cirgue

The answer is contractors and consultants. State agencies routinely work with third parties that need to be able to share files. Obviously this isn’t universal but it isn’t uncommon.

It escalates tensions for no readily identifiable reason. Like we’re not looking to pick a fight with China or Russia right now, and saying “hey y’all we captured a Chinese drone” sounds like a great way to push public opinion over a precipice and create a crisis that serves the interests of quite literally no one.

Where did it mention that they were unable to get imagery of the drones or recover one? If the thesis is that this may be a foreign incursion, I very much doubt that they’d broadcast that they’d captured one.

You are not capable of interacting simultaneously with millions of people who regard you as anything approaching a source of truth.

Anyone who’s old enough to have a 20 year military career is at least a millennial.

Furthermore, most people panicking about dnd and raves have exactly zero experience with either. Almost everyone has experience with social media and a lot of the criticism of it comes from things people directly observe from their own personal experiences. It’s not like this is a completely uninformed mass hallucination like the satanic panic of the 90s.

Low-code is just good libraries and good frameworks. My hot take is that anything “low code” beyond that is just an aggressively user-hostile config interface.

Cardio in the mornings. I used to work out mainly at night, and I still lift in the afternoons, but going on a jog or bike ride right after getting up is amazing. No matter how shitty it is outside or how much I do not want to drag myself out of bed, being outside and active for 30-ish minutes at the start of the day makes a huge difference.

There are a lot of things in life that would be trivial if everyone was really good at what they did, had the most perfectly pure of intentions, and were omnisciently aware. Unfortunately that’s not the world we live in, and even farther from the companies most of us work for. Good technology is about figuring out shortcuts around hard problems, and “large groups of people trying to coordinate their activities across space and time” is a hard fucking problem.

Try teaching or tutoring for a while, either something academic or not. You get the chance to talk to groups, it’s going to be a topic you know well and are comfortable with, and you’ll get lots of chances to refine your techniques.

I think the author kind of has it backward. Most people I know (specifically younger people that I work with) that struggle with perfectionism are afraid to fail enough to master something. They end up king of the bunny slope because they don’t want to do something imperfectly, so they stick to the easy stuff and eventually give up. Like being really really good at something requires, like the author said, that you continue to do things at the outer limits of your abilities, and if you’re doing that you’re going to spend the majority of your time performing below the standard you set as perfection. If you have a healthy relationship with failure and imperfection, that drives you forward, and if not it stops you from progressing.

The point of the Stasi wasn’t to find/prosecute dissent, it was to create an environment that prevented it from occurring, spreading, or gaining traction. The Stasi existed to sow the fields of popular politics with salt through creating an environment of paranoia.

I have experienced clinical depression and physical activity was absolutely 100% a critical part of both recovery and maintaining mental health. Most (but not all) people that I know who have experienced clinical depression have had similar experiences.

I’ve always loved technical analysis discourse because it’s the starkest example of how to actually make money in financial markets, and that’s to actively cultivate information asymmetry among other market participants. If technical analysis were a successful strategy, it would, like most other techniques that can actually generate sustainable alpha, be a closely guarded secret. But it’s not. It’s something people shout about from the rooftops trying to get rubes to follow the bait. It’s the same kind of play as wallstreetbets, where you’re tying to increase the amount of stupid, predictable money in your corner of the market.

Never fear, we’ll get there

Seconding this. You can have all the meetings you want, but at the end of the day the core competency of bank management is managing money and not managing IT, and banks suck at managing IT when it isn’t directly in the critical path of cash flow, and even then they get it wrong more often than anyone wants to admit.

It is effectively not possible to be a mod of a subreddit without third party apps. I don’t think people fully understand just how awful the native mod suite is for Reddit, and this is what the blackout is really about: the fact that Reddit seems to want to absolutely refuse to support the unpaid labor that makes the site a source of real human knowledge as opposed to a wasteland of bots and trolls.

At least with chess (and plenty of other games) it’s a structured way of participating in cooperative competition/competitive cooperation. Your peers are your adversaries when you’re actually playing, but they’re also the people helping you get better. Work doesn’t teach that, or at least not explicitly, but the ability to navigate social spaces where you’re both cooperating and competing is critical to getting anything done.

The origin 100% does matter. It demonstrates that some kinds of virus research pose an existential threat to humanity if not handled properly. That seems relevant, especially when simultaneously Covid demonstrated that such research is also really important to do. Like the origin actually does pose some serious, non-trivial ethical questions about disease research that the public absolutely has a right and obligation to participate in.

I live in Atlanta and Korean isn’t quite taco-level ubiquity but it’s darn close. Everyone I know under the age of 40 does an h-mart run somewhat regularly and kbbq is a goto group dinner spot.

almost everything innovative looks like a bad idea to almost everyone

I disagree really strongly with this. Innovative things look like impractical long shots that have obvious upsides but that violate conventional wisdom around what is possible. The smartphone is a great example of this: it was obviously innovative, and the idea was obviously great before it actually became reality, but the practical limitations of hardware made it impossible until one day it wasn’t. Same for generative language models. The real innovation for both of these things is that some element constraining a good idea changes and someone notices and can act on it decisively.

Some version of the Metaverse has always been possible in one form or another, but no one acts on it because it doesn’t benefit the users it depends on for success. The fundamental limiting factor is participation incentive, and technology doesn’t change that.

In Reddit arguments, there are only losers.

+1 for government. I work with state and local governments a fair bit, and while there’s a lot of red tape and weird politics, the overwhelming majority of clients I work with are smart, capable, highly mission driven people doing their best in a system designed to move slowly. Being able to look back on a project and see a positive impact in a community is way more rewarding than trying to move the needle on click through. And the pay cut for public sector consulting isn’t as much as one would think. Especially for federal.

This is their business model and their marketing targets exactly the group of people who are clueless enough to continue paying them. Why risk selling to someone who has a nose for bullshit by doing anything that implies you have a real product?

I know for my part, I go out a lot over holidays because I’m back in my home town at the same time as a bunch of other people I don’t see that much and it’s a good opportunity to catch up. I suspect that this is pretty common, especially for folks that live somewhere other than where they grew up.

“Dishonest and profitable” is a usable definition of fraud. What’s the issue here?

This is silly. No religious person today who has even a passing understanding of church history thinks that indulgences weren’t a scam. You’re aware that the Reformation has happened since then, right? As to Keynesian economics, the author isn’t arguing for a Keynesian worldview per se, he’s using Keynes definition of economics, which is a definition not unique to him.

This is so utterly wrong it hurts. The internet is real life the same way that evening news is real life. It’s a self-referential funhouse mirror that’s useful exactly for understanding what people who post on the internet think, and “people who post on the internet” is a tiny, profoundly idiosyncratic group. Conflating their opinions with “real life” is a powerful solvent for rationality, empathy, and mental health.

All of this talk about IBM being incompetent is completely undeserved. They are probably the best in the business at selling nonsense to gullible executives.

I set up a webcam to take selfies every few minutes last year because someone made the same comment to me. Turns out I look like I’m fully prepared to kill when I’m focused intently on something. Which is weird, because I’m rarely actually angry, and when my face is relaxed I look pretty genial.