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electrodank

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Each employee was empowered, expected, and trained, to make decisions as if they are the president of the company.

And compensated at a president’s salary for the new insurmountable levels of responsibilities right?

The person who returned to them the source code disk has done everyone dirty. I’m optimistic Microsoft will eventually open source stuff but goddammit.

The largest filter, the Great Filter, these companies cannot overcome is a true digital native workforce and communication mechanism. When your days are haraunged by voice/video meetings because people don’t know how to work asynchronously, productivity plummets when timezone differences are introduced. An absolute shitshow to behold.

Very few, relatively speaking, tech teams understand how to leverage asynchronous work patterns. I think open source projects which are dominated by 40 year old virgin neckbeards (those still exist right?) show the silver lining, but alas, nobody will get it.

Round the merry go round we go again.

That “attention to the market dynamics debt” will catch up to them, just as it has caught up to all the working adults who are unable to afford living expenses in their cities because they spent their 20s partying rather than investing and looking to get ahead/stay ahead of these things. Anyone in their 30s saying “I’d like to have children but I can’t afford it” has been asleep at the wheel of a global change that has been unfolding in a relatively obvious way.

I’m not saying it’s good or bad - everyone’s free to make their own life choices, I’m saying it is what it is and TANSTAAFL.

As someone who has the old dead tree version of Intel’s x86 and 64 architecture instruction set reference (the fat blue books), and in general as someone who carefully reads the data sheets and documentation and looks for guidance from the engineers and staff who wrote the said data sheets, I always have reservations when I hear that “intuitively you would expect X but Y happens.” There’s nothing intuitive about any of this except, maybe, a reasonable understanding of the semi-conductive nature of the silicon and the various dopants in the process. Unless you’ve seen the die schematic, the traces, and you know the paths, there is little to no reason to have any sort of expectations that Thing A is faster than Thing B unless the engineering staff and data sheets explicitly tell you.

There are exceptions, but just my 2c. Especially with ARM.

"Our hypothesis strongly indicates that the 'pleasure index' or 'adrenaline rush' of relationships is taking more prime importance in the younger generation over long-term stability," he says. "It is alarming that impulsiveness or confusion can lead to instability in the human relation-maintaining behavior, which is actually affecting the normal social behavior in humans."

This is orthogonal from social media.

Given the same choices the people who voted for Brexit had, who/what you would you have voted for? What do you suspect the outcome would have been as it relates to the matter at hand?

For those of you who do not suffer from dead-on aphantasia but simply have bad visualization/memory recall: you may find great industry in learning to draw, paint, sculpt and immersing yourself in perceptory recall to essentially, in an analogous manner of speaking, strengthen weak muscles. You may go so far as to find the book “ The training of the memory in art and the education of the artist” by B., L. Horace to be of interest. Do not skip on music and try to find ways to engage physically as best as possible. Perception works best in totality, and people who have strong visual recall often have other strong recall functions as well, disabilities notwithstanding.

I don’t personally agree with the term “overcorrecting” because they aren’t correcting anything. The output is already correct according to the input (humans behaving as they are). It is not biased. What they are doing is attempting to bias it, and it’s leading to false outputs as a result.

Having said that, these false outputs have a strange element of correctness to them in a weird roundabout uncanny valley way: we know the input has been tampered with, and is biased, because the output is obviously wrong. So the algorithm works as intended.

If people are discriminatory or racist or sexist, it is not correct to attempt to hide it. The worst possible human behaviours should be a part of a well-formed Turing test. A machine that can reason with an extremist is far more useful than one that an extremist can identify as such.

I see ASTs books, in particular the hands-on Minix ones, as sitting on the same “plane” as the philosophy espoused in The Night Watch paper. Ultimately the paper is about a level of comfort with reality that is at it’s core rooted in familiarity with rather than ignorance due to abstractions, and having learned fearlessness rather than helplessness. While it is highly unlikely you will be having a debugging session that has you executing kernel-level code alongside having an oscilloscope/logic probe hooked up to the pins of a processor chip to monitor data lines (though we all know someone who does this without a second thought), having this level of knowledge and comfort with being ever so slightly closer to the silicone, the data sheet of the processor somewhere near by, the memory segmentation modes not too alien of a concept, is a great boon to a software developer. It is a leap that I think everyone should try just once, and with it, abolish any notion of mental barriers that prevent one from understanding how things really work.

Left field comment but I’d love to be thrown into an MBA-like simulator (HBS?) and have to figure out the industry and the company and stabilize it/make it grow and whatnot within some time window.

Great read, thank you to the author who took the time to write up all that, it was very insightful and must have been fucking difficult in many ways.