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Beijing more resembles Greater New York—a conglomeration of over 70 cities—than it does New York City. A similar pattern holds for most Chinese cities.

TIL with this one, I’ve been wondering until now how so many cities in China have a crazy high population and if it really is that urbanized

I agree with the premise of the article, but something caught my eye in it:

Some experts worry that this kind of information may shift policing more toward quality-of-life issues and property theft rather than life-threatening crimes such as assault.

Property theft isn’t merely a “quality of life issue”. This seems to imply that policing shouldn’t be concerned with it, which is utter bullshit, they absolutely should be

Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it?

Another example, if there’s some repetitive task that you automate at a software dev job, would you get rewarded for figuring out how to automate it? The answer is obviously dependent on culture, at my current gig you just get brushed off

Seems to me like you’re assuming that the economy incentivizes efficiency. Imo it doesn’t, it’s just a bunch of stupid rich people sloshing money around (for the most part). None of it makes any sense

only to end up, a decade or two later, in either a regular struggling life like so many others, or a downright bad place

It isn’t like they transform into the ubermensch and transcend the bodily functions of eating and shitting. At the end of the day we all have insecurities

You can be struggling, you can be in a bad place, but that’s orthogonal to feeling connected and spiritually awake

And I’m not saying drugs are how you can (or should) get there, just that the material conditions that someone is living in have nothing to do with being “there”

And by “there”, I mean a sense of abandonment of self to the fabric that you arose out of. Which is not the same thing as conformity, more like a sense of understanding and acceptance of where you belong in the grand scheme of things

Beloved websites are destroyed by money hungry ghouls everyday.

Seems like a common theme: people build a community around something, it becomes something really cool, and then a bunch of businesspeople insert themselves and liquidate the trust that’s been built

The problem is money, it pits people against each other. It draws in all of these sociopathic businesspeople. It turns people into ass kissers. It liquidates trust. It destroys community

Build a culture where people think money = God and this is what happens. It consistently brings out the absolute worst in people

Most of the time it’s like I spend 90% of the time trying to understand context of preexisting application and requirements, that’s purely reading and not writing

Once I start writing, it’s normally straightforward what’s needed. What difference does it make if it takes 10 minutes to write something or 2 minutes to write it? Especially when most nontrivial problems can take several hours to grok

And no, I don’t trust a model to “grok” the code for me, I’d much rather suffer through it. And introducing another tool isn’t worth 8 minutes of time savings to me if those 8 minutes are relatively enjoyable

Just go into software dev. Don’t go into “Devops”, it’s just some shitty buzzword for having a bunch of oncall. “Data science” is really oversaturated atm. Cybersec in industry isn’t as glamorous as what you might think

There's no "guarantee" but there's an increased probability

This is part of the problem. If you work hard but don’t benefit, you’ve essentially fucked yourself because then you’ll get assigned more, you’ll be stuck carrying a bunch of people. Even if you factor in comp increases, how do you know there’s a net benefit to working hard? (specifically for your employer, on your own time is a different story)

It isn’t blind “probability”, it essentially turns into this little psychological game where management dangles promotions in front of people to manipulate them into doing more than is needed

coupled with a good employee's ability to move to an employer that values someone like them.

Hasn’t aged well in the current job market

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

SF has one of the highest measures of property crime in the country. Article was mainly referring to violent crime. Don’t have any drug stats off the top of my head

a) Years at job = pay. Absolutely no pay increase or decrease for working harder or being better than average.

It’s already like this

b) You are near impossible to fire unless you do something really dumb (caught watching porn at work multiple times, punch someone). You can be far below average and kinda sorta do your factory job and keep it for life.

Good, the bullshit takes less time and leaves more time for foss or family life or whatever else

It's good for society, the individual, and the employer when people have room to grow/work harder/contribute more and be rewarded for it.

Rewards are distributed based off of seniority. If you do more than what’s “expected”, there’s no guarantee it will lead to promotion. It’s more likely that you’ll just be given more work

I agree with you when you say that hard work is good for people, but doing this for your employer (as opposed to for FOSS or personal learning) will just screw you over in the long run

https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-gangs-60...

How does this relate? There they actually enforced the laws and threw violators in prison. A similar strategy could be employed with drug dealers, property crime, etc in SF

I really don’t get why all of the fanfare and hand wavey attempts at outreach are necessary here. You have a well defined problem: high rates of property crime and drug use. How to solve it? Maybe try what they did in El Salvador, since that’ll actually accomplish something

The impression that I get from this article is that the city has too many bullshitters in it to actually solve concrete problems: the same problem of a company with way too much management

In other words, it's like living in a Nordic country.

What’s this about? Do Scandinavians have a reputation of being fake or something?

no one really wants to leave anymore.

According to what exactly?

Anecdotally, in my circles, most truly thought that this won't have an impact in the compensation levels.

I mean, even if it does, it’s not that big of a deal. Fewer people propping up a ponzi scheme of a real estate market that tries to soak up as much surplus as it can get its hands on

Also, fewer incentives to remain in the US with its shitty excuse of a health care system and public school system

Edit: and shitty life expectancies in the US as well compared to developed countries. Also shitty work culture

We can’t regulate acts of nature

How can you be so sure? What about controlled burns?

Wow you just described my current gig, it’s like they have this inner circle of management/architects that just withholds information. No one documents anything. It’s a fucking mess

Many people now prefer not to even use search if they can help it, because it's got so messed up.

According to what exactly? Journalist speculation?

What I don’t get is this: why does youtube still have such a monopoly after all this time? It’s had a shitty reputation since I can remember, why don’t creators just band together and take their viewership somewhere less hostile?

Well yes, I was talking about a different hypothetical :)

we're one thought away for being thrown into jail for shower thoughts that go slightly the wrong side of "publicly acceptable".

Not really. That’s like being laughed at for being naked at a nudist camp. If nobody has privacy, all of those little thoughts become public and the perception of what’s acceptable shifts

In a weird way privacy is a double edged sword and necessitates its own existence

I think, in general, we’d be a lot more sane as a society if we held back less from one another

A lot of negative comments here but I could see some merits to this (supposing it’s in an open source context and the data doesn’t go anywhere)

For example, whenever you start to get stressed out, the thing will tell you to take a break. Little things like that. Instead of relying on your own level of mindfulness to get you there

I think that little things like this could definitely improve quality of life, something I’d pay for personally, although with the constraint that the data doesn’t go anywhere with zero exceptions

Meanwhile someone joined my team a couple months back and is getting paid to literally do nothing and take sick days every other day

I don’t need to say anything more about them given the context of this comment

No there isn’t some conspiracy to leave it unprosecuted, just that people with psychopathic tendencies are good at sniffing out the areas where the victim is unlikely to hit back

From my experience, only way to really deal with those types is to always escalate and get more eyes on the situation

WSJ is utter garbage and the account that posted this has spammed 5-6 WSJ articles on here in the past 24 hours. Mods should probably take a look

I remember I was at a party few years back, some guy did way more acid than what he could handle and had a breakdown. I remember there was another guy there who was “tripsitting” but just something about him seemed kind of off, like he was trying to control the whole situation

So here was this one guy having a mental breakdown, really suffering, and there’s this other guy who keeps aggressively “checking in” on him every other minute, nobody stepped in to stop him because he was “tripsitting”.

(I know normally tripsitters can do this, but the way the guy was doing it was just awful, like he was invading the guy’s space and pestering the shit out of him, it freaked him out even more)

You’re definitely fortunate to have had a good friend nearby, some people are too fucking crazy to ever get high around

I don’t get why money is so concentrated in NYC and SV

Why are people willing to pay more to get you to move to those areas? It just seems really weird, like there’s some man behind the curtain pulling strings to concentrate people in the above metro areas

Imo all of this talk about being “well treated” in SE is an utter load of shit

Regular office jobs don’t have oncall. They don’t get randomly pinged outside of business hours. They aren’t as rat racey. There’s less ageism. They don’t force you to live in areas where a shitbox sfh costs more than 2mil

Seriously, I wish I could go back to undergrad and tell myself to go into a regular engineering field. And my experience isn’t even the worst I’ve heard, just ask anyone from AWS and they’ll tell you

It’s kind of a miracle engineers are treated as well as we are compared to most traditional office jobs.

Other office jobs are treated better. They don’t get pinged at random times outside of business hours. They don’t have to attend late night meetings because of foreign time zone

I know a bunch of AWS people and have heard worse things from them

Frankly, I love programming but would rather have a regular office job. This industry is predatory