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tibiahurried

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Internet was a fun place … until they turned into s.. with ads all over. Social media destroyed it.

AI is killing creativity and human collaboration; those long nights spent having pizza and coffee while debugging that stubborn issue or implementing yet another 3D engine… now it is all extremely boring.

I have worked at a couple of FAANG. When I wanted to get things done, I would hide in a meeting room, or I would work from home. The office is the most unproductive environment (at least for me). People will interrupt you all the time, for random things, chit chat, coffee and what not. Having head phones all the time did not make any difference.

I wish companies would understand this.

I don't know where you guys work but I have worked in very big co with meeting attended by entire organization > 50 and much more. Google Meeting, in chrome, worked just fine. I am not sure about other browsers. But I prefer chrome to having to install a client. Also, I find Google Meeting interface much cleaner and easy to use than Zoom. In addition, you can record meetings; they are stored in GDrive and you can share them. Plus, you get captions and transcriptions. All in all, is a much superior product.

more space

That's hardly the case. Buy a big place, usually costs more than renting one. Or at least that's my experience. If I had to buy the place I rent it will cost me easily $3M to 4M. My rent will only pay for a 2b/1ba. I am talking about major city. Perhaps is different in suburbs, don't know.

Dealing with terrible neighbors isn’t nearly as bad.

It is way easier to just rent a different place than having to sell your house because of that noise neighbor that likes to throw party every week end.

ownership of a house in some areas becomes so expensive as to be the exclusive domain of the wealthy

I agree. In fact, I live in an expensive area, but planning on moving in few years when I will be retired. Then I will buy a mansion for little money. And still gonna have plenty of savings and investments to pass onto my kids.

I don't understand the ownership at all cost. You need to run some numbers and understand if buy is financially more convenient than renting. If not, it is ok to rent. But some people are just obsessed with ownership. Even if is not financially sound.

Absolutely, it all depends. But I keep seeing close friends who are now home poor. They own their place, but that's it. They are done. They don't have any significant money for rainy days, they can't afford anything else because all their money go into their properties.

For me, that's not how I want to live my life. But as you said, everyone is different. So for them, perhaps that's ok. Not judging.

It is a seller market, and it is probably gonna stay that way for some time. The only properties I am considering buy are those located in vacation places. You can still find good deals, and you can easily repay by renting them out for few months a year.

I will only consider buying a property in a major urban city only if I had to live there basically for ever. Otherwise I will keep renting. Prices in major EU cities, like the rest of the world are insane compared to the level of income, even for wealthy engineers.

Homes like stocks are way overvalued. Homes are fueled by the frenzy of ownership at all costs, and stocks keep pumping at absurd levels.

Everything is extremely overpriced. Eventually, it will come down to common sense.

My friend has put all his savings and stocks to buy a 2b apartment. Myself, on the other hand, did not sell any stock and have invested all my savings. I rent a much bigger place, my rent is way lower than his mortgage and at least for me it will be more convenient to rent at least for the next 10y. After that, I will retire and move to a cheaper area.

Keep saying people have gone mad. Many fail and underestimate cost of ownership. Remember that a good chunk of your mortgage are taxes and interests, factor that when you compare rent vs buy.

That said, I do own properties that I rent out. But I bought them at sane prices. And they generate cash flow that I use to pay for my rent and other expenses.

My background is in automation and robotics; I studied system identification: a discipline where you would use mathematical means to identify a dynamic system model by observing input/output.

You treat the system as a black box and estimate a set of parameters that can describe it (e.g., Kalman filter).

I struggle to understand what's the fundamental difference between system identification and ML/AI. Anyone?

You ultimately have a bunch of data and try to estimate/fit a model that can describe a particular behavior.

It all comes down to a big optimization/interpolation problem. Isn't what they call "Learning" just really "estimating" ?

Then the more CPU/memory/storage you have, the more parameters/data you can estimate/process, the more accurate and sophisticated the model can be.

In event sourced systems, where the state of an application is stored as a sequence of immutable events, one way of solving the "delete" problem (e.g: GDPR) is to have all the events encrypted to begin with. The deletion (without performing a rewriting of the events) can be considered executed by simply "deleting" the key used to decrypt the events.

The information is not deleted per se, but it is not usable anymore. Now, if you have access to new means that allow you to break the encryption, then yeah it could be a problem.

you even get rewards if you choose better security

Service providers should know better than their users and make the best choices for them.

It is not like when you buy a car you get to choose whether you want airbags or not. They decided for you, and you must have airbags, period.

Users, on overage, do not posses the knowledge to make the best decision when it comes to security.

They go with the least friction solution. SMS works great everybody know how they work.

So, yeah, the burden and responsibility should not be on the end user. This is clearly companies' fault.

I have come to the conclusion that is not about the methodology but the people. I worked in super productive teams that were not following any "agile" methodology, or really any particular methodology.

The goal was to get shit done and make customers happy.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have worked with teams that were pretending to embrace agile and scrum methodology though could keep standup quick and sharp.

It was an excruciating ritual that would take my most productive hours of the day: every day!

I always try to work with smart people. People who don't need much direction and know how to get things done.

TL;DR:

  - Meeting -> Outcome -> Create tickets -> Assign

  - Developers: write scripts; value automation over documentation
In my experience, people don't read documents.

When they need something they will ask.

A meeting should always have an outcome in the form of actionable work;just create tickets and assign them to people.

The ticket should capture all the necessary information to work on it. If a document is needed, it should be linked to the ticket.

As for developers, scripts, tools, automation works better than a boring, soon to be outdated document.

If I am not mistaken, when an employer let people go they should also pay what 3 months of full paycheck? It is easier to let people go, but also expensive.

the cost of childcare for both children encroaches the income of one parent alone

That's the case in the US. In countries where family welfare policies exist and where governments incentive and support families: that's hardly the case. Childcare is pretty much free or does not cost as nearly as much as in the US.

I think the US may be an advanced country for many aspects, but it is just ridiculously behind when it comes to healthcare and families.

I keep saying: do you wanna solve the house crisis for good? Make it so houses cannot be used as mean of investment. See Denmark. A foreigner can't just buy houses there. You have to live and work there.

For as long as wealthy people and funds keep buying all the houses and rent them out, you are never going to solve the problem. Never, ever.

Don't get me wrong, I know what 1:1 are for. I know all about that, and I am not saying there are not good managers out there.

I was just trying to be honest and share my experience from small/medium/corporate companies. Maybe I was not lucky enough, but in my experience good managers are not the common case. Company politics and product/customer priorities often win over people requests for change.

That is why, if I am not happy in doing what I do, I simply move on and get another job. That is just way easier.