zvorygin

How did you get into large scale manufacturing and production? Was it a career switch? Downsides? It too fascinates me. Any book recommendations?

France had almost a thousand years of autocratic and aggressive tradition. Prussia/Germany too. There’s many more examples.

These things can and do change.

Append “First ask clarifying questions” to your prompt.

https://archive.is/jIQg3

I think society has never, does not, and probably will never work the way you suggest it should.

I wish the journalist asked the leading scientists in the field “Before you learned of the Hubble tension, what did you think the odds were of the standard model being correct? And after?”

And everything would be much clearer.

The Wikipedia article you link states:

It has been called one of the least productive Congresses since 1951

Let’s not measure productivity in terms of count of bills passed like measuring output by lines of code.

Healthcare reform, SS reform, fiscal sustainability, electoral reform, climate, immigration, information environment, cybersecurity, how many of these pressing issues have been tackled and solved by congress?

My guess is that each simultaneously picked a number, one for numerator and one for denominator.

History unfolds without anyone at the helm. It just happens, like a pachinko ball falling down the board. Global economic structures will push the development of AI and they're extremely hard to overwhelm.

In my high school, without naming any names, the teacher told us all that anyone who changed their results to 9.81m/s^2 was doing science incorrectly. And we were graded on our analysis of the experimental procedure, or something like that.

Botswana is actually reasonably well developed and stable. It seems fine, and I applaud them.

Have you ever thought of adding a feature like automatically analyzing invoices to show owners “This supplier raised the price of 2x4 Joists by 22%” and other such insights?

They offered a number of good points, it doesn’t seem like undiscerning nihilism to me.

When have the corporations ever not had a short-termist "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality in America?

Your team gets a clear and simple high-level goal that everyone at the company understands is important and shields you to work on it for a year without interruptions.

You don’t know it, but your manager playing up your teams contributions to the company, arranging happy coordination with other teams, occasionally intervening to resolve intra-team disputes, privately managing egos and careers, and jiu jitsu’ing any attempts to distract your team.

They trust your competence and decisions, but they understand enough to keep you on-track and provide a valuable outside view perspective.

What does “whether it’s worth it right now” mean? As in, whether companies are really worth as much as they’re valued?

I agree, and at the same time I think that sometimes you realize your approach to life has been wrong and you’ve learned your lesson but it’s easier to start over than to fix the existing problems.

In this case I recommend moving cities within your own culture rather than switching to a new one.

I know this experience is not universal, but I do think it is underrepresented.

Europeans could learn from Canada how to allow immigration in a fashion that the population embraces rather than tolerates, though a housing crunch has frayed that consensus of late

A little bit of an understatement, that consensus has almost been completely shattered in Canada.

Currently Canada can barely handle the people it has, there's quite a severe housing crisis. There's just not enough housing in any of the areas that people want to live. Canada does not need more people.

And most of the people hypothetically moving to Canada from Europe will probably be refugees who have little ties to Europe. Which would also not go down well in Canada (because of uhh, human tendencies against the outgroup).

Personally, I'm pro-immigration. It keeps the cost of labour down which is good for people like me. I just think even the current level of immigration has been too destabilizing for our society, so I'm opposed to increasing it yet further.

That being said, as a Canadian I'd love to have the right to live and work in the EU, and I would love for honest hard-working Europeans to have the right to live and work in Canada. And I'd love closer and denser trade ties, for example an investment in LNG shipping infrastructure to help Canada and the EU, assuming this is economical and not just a pipe dream.

My thoughts are similar. I don’t think it’s a troll, this type of thing is very common.

You don’t have to engage or understand a topic if you can intellectualize it and create “theories” about it.

It’s like when you read blog posts on dating filled with game theory and statistics.

I would have liked to see the author try to spend a year or more trying to earnestly adopt an opposing worldview. Not to try to model another worldview from within their own, but to know what it’s like to be another way.

That would have been more interesting.

I quit my last job in no small part because of Bazel. I hated it so much. It tortured me.

I think Bazel is the kind of really complicated language that invites clever engineers to build incomprehensible balls of spaghetti. And the tooling and docs are really underinvested in.

But I got a new job, and to my surprise I've been doing Bazel all day. And I love it. I don't really know why.

All this to say, don't make a final judgement yet, there's something brilliant buried underneath that pile of rules and aspects.

Only you can choose to care or not care. And if you care about some troll, you’re going to become angry and then exhausted.

Did it make you cool and independent or more like a hateful incel. Honest question, no judgement either way.

As someone who flies a lot on his own dime, inscrutable airline pricing ends up being good.

It means I can always get a seat, I just have to pay more. It means businesses subsidize mine and everyone else’s flights.

When I’m travelling the world and have to use a train system with fixed prices, I don’t like that I have to book many days in advance or else the tickets are sold out. Just raise the price! Let the rich pay double so it’s cheaper for everyone else, and anyone who _really needs_ to use the service can weigh the costs and decide to pay more.

The Effective Altruism movement is very good at convincing people they want what Effective Altruists want. Figuring out what you want is really hard. I quit my job and blew my life up since other people do this to soul-search and it was my best idea.

Say you had a blank slate to rejigger how bandwidth is allocated. What would it look like? Could we move things around and end up with more bandwidth than anyone knows what to do with? What's the ratio of "bad legacy we should cut" to "useful legacy band but it's only around because of legacy, we definitely wouldn't carve a band out for it today if it didn't have one" to "we have to keep this around".

Is it like "well, if you want airplanes not to crash, you need to give up this band to RADAR, and that means there's a fundamental limit on how good wireless communication can possibly be for today's humans?".

Thank you for asking this, I was having a devil of a time googling what "total" meant in this context.

Thank you for posting this! I'm going to be starting a new job sometime soon, and this is giving me all sorts of ideas! Especially thank you for being so comprehensive in your comment. Some questions:

What size is your company, and what level of SWE are you? Did your referrals tend to move up the org chart, or stay at the same level? Is your role very broad? I ask this last one because a question like "How do you envision us working/partnering with one another?" seems like something I would ask an immediate coworker, not necessarily someone two connections away. Are you a tech lead, or someone with reports (or some other position of authority?).

Finally, one of your questions contains what appears to be your company name, I don't know if it was intentional to leave that there, just letting you know.

This is actually a very intersting tangent! If I visualize interacting with a physical globe, I'm going to spin it left, as if I was "reading" the globe left-to-right. The rotation displayed on the stripe website is not the rotation of the Earth, it's the rotation of a globe!

Civilization emerged around settled agriculture, not to wage war. Arguably this was a movement away from violence, as compared to nomadic tribes constantly competing over hunting and foraging territories.

Is this even true? I remember when I was reading "Seeing like a State" (or possibly this is from "Against the Grain"), the book would talk about how the first settled civilizations were all violent and oppressive, because nobody wanted to engage in agriculture. Why would you, when anyone could walk into nature where there was an abundance of food and life was much easier.

The original movement towards settled civilization was a violent one, where people were forced to work the land, and would try to escape. Nomadic tribes didn't violently compete with each other as much as settled societies. At least, that was the impression I was under.