabet soup agencies want you. Who knows - all you know is you can't predict the future.

2. It encourages validation seeking behavior. Evidence: social media. Professionally, linkedin is a shithole of validation seeking losers posting below-the-fold faux-philosophy and/or corporate shilling. These people likely wouldn't do this if their identity was not attached to a face, an address, and a company.

Overall, it's a net loss to use your real identity. For the last 25 years I haven't needed to tell anyone online my real identity and I won't for the foreseeable future. I have plenty of friends on IRC and other places that only know me by my handle. This is not a bad thing.

This has never, and probably never will, be anything more than a theory. In my experience this is only true if:

1. The "unit of work" is small enough to decompose into a 50 line PR. This is possible on larger codebases and less verbose languages. It can enforce over-DRY code which often leads to a lower universal ability to understand what is going on.

2. The team responsible for reviewing is responsive. I have never worked at a company where PR reviews happened quickly. Everyone is busy, everyone is overworked, and often times PRs are a chore that can be put off until later. Of course you can make some labyrinthine chain of small PRs all merging into one big PR but the problem still exists. I'd personally rather review a 300 line complete PR written well than 6 PRs that I have to constantly recall context on.

This advice follows the same logic as the asinine cyclomatic complexity rules. Yes, in theory they are sound. In practice, it's more of a flexible benchmark rather than a hard rule. But since someone inevitably writes YASL (yet another stupid linter) that enforces these types of things, an enterprising work-focused engineer will end up spending either more time fixing code to please the linter or more time exploiting loopholes in the rules.

Just write Good Code (TM) - whatever that looks like.

Does the person just say "I have type 2 diabetes"?

Like usual lawyers walk away with Ferraris and the victims get a pittance. It's particular egregious in this case. $15k is almost surely less than even a year's wages. How pathetic. The very least they could do is calculate 7 years worth of interest on the 18M...but then the scumbag lawyers get more.

> Tl;dr - "masking" making defining "authenticity" challenging for neurodivergent folks.

Understood

> But I don't think having a fixed concept of self is a universal experience. For me, (when I'm at my full potential) I'm able to select and deselect attributes of myself to express.

I don't think anyone has a true "self". I am not who I was 10 years ago and neither are you. Physically, sure. Mentally? Metaphysically? Absolutely not. People you interact with aren't stagnant by definition. If they were, you wouldn't be interacting with them. Where the honesty (and the authenticity) comes into play is where who you are now is who you are representing.

As for selecting and deselecting traits I don't think this is inauthentic. It's normal, actually, in that people do this to create connections. I like to think of it like a handshake. We each kind of discuss things we like, we eventually arrive in some consistent state, and now we're "connected". We are still authentic (in that we are still honest) but we have selected certain traits of ours that are similar enough to foster a relationship. Of course, the inauthentic person can exploit this by just replaying back what they hear. This usually doesn't last long though. Someone too similar also raises red flags. An authentic person, IMO, will present with things you like and things you don't like. The balance of that is what makes the relationship between the two. Admitting what appear to be a negative (I don't like X, I think X) is actually a good indicator of an honest person.

> Do we even see authenticity in public?

If you have the ability to sense another human's emotions you can often tell when someone is being authentic or not. Set and setting are also important. Authenticity is closer to honesty about yourself rather than some kind of self-expression. I am still authentic if I don't mention my hobby of collecting records while I am at the gym. I am not authentic if I start making up whatever will impress you.

> But we dislike influencers and the like because while they are (often obviously) inauthentic, they try to hide that fact under a facade trying to make it seem like it's their "real expression".

IMO, most people dislike influencers because they fall into the category of people who are outwardly pathetic. In any sort of human interaction desperation is seen as unattractive and wrong. Influencers are desperation boiled down into the highest concentration. They are fake, inauthentic, not because they aren't who they are but they try so hard to dial up everything about them to it's maximum.

> Doing a paid sponsor bit is ipso facto inauthentic

If I am doing a paid sponsorship for beard care equipment I am authentic. This generalization doesn't fit.

> I'm sure the Ryan in front of the camera is different than the Ryan I'd meet at the bar: more polished, calculated in choice of words, presenting self in the best light, because that's what we all do in the limelight.

Someone who takes the time to create an entire blog dedicated to a topic will likely be 90% similar to what you're reading. Of course there is nuance in human interaction but someone that dedicated to a particular craft will most likely obsess over it even in person.

I understand your post is some sort of philosophical discussion on authenticity. Maybe in some textbook sense you are right. However, I have had more authentic interactions with people than inauthentic interactions. If you're close with anyone at all in your life you have also experienced that. The systemization of everything (through what you call "radical self-expression") is creating a bunch of pseudo-intellectual naval gazing on what is fundamentally a simple topic. Authentic people are honest people. You can often tell right away who is lying and who is not. The computer in your head has hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to help you with that.

> Tech has obviously in general has made considerable progress in being more inclusive

Ah yes the old and tired argument comes out again. Since there are 50% men and 50% women in the world why doesn't tech look the same?

Cool opinion though...it's so 2015. Almost vintage! I particularly enjoyed the part where you imply it's a bad thing. Why don't we hear about that with welding, house building, firefighting, policing, the military, or any other male dominated field Dr. Inclusion?

The first rule of being an American overseas is you are not an American overseas.

You are a high priority target for robbery, kidnapping, extortion, scamming, murder, and a host of other things from the lovely locals you're mingling amongst. Stay to well lit areas, don't stay out late, don't follow anyone around, dress in a way that does not draw attention to yourself (better if you can get into local garb), and assume every single person is there to kill you. Limit your drinking, and if you do drink do so amongst expatriates and travel friends, and guard your drink at all times.

People do not like Americans. Many times their ill will has at least a logical foundation. While I certainly appreciate the state department attempting to manage image this isn't enough. Americans must be on the defense at all times. You must especially be defensive in non-western countries (where you are probably better off simply not going). While many people are easy going the mixture of zealous propaganda about Americans, and America's own negative image, will have you perceived as a target more often than a friend.

Strangely everyone here is suggesting overt attacks on the drone. That will get you put in prison. Rules for thee but not for me is how the police operate. The drone will have an FAA number and it'll become a felony for "shooting down an aircraft".

On second thought: Perhaps I should edit this post. LOL.