I saw this put really, really well not too long ago:
> A lot of us got the message earlier in life that we had to wait for other's permission or encouragement to do things, when in fact, all you need is the ability to understand the situation and deal with the consequences
Here's the dangerous way I put it that I only tell senior people: understand why rules were made and make sure the people who made them would be happy.
You're doing that common conservative thing of correctly identifying the principle, but then taking a turn into ridiculousness when enumerating examples. We are, in fact, in this mess because of the upper middle/professional class. It's not because of green regulations or DEI. It's because that class has a vested interest in enabling the aforementioned billionaire charlatans and their flights of fancy/fear, no matter wht those might be. Literally, if we're talking about their retirement accounts. Why are the best minds of our generation working on ads and addiction machines? Why can't we, as a country, solve problems that poorer countries solved decades ago? Because so very few with a salary and mortgage can think 5-10 years ahead, outside of their plan to scale the crab bucket walls (as rugged individuals). It won't end until a critical mass are ready to say, when presented yet another boondoggle meant to impoverish their neighbors economically and spiritually, "I don't care, I won't do it, fire me," and mean it. The robots aren't ready yet; the wealthy and deleterious elements of society still need poorer cosigners. Snap the pen in half.
>Could you give a concrete example of what you're describing there?
Pick any pro-1984-esque smart city article that normal people would recoil in horror at the implications of yet HN generally endorses. The author is your example.
Now repeat for every industry and its own insane trends. Manufacturing people endorsing green regulation because they know it gives them a competitive advantage over their competition despite causing off shoring and making the world worse on the net. Lawyers, legislators and law people peddling inequality under the law but dressing it up as DEI. Lead people at regulatory agencies advocating for expansion of their own scope and mandate. Etc. etc. the list goes on.
It's like a stupid reverse gell-mann amnesia effect where people can spot stupidity outside their own industry but lack the ability to be a disciplined adult with self awareness and ability to see consequences when something benefits them.
But of course outsiders don't make decisions until things are so insane that the public weighs in so what happens is the tech industry peddles pervasive surveillance, manufacturing off-shores to countries that belch pollution, etc, etc, until it reaches a critical mass and a populist gets elected on promises to kill all of it no matter what it is.
If you want me to literally cite an example I'll do that but we all know that doesn't really matter because no example will satisfy everyone.
>I wish there would be some tool w/ DDL that you can use to define schemas, functions and views which would automatically sync changes to staging environment and then properly these changes on production.
A long time ago, I joined a company where the "DB Migration Script" was an ever-growing set of migrations that took close to an hour to run. There were the same issues of lack of context, history, etc.
Since we were a Microsoft shop, I took the following approach to use Visual Studio DB projects and the SQL Server sqlpackage tool. Every table, stored procedure, schema, user, index, etc. was represented by a single file in the project, so it would have full git history and DB changes and the code that relied on them would be in the same commmit. (Data migrations still had to be stored separately in up/down migration files)
The "build" was to create the SQLPackage dacpac file from the DB project, and deploy was to apply the dacpac to the target database and then run data migrations (which were rare). Since the dacpac represented the desired end state of the database, it didn't require a DB to be in a specific state first, and it allowed the same deploy to run as part of CI, manual testing, staging deploy, and production deploys. It also generally took less than 5 seconds.
Ah yes—as the saying goes: “keep your friends at the Bayes-optimal distance corresponding to your level of confidence in their out-of-distribution behavior, and your enemies closer”
The reason is that comes from bats. Bat immunology is wild. As I understand it, coming from bats to humans, a virus is basically coming from thousands of years in the future – of an evolutionary arms race.
Bats have evolved much more complexity in parts of their immune systems than us, and viruses along with them. They have extremely rapid metabolism and live packed together in ideal condition for viral transmission. Flight metabolism in bats is absolutely bonkers. Intense energy generation and the requisite damage control. Of DNA. And other stuff.
Bats handle viral infections quite differently than we do and can for example tolerate chronic infections with viruses that can and would kill humans. The arms race is so advanced that for them it’s no longer a question of exterminaton but successful containment. As species and individuals of that species, we do not handle chronic infection well. Note that bats have evolved these mechanisms through selection by survival, naturally accompanied with non-selection through death.
It was known and we were warned that bat viruses would mess us up. It was a known hazard and we were warned to watch for it and not let this happen due do these reasons.
Of bats and men: Immunomodulatory treatment options for COVID-19 guided by the immunopathology of SARS-CoV-2 infection, 2021: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciimmunol.abd0205
While I generally agree with most of your sociology observations, I feel you're heavily discounting the real impact to reliability that relates to design and specification differences between the domestics and Japanese auto-makers. In the 90's, I was a process engineer for an automotive wiring manufacturer supplying to both domestics and Japanese harness makers. The Japanese clients mandated cold-weld free segments for use in all of their cars with no exception. The domestics were ok with <=2. A cold-weld (physically crimped) going through hot/cold thermal cycles will eventually break in a car and is a messy quality risk because wiring controls a huge amount of car function and depending on where the weld ends up and whether it is a partial or complete break - can result in hard to diagnose failure symptoms (e.g. flaky lights, complete outage, etc ...). We used to charge more (which the Japanese clients happily absorbed) for the weld-free wire because the process lines would need to either be re-strung up for each pass (lower line utilization/efficiency) or we had to physically cut out the weld in the wire based on the detector's marking. This small difference in specifications and acceptance criteria will result in reliability differences downstream. I have no doubt that other suppliers could tell you equally divergent requirements which all may feel small in isolation, but amount to large reliability concerns for the system overall. While I understood the cost-control desire of the domestics, it always felt like a short-sighted decision to accept this type of risk systemically. It no doubt helps to have caring owners, but the reputation that draws them is based on design and specifications made early in the product's design life cycle.
Interesting Side-Note: When I first started, there was an anecdote/story about a weld that had made its way accidentally (weld detector inadvertently turned off for the wrong run) into a production lot. This lot was used in a late design life cycle batch run (~50K cars) for one of the large Japanese manufacturers who were planning on announcing a new design model year for the upcoming year. When the auto maker heard that this weld had made its way into the batch run, they gave our company two choices: Either buy the 50K cars or pay for the auto manufacturers engineers to comb through each car to validate the wiring was weld free. I don't know which choice was made, but the there were alot of human and mechanical systems put in place to make sure the weld detector and the client requirements were well marked and understood for all runs thereafter. It was a fireable offense to mess with that detector in any unauthorized way.
As someone who'd consider themselves progressive by the yardstick of 10 years ago but not measured to the new progressives of today, the most visible toxic-but-cozy-because-our-silo was that BIPOC people don't need to use content warning (CW) labels when site guidelines say use CW labels on political toots. The reason given was that white people must not be able to opt out of the BIPOC experience of political outrage.
The New Left has become unrecognizable to me as a mode of liberal thinking and both sides of the political fence in the US appear to have escaped into a hole of myopic beliefs that mirror each other in their intensity and desire for control.
Then add ArgoCD for deployment and istio for a service mesh!
While you are at it, also setup Longhorn for storage. With that solved, you might as well start hosting Gitea and DroneCI on the cluster, plus an extra helm- and docker repo for good measure. And in no time you will have a full modern CI/CD setup to do nothing but updates on! :-)
Seriously, though, you will learn a lot of things in the process and get a bottom up view of current stacks, which is definitely helpful.
And there's another road called Aresstraat that contains rows of totally unique houses, reportedly so up-and-coming architects can try out their weird ideas. Here's a funky looking tilted level "House in House" designed by Marc Koehler in 2011, which was just up for sale for around 700,000 EUR.
(Look up and down Aresstraat at all the different architectural styles! Down the street a bit it flashes back in time to street views from 2009, before most of the neighborhood was even built, showing the wide open sand peppered by a few houses and construction sites.)
>PROJECT ARCHITECT(S): Marc Koehler;
CLIENT: Privately;
BUILDER: Ubink and Co BV;
REALIZATION:
2011
>According to the architect, “House in house” is based on a reinterpretation of a traditional Dutch canal house with an attic. An arrangement of three 'boxes', which accommodate the necessary functions of sleeping, office and entrance, structures the interior space.
>The slanted attic window ensures a striking presence of the house in the streetscape. Here is the sleeping area with skylights to see stars and moon. The floor is placed horizontally, which is visible from the outside. The office is retracted on the first floor, with its own entrance via a spiral staircase. Living takes place in the residual space between the boxes. That space is a route with stairs that spiral upwards. What are usually the landings is here transformed into a series of spacious places, for hobbies, music, watching TV or eating. This design keeps living flexible and dynamic. The house is also equipped for new interpretations that people want to give to the concept of living.
As I get older, the less I identify as my current state and the more I identify with the person who transitions through states. My change in perspective has reduced my anxieties and anger significantly. "This too shall pass" and all that. The more of my self image is focused on superficial things, the more I will take things personally. What we are angry about tends to be a reflection of ourselves more than the current state of affairs.
If I see myself as a busy professional I might be much more aggravated by someone at the grocery store holding up the checkout line with EBT (since I am busy they must be lazy!). If I see myself as a social climber I will always be worrying if people are using me for something (since I am using them!). If I identify with my wealth I might develop some neurosis regarding the sight of the homeless (since they represent ultimate failure!).
I don't believe in reincarnation but it is a helpful thought experiment to think about what benefits and drawbacks your particular incarnation of life holds and how those might be different if you were incarnated elsewhere.
Do you think questions like that can ever be answered?
There's a YouTube video I like, called "The Chinese Farmer," by Alan Watts.
The gist of the video is that reality is so unimaginably complex that we cannot know if a given change is going to be a net positive (over what time frame?) or a net negative (again, over what time frame?).
This pretty much informs my thinking these days, and when something happens that I notice, I find myself more able to refrain from labeling it as either good or bad.
I wonder when is something is legally considered rape. Like what you read in the article, when there was a lot of manipulation, but not really a "no", and a bad feeling during an afterwards.
In the past year, quite a few collections went online. I remember seeing that Van Gogh collection from Dutch museums was digitized and released recently. Does anyone know if there's a list of various online art collections? I'd really like to go through some.
The Peterson Museum (basically the Louvre of automobiles) did the same -or very close- with wonderful video tours of areas that only paying 150$ would get you to see (The Vault).
The Seattle flight museum also started a series where the main curator would talk about individual planes in long format, way better experience than looking at photos online.
I sincerely feel that the discipline of building user interfaces is long lost and perhaps never to come back. From car dashboards to loud typography, the whole field is regressing. Minimalism, too much white space, infantilization of users, design trends, loss of predictability, etc. are all symptoms of this.
Definitely right. After 13 years of this I just find it really hard to care that much about X startup or tech company. My daily work is basically the same no matter where and what industry I'm at. Given some baseline of company quality. There is probably some upper echelon that I'm not smart enough or hard working enough or care about enough to break into - because it would require sacrificing too much of my personal life. And I don't mean your run of the mill FAANG corporations.
The quality of my work is better than ever but my caring is at an all time low. I still study new technologies and learn better soft skills and it's easier than ever with great resources and the perspective from experience. I've had my share of lottery tickets in startups and grinding away at bigger companies and what I truly want is like a 3 or 4 day work week.
Accounting firms and their partnership structure confuses me. Seems very archaic relative to corporate structures. Makes it hard to figure out who’s calling the shots.
When I go to the Canadian E&Y website, it says:
> EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.
> KPMG International changed its legal structure from a Swiss Verein to a co-operative under Swiss law in 2003[25] and to a limited company in 2020.[4]
Are they basically franchises? Is there some uber-partner at the global hq collecting massive commissions?
You'll see similar models in law firms. IMHO it's driven by two key elements in the business: An apprenticeship-like, up-or-out model for developing talent and a vested owner-operator class at the "partner" level.
These firms effectively operate as a collective for the benefit of the partner class. New partners must invest capital, ongoing partners get returns, and older partners retire with a terminal payout. Some partners may take on expanded leadership roles and get higher annual payouts.
The overarching legal structure is a sort of "modularization" to limit the liability of lawsuits and enable flexible operation. There is a usually a global partnership council that dictates universal operating norms and practices.
Again, fundamentally, it operates as a collective and international units support each other for collective benefit.
Well, it is not an exciting story really. I started from dropping out of university because I got children really early. I wasn't a bad student, but not the top 10 either. I studied physics (EDIT: dunno why I wrote psychology).
I got my first child, second. Then both my parents died, I found out my brother was a pedophile at the same time. He touched my child, I was truly alone now. That was the moment something broke into me. Like crack goes the clock work. I then decided to start a startup right in economical crash, I build an instagram like application. I got hooked on GHB during that time to deal with the pressure. I got my third child. The startup got funded, 1.5 million euros. I broke down, withdrawn and had to sober up within two weeks. I kept going on. The company went down, instagram was first and we lost the race. We even had some Russian oligarch visiting us to buy us, but oh well. Missed that boat. I was left with quite a debt and some problems with the tax office.
So I wrote myself out of my country, I went of the grid. If you write yourself out of the registers, they can't find you here. And it is not illegal. I also had a hash dealer invested in my company. So it was better to hide out.
Then I started up another company, a small game company, which blew up right into my face later on, while getting addicted to opiates and another child. I wisely switched to kratom, but I was clearly broken. I also picked up some bad other habits, like running a small designer drug thing. Well, I don't want to say to much about that.
Then I started to experiment with ketamine. Fun times, stopped the kratom and got a real job for once in my life instead of the cowboy behaviour. I was building search engines, it was not that hard actually and I learned the practicality of knowing how to read and apply papers. University still got something good into me, it learned me how to learn.
Fast forward a couple of years. I had stopped doing drugs altogether, except for snuff. My life was relatively peaceful, but boring. I still had some shadows of the past haunting me, like the taxes. I started doing ketamine once in a while again. It was fun. Then I had the first K-hole.
I stopped snuff and I started working out the next day. I dealt with the tax problem.
I am pretty fit now. I do ketamine once in the three months. And every time, I fix up a new problem I find out in my life. I am now working out the thing with my brother, what happened there.
See, I found the moment that happened I felt truly alone and simply stopped processing emotions and then my life devolved into utter chaos. I just soldiered on without feeling, marching and marching.
Now I am on my way to the top of the company I am in now and even if I fall out of it, I have a pretty good perspective. I am handling a complex merger of multiple platforms. I have time for my family, I learn my kids to shoot with a bow and do little projects with them.
Life is less hard and more fun. I am now planning to study again. And I care for both my nieces every week. So I even have some surrogate daughters too now. What can a man wish for? I only got boys to my dismay. And now I have to stop, because that is too much personal details and some people might pin me down. ^_^
That's it, ups and downs. I think ketamine normalized me, gave me a change to be in society instead of on the edge of it. It is a weird thing. And I don't use it all anymore. It is not needed.
Calvin and CRDTs aren't new, but I still think they're dramatically underappreciated! Heidi Howard's recent work on generalizing Paxos quorums is super intriguing, and from some discussion with her, I think there are open possibilities in making leaderless single-round-trip consensus systems for log-oriented FSMs, which is what pretty much everyone WANTS.
I'm also excited about my own research with Elle, but we're still working on getting that through peer review, haha. ;-)
The pattern matching algorithm was originally based on the algorithm described in `The implementation of Functional Programming Languages`, the 1987 edition (there are two versions, one is more basic).
No, prefrontal cortex is about planning, reasoning and inhibiting emotions (we do it all the time without realizing) among a lot of other things. Amygdala is based on reacting to fear, among other emotions.
CBT gives you a toolset to ask yourself questions to understand (a) which perspective you're currently looking things from and (b) which other perspectives you could use.
The 10 cognitive distortions and recognizing them is a good start. Cognitive distortions happen mostly through emotional processes (e.g. the amygdala but the whole limbic system really).
Mindfulness meditation is an emotional-based approach as it mostly relates (for laymen like me) to scanning the body. Scanning the body gives marked improvements to the insular cortex. It also gives marked improvements to the PFC (the inhibition part, not the planning part).
This is all written way too short and my knowledge is a bit stale on it. I used to be really into this a couple of years ago. It was during the time when I studied psychology (I even published a neuroscientific literature review :D).
Outside of the academic literature, it is quite an insular field, so you have to work to find interesting ideas. If you can make money, you probably won’t be sharing much with anyone. A notable exception might be Rob Carver’s blog (https://qoppac.blogspot.com/).
From a CS background, a simple path to see if you might enjoy “quant investing” is to read some old papers from e.g. AQR about factor investing (Momentum, Value) and try to implement it with Interactive Brokers or similar. You should be able to roll something together with very little capital.
On the “quant trading” side of things, try the Avellaneda paper for statistical arbitrage, do some digging about RenTech, read the LTCM book, etc etc. Not something you can do without a lot of infrastructure behind you, but there’s enough information around to work out if it’s interesting.
Having experienced something that seems to be similar, imagine that you are working on a web server. It is very slow sometimes. Your project leader is absolutely convinced that the problem is due to multiple requests being made to the DB at the same time. He has been lobbying to rewrite the DB layer for some time now. He hates the archetecture that was left to him by the previous lead developer and is absolutely sure that if he rewrites it, it will be much faster and easier to work with.
Unfortunately, you've been profiling the code and you've found that the there is an inordinate amount of time being spent allocating a date. It seems like the code is pathologically looping around and hitting that date code hundreds of thousands of times for every request. You've tried showing your lead the code that's causing the problem. He doesn't really understand it. He doesn't trust code profiling either. He already knows what the problem is and he's not interested in hearing any more. He ridicules you for having this stupid theory that allocating a date is slowing down the DB.
It's not that keeping the poor behaviour is benefitting him in any way. It's more that the new solution is not his solution and he's got a lot riding on his solution being chosen (justify his code rewrite). He's kind of staked his reputation and career with the company on his solution. If it turns out to be something else -- especially something he's already ridiculed, he'll be toast. He wants to get into management and management is all about politics and being right all the time (ever hear the President say, "Wow. I was certainly wrong about that!" -- and you can pretty much insert just about any President there... not just the obvious one ;-) ).
That's the way I see it anyway. Doctors, just like computer programmers work with complex systems where they are more likely to be wrong than right. I never trust people in these positions who don't know how to be wrong. But they/we are often placed in positions where we are not allowed to be wrong -- and some people handle those situations better than others.
> A lot of us got the message earlier in life that we had to wait for other's permission or encouragement to do things, when in fact, all you need is the ability to understand the situation and deal with the consequences