tlobes

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

HN has seen this quote many times; tech workers willfully or naively ignore the harm their contributions cause as long as the life changing paychecks keep coming, letting them pretend that they are too far removed from the damage to be responsible.

Then comes the classic post “I’m leaving FAANG, so brave of me <quiet-part>funded entirely by the same extraction and harm I once insisted I didn’t see.</quiet-part>"

For OSX users, this seems to run best in Safari Technology Preview.

Tested Sumerian and it's a barebones 3D web tool (modeled after Unity but more akin to ThreeJS editor) that can be controlled via script by other services. One example is being able to do some tasks like in-browser AR.

I'm always curious if deceptive actions like these are approved by an individual, a committee, or are perhaps a byproduct of unrelated tasks driven by lazy oversight shrouded by process.

Flying into LAX from Asia last week, I had expected to spend a few hours at the airport before officially entering, but alas, it was worryingly expedient only being asked “did I travel to China in the last weeks?”

Enhance

Apex Legends, a property from Respawn Entertainment though technically under the EA/Origin umbrella, has a different approach on cheating by using a combination of deep learning from previous matches and shadow-banning cheaters to play among themselves. I've yet to encounter identifiable cheating since the start of the second season (mid 2019)

Joe Rogan's booking and showrunning team(s) needs a lot more credit where it's due.

The politically and professionally diverse guests they are able to get, no doubt with the assistance of Joe himself, is absolutely incredible. You rarely see a show where you can have an extreme right wing radio host be a guest, only to have a slew of high profile left wing candidates on months later, with zero fucks given in making sure it's family-friendly.

Is the issue of anxiety and depression among Gen Z being brought to the center stage internally at FB? I’d feel a whole lot better about the company if I knew that an actual effort was being made to right some wrongs in it’s wake of addiction profiteering. The optimist in me sees this feature as a step in a more humane direction.

My HEDT at home serves as my VR development machine and doubles as a gaming rig. I generally save basic research, design, and sandboxed coding for my MacBook Pro at a coffee shop.

If I had a similar performing laptop that could replace my desktop in terms of GPU performance and compatibility with the devices I use, my HEDT would start collecting dust.

Given that the latest Mac still uses an Intel CPU, I’d say the range is [5,7] years at minimum, based on Apple’s current vintage/obsolete policy, before x86 support is dropped from OSX.

I’m curious to know how much room there is for optimization in their code

Are there any private prison models that were shown to be more effective than their peers or public counterparts?

While I agree that the vast majority (if not all) of private prisons, and those who participated in profiting from them, are ugly spots on the progress of modern humanity, I'm weary about an overall ban on the concept altogether.

Rather than creating rules against an evil business model or incentives to promote a beneficial one, this "unabashedly California" move cuts off any hope of someone with an ounce of morality to disrupt and ideally create a prison system that truly aims to reform inmates.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40600593

Similar story in the Weimar Republic from 1918-1933

I'm stuck with a $4000 brick I cannot use without frustration. Given that I'm still paying it off, this really hurts motivation.

Another issue that seems to be overlooked is the overly big force touchpad that, in combination with the awful keyboard, will not correctly reject my palms while I type, causing the cursor to move elsewhere, oftentimes causing unintended button clicks, premature email sends, page transitions, etc.

I'd agree with the exception of the utterly awful keyboard & trackpad design that appeared in 2016 that seemed to skip any meaningful QA process inside Apple.

The popular dust complaints aside, a brand new machine has immediate problems for someone whose palms tend to touch the newly enlarged Force Touch trackpad during typing, a hand position I got used to with my Macbook Air 2013. Typing on the new design will cause repeated keystrokes, delayed or missing keystrokes, and instant cursor shifts during typing that make it so I need to approach the keyboard in the same way one would properly play a piano in order to get any meaningful work done. Great if you're a trained pianist, terrible if you want to get actual work done from a coffee shop where you don't have a stand or external keyboard on hand.

Apple knows they messed up with the butterfly mechanism and seem to be fixing that in the next design. In the meantime, there are a few things they could do now through software to alleviate these issues:

1. The ability to remap the Force Touch trackpad tracking area in Settings. Being able to remove 10mm from each side would fix my cursor shift issue. People currently use tape to solve this... on a $4000+ machine.

2. Ability to set a numeric value for Force Touch sensitivity as opposed to 3 constant values with a much higher threshold than is currently being used as "high".

I know Apple is all about limiting options for a customer's own good, however, these software changes would go a long way in helping people debrick an expensive laptop who don't happen to fit whatever hand size their QA team of classically trained pianists have.

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when WeWork pitched their business model and seemingly unique approach to coworking that somehow validates the amount of investment they have received compared to any other coworking space.

I signed up for this after moving out of my apartment and temporarily set up forwarding to my a freind’s address. It’s a great service, though I realized no confirmation was needed for me to start getting this info.

Most likely this. I have a few dev accounts, one which I know I used the feature at some point, another few which did not and those were not reset.

The article only mentions the engineers being laid off, not the managers who botched it, nor the executives who hired with incompetence. The reward structure of such a corporate environment would seem counter-intuitive to success.

Crazy thought. When a company with a ton of accumulated assets (data) craters, do the rules of bankruptcy and/or mitigating their losses to investors force them to just sell these assets outright?

This may not happen in the next few decades with the likes of Facebook, but imagine what kind of data that much smaller companies have that will just be sold off to the highest bidder, possibly de-anonymized to increase it's value. Does a user privacy contract hold any weight when a company is about to dissolve?

Ex-famo.us (pre-pivot short-term contractor'ish) here. It's sad to see famousJS go to the grave, but I'm excited to see dmvaldman's samsaraJS (http://samsaraJS.org) evolve into something great (cakaaaaaaw!). The pre-pivot famo.us was inspiring to work with and I was humbled to see all the projects being created by both the in-house and external teams.

It was an exciting place to work, for all it's ups and downs. Besides the product itself, the office, albeit ungodly expensive given it's location and size, was the perfect place to be productive and push yourself well into the night. There were spots you could work collaboratively next to others as well as little nooks you could "hide" and get some comfy undisturbed privacy. The ambiance of the place worked beautifully to be both creative and technical, together or individually. In the grand scheme of things, I think it's an expense that easily justified the potential reward.

On the other hand, the social culture that Steve crafted, often reinforced by his example, didn't sit right with me personally, nor did it sit well with many others. "Toxic" was an unfortunate word thrown around quite a bit while I was there. I do hope he takes time off to honestly...subjectively... reflect back on how he chose to treat people he calculated could be useful to him in the moment as opposed to those who were not.

On the flip side, when child-like dreamer Steve came through, speaking about his passions and what inspires him to do what he does, he was, in those moments, a really enjoyable guy and motivational figure to work for. I'll be casting an unpopular opinion here, but I do think the guy has it in him to lead another company to success, as long as he takes a cold, hard, unbiased, and honest look at himself to fully understand why famo.us, not just the product, but more the culture he crafted, failed with him at the helm.

The most important takeaway from my stint there was working with the incredible team and crafting the friendships I did. The level of talent that many of the original engineers had and the amazing personalities behind said talent gives me no worries that those who were let go will move on to something far greater and hopefully, personally rewarding. I already know that quite a few have! :)

http://www.thefamousgroup.com - Dat logo, though.