throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

The one thing AI has done really well is generate all the signals of "intelligence" that SV tech folks care about. It's verbose and meaningless, confidently-asserted bullshit wrapped in the right packaging. It's like a Markov chain generator with a Stanford degree.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

I would argue the biggest issue for talented musicians is economic inequality and the rapid increase in the cost of living. If you want to do music as a main job you need to survive on your partner's income or have generational wealth. There's just no room for someone who is talented to keep themselves afloat playing gigs without having 10 roommates and a day job.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

Hormonal birth control is extremely common and generally presents minor issues. This is a relatively uncommon anti-seizure drug that has extremely high risks of causing developmental issues in children.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

You can file in small claims without a lawyer.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

What's the GDP of the Ute nation? It's probably quite a significant investment for them as well.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

There is no "removing Hamas from Palestine". The only way to remove the desire of the Palestinian people for freedom is to remove the Palestinian people themselves. And that is what the IDF is trying to do.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

In every startup I've been in, there was undue deference to long-time ICs. They didn't normally stir up public fights with execs but they would openly undercut line managers and then move around in the org as people tried to stop being responsible for them.

It's not really clear what you do with a staff+ long-term IC. A lot of them don't want to manage or be involved in leadership, but they want to pull down a huge salary and just do work that is frankly replaceable by a senior eng.

To be clear I do believe there are levels of IC experience above staff, but being 21 and joining a startup doesn't make you a Principal Engineer just because you hung around until you're 30. Especially if you've only worked at that one startup.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

In "The Population Bomb" (1968) Robert Ehrlich claimed that within 10 years there would be catastrophic famines because of exponential population growth.

A lot of people have blind faith in just extrapolating numbers out into the future with no context.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

> I didn't get along well with this manager,The resulting conflict lead to a "performance enablement plan"

Respectfully, in your post you literally say you got a new manager who PIPed you for being hard to work with. The whole tone of the article feels like rehashing old disagreements.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

My read is that he was one of those early employees that is a huge pain to manage. They want to do what they think is fun and interesting and they have strong opinions about shit that is ultimately inconsequential. It's a nightmare to manage an IC who is friends with the CEO and doesn't think you're making the right choices. But ultimately they don't accept accountability for any decisions, they just move bop around and cause problems.

One tell-tale sign is endpoint security and using his own device. It's the kind of permissive cultural thing that does not scale because of compliance issues and developer productivity overhead. But it's very hard to wrench these long-time devs away from their preferred Linux distribution which requires conditional build stuff everywhere to support. Use a work computer for work, let them monitor the updates and stuff, as long as they're not using the webcam to record you who cares?

The database backup story - my guy you were on the database team. Backing up the databases is job 1. You can't just passive-voice away "oh there were no backups". But of course he's more interested in fighting about sharding architecture than actually keeping the site running day-to-day.

His big takeaway is that Gitlab didn't spend enough time on performance for their hosted offering which was a huge money loser. Just because he thinks performance stuff is fun to do, if the hosted offering is a money pit of course they're not throwing more resources at it. You have to make an actual business case for why your thing is more important and makes money more than another project. You don't just engineer in a vacuum for the fun of it.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

Do you think the American government can't already find Russian ships? America gets their ass beat consistently in unwinnable wars against guerilla armies, but in terms of identifying giant warships I think they're pretty capable.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

Chevron Reference is the idea that when a statute is ambiguous the agencies can interpret it according to their expert opinion.

The alternative is requiring Congress to write every single rule explicitly and pass a law adapting to any change in circumstance or technology. In practice this means "no regulation" because Congress is pretty slow and adding more detail would only make them slower.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

Honestly in this day and age rolling your own k8s cluster is negligent. I've worked at multiple companies using EKS, AKS, GKE, and we haven't had 10% of the issues I see people complaining about.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

IME EKS version upgrades are pretty painless - AWS has a tool that tells you if any of your resources would be affected by an upcoming change even.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

As other people have pointed out, biological passports track markers across time. If you suddenly recieved a transfusion of your own blood it would be obvious from the sudden increase.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

It's incredible to me that anyone can defend the actions of the Israeli government and settlers at this point. They've murdered tens of thousands of civilians in the name of "fighting terrorists". History will look harshly on the states that aided and abetted this genocide.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

The difference is that Tesla's hardware is simpler in a way that's harder to use. Moving from indirect control to touch screens was great and intuitive for phones. Moving to touch screens in cars is more about cost savings than making them easy to use.

If a touchscreen was the ideal way to interact with a car, why aren't acceleration and braking done through the touch screen? Why isn't steering on the touch screen?

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

Would the world be better if there were incentives to promote skilled crafts instead of racing to the bottom to produce cheap shit at scale?

I'm not saying to go back to the stone ages, but ultimately there have been movements to buy local and preserve traditional ways of crafting that are push back against industrialization.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

People in the thread are dropping all kinds of trivia about Pixar and BSD but possibly the biggest news about the subject of the article in the last 5 years is that he was ousted from his role at Pixar for sexual harassment. Feels relevant.

throwboatyface

2 years agodiscuss

He's been credibly accused by many people, it's an open secret in the industry, and he took a 6 month leave of absence and then never came back and started a new studio. Oh and he publicly acknowledged unspecified "missteps".

For someone who's had so many successful movies you'd think they'd defend him to the hilt if he was innocent?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/john-las...

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