colmvp

Couldn't agree more.

"Kids are hard. People are selfish." - More people than ever before want to live a life free of the responsibilities of having children, which is totally fine but never gets talked about in this discussion about birthrate. I have a lot of financially secure friends who never want kids.

"The dating market is torture." - Expectations of dating, especially online dating are very different from previous generations and kind of wack. I admit to falling into the trap of feeling like someone else out there is better and not giving the person I met online more of a chance past the first date. I'm sure others who I was with had the same reaction. Next thing you know, you're past the age of wanting or even being able to have a child. Either way, it's crazy when you see online discussions about how such and such city has a dearth of good matches which seems statistically improbable.

I thought the rule was to keep the title the same as the article? The title is: "Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe"

Aggressive moderation can be very toxic. The /r/toronto and /r/askTO subreddits are modded by essentially the same people. They remove comments/posts without explanation as to what rules were broken, and then when you critique them in the comments surprise, surprise, they remove them too!

Or possibly financial assistance from the Bank of Mom and Dad.

As for Udacity, which was founded in 2011, it gave the usual kinds of statements a company makes when it gets acquired by a much larger organization like Accenture. That is, it believes that it can reach more people and help them acquire skills as part of the larger entity. That goes without saying, but there had been rumors earlier this year that the company was in talks with Indian edtech company Upgrad with an asking price of $80 million. Apparently that deal fell through and Accenture ended up buying them instead.

I wouldn't be shocked if it was low. I remember during the online learning boom of the mid-to-late 2010s I spent some time studying a variety of courses on Udacity but I felt the depth wasn't there.

And now there's a lot of different options for online learning specialized to particular industries that are superior to general platforms like Udacity. For example, when I was learning DL, I joined a local study group that went through fast.ai together.

YT search results also show results that have literally nothing to do with the query. Stop showing me videos I watched previously when I'm literally in the midst of trying to find something specific.

Do Finales Define a Show?

It's mind-boggling how much Benioff and Weiss dropped the ball on the final two seasons of GOT. It's hard for me to even re-watch clips of the early seasons on YouTube because of how much I know its going to take a turn for the worst. The sad part is the production value and actors were still on their A game.

In contrast, I can rewatch practically anything from BB or BCS.

You'd be surprised.

I remember meeting a woman who said she doesn't date men who don't have at minimum, a Masters.

A doctor I matched up with on an online dating app asked me to clarify my occupation, and when I replied, she immediately unmatched lol

I'm not sure why roundabouts are so uncommon in North America.

Where I live, at a 4 way small street intersection, two of the entrances have stop signs with a roundabout in the middle. At that point, you might as well get rid of the roundabout.

So, is he still going to lead some team at Microsoft?

To be frank, isn't it weird to appoint an interim CEO who sides with the person you ousted? Why not have appointed someone more sympathetic to your position?

I disagree. Browsers like Chrome and Firefox have the ability to install different engines, yet I'd be shocked if Google wasn't at least 90% of the current default search engine on both browers. Most users might be technical enough to change their default, but unless Bing/DDG/et al are demonstrably better in their results, users won't switch.

Wow that brings me back. I remember being on AskReddit when it was relatively small (maybe a few hundred thousand subscribers).

My favorite contribution to that subreddit was one of the first logos. They held a contest and my submission was a drawing of Snoo with his bum facing the viewer with a dollar in between his cheeks. Ass Credit.

I can't believe people voted for it lol, but that was when the subreddit was a lot less serious.

You can still see the remnants of that work by going to old.reddit.com/r/askreddit: Hover over the Snoo's talking and wait for the tooltip.

Exactly.

Sometimes you play a game, and you realize, shit I invested points in these attributes but upon reading strategy guides, I realize I fucked up the distribution and there's no way to reset my character. What is the solution? Abandon the character.

I'm unclear as to why that is hard to imagine.

I live in a city that has many free tech meetups.

One of them involved going through fast.ai. Tech companies were happy to host us for free.

Another was about doing Kaggle competition to practice ML with fellow newbies. Again, tech companies allowed us to use their space after hours, or we'd just to the library and book a room for free.

Vice versa other groups that revolve around learning specific languages or going through specific technical books.

It's really strange, people here are encouraging about online dating and you'd think it'd be easier than ever to find a compatible mate what with the ability to have "access" to people you'd never encounter otherwise.

Yet, I've been doing it for about six years on and off and had one lengthy relationship from it (we broke up after we realized we had incompatible difference). I thought in some ways it'd get easier in ones late 30s where people tend to have a focus on wanting to settle down.

I have a lot of great friends, well paying job/profession, have a pretty comfortable amount of financial assets, a handful of interesting hobbies, I volunteer, mentor juniors to level up in their career... I kind of don't really know what more I can really offer. Yeah sorry, I can't become taller or change my ethnicity or face. At the same time, I'm grounded enough to not try matching women who are incredibly attractive.

I'm not filtering out based on race, past marriages, or whether they already have children, and it's still like months upon months of no replies or mediocre first dates.

No, it's only shared with the provider you choose (e.g. if your default search engine is DDG, then the search terms are shared with DDG, etc.)

Totally understandable.

That said, on subreddits I see people who post content without attribution all the time. I recall in /r/aww you can't directly link to an Instagram post but you can "steal" the image and post it, and it's optional as to whether or not you link to the Instagram post within the comments. Likewise, people take videos from YouTube/TikTok and re-host it on Reddit.

In smaller subreddits people will post entire pay-walled articles as if writers only get paid in likes.

Yup. In Canada, he funded over a hundred libraries.

I never thought we'd hit a point in my lifetime where artificially generated porn would be compelling, but I'm utterly impressed by the quality of SFM adult content.

And I'm thinking if porn sites can combine the various forms of generative AI (including the voice acting) to allow viewers to create their own fantasies... look out.

If people lament the popularity of these fantasies I would say there's a segment of people not lucky enough to find a partner and are absolutely disillusioned about the prospects of finding someone. I know some men for example who occasionally end up using escorts after having no luck finding someone for long periods of time. And so yeah, is it really unexpected that people address these needs elsewhere even if it's not ideal?

On the other hand, they exist in other forms, like interviews or talks viewable on YouTube, or podcasts that can be re-listened to at any time.

> Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.

I don't doubt that people earlier in their career work better with more senior people at arms length to help them. Hell, I experienced a bit of that my first few months at a new job where I struggled to understand processes.

But after a period of time, I got it. Sure it took longer, but I got there.

Now, I get less work done in the office because people spend time socializing, and more importantly, the workstation is not customized to my liking because of this whole satellite desk situation.

I'll say this: If these companies tanked during the height of Covid, they'd blame it on WFH. Of course, the financial performance for these companies was quite good, so now that there's a bit of correction, they search for reasons to bring employees back to the office.

No one forced my friends or people I pass by to use any of the products provided tech companies.

Hell, most of my friends don't care about privacy or being tracked online, or having their information shared amongst other entities.

How many other devs here have had conversations with others about Net Neutrality (back in the day) or Privacy/Security and had people pat you on the head and said okay but let's move on? I recall people just not giving a shit when I talked about the ideal of Diaspora. Or choosing Open Source products that gravitate towards being transparent about what is actually being put into the software, including the type of telemetry being recorded.

If I sound jaded, it's because I am. The community chooses what it chooses. At some point the onus is on us, even if it means abstaining (hence why I stopped using Facebook over a decade ago).

Yeah I'm not sure why that's controversial.

I have a plethora of books on programming languages. Know what helped me learn it the most? Solving small bugs on open source projects.

If I told an AI to code the solution in the language of choice, I would solve the problem but not truly comprehend the subtleties of why the decision was made. Even when it tells me why it did something, I guarantee you I'd forget about it in a few hours if not by the following day.

An AI doing a code review is one thing I could say would've helped me, but an AI solving the problem I think would've stunted my growth.

Your statement made me realize I should empathize with the machines in the Matrix. After all, a human life is objectively worth less to machines than to humans. A machine can last for centuries and can have more utility on a daily basis than a human.

+1000

Point A: Biggest wake up call for me going from a startup to big tech.

Point B: A year into a company, I'd be exaggerating if I said I knew more than 1% of the codebase. So many things the product needs to operate that users don't know exist since no one cares about what's under the hood.

Point C: Yep, imagine having users all around the world who enter and send personal data, and who might use assistive technology. At a startup, it was pretty normal to get the minimal amount done to address some of the needs (if at all) whereas at a bigger company there's way more effort to make sure it's done properly.

I've used apps many times over to travel to Asia/Europe/North America, book accommodations, rent cars... and haven't had a bad experience. That's not to say that I believe bad experiences don't ever happen, but more like they don't happen enough to me that I wouldn't ever use any of the apps.

Most of my friends are more avid than myself at traveling, and they also don't use travel agents.

It's possible it's just because I'm not super picky about my accommodations.

I'm just going to chime here with another anecdata: I've lived in London, Paris, Toronto, Melbourne, New York City, and San Francisco. The two times I've had things stolen (computer, bike) were in the Bay Area lol

Serious question: Is there a law that says a person cannot be working two jobs? I mean, I get it if the people fired failed to do their job, but if they were fulfilling their duties and weren't working for a competitor, I don't see an issue.

While I enjoy learning stuff that's out of my expertise, I do worry about whether or not being a generalist is more of a hindrance as both the backend and frontend have a LOT of ways one could expand their mastery. There is a bit of zero-sum in this as the hours I spent outside of work learning Go/Rust/Postgres for more understanding of the backend could've been spent on diving deeper into frontend things like performance optimization and web accessibility.