HN user
Speaking of low salaries, I saw a $30K/year job ad in a western EU country for a research engineer who will need to build a secure and scalable infrastructure - and I laughed hard. It wasn't even scam, quite to opposite.
Take look at luigi, which is a lightweight task orchestrator with minimalistic dependencies.
It's funny, if it weren't that sneaky and scuzzy and very much in line with what FB excels at: web scale deceit.
Exactly, do not expect a business (except it is a non-profit) to do something out of charity - they don't.
Probably so. The part of the population that reacts in any way to "delete your account" is probably 0.25% - FB knows that, too. Fine if every other month a #deletefb campaign comes around, the MAU is a harder fact.
The next big thing must flush you with probably an order or so more dopamine - maybe some free artificial/AR world with hundreds of new cool friends who aren't real but make you feel better. That would be so 2020s!
Yes of course. You have to give in at a point, because you have no options, it's probably simple as that.
Sad to see that FAANG is so attractive - sure, pay is nice, technical problems are nice - but you are actively working on walled gardens. You become a walled gardener.
Good for them. I find it strange that we have this org setup at all. A union illustrates the clear divide between capital owners and workers. It sounds so 19th century, but it's just as valid today, unfortunately.
Always remember: Don't get high on your own supply.
I don't know. I see the nice HSBC building in my city and all I can think of is that half of the business of theirs is crooked, money laundry, trafficking, drug cartels. No shiny building can change what you actually do.
I can see that mining is a good incentive to look for excess energy in all kinds of places and make use of it. That's a capitalistic motiv, finding solutions to derived issues, when something else is at the core of the problem. But anyway.
B$ still looks ridiculous, let me explain.
* world electrical energy consumption: ~25000 TWh [1] * bitcoin energy consumption index: ~77 TWh [2]
Bitcoin today consumes as much as 0.3% of the total energy available on this planet.
That's fine, if half the world would use it and would do meaningful things with it.
What is it actually used for most visibly?
As a betting ground with galactic momentum, a technology promising to be the solution to everything, and just outrageous claims that only the bovine left to be excited about.
It's not that the algorithms and data structures are not cool, the certainly are - but we can do so much more today with technology than this.
[1] https://www.vgb.org/en/data_powergeneration.html?dfid=98054 [2] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
That's my #1 reason to be bearish on B$ - it's just a complete environmental cluster-fuck. And in order to not see this, you'll have to ignore a lot of facts - which in turn tells me a lot about those inside the crypto-bubble, namely that they do not care that much about facts.
Internet as a public good.
I was stretching the point, but what amazes me is the amount of stuff people want to do vs. the amount of equipment they throw at the problem.
To put it into perspective: You give me $72K and I'll set you up a 1PB replicated storage infra with a total of 100+ available CPU cores and half a TB RAM.
I saw people burning through cash in the cloud, which makes you wonder weather money is any concern at all.
Just sampling: The last billionaire I looked up was a north american mining guy. He owns mines, in Africa. Can you guess which country? Yes exactly, the one that prospers much more than the others.
Basically, the "work" has to come from somewhere. The reason FB is rich is because 2+B people choose to work for free. The reason Google is rich is because they do not have to create the content (in fact, "content creators" are pushed to the back seat). The reason Amazon is rich is because you can use cheap labor and sprinkle tech-efficiency on it. The reason all gig-companies are rich is because they can circumvent many "worker-rights". The reason Microsoft is rich is because they give a damn about compatibility and competition (the will extinguish probably even the classic "open source", given enough time).
Some hedge funds are rich, because they buy the order-flow data of poor people playing with their money - maybe they use it against them, maybe not.
I cannot see non-exploitation in any of these. Another grandiosely self-serving essay by a rich man, who thinks he has figured out how the world works.
If he really had, he would probably want to change it. For the better - which is probably much harder then just doing more of the same.
Edit: I sometimes think people who write these things are painfully aware of the kind of illusion they create and choose to create it nevertheless. Mundus vult decipi.
Maybe it is a better way to learn independently, with regular, e.g. monthly or quarterly check-ins with an experienced mentor?
Would solve quite a few problems altogether - people getting more independent and following their interests. You would still have competition, but that would be moderated by actual needs, both in the private and public sector.
Not sure an end to the classic higher-ed system would be a bad thing.
One exception may be Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist, who was a prolific writer. His note taking method was part of his philosophical process, I assume.
No, I do not want a part in that.
I had an ok, low life once. Today I work 80h to catch up with capital gains of those who sell me food or own my place. The essence of capitalism is embodied in private equity today - a company is not there to make shoes or build a car - a company exists to make money.
Everything else is rather accidental, which is my take on the uber-exhaustion of the western world. I work hard to catch up with capital gains, which I know I cannot.
edit: What keeps me sane is that I basically reduced my life as much as I can. I life and work in a small room, have no car, I have clothing for a week, that's it. The flat I life in is about 70 years old and has hardly be modernized. I buy food and cook myself. I do not fly, my phone is old, I do not stream anything, I ad-block (otherwise I could not use the internet) and I support some core sites of the (old) internet with a bit of money.
I do not crave any of the "niceties" of today's world (I use dish washer and washing machine, do not get me wrong), let alone the tech world. No social media, except HN and a few very specific sites. Basically a modern day recluse, as it is the only way I can implement sufficient distance to this world.
If you have me guess, what the effect of low access to resources is (time, money, health, job, anything) I will bet having lower resources will have an adverse effect - because that is kind of the definition of it.
When I read these studies, I'm thinking that this "fact" is disputed and low access to resource may have positive effects - which is ridiculous.
A kind of second order implication of this is that it's more important to research the problem than to solve it (I know you need to understand the problem first, but I think it is not that complicated).
Excellent video. We have the tech and skill to reconstruct reality, at the same time we do not possess the skill to let reason rule critical parts of our (here: Beirut's) infrastructure.
As humankind, we are probably closer than ever to hassle free life and we will nevertheless go down skirmishing and fighting.
I'm sorry for the circumstances.
I just want to note one thing: any large community will have aspect (sometimes many) that many people will not like. That's not personal, it's just statistics. And when someone (Go team, Stack overflow a few years back, ...) appears heavy-handed, try to imagine to herd hundred-thousand creative, intelligent spirits - that's an impossible task. If you complain about the font (and others did, too) than either ask yourself, whether the stress of conflict is worth it - or leave the matter - or the community - for good.
I calculated that so far I saved with my pro-bono work in open source and documentation around 2,085,000 million hours of professional labor.
Now my hourly rate is 100 bucks, so that's about 200M worth of labor that ended up in other peoples pockets.
I could probably retire now. In a just world, we might give people credit for this kind of work or we would organize our commons more sensibly.
But in the world today, value is siphoned up - and the siphon is a very well tuned siphon.
I'm off the main hubs, SF, London, NYC, but here, in my gamma level city people talk a bit about AI but I have yet to see applications that are not vaporware. Don't get me wrong, I love ML challenges, but the real world seems to have so many other little things to solve first, before we can finally realize our ai dreams.
I used Helios 4 (32TB) and currently building a Helios 64 (80TB) NAS. It works great with armbian, which was the key for me.
After watching a presentation on firecracker from Amazon team it seemed like it is more of a playground for their junior developers than some high profile library. Not trying to be dismissive, just an impression.
From the FAANG, Amazon strikes me as the one using most open source code while at the same time not having much to show as open source - firecracker is a (relative) toy.
Call me a bluff old tradionalist, but there are costs associated with "internet operations", tech firms: That is, they are or will abuse their enormous insight into the heartbeat of society. If you know for billions of people where they are, what they do, and all other thousands of attributes, what is your end goal? To sit on the money printer? No, tech just moves forward and what is possible will be implemented. I love tech, it's so cool to build stuff. But in 2030 the majority of the population will be flies in a web of tech, surrounding and controlling you in various ways, all day every day. Opt out will be the ultimate luxury item.
Spent hours playing Apache comanche game back in the days (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLcxgYEBAXA). It ran on a 4MB RAM machine just fine.
I wonder if we ever get back to this kind of efficient use of computers?