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I don’t know. I think you’re right that the root cause is low EQ either way, but at least the low EQ used to be expressed in each’s own personal manner. Your friend/ex/family member might have been an ass but at least they were the ass you had come to know and maybe appreciate to some extent, and that fosters empathy. When they phrase assery in therapy speak, it feels like all of a sudden your familiar relationship has become one-sided and impersonal. And before at least they had to make an effort to justify being a dang dangus — another opportunity to foster empathy.

There’s also a real conflict of interest in therapy where the therapist has a financial interest in pleasing the client but no stake in the wellbeing of the client’s acquaintances (other than the value they provide to the client). Hence empowering them with generic therapy speak around boundaries seems like somewhat of a logical outcome of that (and anecdotally what I’ve observed in my own experiences with therapy and in others who go to therapy)

Source: I am an Amazon employee.

I’ve been here for ~4.5 years, on 3-4 teams across 2 different orgs. I work as an applied scientist (i.e. data scientist who meets the SDE bar, and works on an engineering team).

My personal experience has been that the reports you’ll find online have been greatly exaggerated. On none of my teams have I been expected to work more than 40 hours/wk, and all of my managers have been nice. I’ve worked 1-3 people who I believe to have been PIP’d, but they were legitimately low performers (highly opinionated, difficult to work with, unproductive).

I don’t doubt people have bad experiences. Amazon leaves a lot of power to managers, and that enables abuse probably more than other companies.

Amazon doesn’t attempt to be as employee-friendly as Google. If that’s important to you, it probably won’t be a good fit.

Amazon mostly focuses on the business, and treats employees mostly as the market requires. For engineers in a tight labor market, that means at least somewhat generously as long as you’re contributing value.

Amazon is known for being a place where nobody will hold your hand. I think the culture of ramping up new employees is weak, and more tenured employees are generally quite focused on their own work. This means a lot of unnecessary stress when you first start here imo, but it also demands some level of entrepreneurialism and self-sufficiency. These are good skills to develop and be held accountable to.

It’s a big company, and whether your experience is positive/negative is mostly a function of the team/manager you end up with.

The promotion process seems intentionally obstructive, although lots of people do get promoted (i.e. most everyone who joins as SDE I and sticks around).

I’ve had (several?) local primary care doctors hint that a fair amount of people working here are either anxious or depressed. Not sure how true that is elsewhere in tech though. I have a suspicion that FAANG companies in general attract a lot of people with existing insecurities, and so I think that might come with the territory to some extent. Though I could totally see Amazon’s culture exacerbating that.

So is it worth it? I’d probably do it again. I don’t love the place as an employer, but it’s not nearly as bad the internet makes it out to be in my personal experience. Many of the employee/culture problems you’ll see at Amazon exist at other FAANG companies (and in corporations in general)… Amazon is somewhat more openly capitalistic and thus the problems probably exist to a somewhat greater degree, but still the variance between mid-large tech companies is much smaller than the variance within them.

Honestly I’m much more bothered by the lack of meaningfulness in having my life’s work being a contribution to a consumerist shopping platform than how Amazon treats me… and in that respect, switching to the addiction/surveillance/advertising FAANGs/other tech companies isn’t much of an upgrade.

Just one perspective.

I don’t think GP’s claim is entirely accurate. Bing is an input into the results, along with other inputs (Bing is less than majority responsible in most cases iirc). I don’t remember if DDG does any indexing on it’s own.

Hopefully someone more informed can chime in but GP’s claim was strong, provocative, and to my knowledge inaccurate so wanted to correct it.

I feel fairly uneasy about my ownership of my cat. I live alone (besides the cat) and am probably gone 12/16 waking hours per day and obviously asleep the other 8. During the remaining 4, I’m probably cooking, showering, or recreating (not involving the cat). Add all this up and the cat probably gets about 5-10 min of attention from me each day. That’s the entirety of her interaction with any other living thing. Day in, day out.

I’m not an expert but my guess is that that feelings of boredom/loneliness that humans feel are relatively primal and experienced similarly (at some level) in most other mammals. If that’s true at all, it comes to a rough life for domesticated cats.

That’s ignoring the fact that cats usually have large territories that they patrol in the wild while my apartment is 700 sqft as well :\

The pure mathematician is a relatively recent beast though, and most non-graduate students of math (i.e. almost all of them) study mathematics that almost exclusively was developed to solve a problem in the physical world.

Does this resonate with anyone else? Is there any studies on this?

I’ve had a similar experience over the past few years — a ton of work focus (at a FAANGM as an ML scientist/engineer) combined with limited social interaction and I’ve noticed my ability to have normal social interactions has declined greatly (“verbally inept” and “difficulty with empathy” pretty much hit it on the head). There’s potentially confounding factors in my case so I’ve been hesitant to attribute it to overfocusing at work although I’ve considered it may be a cause.

In retrospect I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s not really a worthwhile tradeoff and I’ve been pulling back from work a bit. To add to the larger discussion, I thought I was focusing on work for the right reasons (making a difference in the world, gaining skills, self-actualization) but after getting my “dream job” it turned out that it the job wasn’t very fulfilling at all. No technical challenge or abstract impact metrics really did much for my happiness (or money fwiw)... at the end of the day it’s still rewarding social interactions (which don’t necessarily _have_ to be outside of work) that control the needle for me.

I would fairly shocked if the CCP didn’t issue guidelines for history textbooks in addition to a post-publication review for approval.

Sure, I might be okay with that for a niche community. But social networks tend to be monopolies or oligopolies due to network effects and general audience social network apps (which TikTok is) empirically appear to be the main for platform for large-scale organized protest movement in the internet world we now live in.

I don’t judge it as worthwhile to get rid of such a platform for capitalistic soma reasons. I’m even more suspicious when the company is from a country with close government-business ties where the government has openly demonstrated it uses such apps to suppress political dissent.

Did you miss the section about Hong Kong and the blanket ban on political/protest content?

The latter is very Brave New World-esque in that it both “keeps the app fun” and acts as a means to suppress dissent. If they have the capability to identify political/protest content, why not label and allow filtering instead of blanket removing all of it from the app?

The designer of the software should be liable for bugs that cause life and property damages. This makes sense morally, and the costs incurred from damages should be factored into the costs of pricing a driverless car.

This protects the consumer from being responsible for damages they have no control over, provides meaningful competitive incentives for driverless car manufacturers to improve safety, and doesn’t hamstring the industry’s development.

I have no idea what relevance trade history from hundreds of years ago has to modern geopolitics and economic globalization.

Historically, Europeans didn’t know North America even existed and the USA wasn’ta country

“The government” is not a homogeneous entity.

The brain-dead obvious response to this is that Jeff Bezos isn’t hiding his money under a mattress. He’s (directly or indirectly) investing in ventures that employ people anyway, and the mechanisms that allocate his investment funds are possibly better at producing productivity returns than e.g. having several thousand people eat out one extra time per month.

There are reasonable responses to the above but nothing about these discussions appear brain-dead obvious to me.

Thomas Picketty did great research in this area.

My understanding of the general consensus of economists on Piketty is that his data collection efforts were great work, but his analysis and interpretation of that data was not particularly excellent. His theories have been substantially criticized by that group.

I’m not really in a position to evaluate the substance of the claims of either side but just want to point out that Piketty’s work isn’t by any means universally acclaimed and it isn’t just shills that have issues with it.

Isn’t figuring this problem out what the FAA has been doing for the last five years? If we’re going to have public nuisance drones at the end of the day anyway, why they just let it happen earlier?

My understanding is that drones will operate sort of like power lines or a highway system; they will fly in straight lines on pre-approved routes and only deviate at last mile delivery. Hopefully they’ve thought of other measures as well.

Unfortunately though, whatever natural selection that occurs in a post-civilization world is might be sort of orthogonal to improving human civilization when civilization returns.

We’d surely get some beastly hunter-gatherers out of the deal though :)

It's not so much China as it is Xi and his minions. There are 1.2 billion hostages under the control of Xi.

You’re vastly underestimating how successful the CCP’s propaganda campaigns, censorship, and patriotic education have been. Actually, even without those, the CCP’s economic successes have earned it a lot of legitimacy (deserved or not). A more liberal successor to Xi might be able to nudge the ship to a slightly less nationalistic direction (a noticeably less hostile foreign policy) but I suspect a hypothetical liberalized China will take generations.

I don’t think the government has shown it has a position on the issue really.

China is not a gay-friendly place though — gays often hide their homosexuality from their parents and parents often insist “it’s a choice.” The younger generations are more accepting though (although still not nearly as much as in the West). But I think this is more due China’s level of development than it is to the CCP.

From what I’ve read in mainstream US news sources, Europe, NATO, and the US have no faith in Turkey’s ability to execute its plan. And setting up a mini-state isn’t something you can really mess up without having catastrophic humanitarian consequences.

And quite frankly, I don’t see any reason why Turkey would succeed. Just look how much trouble the (presumably better resourced and more experienced) US has had in setting up stable governments in Iraq and Afghanistan which (in my admittedly nonexpert opinion) seem to be the best historical parallels for attempting to create stable societies out of a legal vacuum with little-to-no useful institutions and peoples with minimal experience/exposure to operating in such a society.

Because there’s only 24 hours a day? Because my tax dollars are often funding this research?

Why not take this farther and just do the research myself, eh?

The app developer supposedly made $150 before the app was taken down. Hardly a successful cash grab. If people didn’t feel the app provide value worth the cost of its services, they can choose not to buy. What is Google’s place in the making of that decision?

There is no reason to give Google the benefit of the doubt here. They’ve been making efforts to re-enter The China Market (tm) for years.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-pulls-hong-kong-cop-track...?

As I mentioned above, the Chinese are undoubtedly extremely sensitive about HK (I would argue due to propaganda but that’s irrelevant to the question). There is some amount of authenticity this (definitely at least 50%) and the HK protests are truly almost universally very unpopular in the mainland. That said, the degree to which this particular outrage is manufactured by Beijing vs organic is extremely difficult to determine.

While this definitely exists, I’m not completely convinced the true intensity of the Chinese exactly matches the front that Beijing allows forth. I’m confident that most Chinese are unhappy (maybe very unhappy) with the comments, but an entirely organic nationwide boycott seems a little farfetched to me. Chinese aren’t robots; there’s significant variance of opinions and eagerness about politics among them just like all other humans.

However, if the government chooses to grease the wheels of fury or even light the flame via astroturfing while simultaneously censoring dissenting opinions, they look mighty unified.

Remember, this tweet was on _Twitter_. Twitter is banned in China, which raises the question of how this became such a mainstream issue there organically. Sure, I suppose it’s possible that an expat reshared it on Weibo and the entire country went bananas but that seems a like a bit of a stretch to me.

Apple only has its self to blame when it doesn’t necessarily get the benefit of the doubt as far as potential Chinese policy influence goes.

FOIA doesn’t usually involve my personal data as a typical private citizen. Personal data that can potentially be traced back to me and affect my life in negative ways. It usually involves data about the work that the government itself is doing... work that is funded with my tax dollars and involving data that ostensibly can’t be used to harm me personally. Data sharing increases the attack surface for that data... considering I never consented to that data being collected in the first place, the supposed government of the people should be working very hard to make sure my data isn’t abused or hacked.

Agreed on the latter statement though.

Is this really a good thing?

1. Indiscriminate collection by law enforcement is bad to start with.

2. Since we agree it was bad to collect such data, we’re going to set a precedent that law enforcement can’t have exclusive rights to that data. Instead, now some legal process allows bureaucrats or justices to give data improperly collected about me to third party private agencies that I’m not familiar with.

This is supposed to be a win for me? If data was improperly collected, it should be deleted. I don’t care how much value Org X thinks it can derive from that data and how many government employees Org X can persuade to share it with them.

I gather from comments here that EFF has a laudable mission and track record, but the reputation or purpose of the organization in question is orthogonal to the reasonableness of the data sharing precedent.

Perhaps I’m missing some crucial facts?

I find it pretty remarkable (and scary) that the international community is much more comfortable calling out the USA on human rights abuses than it is China (e.g. the world pretty uniformly opposed moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem).

It goes to show how much you can accomplish foreign policy wise by being completely intolerant of any criticism (assuming you are armed with a sufficiently large stick and a people unified enough to wield it consistently).

I think a big part of it is that most (recent) mainland expats still mostly consume mainland (i.e. censored) news media and social media, and their friends in their destination country are almost exclusively other mainland expats. Reading and writing Chinese is significantly more comfortable for most expats and mainland Chinese media has cultural appeal for them as well for obvious reasons.

It takes an unusual and frankly relatively rare amount of independent thought and personal research to believe something at odds with a reality that your entire social network accepts as obvious fact. Especially when you start from the same manufactured reality that they did. And I would guess, even among expats, speaking about such doubts of the official CCP line probably is met with significant resistance among other mainlanders as mainlanders tend to be relatively nationalistic (as a product of their censored media and “patriotic education“). Why bother with it then? Which is also a part of contemporary Chinese cultural (no doubt nurtured by the CCP) — politics are is the business of the government, not the governed anyway.

So, in short, there’s a lot of political inertia for mainland expats, not a lot of incentive to consider other views, disincentive to adopt other views, and a lot of work to learn about other views anyway (must be in English in non-work hours, learning a whole alternate history and political philosophy takes a ton of time, your network of Western friends with sufficient knowledge to discuss these topics with is probably amounts to zero). So really, it would almost be more surprising if they were flipping views — even though, personally, I’ve spent significant time learning the CCP canon and find it rather obviously holey.

While satirical, this doesn’t really make sense as an answer to question at hand. Natural selection dictates that intelligence, if possessed, will be put to use to further survival and reproduction. There are some limits to this — humans in many cases clearly have other goals — but it should be true to a large extent. The wheel, New York, and wars are pretty clearly aligned with this goal.

If the octopus possessed sufficient intelligence, something along the lines of an octopus city would presumably be in the cards. Or if they do possess such intelligence, the question again is why not form civilizations (which would presumably boost survival and fertility rates)?

Both happened, but 1/2 to 2/3 of the difference is due to actual efficiency gains.

Source: recently read The Quest, book which discusses energy in the modern world