goo

You may be right, but this article is entirely about the author's kids and has nothing to do with any administration.

Unless part of the poly-crisis is one twin changing the page of the book to one with fewer moons, and the administration is the parental policies of bedtime warnings and teeth brushing.

it's really hard not to have at least one single point of failure. there's a case to be made that a single cloud account actually reduces the ways things can go wrong to just one point of failure, instead of a handful.

e.g. email on a custom domain. your domain registrar is now a spof AND your email provider for your domain is a spof. and that's just email.

There's obviously a middle ground and ways to have a strictly better personal data posture than before, but it's a multi faceted problem balancing usability, security, and resilience

Micron leadership probably just heard about Roko's basilisk.

Almost perfect. Inspirational.

It just needed to create a little box you can drag around when you click on nothing, like OS desktops have.

So here's the snippet to do that, toss this in the console and live the dream:

(() => { let startX, startY, box, dragging = false;

  const style = document.createElement('style');
  style.textContent = `
    .___selection-box {
      position: absolute;
      pointer-events: none;
      border: 1px dashed #2b76d6;
      background: rgba(43,118,214,0.12);
      z-index: 999999;
    }
  `;
  document.head.appendChild(style);

  function onDown(e) {
    if (e.button !== 0) return; // left click only
    startX = e.pageX;
    startY = e.pageY;
    dragging = true;

    box = document.createElement('div');
    box.className = '___selection-box';
    box.style.left = startX + 'px';
    box.style.top = startY + 'px';
    document.body.appendChild(box);

    e.preventDefault();
  }

  function onMove(e) {
    if (!dragging) return;
    const x = e.pageX, y = e.pageY;
    const left = Math.min(x, startX);
    const top = Math.min(y, startY);
    const width = Math.abs(x - startX);
    const height = Math.abs(y - startY);
    Object.assign(box.style, {
      left: left + 'px',
      top: top + 'px',
      width: width + 'px',
      height: height + 'px'
    });
  }

  function onUp(e) {
    if (!dragging) return;
    dragging = false;
    console.log('Selection rect:', box.getBoundingClientRect());
    box.remove();
    box = null;
  }

  window.addEventListener('mousedown', onDown);
  window.addEventListener('mousemove', onMove);
  window.addEventListener('mouseup', onUp);

  console.log(" Selection enabled. Drag with left mouse button. Check console for rect.");

$40k for dentures? She got fleeced.

$3M for retirement right now is plenty, but you have to live like an actually middle class person.

"The market is like a large movie theater with a small door. And the best way to detect a sucker is to see if his focus is on the size of the theater rather than that of the door." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Skin in the Game

(This is not to say that you, specifically, are a "sucker", and I don't love the term. But I think Taleb has a lot to offer on considering risk.)

Colorado's where the river's headwaters are: this is probably an even bigger deal for those in Utah, Arizona, Las Vegas, and Southeastern California.

The collateral limit getting triggered isn’t a particularly big deal: it just means that MSTR needs to quickly furnish more BTC as collateral or they’ll be in breach of loan covenants. But they HAVE a ton of BTC, so there’s no effect on the market. The only way this gets interesting at all is if the total bitcoin owned by mstr starts approaching the price of the loan (which it’s not even close to, but that’s the point where silvergate could lose some money…)

Really all the margin call does is reduce the amount of additional debt collateralized by bitcoin that MSTR could take on. It’s clickbait!

They have debt too. It’s clickbait style writing.

This is my favorite article about inflation https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2021/11/24/the-truth-abo...

Inflation is not simply a matter of the government adding more money to the supply (although that's one of the actions that can help reduce the value of currency)... the flow of money (and power) is immensely complex, and inflation as a measure is a procrustean bed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes)

Start sleeping more, eating healthier, exercising more, and working less. Cut down on weed and alcohol if you partake. This should hopefully help you feel well enough to get a different job which will be less stressful and pay better. Good luck!

I'll absolutely advocate for spending some time on the frontend to see if you like it. In addition to other roles in the past, I built a SaaS company as the founding engineer where I covered all parts of the stack, including primarily backend for a while. Nowadays I work almost exclusively on the frontend, because I enjoy it!

I think there are pros and cons of being in a specialized role at any part of the stack, but some of the things I like about the frontend nowadays is:

1) The feedback is rapid. You can immediately see and interact with the result of your work. Mocking backend data is a possibility, but when you're working on an API or other backend stuff it can be hard to imagine how it will work for the person at the end of the line. Rapid visual feedback on building stuff is satisfying!

2) It is now way easier to build maintainable applications that are easy to understand and hard to break. By using react and typescript (...and mostly writing pure functions with clean interfaces and unit testing them...) you can create tons of functionality with very clean code that's easy for others to understand and modify.

3) CSS is funky sometimes, but with things like flexbox and css-in-js (or even just less/sass) you've got powerful tools for working with it.

4) It used to be that making everything work across all browsers took a ton of effort and was the most frustrating part of FE programming. Nowadays it's pretty easy.

5) With Electron (and perhaps React Native, although I can't speak to that), frontend skills are more useful in more contexts than they ever were before.

6) Although there may be something "oncall-ish" at your company for FE engineers, being on call for backend stuff means you get paged much more and will have much more work to do, and it will likely be due to stuff outside your control. You will get paged much less for FE problems, and you will be able to do something about it.

I think also that the role the frontend has played has gotten more complex (more state, more data, bigger codebases, more stuff users can do), so I've felt that a background in backend work is advantageous when it comes to working on the frontend and can lead to great work, since backend people are often strong in core concepts like writing and testing functions with good interfaces, doing a good job managing state, interacting with networks and dealing with errors, etc.

Well they make 5 billion revenue a year, are close to profitable, and their online revenue is up 34% in 2020 to more than a billion. And now they can print money with share dilution, and they’ve become a household name and are touted as a weapon in a class war. So IDK if dying is the right word for it.

The collateral on cash secured puts is always just the amount of money need to buy the shares specified by the contract. (Hence: "cash secured")

Thanks for your input. A couple follow-up questions though.

Why would the price on the low valued puts go way up though? Is it now, after the squeeze, MORE likely that GME goes bankrupt? And even Hertz, which is _literally bankrupt_ is still selling for more than a dollar a share, so the stock price could remain untethered from realities for a long time.

And why can't they just do some share dilution to raise capital?

25% of California's population is from LA county. Just to put that in context.

If you really think through the implications of every individual in America owning a pony, it gets a lot more interesting than that! It means that everyone in every city would own a pony -- would that mean that perhaps a proxy ownership situation would occur, where you had a certificate of pony ownership, but the pony would be housed and maintained anywhere in the country that could do so cheapest? It would cost a lot more than 2-3k/year to house a pony in NYC! Let alone the sudden demand for housing about 5 million of them...

My guess is that these ponies would be kept in horrible conditions similar to the way domesticated cattle are raised for milk and meat. I would hazard that all of our assumptions about the actual price of ponies and maintenance would come down if we all needed to have a pony, and would come down by a LOT.

The thing is, everyone _could_ get a pony, if we decided that doing so was a priority. Ponies cost about $1000.

If it mattered enough, the US government could ABSOLUTELY afford $330 billion to get everyone a pony.

It's not that tremendous things aren't possible, it's that we aren't doing them.

Rich Hickey has some fantastic talks: https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits

My favorite is https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hi...

Of the books I've read this year, there are a small handful that I think are beyond good.

Antifragile: This book has informed many decisions I have made recently. It is insightful, entertaining, and in its concern for human choices manages to send a beautiful message about nature and reality.

The Power Broker: I listened to this via audiobook and I highly recommend the experience. It's a large dose of history and a fascinating exploration of city politics and, as its name implies, power. And I learned a lot about New York!

Lonesome Dove: I hadn't read any fictional "westerns" and this came well recommended. I loved it. Listening to it while backpacking and on a road trip was extremely rewarding.

Man's Search For Meaning: Extremely powerful and potentially life changing. It was both cathartic and therapeutic for me, and has affected how I live my life.

The Lathe of Heaven: Incredibly enjoyable dystopian future fiction. It came recommended via the "HN reading list" released some number of months ago, and I liked it a lot.

The Fellowship of the Ring: I had started this book in high school but hadn't finished it for some reason. I picked it up again, and I'm glad I did. It is a gem, and there's good reason that it has become a part of our cultural bedrock. Its exploration of purpose, challenge, and choice is quite moving.

From my notes file about "decisions":

"You've got to keep making decisions, even if they're wrong decisions. If you don't make decisions you're stuffed" - Joe Simpson, (Touching the Void)

Making a good decision quickly is often better than any other option -- waiting too long may make all options worse.

Make decisions based on clear goals, and attempt to record the reason for making a decision at the time of decisionmaking

Always consider opportunity cost.

Always take individual incentives into account.

Be open-minded, give ample room to disprove your preconceptions.

Take into account your cognitive biases when you can, and reduce them as much as possible - loss aversion - sunk cost - inclination to maintain status quo - avoiding ambiguous options - tendency to do things based on many others doing the same

Consider others' feelings, and how their feelings will affect you and others.

Do not assume optimal future behavior of participants, especially yourself. - do not overcommit your future time.

Do not assume poor future behavior of participants, especially yourself - especially when depressed, it is easy to be pessimistic about your future behavior

Do not seek information when it will not affect action

Avoid over-relying on familiar tools and methods - consider and value alternate approaches - "If all you have is a hammer..."

Avoid overconfidence

Just because someone is in conflict with you doesn't mean their idea isn't good

Do not give disproportionate weight to trivial issues: - "bikeshedding"

Orient towards reality - establish a baseline understand of reality before moving toward solutions

Learn, THEN decide. - am I done learning? - have I learned enough to make a decision?

Consider postponing decisions until the last possible moment - at which point you will have the most information with which to make the decision

Consider doing the simplest thing that could possibly work

When encountering hard problems, dissolve them into smaller pieces and identify the success criteria, immediately, before trying to generate solutions.

Although I think you're trying to use these examples to highlight that regulation can indeed be valuable (and to insinuate that such an idea should be obvious to anyone), I think that even these examples have subtlety. See the following article for an interesting exploration of how building regulations contribute substantially to urban blight in America: https://granolashotgun.com/2017/11/13/mind-the-gap-2/

Thanks for clarifying that here -- it took some close reading to understand that. With an otherwise nicely detailed account, the mislabelling of the axes is jarring. I would definitely expect a positive number to correlate to more sleep deprivation, if the axis is labelled "Sleep Deprivation" or any variant thereof.

I was basing my analogy on the idea that a standard dose of beer, for someone drinking beer, is probably 2 12 oz. bottles of beer.

"If it isn't affecting perception, it's not affecting experience!" I think this is the main point on which we disagree. I'm curious why you assert this so strongly.

If we agree that there is an effect on the nervous system, then the question is, at what point does that effect "matter". And you are saying that it only matters at the point that the subject can detect the shift in their own perception from baseline. You also argue that any purported benefits of the substance are only realized as a result of the detection in this change of state.

I can think of a few examples of cases where we would not be consciously aware of a change from baseline, but would effect our experience. Do you need to be aware of your change from baseline for the painkilling and pleasantness of endorphins released after a mild walk to have an effect? Do you need to be aware of your own difference from psychological baseline for the little bit adrenaline released before an important meeting to have an effect on your alertness?

Our recognition of our own perception is a fallible signal detector. There can be effects on the nervous system that have effects on other systems, regardless of whether the conscious mind detects a signal.

And if you agree with me so far, then the question is if the effect on the nervous system and in turn its effects on other internal systems has any therapeutic effect. That's a different discussion, I reckon. But unless a requirement of all the purported therapeutic effect is that the subject has consciously observed their altered perception, then it is possible for there to be an effect on people's lives from sub-perceptual doses of chemicals. (for example: non-psychoactive drugs, heavy metals, viruses, etc.)

Homeopathy and 3% of a standard dose of one of world's strongest drugs are very very different things.

Even setting aside the massive, proven, perceptual effect that placebos have -- which means that if you do believe in homeopathy, it could actually have a strong effect -- this is analogous to saying that a couple of sips of beer is going to do "jack shit". It won't do much -- but your liver will still process it, and it will provide some energy, and it will have a very mild affect on your nervous system. Is a couple of sips of beer an "active dose"? What's an active dose here?

In contrast with homeopathic solutions, which are diluted down to figures like 1 PPM (presumably a very very low % of what would be an "active dose" of its chemical), this is a 3% dose we're talking about! It's intellectually dishonest to assert that there would not be an effect on the nervous system at that level, and it is a strange position to assume that because the effect on the nervous system does not rise to obvious perception, that it has no effect on the experience of the subject.

From an engineering perspective, building a remote-first team was an easy decision to make after a brief attempt to hire local talent.

Some of the unexpected benefits, in addition to the obvious upsides of better talent for the same money, an easier time finding them, and better retention:

Documentation gets really good.

Discussions frequently have a written artifact associated with them, which allows for easy reference later on. (e.g. asana thread, slack discussion)

No open office problems. The dreaded shoulder tap is not a thing.

We have to be clearer and more deliberate about the communication channels we use and the reason we use, and when and how we choose to do so. This is a good thing! We use a mix of Slack, Mumble, email, asana, Zoom, and 1:1 video calls.

Our culture is less driven by force of personality than it may otherwise be. Having a strong leader in the room can be a powerful multiplier. On the other hand, remote teams can lead to a more subtle and thoughtful type of leadership, with more of a focus on the team as a system than as a troop. This is frequently a good thing! Also, if someone important is having a bad day, there is less of a transitive effect on the team.

Our automated dev tooling got better. (Since futzing around with other people's computer has a higher barrier, code that does stuff like setting up a vagrant box on dev machines becomes more valuable. So we keep it in good repair, and if something about it doesn't work, we fix it right when the problem comes up!)

The above extends to all code: when your code may break other people's builds, and you won't be physically around to make it right, I think people put in a little extra elbow grease and, for example, write one more test than they may have otherwise.

Our systems for code review are naturally a lot more in line with some of the compliance requirements we have. All of our code goes into a PR for code review, and many of our clients need that as part of a comprehensive set of data protection and security requirements.

Our automated testing via CI got better. Would it have gotten better without being remote? Probably. But tests are a great method of communicating about code, and so we started caring more about them.

Team get-togethers become exciting due to their infrequency!

Even beyond all these rational productivity-based arguments, it just feels more natural and humanistic. Makes it easier to spend time with your kids! To travel to your dream destination and spend time working from there, as more than just a tourist! To settle down exactly where you want, with the continuity of your same team and job and project. No commute if you don't want one! Less of a second-circuit driven environment! (as defined by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-circuit_model_of_conscio...)

Hit me up if you're looking into adding remote work into your organization, especially if you're early in the process. Let me try to help convince you!

Looks like that link got cut off, likely copied from a prior post. The following link should resolve: http://tech.adroll.com/blog/frontend/2017/08/29/how-to-run-a...

I'm fascinated by the appropriation of the term "Silicon Valley" to represent all of (a certain type of) technology. I think that the name alone will contribute to the future primacy of the Bay Area in software.

It reminds me of this excellent scene in "The Founder", after Kroc has managed to buy McDonald's and is conversing with its original founder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FxHY-vLMgs

s/McDonald/Silicon Valley -- makes for an interesting perspective.

One insight that I've come across is the idea that "writing is just thinking on paper". Detail isn't necessarily valuable when it comes to thinking -- it can add noise to the crucial signal. I think the same is true of notes.

I spent my entire education and most of my software career taking few notes, and they did the job well enough. Despite my shift to taking a lot more for various reasons, I agree that there is no moral or strategic value to taking nice notes just for the sake of having done so.

I think that's a really valuable mental tool. Sometimes past baggage is a hindrance to current goals.

As part of treating my notes as a code project, I even keep them version controlled, which leaves me a little more free to just delete things or "refactor" stuff. A lot of the value I get is going back through things and synthesizing them into clearer and more useful notes. TODOs in particular are dangerous -- I try to treat files of that nature as extensions of my long term memory, rather than a curriculum which I feel obligated to follow.

That being said, there is an element of this project where I feel like a am building a piece of "my life's work". I've built a number of software projects, and part of building them over time and organizing them leaves them in a state where I am proud to have built them -- I can point out a piece of the system, and understand why it works that way, and remember the choices that led to its current state. At one point, I realized that I had no such project for my life, and it was a little weird that I had so clearly documented software systems that were hardly used, whereas my life and action and ideas and knowledge were, for the most part, just in my head. So in a way it's more than the practicality of having notes, although in the practice of it I have found it to be practical. It's a way of adding meaning to the course of my life -- now the ten minutes I spent reading an article can also become a gift to my future self due to the one choice quote I grab from it.