john_moscow

Unpopular opinion: there has been a steady decline of standards in the research community in the past decade or two. First reproducibility crisis. Then, some topics becoming political taboo where the unorthodox opinion would get you fired and canceled. The credibility of the science in the West has been falling, and the recent change of administration is predictably axing something that has a perceived strong bias in the opposite direction.

An optimist in me hopes that we can get back to unbiased science, where it doesn't have to agree with the current side, but both sides perceive it as fair and agree to leave it alone for common good. A realist thinks that it will happen in China, and the West has just run out of steam.

If you know how to get stuff done yourself, start your own company, get stuff done, and enjoy the profits (or losses, depending on how good you are). It's your risk and your reward.

If you are working for someone else, the unwritten rule #1 is that a single employee should not amass too much influence within the company to start dictating their own conditions. So, the management culture averages decisions across multiple people, to make sure the loss of one-two team players won't be noticed.

It can be extremely demotivating if you are smart and capable, but these are the rules of the game. Be nice, get paid, accumulate some savings, make connections with other smart people, learn the market, and eventually start your own game on your own rules. Until then, trying to stand out will get you labelled as a troublemaker, and will hamper your progress in the long run.

Surviving at BigCo is all about saying one thing, and often doing quite the opposite to advance your career.

If you don't like it, working at a BigCo could be quite soul-draining.

This looks like an additional incentive to channel owners to somehow convince their audience against the ad blocker use. Makes sense, better than trying to win an unwinnable arms race against the blocker maintainers.

They probably got what got left of it in a cashless deal. Basically, the shareholders got to exchange X shares in a fatally wounded company into Y shares in a still-alive startup. The economic sense depends on the ratio between X and Y, but if the board was close to panicking due to recent events, Cognition probably got a good deal.

Space exists around things with mass. Also, above-absolute-zero temperatures cause particles to jump around randomly.

Now if there is "more space" around particle A, particle B will have a slightly higher statistical chance of randomly jumping closer to it, than farther.

Rinse-repeat. Gravity as we know it.

No point in setting yourself on fire to keep others warm though.

The lie generator can very efficiently pull the relevant parts of the documentation and tutorials, and it's not that hard to programmatically ask it for a quote and compare it against the actual tutorial.

Knowing how big corporations usually work, dropping the FreeDOS option completely due to incompatibility would require approvals from 7 layers of corporate management, while shipping a half-assed version that is not usable for any practical purposes only took one nerd from engineering.

You agree that you will not work around any technical limitations in the software provided to you as part of the Services, or reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, except and only to the extent that applicable law expressly permits.

Translation from legalese: we will likely throttle the free accounts in some possibly bypassable way, and will ban you if you try to work around it instead of switching to a paid account.

Not a crypto optimist at all, just trying to be objective. For both crypto and gold, the price is supported by the amount of people willing to buy it as a store of value (yes, gold is also used for jewelry and some manufacturing, but that's a secondary use).

Crypto is new, so it's mostly recognized by early adopters - people that are more likely to change their mind in the changing circumstances. There's also a lot of the "get rich quick" crowd, money laundering, illegal purchases, and other activities there, but these are all the factors that support the price of crypto.

So yes, it's extremely volatile. Yes, its price depends on the mood of lots of moody people. But it's still a valid commodity backed by human greed.

This is a good point, but there is a counter-argument as well. America is currently divided into the rank-and-file class vs. the stockholder class. The governments' actions so far have been heavily benefitting the latter. Workers get a $1000 cheque, stockholders get a 20% net worth increase. Mom'n'pop shop closes due to lockdowns, Walmart eats up their niche due to being exempt.

Taking too much money out of the economy at this point would harm the interests of the stockholder class, so they would try to do as little of it as possible. Of course, that would only deepen the divide and push Gen Z into accepting more socialist demagoguery, but the short-term stock market dip might be somewhat less than in the dotcom times.

There's a third strategy of "index minus bullshit stocks" where you would include both INTC and AMD stocks for risk hedging, but would leave out things with questionable sustainability like Uber and Netflix that otherwise made it into the index due to the speculative value.

It's worth noting that the fixed-price unlimited support only works if you are charging north of $1000 per year. This limits your users to those who actually know what they are doing, and value their and your time.

Try doing the same for a $100/year product, and you will get very quickly overwhelmed by freelancers trying to push 100 different issues from their customers on you. And reasoning with them won't work because they have all day to try rephrasing the same problem in 10 different ways, hoping it will get them to a different agent.

Needless to say, the most entitled people will be the free tier users believing that the sole fact of them paying attention to your product is enough for you do drop all what you were doing and start rewriting it to their vision.

You need to handle your PR better, dude. Whenever you speak out, always get a chance to acknowledge the help/ideas of others, unless they are your competitors. Make sure your work isn't understated though. Like "Turns out, many users complained about <...> and even a few shared patches (<link>, <link>). We even had a conversation with Mr. Smith suggesting <..>, so we finally took a good look at it and made a universal solution that covers all the bases".

It's not like you will get less credit for mentioning it - you still delivered the solution and that is what counts. But if you mention other people, it opens a few doors:

* They will like you and will be more likely to share further suggestions or code snippets (that will help you build your promotion package).

* The management will see you as a person who knows how to work with people, so you'll get a higher chance to get into the management track.

* Once you discuss a technical solution with somebody, and don't leave them in dust like an asshole, you get basic mutual trust. If you ever lose your job, they might gladly recommend you to their company, or vice versa.

They are likely using some fuzzy logic to detect people evading bans by creating multiple accounts. Could be some combination of IP address, OS, browser fingerprinting, etc.

This approach inevitably results in some amount of false positives, but nobody cares since the users aren't the paying customers.

As an engineer running his own business, that had to learn all those skills the hard way, I can tell you - you can't.

The job of a startup CEO is a 100% full-time hustling. Use observation and negotiation skills to strike deals that will benefit them (the CEO) in the long run. If the CEO is one of the founders (or hired by investors with proper skills in setting incentives and making contracts), the benefit of the CEO will be aligned with the benefit for the company. If a bunch of engineers lacking these skills hire a CEO excelling at them, the CEO's first priority will be to replace the founding engineers with someone replaceable and loyal as soon as the chance of a payoff appears on the horizon. It sucks for the company long-term, but it happens left and right, because that's the job of a CEO - take advantage of suckers that cannot negotiate and hustle. And there are numerous shenanigans in their arsenal to pull that off (stock dilution, creative voting rights/board structure, etc).

The best advice I can give you as an engineer - you can rewire your engineering brain to do all those things. Just like you study examples for a framework before starting to use it, research what similar companies do, how do they find customers, how do they handle pitches, etc., and try to replicate it. Just as you may conclude "I need a better PC to build this library" you will likely think "I need better presentation skills to give that speech", so go ahead and practice them! Join your local Toastmasters, try to launch a blog and get some consistent followers, set goals and accomplish them. Once you get the hang of it, you'll see it's no different from having to refactor your code to avoid drowning in exponentially rising complexity. Just another skill to acquire and use.

Easy. Having people change their ways on your demand is called power. And since our brave new economic order eliminated the constructive ways of gaining power, more and more people see this kind of behavior as the only outlet for their ambition to be more than a nameless cog in the machine.

after said person removed the photo in a completely reasonable, not-online-24/7 amount of time

That was his mistake. He fed the troll. Thing is, trolls like this don't care about the actual issue, they just use it to exert power over other people. If you engage in a conversation with them, you basically volunteer to become a target. If you resist the urge and completely ignore their outburst, they will quickly get bored. For a couple of days to a week the front page of your issue tracker will have one issue where one person is effectively shouting to himself. In a few weeks it will go to the bottom of the list and nobody will care. And as for the Twitter shitstorm, it could be rewarding for trolls to bash someone's response and stick all kinds of labels to them, but it doesn't work if there is no response at all.

I argued that we are avoiding dealing with our economic challenges and are focusing on non-economic political problems.

Well, yeah, since all major media companies and social networks are owned by the entities directly benefiting from the "economic challenges" of the former middle class.

Economy and politics always go together.

Optimizing the economy for the retirements funds (creating favorable conditions for existing big companies) has eliminated the paths to prosperity for the new generations (you cannot run your own shop to outcompete Loblaws or Walmart, and a cashier job there will never afford you anything more than bare survival). This is discouraging people from starting families and having kids, so the government began outsourcing population growth by importing people from other cultures with lower standard of living. This ignites political division in the society where the far left sees anything beside a shared room a privilege and the far right wants to deport anyone who isn't a 3rd-generation local.

Keeping the real estate bubble from popping has served somewhat well the real estate investors, but made property ownership impossible for many people. The political response is unsurprising: many question the whole concept of owning real estate, it's becoming increasingly hard to evict a bad faith tenant, and aggressive homeless people actively disrupting the life of nearby real estate owners are seen as victims and not malefactors.

The corporate media is doing their best to steer the discussion away and people are buying it. "Fair" isn't somehow when the median salary can reasonably afford a single-income household comfortable to raise 2+ children. It's now about how your fellow minimum-wagers should use the pronouns and how promotions from toilet scrubber to shelf stocker should be granted based on the skin color and historical oppression points, while the actual oppression of the former middle class by the corporations is happening right now.

This will probably get downvoted and flagged (who wouldn't like to shoot the messenger) but here's an example [0] of a person posting a long chain of twits that would almost certainly warrant a ban under the old management, and not getting shot down so far.

[0] https://twitter.com/SaraGonzalesTX

This can be equally well explained by both software changes and the usual patterns of the public attention.

When any kind of high-impact news breaks out, it immediately sparks peak interest lasting a few days, and then exponentially dropping back to near zero, as the attention becomes split between other topics. It doesn't matter if the original event is still ongoing, it's just how the public attention works. You can see it quite well on Google Trends for any kind of large-impact event (e.g. [0]).

The attention to Twitter buyout will follow exactly the same curve. Most people who would ever react to it (by joining or leaving) will do so in the first few days, and then the change numbers will start dropping exponentially.

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Ukraine%20war

Well, why do you think the elites are unanimously supporting the recent equity initiatives? Because in reality they penalize the potential contenders from the rank-and-file class, while the top ladder plays by their own playback.

The trouble is, people that are actually productive usually suck at convincing the management that they belong to the "good" half.

They could continue work in feature branches, it just won't be pushed into the production branch unless it's a critical fix approved higher up.

Why would they? If there were many small banks competing with each other for the consumer's money, the free market mechanics would have quickly brought the interest rates up.

But hey, who needs competition. Let the banking sector be run by a bunch of buddies that go to the same golf club, and if they cock up, they can always schmooze the regulator to give out a hefty bailout package. Who would have thought the consumer will get screwed?

Unfortunately, there is a very solid explanation for it and it doesn't yield a good prognosis:

1. There is a small minority of people who truly believed in it in the first place.

2. Then there are people who exploit the system by charging hefty sums for diversity trainings (and calling any opponents to such spending racist).

3. Then there are people who sold the #2 group the student loans and gave the degrees where all you need to graduate is to repeat a fairly basic set of dogmas.

4. There are people who are disillusioned about the whole thing, but are now stuck with the student loans and no other way to make comparable money.

5. There are entrepreneurial people that want to make a change, but since most business niches are occupied by the corporations, the only outlet they have found is to join the diversity & inclusion effort.

6. There are people that want to get rid of their competitors. And since being not inclusive enough is now a firable offense, they are stuck competing who can say more things they don't really believe in.

Ironically, it reminds me of the political situation in Russia, where many people support the war despite suffering economically from it, despite having their children slaughtered, despite losing the rest of civil freedoms in the past months. The mechanism is the same: if you don't play along with the narrative, the competition will eat you alive. And it you overplay it in a clever way, you can get a promotion or a government contract.

I wish sociologists actually studied such phenomena rather than being another echo chamber for the same narrative as everyone else.

The items on the list are the problems relevant to most Americans. Except, the human brain has a limited capacity for "currently tracked" problems and tends to pick them proportionally to the amount of attention paid to them.

So the media is abusing it by spamming people's attention with disproportionately exaggerated problems that don't cost the elites anything to solve, so that people won't have any time left solving the problems that would look bad on the corporate bottom line.

Well, such things are always driven by demand. And unfortunately, there is a strong demand in our society for policing words, renaming formulas and issuing apologies all while:

* Property ownership is becoming out of question for an increasing fraction of Americans

* Any kid of retirement (as in not having to work and enjoying life off your savings) has become a pipe dream

* Having a single-income family with one parent dedicated to raising the children has become unaffordable.

* Even if you managed to put enough effort to teach your kids the values of hard work and setting long-term goals, the public education system is set to confuse them and kick them off that path, so they will never be competitive with those who received education abroad.

At the same time, the media oligopoly [0] keeps ignoring the problems and pushing the narratives how addressing short-term emotional problems is the top 1 priority, and anyone who wants real prosperity instead of taking a part in the never-ending mutual comforting game is the enemy of the people.

I wonder if people will ever realize they are being manipulated into poverty before it's too late.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31077525

These companies manage ETFs, so instead of purchasing shares from 500 companies tracked in S&P 500 (and paying 500x the commission), you can just purchase X shares of the VOO ETF. On paper, it looks like they own everybody else, but in practice they are just proxies.