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extragood

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I had a Lyft driver who nodded off several times during a ride to the point we had him leave us at the nearest corner as soon as it was safe. It was genuinely scary.

I messaged Lyft and they really didn't seem to take it seriously or care. They of course worded it in a way to avoid any potential legal problems, and I doubt anything came of it. That driver should not be on the road.

There have been several other less notable incidents where I was worried for my safety.

I'm here for the robotaxis

I was actually converted to tabs after hearing Richard Hendricks' argument against spaces in Silicon Valley, the TV show. Really didn't think I was going to be challenging my own preferences when watching that show.

Yep. My previous company almost exclusively hires in Latin and South America now. The interesting thing to me is that it hasn't affected the executives themselves yet. If employees from one region work just as well as employees from another for other roles (or at least cost to performance is favorable), then it seems hypocritical and counterproductive for them to insist on US-based execs. The vindictive part of me hopes that it catches up with them next.

That policy was actually one of the major reasons I liked that company and stuck with them for so long. Their goal early on was to avoid raising money if at all possible, and they managed that for a long time by mostly being cash-flow positive/profitable. The trade off is slower, but sustainable growth.

We hit an inflection point in the early pandemic where money was cheap and we had a ton of new customers coming in, so we were able to secure very favorable terms for the Series A and used that money to expand the business. Things continued to go in the right direction for the next ~2 years and we ended up doing a Series B round, and that in retrospect was a mistake. We over-hired in 2022 and couldn't back that up with increased business. And because we had given up so much control to investors in the previous rounds, we were unable to return to the sustainable-growth strategy that had worked for us in the past, and had to adopt faster growth strategies, none of which panned out and ultimately hurt the company and led to many rounds of lay-offs.

I am convinced that the WFH movement is responsible for the recent offshoring trend.

Before 2020, it was fairly uncommon to work remotely and most employees were expected to physically come to the office. You would relocate if you got a job in another state, and employers had to go through a painful visa process to access foreign workers or set up expensive international satellite offices.

The great WFH experiment kicked off by the pandemic concluded that no productivity was lost, so many employers realized that they did not actually need to hire domestically at all. Everyone can be remote and work from wherever. LCOL in the US is still extravagant compared to many other regions, so a top engineer can now be hired for pennies on the dollar. I think there's a very good chance that tech salaries in the US have begun to and will continue to equalize with the rest of the world as a result.

It happens.

I was offered the option to liquidate up to 20% of my vested shares at my last company's Series A. It was restricted by tenure though (3 years), so it wasn't available to everyone. In retrospect, I should have liquidated the full amount, but it was a new concept to me at the time and I was more conservative with the amount.

I more recently interviewed with a pre-series A company and they said that they'd include me in a liquidity event when I brought up compensation.

I have Crohn 's disease and it's never occurred to me to fault my parents. It is a genetic disease, and I can only hope that the doctors you've worked with have helped you to understand the basics so you can educate yourself and help your son.

There's been a lot of really encouraging progress in the 15+ years since my diagnosis, but there are still a lot of unknowns. I got very little support in the dietary side of things other than the infamous elimination diet approach. It took a while for me to dial it in, but I did and am very rarely sick these days, now that I've discovered my own food sensitivities.

As much as you may want to solve this problem for him, it will take an immense amount of maturity on his part to want to discover and understand his limitations and to create and stick to a sustainable lifestyle.

Not sure if it's what was meant, but an HOA board isn't too far off of that description. In my experience, the job is necessary but relatively thankless and uncompensated. No one wanted to volunteer their time, and I was interested in cash flow and a building improvement so I served for a year. The only other board members ran uncontested and also had very demanding jobs outside of the association. Everyone else was happy to let us take care of all the minutiae of coordinating maintenance, budget, property management, etc. It was a lot of work.

So to answer your question, I've observed that it attracts people who are already ambitious in other aspects of their life (and maybe a little too generous with their own time), and the extra work it entails compounds with their other commitments which can lead to burnout.

Yeah, I'm very certain that I've read about this phenomenon in the not so recent past. To the point where I've intentionally listened for the difference on many occassions since then.

I've just started using Otta for my search and they publish responsiveness scores. Not sure if it's by role or across the company. It's saved me from wasting time on companies with bad hiring practices (assuming scoring is accurate)

I don't see any missing essentials on this keyboard (even pg up is there), but some of the even smaller form factors actually remove the arrow keys, and using fn for those gets irritating super quickly.

  Location: San Francisco, CA
  Remote: Yes, but prefer hybrid/on-site
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, Flask, React, MySQL, MongoDB, GCP. Some Javascript, Rust, Java.
  Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cXYVzM05QOYD02Xht74g4ekRJxqpWD6EkeaQd__JsSo/edit?usp=sharing
  Email: pasjoman <at> gmail <dot> com
----

Solutions/Customer Engineer roles preferred. 10+ years B2B SaaS experience. 5+ years management and leadership experience.

  Location: San Francisco, CA
  Remote: Yes, but prefer hybrid/on-site
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, Flask, MySQL, MongoDB, GCP. Some Javascript, Rust, Java.
  Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cXYVzM05QOYD02Xht74g4ekRJxqpWD6EkeaQd__JsSo/edit?usp=sharing
  Email: pasjoman <at> gmail <dot> com
----

Solutions/Customer Engineer roles preferred. 10+ years B2B SaaS experience. 5+ years management and leadership experience.

Thanks for the detailed response! That's really encouraging to hear, and I think thats enough to push me over the edge. Had a close call recently and lost a disk as I was preparing to migrate to my current hardware. I may adopt your 2 tape system as well. It'd be heartbreaking to lose my collection

I've been getting a biosimilar to Infliximab for several years to treat Crohns. I go in for an infusion every 8 weeks; about 6 times per year. I can only tell you the cost on the invoice from US providers, but it's about $10k for each infusion. $60k per year.

That said, our healthcare providers get very creative with pricing, so I don't know how Adalimumab compares. It's never been suggested to me.

This has been my major concern with the currently available LLMs.

You can know what the input is, you can know the output, you may even be aware what it's been trained on, but none of the output is ever cited. Unless you are already familiar with the topic, you cannot confidently distinguish between fact and what sounds reasonable and is accepted as fact.

It's notable that it's in Chinatown. I lived there a decade ago and currently work close by. There are few drug addicted homeless people who reside there. The news makes it sound pervasive for political reasons, but it's actually highly localized. I would bet on job displacement, personally.

In the past, many archaeologists interpreted these batons as a noisemaker or ritual object, a sort of ice age magic wand or scepter. “Ritualism was something they used to ascribe everything to,” says Wei Chu, an archaeologist at Leiden University.

This is encouraging. Surely many of the artifacts we've found had some functional purpose. Ritualism as a default seems like a cop out in many cases. If we don't know, "we don't know" suffices