The soapbox-vs-megaphone analogy falls apart fast.
Name me one serious, intellectually honest critic of Thiel—say, Malcolm Harris, Evgeny Morozov, Shoshana Zuboff, Mariana Mazzucato, or even random Substackers with 100k+ followers who’s struggling to be heard because Thiel bought all the megaphones.
They all have huge platforms, book deals, TED-level reach, or blue-check amplification. The “undue amplification” crowd never points to a single silenced dissident; they just dislike that Thiel’s ideas are winning in the marketplace anyway.
If every prominent counter-voice already has a bigger megaphone than 99.9 % of humanity ever will, the complaint isn’t about access it’s that voters and readers keep choosing the “wrong” rich guy.
Yeah sure, Thiel’s money helped put his protégé Vance in the VP chair, he has real influence, no denying it.
But scroll this comment section for any critique of Thiel and you’ll see the pattern: his wealth gets attacked, his actual ideas almost never do.
Take the “Antichrist Thesis” everyone mocks. It’s Rene Girard-speak for centralized, charismatic authoritarianism that weaponizes morality and scapegoating to grab power. Think Sam Altman preaching about AGI danger while lobbying the gov for openai prioritizing and startup stifling policies. Fed government using big tech censorship for preventing hate speech. He’s been dead-on about that danger for decades.
Wanting to “collectively figure out how to take away the microphone” from rich people you dislike isn’t a brave stance against inequality, it’s straight-up authoritarian censorship based on net worth. In a free society, people choose who gets attention. If you don’t like Thiel, out-argue him or ignore him, but don’t fantasize about silencing citizens because they’re successful.
And honestly, Thiel’s worldview has real strengths: he’s been early and right on remote work, the stagnation of atom-based industries, the broken incentives in higher education, the dangers of bureaucratic overreach, and the need for bold technological breakthroughs instead of endless regulation. PayPal, Palantir, SpaceX (as an early investor), and backing young founders through the Thiel Fellowship have created massive value and progress. Dismissing all that because he’s rich and contrarian is lazy.
I like dbeaver for browsing DDL, list of tables, examples of schema, data types. also, to edit a few rows here and there as a quick test/fix to something. because its easier to click around than write many 2 line sql to do the same thing.
But, I often use jupyter notebooks for the DML aspect of hard queries and data anlysis, for the power of dataframes and repeatable cells mixed with documentation and sharing.
So all that to say, anyone know if there is a DDL browser equivalent ideal for jupyter notebooks / ipywidgets?
this plus lack of performance eval/culture/strategy to grow responsibly and enable future success
its a great learning experience though despite what people say about the inability to learn the new hot hot tech. the nuance of software development is the decisions that other people make, that is inescapable and is a skill worth developing. i'm not buying the "just do a startup" because i think its a cop out.
The top 1/3rd of Eng don’t see it as immutable. But the stack can consist of 10 other teams tools, and you’re not rewarded for the amount of time you’re spending to fix other people’s stuff. So it goes on
Preface: I’m not in front end or flagship teams so I’m saying hearsay.
The initiative Chris refers to is still alive but likely hasn’t made any meaningful progress. These things tend to have a lot of fan fair and then suddenly leave the front conscious of the company as we get a new GDPR/DMA fire to put out. at that point it will be dead. Or, it will stay alive for 2+ years as slowly but surely 50% of clients migrate to it and see even poorer performance.
There was a blog here a few months ago about migration from restli to grpc. It’s still going on, and nearly every app i see is still restli.
Yea, give everything 3x estimate because everything that can break will break along the way.
Fresh clone of master won’t build, the local build command is broken, gradle, remote build, GitHub, staging is an inside joke, prod host os upgrades, dependencies bumped in repo, http dependency’s network route changed, etc. etc. etc.
And as a tax payer I prefer discretionary spending for high performers.