For me, it maps to pandemic, which was midway through my time at GOOG. That's when the COVID-sparked Zero Interest Rate Policy caused the company to hire engineers and PMs like crazy. There were suddenly too many new hires to inculcate with the old leadership and engineering ethos—especially via remote work—and the values got diluted, probably beyond the point of recovery.
Are there any risks associated with NAC supplementation? For example, could long-term usage reduce aptosis and thereby increase risks of developing cancer?
I think it’s important to acknowledge that today U.S. citizens in the bottom economic decile live longer lives and do so with more comfort and convenience than even the wealthiest and most powerful people of 100 years ago. Not even the infamous robber barons, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, with all their staggering wealth, had access to anything approaching modern health care (and dentistry!); air-conditioned comfort; television, instant communication across the planet via text, voice, and video; computers, let alone supercomputers in their pockets giving them the internet, Google, GPS, and approximately free and instant access to the world’s information.
Yes, there is still much work to be done to improve the United States, but I’d rather be poor in the United States today than wealthy in the United States 100 years ago. I suspect that most educated people would choose likewise.
Why do we have legislated cliffs instead of gradients? Because approximately nobody understands lerp. And linear interpolation is the simplest (nontrivial) gradient scheme. Consequently, we get cliffs or, if we're lucky, lookup tables that approximate gradients with stair-step successions of small cliffs.
> You can't unit test for taste if you haven't written down what you mean by taste. If you can externalize it, then you can.
I'm not so sure. For instance, you can write down what it means for a program to be free of XSS and other injection vulnerabilities. Now, how would you unit test for that property?
Yeah, this is a promising solution to scalping. Previously, if you had only small numbers of consoles available at launch, scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them. With Valve's new policy, that share is reduced to s/g, where s is the number of verified Steam accounts controlled by scalpers and g is the number of legit gamer accounts. Since s is likely to be much less than g, s/g is close to zero, and scalping is dramatically curtailed. Almost all of the initial batch of consoles will go to legit gamers.
Okay, here's what I still don't understand. Were the things he was “making a huge stink about in every training” true or false? Reports at the time claimed that he was ”perpetuating harmful stereotypes,” but other reporting claimed that he was pointing out facts that inconveniently challenged the cultural orthodoxy and then wrote the doc to clarify his feedback, and so he became a target for internal activists. Are you aware of any specifics that would allow a reasonable person to lean one way or another as to the reality?
What other things did he do to make you believe he was “kind of unhinged”? I know about the memo thing, but I think it was covered in an inflammatory way because the press loves to play up a controversy. What else besides the memo incident did he do that merits his firing?
> It is only a true value if you are willing to do the right thing when you cannot get away with doing the right thing.
In reality, neither corporate nor personal values are binary, all-or-none propositions. They are more like springs that push you in the right direction. But if something pulls hard enough in the wrong direction, a spring can be overpowered.
Do they still have the "Stump The Experts" event at WWDC? You know, where you ask Apple engineers a technical question about their work and, if they can't answer it, you win a t-shirt with tree stumps on it.
I made a quick web app that lets me easily perform Bayesian evidence updates for a set of competing hypotheses. You drop your hypotheses into rows. Then for each piece of evidence, you add a column and fill its values with the odds of observing the evidence given that the corresponding hypotheses are true. The app then computes the posterior odds on the competing hypotheses, given the complete set of evidence. You can also import/export your results as CSV data.
I suspect that someone at Google has read economist Albert O. Hirschman's treatise on Exit, Voice, and Loyalty [1]. The central idea is that when people are unhappy with a relationship between themselves and, say, a firm, they have basically two options: (1) Exit, that is, leave the relationship; and (2) Voice, signal their unhappiness. Hirschman argues that encouraging one option reduces the inclination to exercise the other option. Further, he argues that when people Exit, the firm has little opportunity to understand what motivated the people to leave, so it is advantageous to shift people toward the Voice option, which conveys that precious information readily. So, by allowing Memegen to exist and be used, Google management gives employees a way to exercise Voice instead of Exit, and management learns more about what people are upset about on the margins of the employee base, giving management an opportunity to respond (which they are free to ignore if they want).
On top of what you wrote, Memegen is not representative of opinions among Googlers. Memegen, like most social media, focuses on the extremes. You'll see a lot of spicy takes, but that's not what the typical Googler thinks. For a more realistic view, the comments on Memegen are better but, again, unlikely to represent the views of most Googlers.
So this article boils down to "On a site that focuses on extreme positions drawn from a very large population of people, we found extreme positions about this product." Doesn't really tell you much about the product or the very large population. You can make the same statement about most products and most very large populations.
I'm curious. What specifically about my comment made you believe it was a test and that I would be assigning grades to responses, as opposed to an idea for which I invited criticism?
> Would you advocate for a 0% capital gains tax? Or a capital gains tax-break? How would you calculate the ideal number? (I would place capital gains tax included in income tax.)
I wouldn't advocate for any particular tax rate for capital gains without it being part of comprehensive fiscal and government reform. The point I was trying to get across in my original comment was that, when people talk about raising the capital gains tax because they think it's an obvious way to tax the rich without affecting working people and that the only reason we're not already doing it is because the rich have rigged the system, the reality is way more complicated. There are no easy fixes. Changing the capital gains tax substantially (outside of more widespread reforms) is likely to have unwanted consequences. And even with widespread reforms, we're likely to suffer unwanted consequences.