bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Do you work at a large company?

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

FWIW the acquisition was only 25ish percent above market value. In the public markets Nuance was worth something like $15 billion.

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

If the industry demands weird or suboptimal practices or has strange evaluation criteria then the people making the most will be the people who are best at the game.

I think the popularity of untyped languages is one example of that. Clearly worse, you're removing an entire class of embedded test and nuking your ability to refactor safely, but huge chunks of the industry don't see that as a bad thing. I'm a worse programmer because I've spent so much time in Python.

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Why not just:

    function foobar(version: number): string {
      if      (version >= 3) { return 'result_3'; }
      else if (version >= 2) { return 'result_2'; }
      else if (version >= 1) { return 'result_1'; }
      else {
        throw new Error(`Cannot interpret version '${version}'`);
      }
    }

?

I don't see what advantage the switch provides here.

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Is this really true? In my (limited) experience, the best coders are the ones who understand the technology, understand the hardware, and understand good program structure. "Communication" and "teamwork" are totally unimportant and they're usually organic side effects of understanding the domain. I've done open-source stuff with a total asshole and it wasn't pleasant but the end product was good because he was good, and I learned way faster than with most people.

But I've not been exposed to that kind of corporate environment. Is it really that important? It reeks of corporate buzzwords to me.

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

That assumes the selection process is effective, but FAANGs are all monopolies so there's very weak selection pressure for them to distinguish candidates correctly. They don't get punished for their mistakes.

I'd argue the people at FAANGs are the people who are best at hitting the requirements of a FAANG. That's still a competition and they'll brain drain from smaller companies, but it creates arbitrage on unrecognised ability and other opportunities may exploit that (e.g. starting your own venture relies much more on genuine ability than where you stand on a FAANG progression matrix).

I was contributing to an open-source FAANG project recently and the oversights they'd made in the codebase were surprising to me. There were very basic errors and mistakes and the people managing the codebase didn't understand what some of the functions were even supposed to do. The API wasn't consistent. Tests were testing behaviour that was outright wrong (and, somehow, passing). Feature prioritization was way off. There were half-hearted implementations of some features that were bad enough that they weren't useful. They weren't talking to other departments working on the same basic area (who are also open-source, and hold the state of the art), so there were important features that weren't ported. The project was small, too (but not unimportant).

I don't have high market value, but I was fixing some of these bugs in minutes. The guys managing that project are obviously a lot better than me overall, but I think it betrays a flaw in the institutional structure. Those weaknesses in the codebase would be cheap to fix, the problem is the FAANG standards are such that they are able to go unrecognised.

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I get what you're saying but Marxists don't bomb the homes of billionaires, or shoot them. There's no actual warfare, genuine violence is directed at the right, not the rich. They do make a show of constructing a set of gallows in front of Jeff Bezos' house but they don't actually do anything to him, and that's a big difference. I think it's because they don't have the fight-or-flight terror that drives far right-wingers to push the gas pedal of their car into crowds of protestors. They might, in a different system. But I think then the ideology would be different.

In the 70s there were genuine left-wing terrorists like the Weathermen, which might be a good comparison, but the vibe I get is that they liked violence first, and fell into a movement that gave them a justification to perform it. They didn't seem scared to me. The far left rarely seems genuinely scared, but the far right seems very scared.

The difference to me is that nowadays, left-wing threat narratives tend to exist to justify behaviour they already want to engage in, whereas right-wing threat narratives exist much more to be scary. Toward the center things are similar but the differences are quite stark at the fringes.

I don't mean this as a technical argument or anything. I could be wrong, I'm just trying to describe my instinct.

> The Great Purge

Was a genocide by people who attained power, not the fringes of society acting out for weird psychological reasons. I wouldn't really compare the motivations. Dictators are dictators, right or left, and the support they get is much more transactional. I'm also skeptical that Lenin was genuinely motivated by Marxism. I think Marxism was an excuse he could use to gain power.

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

And which permission do I take to access that?

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I said it's less sensitive.

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

The left-wing narrative is usually "[group A] is hurt by [issue and thus group B]", whereas the far-right is, "[group C] will hurt you, if you let them." I think it's a deliberate difference. The far right would never say Jews were accidentally conspiring against Americans, it wouldn't help them. But it helps the far left to say their issues are inadvertent, that [villain] can't help his bias, or that he doesn't have to do it deliberately.

Left-wing narratives are often decoupled from intention (e.g. systemic and unconscious bias) because it makes them easier to propogate, whereas right-wing narratives are the opposite - intention is ascribed whether or not it's there, also because it helps the narrative propagate. They're selling to different human tendencies, I think.

Watch the far-right protest. Their eyes usually convey fear or animalistic aggression, even when they're dominant. Far-left groups carry very different emotions, even violent ones like Antifa.

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Firefox already has this. Click reader view, it also gives you a time estimate.

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

It would be nice if Firefox provided an API that only exposed the static HTML of sites you're visiting. I don't care if an extension wants that data, it's nowhere near as sensitive.

I guess this doesn't solve injection, but there must be other ways to solve "display some additional data."

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I think there's crossover but I don't think those two groups are motivated by the same thing.

My observation is that far-right activists tend to feel that they're being deliberately stabbed in the back by the powers that be, rather than seeing themselves as collateral damage. They're also significantly more likely to be paranoid, and they perceive their targets as you would an invading army.

Far-left activism isn't like that. They don't perceive The Man as sadistic, they perceive him as disinterested. "Nobody cares about global warming" vs. "they're deliberately raising the temperature of the earth to hurt me." I also get the vibe far-left activists often engage in activism for fun. It's an exciting mission to break into the farm with your friends. They almost always do it in groups, whereas you're more likely to see jilted right-wingers plan solo attacks like this guy.

(I'm not trying to paint the far-left as better here. I think they're often quite dishonest about their motivations, whereas the far-right is extremely up-front, pied piper gurus aside. I think that's one of the reasons paranoid schizophrenics gravitate more toward the far right, although it helps that their narratives are more about conspiratorial persecution.)

The demographic distributions are also different. Almost all far-right activists are male, whereas vegan & climate activists are mixed.

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I would argue if you're not bringing your idea to market, that's not innovation. It's the opposite, you're blocking innovation.

Patents stop other people from creating useful stuff. I think it's reasonable that you should have to fill the gap in order to retain the right to stop them. Although enforcing that is difficult.

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

How is that legal?

I mean mechanically, how do they get away with it? What legal defense do they use?

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Tht's insane. Is that rule in the contract, or is it something that's imposed after employees are hired? (Or is it like, "you agree to adhere to all Amazon internal policies"? Is that even legal to begin with?)

I don't understand how they can enforce something like that without it being an explicit agreement in the contract. Is it the case that they are explicit clauses, but people don't negotiate them out?

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I'm on the outside here so I might be misreading, but are these internal policies explicitly written into their contracts, or are they secret, internal rules that Amazon unilaterally imposes after you're hired?

It sounds like they're breaking rules they never agreed to. Is it legal for Amazon to impose rules like that? Is this common across the industry? How do companies get away with it, is it just a US thing?

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Hah, to be clear that is what I meant - the idea that Facebook doesn't have the resources is ludicrous, the problem runs deeper.

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Facebook took $85 billion in revenue last year and has thousands of developers on the payroll. They could absolutely maintain 3 separate services.

Bear in mind WhatsApp used to maintain a userbase of 200 million with 50 total employees (not even just developers).

bananaface

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

If they didn't publish a retraction, they probably could have been sued. They're covering their ass, I wouldn't give them moral credit.

comments