jfasi

For the people rushing in to call this the beginning another great financial crisis: remember that back then the tower of cards that collapsed wasn’t the mortgage backed securities themselves but the spiderweb of derivatives and secondary securitizations built on them.

Obviously everyone who invested in MBS’s lost their shirt, but the general economy was hurt by the sheer level of exposure to MBS’s and the suddenness with which the realization of their corruption hit. I’m no expert, but I see no reason to believe a similar level of exposure and surprise is at play here.

Right now Netflix is only hiring engineers in Poland

This is patently false. Source: I’m an engineering manager at Netflix who’s hiring in the US and whose peers are all doing the same.

Interestingly, ChatGPT correctly points out this exact issue:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6793a2d1-5f84-8006-8e78-16be4d4908...

Original article archived here:

https://archive.is/9Yytc

Libertarianism is a two-part ideology that holds that first, despite all the clear signs around us, the world is simple. In a simple world, what is the point of regulation, policy, or any other collective action, for that matter? Why not abolish everything?

On its face, this isn't an insane point of view. It's natural to look at the scope and complexity of government and as yourself "is all this really necessary?" While it'll never achieve mainstream status, some tinges of libertarianism contribute meaningfully as a counterweight to the tendency of government to grow beyond the point of diminishing returns to society.

The problem is, the ideology has a second, usually unspoken tenet: anyone who suffers brought it upon themselves. Hacker stole your bitcoins? Should have used a hardware wallet. Hospital bills driving you to bankruptcy? This is what you get for not saving for a rainy day. Poisoned by shoddily produced medicine? Hey, you get what you pay for.

It's an ideology of arrogance. Both intellectual arrogance, as its dunning-kruger afflicted adherents look over the vast and complex world and say "how hard could it possibly be?" to every challenge they perceive, and also of moral arrogance, as those same people cast their eyes over the depth of human suffering and inexplicably think "I've got mine, you all are on your own."

The reason why libertarians always lose is because anyone who isn't a billionaire would spend their entire existence looking over their shoulder in terror at the infinite ways life can screw you. And even then they would probably fail. Any reasonable person would gladly hand over the right to sell medicine they mixed in their own basement in exchange for knowing they won't be poisoned when they need help themselves.

https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309

An indefinite blackout is not a protest, it's extortion. It's saying "if I can't enjoy this subreddit the way I want to, no one can."

And if they allow popular subreddits to remain private indefinitely then a lot more users will leave than just the ones who oppose the API changes. Better to force communities back open and let the most obstinate users leave than keep them private to satisfy the feelings of that obnoxious minority.

Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting

Reddit has announced they're providing carveouts for apps that provide critical moderation tools, that justification is already gone.

And that's their right. Many subs announced they would protest for 48 hours to prove a point, at which point they returned. But a moderator who continues to keep their sub private indefinitely is not protesting a decision, they are defacing their subreddits and harming their members. Removing such a moderator is the appropriate thing to do.

If the community decides to leave, it won't be because of API pricing, it'll be because the content and spaces they used to enjoy were taken offline because of a minority of moderators.

Honestly, good. Protest is fine and good, but what exactly are we protesting for here? The rights of a minority of users to freeride on a platform that gave them ten years of free API access? The right of third party app developers to make practically 100% margin on apps whose backend Reddit pays for?

The initial announcement and AMA were ham-fisted, to be sure, but at this point these protests are getting ridiculous. Tens of millions of people are prevented from enjoying their communities because a quixotic crusade of a literal handful of moderators? These people rule their little online fiefdoms with an iron fist, and the entire internet suffers. If I were in charge of Reddit I'd replace them, too.

Looks like most of the layoffs are in marketing and sales, and that they're still hiring on engineering and product. Honestly, I'm surprised they had marketing and sales people to begin with. Those sorts of efforts pay off most with big-name, high-end artists who probably don't need monthly patrons to be successful. Focusing in improving the product seems like a smarter move, especially given how janky their product was until quite recently.

I’m about as far from a crypto defender as you can get, but I think this page misses the point. If El Salvador is planning to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, which by all accounts they are, their being “up” or “down” must be measured by the size of the economic activity that Bitcoin allowed them to facilitate. That figure is harder to get at.

Viewed this way, the additional purchases which seem foolish and laughable might even be signs of success: perhaps Bitcoin business is booming so hard they need to expand their reserves?

To be clear, I highly doubt that’s the case here, but if we’re going to assess success we should at least try to steelman their position. There’s plenty to mock about this change without taking cheap shots.

I find that something magical happens when you write things out by hand. Thinking slows down, you subconsciously explore the problem, and your expression becomes much more deliberate.

Also, you activate more of your capabilities as a thinking creature that way. Why just approach a problem with your fingertips on a keyboard when you can activate your visual, spatial, and temporal processing capabilities?

Personally, I’ve recently fallen in love with Leuchtturm notebooks. I bought the great big 83+ one, a nice Japanese mechanical pencil, and I’ve been going to town on problems ever since.

Out of curiosity, can you name the company?

Same information, minus the hit piece angle:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/6/24/22549157/google-unrelia...

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-reliable-sources-...

https://mashable.com/article/google-search-results-changing-...

America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.

So if we're going to tax them in years when their wealth increases, I presume we're also going to issue tax refunds when their wealth decreases?

I recently read a very detailed and very compelling argument for why COVID-19 did not originate in a laboratory from a specialist in high risk biocontainment viruses. Compare the hand-wavey and fluffy arguments presented here with hard and scientific ones presented here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kAHSEx9-eIyVIahczH8itHaUm9j...

This is the relevant response. What the commenter is trying to imply is that the authors of this study are so staggeringly stupid that they overlooked the possibility of false positives when designing this experiment.

In reality, this test would need a false positive rate of over eighty percent to explain this kind of asymptomatic infection rate.

Also, prisons are useful because due to the close quarters it can be taken as a given that a substantial proportion of the population is infected, further minimizing the danger of these sorts of errors. The choice of population suggests a sophisticated experiment design, and the commenter is implying that the study authors made a statistics 101-level error.

I hate to say it, but I’m not optimistic about Google’s case here. From a purely technical point of view, APIs being free to reuse is an awesome thing that makes for a more vibrant and competitive software ecosystem.

At the same time, Oracle’s characterization of their API as “original software” is not entirely off base, as anyone who has spent time and energy creating and API would know. The amount of design and work required to create an elegant and useful API is huge, and while it would irreparably harm software as a field to call it copyrightable, calling it anything other than an “original” work is a weak position.

Personally, I’m dreading the outcome of this case.

Lenders have bundled more than $18 billion worth of these loans into bonds this year that they then sold to investors...

Compare this to the ~$17 trillion of mortgage backed securities that existed prior to the financial crisis. $18 billion is peanuts, and hardly a systemic concern.

I’ve always believed that if you want to see a person’s true colors, look at how they treat people poorer or otherwise socially weaker than them. In other words, if your date is charming to you and nasty to the waiter, run like hell.

The same applies to companies: there’s no better way to cut through the recruiter nonsense like checking out how treatment of H1-Bs compares to treatment of citizens and green card holders.

A personal anecdote: a friend of mine who is on an H1-B works for a bank. This bank talks a great game about culture and working conditions and liberal social programs and opportunity and whatnot. How do they treat my friend? She makes forty percent below market rate for our area, and their policy is she has to work for them for five years before they even start the green card process for her. Meanwhile complained like Google and friends typically start the green card process immediately upon hire.

Anyone who looks at their promotional material (who isn’t already disinclined to trust a bank) would come away with the impression that this institution is some sort of paradise of opportunity and career advancement. Meanwhile anyone who’s worked for them for any appreciable length of time knows that isn’t true.

I used to work at a company that gave our two machines: a beefy desktop with lots of RAM, many cores, two GPUs, a fast disk, etc., and a mid-range Apple laptop. For consistency reasons, my main development environment ended up being a tmux session running on the desktop, and I would ssh in to the machine from the laptop.

The latency hovered around 100ms (it's not great), but it went up and down throughout the day and as I moved in and out of the office. Honestly, it isn't so bad. I find after years of working like this I keep enough of a mental model of what I've typed that I'm not bothered by even the "we're done here" setting.

This isn’t bad news. This is exactly the sort of cost cutting and fat trimming a company in Uber’s position should be performing. From a tactical standpoint, Uber’s IPO acts as a promise to Wall Street that they will continue their existing business while slimming down their books.

From a strategic position, it’s not as great. Uber’s rivalry with Lyft is a war of attrition: given that the two services are perfect complements, right down to the drivers themselves working both networks simultaneously, growth is entirely a function of platform-level economics. While Uber is wise to cut corporate costs before materially cutting driver commissions or raising consumer prices, it’s not exactly a show of strength to be scaling back marketing and engineering, the very departments that Uber needs to continue growing.

That being said, the size of Uber’s war chest doesn’t make me worry about their ability to continue operating. If I had to prognosticate, though, I’d say this is a sign that Uber is going to be posting some rough results for a couple quarters.

Is it just me or has the usefulness of Google Maps declined substantially over the past year or so? A miscellaneous listing of complaints:

* It supports double-tap to zoom, but the first tap always causes it to lose context and open whatever I happened to tap on. This is extremely annoying when searching for restaurants in an area with one hand because that first tap will always cause me to lose my search context.

* Places I know are there don't show up, even when I zoom in to the point where the only thing in the viewport is the block where the store is located.

* Street names are still impossible to discover. In NYC, whenever I find a place that's on an avenue I have to scroll blocks left and right just to find out what street the place is on because street labels aren't automatically placed in the viewport.

* I routinely make a journey to places that turn out to be closed. I'm not talking about little mom and pop shops, although plenty of those are reported as open right now despite being permanently closed. I'm talking about major, newsworthy bankruptcies. I used to see Toy 'R Us on my map for months after the stores themselves shut down. It's gotten to the point where I call ahead whenever I want to go to a store I've never been to.

* Automatically generated markers obscuring mass transit markers. I recently spent ten minutes trying desperately to find a subway station that I knew was close to me because its marker was hidden underneath a Dunkin' Donuts. I've literally never set foot in a Dunkin' Donuts, something which Google literally knows for a fact, and yet it decided that notifying me of that store's location was more important than the entrance to the mass transit system I use every single day.

* While we're at it, let's talk about the little store markers. Google is running an ad auction on each impression, and that the reason you see useless stores that have nothing to offer you is because they decided to pay their way into your map. It's hard to believe Google is "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible" when they shove Dunkin' Donuts in my face.

If I seem mad, I'm not. I'm disappointed. So disappointed that I did the unthinkable and installed Apple Maps, and I have to say, I'm very glad I did.

I just spent three months hiring in NYC, and now that I think about it, I haven't seen a single person mention they were considering counteroffers from Facebook. For context, Facebook and Google are the two largest tech companies with a significant NYC presence. It's telling that a substantial portion of our candidates admitted to considering competing offers from Google, but literally no one was considering Facebook.

Usually half of the close is done for recruiters with the brand Facebook has

I'm also finding that company brand plays a huge role in closing candidates. Our company's brand is generally pretty strong, and I've found one of the things candidates respond to most is the story we tell about our company's past, present, and future. Facebook's story has become "we were founded by a jerk who didn't care about privacy, our not caring about privacy has had massive consequences for American and global society, and our promises to improve our approach to privacy in the future have proven to be disingenuous smokescreens."

It's no wonder the substantial portion of people who care about their employer's ethics are turned off.

Are you personally managing 40+ people, or are you a director with a layer of managers beneath you? I can't imagine how stressful it must be personally to manage 20 people, never mind 40...

We live in a society

I'm disappointed I had to go this far down into the comments to read an actual sensible rebuttal. I stand by my calling it a disorganized mess, but you'll notice I never actually say this strategy isn't paying off for the company...