You're right that it's become a stock phrase, is somewhat redundant, and I used it without thinking. I strive to avoid such stock phrases (see Orwell's Politics and the English Language), so I thank you for drawing my attention to that.
I don't think it's a dog whistle. A dog whistle is when you signal something to a subgroup of your audience, using language that only they will understand. I have not seen "lived experience" used as a dog whistle.
I have seen it used to contrast official or elite discourse with what happens in one's daily life. For example, official statistics may show that crime is down in your area, but that does not comport with how you are now avoiding certain areas of town completely. Or a woman might be told that their company does not penalize them for taking maternity leave, but in practice they see they are sidelined. The "lived experience" trope is usually deployed when you start trusting your own biography, even the reactions of your own body, as a source of knowledge, opposing dominant narratives.
According to my very some brief research, it seems to have entered English from German, in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir.
I understand why the parent post felt it was clankerish. It has the same feeling - many signposts on a road to nowhere.
But it's also got the structure of marketing. Or a pitch for a cult. Or both.
It is literally book-ended - they mention the new book in the first and last paragraphs.
As far as I can tell it's no different from a pitch for other popular spirituality books. A tease that there is an answer, the author discovered it, but now is not the time for that revelation. Boring.
It's just targeted towards an audience that has different filters, and different expectations for what enlightenment might look like. Apparently for some it involves PKD-like psychonauttery, name-checking Bay Area grifters of past and present, post-rationalism, etc.
Yeah this is a bit sad. I think maybe this person actually had some real lived experience and wrote bullet points and then generated the book. I don’t even want to think about the possibility that the whole thing, including anecdotes, might be generated.
I skimmed the content (it has no immediate relevance to my life) but even the chapter headings are sloppadocious.
A friend of mine has this problem with their D&D campaigns. He makes huge efforts and there’s always one or two people who flake or don’t have the same commitment level. He’s gotten quite angry and sad about it.
He is trying something different now, to make a hybrid campaign where there’s a lot of one-shots in a broader story arc. It’s structured like missions in an ongoing struggle.
Maybe if you want to do board games,
we need more games that scale up and down easily. I’m not a board game person, IDK.
You want to just hang out, you reach out and propose what you’re doing.
You want more purposeful and meaningful time, join a volunteer group you vibe with.
Even if it’s meeting for coffee. You have to be the one who reaches out. You have to do it on a regular cadence. If, like me, you don’t have little alarms in your head that go off when you haven’t seen someone in a while, you can use automated reminders.
I have observed my spouse (who is not on social media) do this and she maintains friendships for decades this way. Nowadays she has regular zoom check ins, book clubs, and more, even with people who moved to the other coast. You do now have the tools for this. I have adopted it into my own life with good results.
Note: you are going to get well under a 50% success rate here. Accept that most people flake. It may always feel painful (and nerds like us often are rejection-sensitive). You have to feel your feelings, accept it, and move on.
You are struggling against many aspects of the way we in the developed world/nerd world live. We have a wealth of passive entertainment, often we have all consuming jobs or have more time-consuming relationship with our families than our parents ever did. We move to different cities for jobs, and even as suburban sprawl has grown, you’re on average probably further away from people who even live in the same city! You get from place to place in a private box on wheels, or alternatively in a really big box on wheels with a random assortment of people. You don’t see people at church, or market day, or whatever other rituals our ancestors had. On the positive side, you have more tools and leisure than ever before to arrange more voluntary meetings.
He's not saying that these are all common values or practices at Google.
He's saying he learned those lessons while working at Google.
Despite the metaphor of a "lesson", a "lessons learned" post is almost never about something the author was explicitly told. It was something that you had to learn from experience, or at best from informal advice. Where you had to swim against the flow of your circumstances.
I neither think Osmani means to say that Google is _against_ these lessons. Every organization as big as Google has a lot of accumulated wisdom that will help you. These are just the things which remain hard, and some of which are even harder in a large organization.
Peter Weller, playing Buckaroo Banzai, is late for his military-particle-physics-interdimensional-jet-car test because he's helping Jeff Goldblum's character with neurosurgery. Later that day he will go play lead guitar in an ensemble.
Scriptwriting gurus advise that your protagonist should have flaws and character progression. The writers of this movie disagree.
In Mad Men, we have these little moments of mind=blown by the constant sexism, racism, smoking, alcoholism, even attitudes towards littering. In 2040 someone's going to make a show about the 2010s-2020s and they'll have the same attitude towards social media addiction.
It has never been about small government. You can just look at the Republican record on deficit spending or military funding to dismiss that. “Small government” was just an acceptable way to say you were for reducing benefits to people deemed undeserving.
There are people who called themselves Republican who started to believe their own propaganda, but it’s never been an empirical fact in the modern era that Republicans acted to reduce government spending in toto.
Thanks for bringing Vancouver into the discussion.
We have SROs here still, and they have a contentious relationship with both the government and the population they serve. Sometimes it's hard to tell if they are good or bad, other than they're probably better than people living on the street.
For example, a few days ago it was announced that a major SRO downtown would close. It was perceived to be causing nuisances, but also, we have FIFA coming soon and many cities do this sort of "cleanup" when events like that happen.
You're right that Eby has shifted rightwards somewhat. In my estimation it's more to do with where the voters are. Sometimes we're electing socialist advocates for the unhoused to be premier and then we're electing Bitcoin-happy bagel merchants to be the mayor. Make it make sense.
So details were left out and it doesn't adhere exactly to this author's idea of what a good security report is.
Nothing to see here IMO.
The simpler explanation is that:
- They're a young organization, still figuring out how to do security. Maybe getting some things fundamentally wrong, no established process or principles for disclosure yet.
- I have no inside info, but I've been around the block. They're in a battle to the death with organizations that are famously cavalier about security. So internally they have big fights about how much "brakes" they can allow the security people to apply to the system. Some of those folks are now screaming "I TOLD YOU SO". Leaders will vacillate about what sort of disclosure is best for Anthropic as a whole.
- Any document where you have technologists writing the first draft, and PR and executives writing the last draft, is going to sound like word salad by the time it's done.
XSLT is being exploited right now for security vulnerabilities, and there is no solution on the horizon.
The browser technologies that people actually use, like JavaScript, have active attention to security issues, decades of learnings baked into the protocol, and even attention from legislators.
You imagine that XSLT is more secure but it’s not. It’s never been. Even pure XSLT is quite capable of Turing-complete tomfoolery, and from the beginning there were loopholes to introduce unsafe code.
As they say, security is not a product, it’s a process. The process we have for existing browser technologies is better. That process is better because more people use it.
But even if we were to try to consider the technologies in isolation, and imagine a timeline where things were different? I doubt whether XML+XSLT is the superior platform for security. If it had won, we’d just have a different nightmare of intermingled content and processing. Maybe more stuff being done client-side. I expect that browser and OS manufacturers would be warping content to insert their own ads.
With these characters, from Trump on down, discourse is not the point.
He is flexing his power by showing he can make an obviously fatuous point and get away with it. Because there are no consequences, for someone like him.
Working on: to teach myself Rust, I’ve been working on a NYT Letter Boxed solver, with some ambitions to turn it into a game by itself. I think this game could be made a lot more fun.
Thinking about: A new take on LinkedIn/web-of-trust, bootstrapped by in-person interactions with devices. It seems that the problem of proving who is actually human and getting a sense of how your community values you might be getting more important, and now devices have some new tools to bring that within reach.
Microsoft and Oracle sold closed source software that had obtained tremendous leverage in their fields, if not outright monopolies. Historically, Microsoft and Oracle’s business models were threatened by open source. They have reacted in various ways over decades: alternately resisting, embracing, or acquiring control of important projects.
However, Shopify sells SAAS thst runs on open source. What does it benefit them to take over key aspects of infrastructure?
If they disliked what was happening with the OSS tools, they are big and rich enough to maintain forks or their own toolchain.
The OP seems to be associating the start of this controversy with some feud between DHH and the founder of Sidekiq. Shopify is indeed quite aligned with DHH. And there’s some controversy about so-called supply chain attacks, which I understand might inspire a call for a more locked-down organization. But as an outsider I am confused.
Mostly relatively dry discussions, but they do seem a lot better structured than the average blog post, and (thankfully) not AI garbage. He is a good writer.
The story OP posted is tagged with "War Stories", and these do seem to be far more literary, with first-person perspective and novel-like dialogue.
I suspect the same writer really has written all of these. It may be the actual person credited, Lee Stimmel, but it impossible to know if it's a ghostwriter without other samples of Stimmel's writing. But I don't think the technical details of the law would be well captured by a ghostwriter. There is a distinct change of style between both kinds of articles, but to me it feels like the same person writing.
I always thought the gentleman thief was a fictional character. Assuming this is more or less real (the detailed dialogue is a bit concerning) it’s fascinating.
Why do you feel so certain about that?