drchopchop

The difference is that Roblox has a thousand "attention stealers" which have enough gameplay and multiplayer fun to keep an eight year old entertained for a long time. Fortnite is just the same recycled concept over and over, with an interface that is difficult for a child on a console. There are a number of Roblox games that are genuinely well-designed and fun, don't let the graphics fool you.

(Also, eight year olds don't have $3 in Robux unless someone buys it for them, so blame the parents as well)

" This group tended to agree with dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues came up with an unforgettable term to describe this group’s psychology: “The need for chaos.”"

My take is that a lack of opportunity / class stratification / societal mobility plays into this. It's essentially the same reason people play the lottery. When you're stuck in a seemingly intractable situation, you need the world to suddenly change around you. Maybe you win Powerball, or maybe you decide to just burn everything down out of desperation. Social media just amplifies those thoughts.

The article references a study which claims that university students have difficulty reading Dickens or Jane Austen. Here's an excerpt of the Dickens from the study:

"LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest."

I'm a college-educated, reasonably well-read person and this is a rough paragraph to get through. Old idioms, excessively lengthy sentences, anachronisms (what is a "horse blinker"? "Michaelmas"?), etc. Why choose this type of subject matter to draw conclusions from?

Not advertising it is key. I'm also coming up on 50, and people constantly are surprised when they inevitably find out how old I am. Ageism can unconsciously creep in when you have more than 15 years of experience visible on your resume, even for higher management-level positions.

Also - if you're a mid-level IC in your 40's you should start asking yourself what's stopping you from being higher up on the IC or management tracks. "Career senior engineer" is not a great place to be, long-term.

Rails may indeed be good enough, but comparing a full-stack platform (Rails) to a frontend UX framework (React) is fundamentally unfair.

This. They're great for small/mid-sized developers, but they price themselves out once you're doing billions of messages a month. At that point companies start looking at aggregators one level down (i.e. closer to the carriers or raw SMTP).

Firing IC's at large corporations usually involves some sort of a individual coaching/PIP plan. This takes time for managers and HR to write and implement, takes N weeks of observation, and creates nervousness in coworkers who think they might be next.

Much easier to do a Thanos-style snap and get rid of X% all at once, with no pre-warning or reasons required besides "challenging economic conditions".

Sure, but Google at least presents itself as being a search engine, composed of potentially unreliable information scraped from the web. GPT looks/feels like an infallible oracle.

It's great, until people realize GPT-3 will generate answers that are demonstrably wrong. (And to make matters worse, can't show/link the source of the incorrect information!)

That would make more sense if 1) he had a coherent plan 2) he could motivate the good 20% to stick around 3) he had some way to differentiate high vs low performers.

Instead, he now gets an effectively random layoff, with potentially whole/important teams vanishing, and biased so that the best people (who can easily find jobs) are most incentivized to leave.

Lawyers and bankers a) don't fly on their own dime, b) have huge potential financial upside in getting those deals done.

A blockchain that can barely manage seven transactions per second is the "best monetary system we could have invented"?

These tools aren't interchangeable. Photoshop is for editing images. Illustrator is for editing vector graphics.

Figma is a multiplayer layout tool, which can be used for web, print, or anything else. The main use cases for enterprise are a) it's web-accessible, and b) the realtime collaboration/revision/commenting tools.

The smart thing would be to just sunset Adobe XD and replace it with Adobe Figma.

My company gave managers Clifton Strengths tests, and it was fairly interesting (and tracked with my own self-introspection). Wasn't used for hiring or performance, but more as a tool to people recognize their traits and how others may differ.

https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/253790/science-of...

Not to mention the technical issues involved in having a truly cross-platform asset. What's the poly and texture count? How is scale represented? Collision volumes? How does it render properly? What file formats do we standardize on?

The whole thing is ridiculous. The cynical view would be that this is trying to quickly get retail gamers/"investors" to subsidize VC returns, before the crypto market fully tanks.

Extremely easy. You just have to navigate a maze of foreign visa requirements, have a large amount of money, no need to work, learn a foreign language, get your partner/dependents to agree, and be separated from all your existing friends/family. Why don't more people do it?

I'd disagree re: Figma and Notion. These are very sticky, best-in-class tools which have a lot of use outside of "VC-land". Figma is becoming the de-facto way to share designs across the internet. Notion has a good shot at becoming the internet's default business wiki, killing Confluence.

Ableton does allow you to easily export sessions, and freeze tracks that have custom plugins. Their stock plugins are now good enough that they can rival commercial ones for many use cases (which is often good enough to the track to the final mixing stages).

Definitely agree re: VST format - PC/Mac/Linux fragmentation is annoying, old plugins often can't even be loaded, and sharing presets is a pain.

I know this is a hobby project, but who is the target user for something like this? What's the benefit of doing this in a browser?

Desktop DAW's have many benefits:

  - ASIO drivers for low latency
  - Better CPU utilization
  - Multi-channel output
  - VST plugins (essential for most composers)
  - Good MIDI support

The problem with JIRA is that yes, everyone uses it, but most people hate it. In my experience, the only people that advocate for it are PM/PMO/TPM type people who need very specific and customizable workflows and reports. And even then, they continually run into quirks and bad UX everywhere.

This leaves them very vulnerable to another company taking their market share, as soon as they create something better that is extensible enough to get management signoff. I know a lot of companies have tried and failed here, but someone's going to eventually do it.

Same, lived there in the early 2000's, and coming back recently it's almost unrecognizable. The music scene is largely gone, tech bros everywhere, the traffic is even worse than it was before, housing is ridiculous. The "Keep Austin Weird" charm, which used to be real, is now a faded memory that's packaged up to sell at the airport gift shop.

It's much easier to save money than it is to make it, and that's why revenue is valued more.

You can hire any number of consulting firms or smart engineers that can tell you how to lower your AWS bill, or get rid of unproductive employees. It's much harder to figure out how to grow your business by 2x.

Mensa is catnip for narcissists who are great at pattern recognition.

Agreed. Finding product/market fit is the only thing that matters in a new company.

If you think that's the "boring stuff", then you're not going to love the amount of iteration/thrash/constraints that it will introduce to your engineering life.

Side note, from a usability perspective: G major is arguably the easiest key to play on a guitar, which is used heavily by both popular music and songwriters. The I/IV/V maps to G, C, D, which are all easy open chords to finger, plus Em is also simple (two fingers).

(Many of the other options include either B major or F major in the I/IV/V, and those are considerably more difficult to play)

This is exactly what happened on his last big space project (Freelancer) - way over time/budget, too much random micromanaging of meaningless things, etc. Microsoft had to swoop in at the end and save the project, removing him in the process.

You can solve that with occasional, in-person team meetups (a few times per year).

Meeting people in person, at least once, is valuable. It improves communication, helps people feel assimilated to the company and team, and creates a mental image of a three-dimensional co-worker (instead of just a faceless Slack handle)

Sitting physically next to people every day, especially for engineers, is often not valuable. This is especially true for those who have significant commutes or families.

High-powered engineers often assume that building a startup's technology is the same as building a startup. In this world, product/market fit is the ONLY thing that matters. A bad, but functional implementation of a great idea is 100x better than a great implementation of a bad idea.

Build an MVP that can acquire actual paying customers, and the growth rate/ROI will end up making the decision for you.

Not really. C to E is a major third (4 semitones), E to G is a minor third (3 semitones), and C to G is a fifth (7 semitones).

4 + 3 = 7

Not much.

From the article: "And secondly, working with Bitcoin wallets to allow the Bitcoin to be translated into a fiat currency and therefore immediately be able to be used at any of the 70 million places around the world where Visa is accepted."