prewett

4,430 karmajoined 17 tahun yang lalu

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42 menit yang laludiscuss

It's in the beginning of the Prose Edda. It's part a genre one could call "universal history", which is tying your group's history into the narrative of the world. It was pretty common in medieval Christianity; I'm not sure if places like Japan or Vietnam tried to tie themselves into Chinese mythic history. It makes some things like the Book of Invasions (Irish) make more sense, because historically Ireland being invaded from Spain en route from somewhere in the Mediterranean seems really unlikely. But if you're going to tie yourself into the biblical narrative, you've got to somehow get yourselves from the Mediterranean to wherever you live. In the case of the Icelanders (the Eddas), the way this was accomplished was to say that Odin et al were not gods but came from Troy, with a stop somewhere in-between (if I recall correctly), and over time came to be worshipped as gods.

3 hari yang laludiscuss

Spending is also a noun. A gerund used to be the way you nounify a verb. “Ad spending” is perfectly grammatical, unlike “ad spend”.

This seems to be part of a broader trend, not just business. One group of pastor-students would talk about giving a “preach”. Drove me nuts.

3 hari yang laludiscuss

I think it is used sort of the same way that fundamentalist Christians take the Bible "literally", as in, there's just the literal meaning of the words, no deeper symbolic meaning, usage of literary themes, allusions, etc. Fundamentalism also has a similar aversion to nuance. If you conceive of much of the world as driven by tensions between two opposites, fundamentalism chops off one of the ends. So for example, you have a tension between a subjective meaning (symbols, themes, allusions, etc.) and the objective meaning ("literal" meaning). As the late Rabbi Sacks observed, often the subjective meaning of the text runs counter to the objective meaning, and that counter- tension results in much deeper meanings than either alone.

I think he is observing that we live in a fundamentalist age. By "fundamentalist" I mean "there's one right answer", that is, no nuance. Even on the political Left, where you normally find some nuance, you get a fundamentalism that requires interpreting everything through an oppressor/victim lens that assigns groups to one or the other. So Palestinians are "victim", despite the fact that the Muslim view of homosexuality would be categorized "oppressive". White people are "oppressor" because they enslaved people, despite the fact that young white men died by the hundreds of thousands in a war to end slavery, and that the British Empire ended slavery in the Ottoman Empire by refusing to trade with them if they continued slavery.

3 hari yang laludiscuss

Who's defrauding poor people? The risk/reward is much better for defrauding rich people...

4 hari yang laludiscuss

Landlords of Adam Smith's England and what "landlord" means in contemporary America are two different things. None of my landlords have charged to use pre-existing natural resources, they charged to use a decidedly non-natural housing structure.

Landlords absolutely create value. One value they create is liquid short-term (yearly, usually) housing. Another value they create is dense housing in desirable areas (such as downtown housing complexes), although landlords are not the only way to do this. They also create smaller housing than single-family homes, and maintenance-free living (again, not the only way to do this).

Now, whether what they charge is commensurate with the value they provide is a different question. My experience with private landlords has been positive and with commercial landlords has been grossly overpriced, lousy construction, and noisy. In my area commercial landlords are priced close to a mortgage, so they are a terrible value unless you are definitely short-term.

(Also, I don't think Xi Jinping popped the real-estate bubble quietly... He was pretty public with your statement, but it was a debt crisis that popped the bubble. It was not quiet at the time, and secondary effects lead to several locally-large protests.)

8 hari yang laludiscuss

I think the original notepad.exe was just a Win32 Edit control (whatever it was called) with a window and some menus. I expect that Apple's TextEdit.app is just a wrapper around the rich text control in Cocoa, too.

But yes, it's hardly writing a text editor to write a Win32 app in assembly. (Although, if they used the COM control and did that in hand-written assembly, that would at least be an impressively tedious mortification of the flesh.)

9 hari yang laludiscuss

I'm American, but I've said "washroom" for a long time because I'm not asking to take a bash, but at least I wash at some point afterwards. Most people seem to understand fine, but I do get a few now and then.

Funny story, I was visiting Hong Kong one time, and asked the young waiter, who seemed to speak English just fine, where the washroom was. Blank stare. Bathroom? Cesuo (Mandarin)? All blank stares. I was a little out of options at that point... Turned out the word I was looking for was "toilet", which is a word I never use.

9 hari yang laludiscuss

Maybe you just didn't really see it. I've begun to notice that I don't even see certain things that I read, especially if I'm not intellectually prepared to receive them. I vaguely remembered the mice and the earth being a computer (once prompted by the post), but I had no idea about the mice being 3D projections of a multi-dimensional being. I'm pretty sure that idea was either not something I truly comprehended at 20 and/or I thought it was stupid/random (my opinion on the book as a whole), so the thought never even sank in.

Other times I just don't see something for other reasons. I read Augustine's Confessions and never saw the famous line "our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee", which is in the THIRD sentence! I'm not sure if the antiquated English [1] threw me off, or what. In fact, I don't remember seeing pretty much every quote people take from Confessions, besides the pear episode. Some of those are theological ideas that are just completely new, some are probably my annoyance at his "confessing" things that aren't really faults [2], and my annoyance at his insistence on quoting the Bible everywhere he could [3]. But I find it strange that I seemed to have simply not seen most of what other people get out of it.

[1] Rant: don't bother reading the out of copyright translations of ancient works, because the 1800s and early 1900s seemed to think that because the works are old, it should be translated into old English. This is stupid. Augustine didn't write in 500 year old Latin, so translating it into 500 year old English is mistranslation.

[2] I am starting to think that maybe "confess" might have meant something different, and it is not confessing a faults but a statement of beliefs.

[3] I suspect that ancient ideas of rhetoric valued quoting trusted sources a lot, kind of how classical Chinese literature quotes older classic literature a lot. Augustine, being a professional rhetorician, would in that case be expected to do that. But it drove me nuts.

9 hari yang laludiscuss

This sort of thing makes me think that if I were engineering a biome, this sort of specialized spider would be exactly how I would solve the problem of a species that I accidentally made too prolific. The spider is a targeted fix: only preys on the ants, and if the ant problem ever resolves itself, the spider goes away.

I think this is a case where the theory of evolution feels pretty handy-wavy and doesn't answer the mechanism of how this happens. The article even talks about "bioengineered" silk! There are certainly lots of cases of evolution, so it is clear that things do evolve, but the problems of a theory are revealed in the edge cases, and I think this spider suggests that the theory really needs a lot of work to be a robust theory. I don't think a simple gradient descent (evolving toward more fitness) has explanatory power in this case. A theory that hand-waved around edge cases like this would never fly in Physics; at best it would be considered a holding theory until a better one could be found, like dark matter.

(Plus, I think it's fun to think about bioengineering in a sci-fi, or even Babylon 5 way)

11 hari yang laludiscuss

I'm confused about the quote, because the numbers do not add up to me. Elsewhere in the discussion SV apartments are quoted at $3500/month. When I rent, utilities tend to be under $100, and groceries are about $400. Let's be generous and say "utilities and groceries" are $1000. So "rent, utilities and groceries" are $4500/month, at total federal + CA state tax rate of 40% (estimating high), that means $90k/year to break even. I'm not sure what Ms. Gan filtered via the reporter thinks "consum[ing] nearly everything that comes in" means, but lets say 80% of income that's $112k, although that would still be a $20k/yr surplus (and a 5 month cushion). So there's quite a lot of room "earning below $200,000" and financial distress. If the article meant "less than $100k" I could believe it. Or perhaps Ms. Gan's friends' "rent, utilities and groceries" comprises more things than it literally means?

18 hari yang laludiscuss

It doesn't even do that. If there's complete collapse, there won't be a reliable network to transact over, and not reliable electricity to run the network and do the processing.

29 hari yang laludiscuss

> you will eventually hit a point where you start thinking it's all meaningless ... You come to a point where you realize that you're not doing anything that creative

I hit that point after about 5 years. At the time, software development was mostly desktop applications (which are sadly defunct), and UI frequently doesn't require much in the way of algorithms. Then I focused on the challenge of design a UI that matches the user's mental model, which lasted about five years. After another a stint in mobile games and apps, I started doing contracting. The key for me was the concept of serving someone else' vision (instead of my own vision of FIRE), and some HN conversation on some of Steve Job's videos on work. This all boiled down into an attitude of "I will solve your problem (and you will pay me)" (from Job's discussion with the guy who designed the NeXT logo).

As a contractor, sometimes I solve your problem with a cool algorithm, sometimes by simply implementing your pixel-perfect design, and sometimes with a true-Agile back-and-forth of vague design into concrete software. Since I switching to the "I solve your problem" perspective, I haven't had any problems with feeling frustrated at just being a code monkey implementing stuff I don't need to think about. (However, I have discovered that I get really bored doing server stuff, and it doesn't save me from that. I just like something concrete, and not having to debug by putting in print statements and wading through thousands of lines of output, with only the reward that the variable contents is now correct. Turns out I want to see something. I get unreasonably excited about going from a blank screen and slowly populating it with widgets.)

bulan laludiscuss

Dividends are also one way of income in retirement, much more predictably than selling stock. The yields are worse than bonds, but they can be considered to be mostly to rise with inflation, albeit on a year or two delay. Dividends also act as a discipline to keep management focused on the business, since you need to pay real money to shareholders, instead of just doing whatever good idea you have, regardless of whether it is a net benefit to the company.

bulan laludiscuss

GOOG and META are listed on the Nasdaq, as far as I know, hence the four letter ticker, so maybe NYSE still has a mono-class requirement. That's something worth knowing, I avoid investing in companies where my stock isn't the same as everyone else's.

bulan laludiscuss

This is a great use for AI! Calculating intersections is tedious and there are an surprising number of edge cases that are tedious to track down and fix.

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You've been at your current career for 20 years, and you have at least 24 left, so it seems like there's plenty of time for a new career. Even 10 years would be a worthwhile second career. I even met someone who went to seminary around 58, worked as a pastor for 5 years, then retired (and became an Orthodox catechumen right afterwards).

bulan laludiscuss

Why short QQQ when SpaceX will only be 2% (according to a poster above), when many of the other companies in the index are tech and chip companies, such as NVDA, which are going gang-busters? Even if SpaceX went bankrupt you'd only see a 2% drop, which is easily covered by all the AI chip companies going up. If you think SpaceX is overvalued, buy options against it directly.

bulan laludiscuss

Since you couldn't "put money in the internet", you had to choose some actual companies. Your results varied by which company you chose, and when you invested. (This is always the case, obviously) Sun Microsystems? Let's say you bought the dip at the end of May 2000, at $150. It's ending price when it was bought by Oracle in 2010 was $9.50. [1] Suppose you bought Cisco at the same time for $37.30. You would have waited 18 years, until Aug 2018 for it to reach the same height. Now it's at $127, which over 26 years is an annualized return of 5%. It would have only taken 14 years to break even with Microsoft.

Now, if you had put your money in those stocks 12 months later, you would do okay (except for Sun). So, no, those pensions did not do the right thing by buying at the peak of a bubble. At least, not for people like me who don't like 15 years of negative returns.

[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/sun-microsystems/stock-price-...

[2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/cisco/stock-price-history/

bulan laludiscuss

This is a thoughtful article, but I think the axis isn't between builders and algorithm researches, but between craftsmen and results-oriented builders. Both want to build something, but the craftsman cares about the quality of the result (usability, maintainability, code quality, UI polish, etc.) while the non-craftsman is happy with something that works, even if some of the corners are janky.

Or, thinking about Windows and macOS in the Jobs era, perhaps the difference is more between the quality of taste. Microsoft focused on quality code, and came up with COM, architectures where an instantiable button is 13 levels of inherited classes, and things like DirectX, where the architecture is clean and extendable, but forces every developer to do things like allocate their own @#$! framebuffer. High level of craftsmanship, but poor taste. Jobs tended to focus on the user experience and had good taste, so the results were generally pretty good, but I got the feeling that the code wasn't as much of a priority.

bulan laludiscuss

It's even worse. The capital class is disconnected from employees because they have the managerial class running the business, so it's actually the managerial class that creates the employee experience. But, it turns out that "the capital class" has a large component of 401k funds, and so "the capital class" has a very large component of small shareholders, and so they don't really even have any influence whatsoever.