Dad, husband, and principal engineer @ https://wayve.ai. Anyone can break one computer, but if you want to break thousands of computers at the same time you need a professional. Also enjoys reading everything that's not nailed down and pixel art.
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The answer, of course, is that pass completion rates are low because there is ANOTHER TEAM TRYING TO STOP THEM. It's almost too obvious to say about football, but for some reason some people find it difficult to imagine that the Left fails because it is intentionally and actively opposed.
The one thing I wish we did have more of is the consequences of capitalism. I talked to a former coworker who has a rental property, and was mad about having to skip rent during covid. He wanted the government to pay him back. Nobody guaranteed your investment, my man! Sometimes you lose your money!
I think about it as, there are clearly places where market solutions do not work (the worst example I know of being health care), and it's reasonable to demarcate things as off limits from the market in those cases. I don't mind people making money but I mind deeply people being exploited to do it
BYD (out of China) had a prototype that they asserted could get 600 miles in 2021. I don't believe they've brought it to market but I imagine they could if they thought the demand was there
You Got Served
I read a story once about humans becoming immortal. The unintended consequence was that younger people never made decisions because they could always consult their elders and never had to think for themselves. I think about that all the time when I hear about tech oligarchs trying to live forever
I'd think much of Adult Swim would be suitable for this. Right off the bat I'd suggest Aqua Teen Hunger Force to meet your weird quotient, or Sealab 2021.
I am given to understand that the Chinese word "guanxi" encapsulates this practice, and I wish English would borrow it
This one is only for Blueskyers of a certain age.
"Rally J", am I right?
Whenever someone asks me how I "got good at computers", I always reply that I tried everything and remembered all the things that didn't work.
Man, I miss old Slack. It really was like nothing else.
This sounds insane to say even to me, but I firmly believe it's because the Gamergate thing stumbled upon the technology of efficiently coordinating and directing masses of people on social media to effect real-world outcomes. Once that genie was out of the bottle, it started getting used everywhere
First they came for the immigrants, and I did not speak out (because the message test performed at a low percentile rank compared to other messages in our testing bank for non college men who opt into online surveys through various consumer reward programs)
A columnist at the SF Chronicle thinks so
Words/phrases Democrats should never use: * bipartisan * my Republican friends * real, valid, legitimate, serious, important (to describe issue raised by Republicans) * yea (when voting on Republican bills) * distraction (to describe bad thing Republicans did) * woke (in derogatory sense)
Then the CEOs can't have their compensation approved until they allow (or encourage) their workers to form a union. I'm being flippant, I know there's lots of problems, but I tend to think relating CEO compensation to worker compensation is just going to wind up with them being paid in private jets
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Just make it so the union has to approve CEO compensation. Solves a bunch of problems all at the same time
For our first date I invited my now-wife to see Spellbound (2002), a documentary about the Scripps National Spelling Bee. When she agreed, I knew she was the one. (It's great, by the way, definitely check it out)
I imagine that's what all the ketamine is for
The fact that Twitter tried to automatically block white supremacist content, and then had to turn it off because it kept catching Republican elected officials, seems like it should have been a much bigger deal than it was
"I regret nothing!" from Shorts Vol. 1
"It was the peak of your civilization" hits harder and harder each year
Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" but tickets are allocated one for each dollar of wealth.
As I like to saw, law is a truce
I think the disconnect is the arbitrage between content that's cheap to produce and monetization that pays out in excess of that cost. The thing I've never understood is where that money comes from. Why do advertisers allow themselves to be milked to fund slop? Fix _that_ and this all goes away
"They won't stop until someone stops them" is obviously true and impossible to acknowledge. The implications tower until the mind flees into distractions. Like Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff but trying not to look down to delay the fall.
Something I wish we taught neurodivergent people more explicitly is that, if they're masking anyway, they can choose a different mask.
It'd certainly solve some of the UX issues with discovery and lists, presuming that each subcommunity would have its own feeds of members, prominent third parties, and other lists to follow.
AOC has made this point as well. I think a lot of people just genuinely don't realize there's a difference, much less how big the gulf is. Another casualty of everyone selecting into their preferred universe and never experiencing anyone else's point of view, I suppose.
I grew up in a not-nice neighborhood where the cops were neutral at best and ready to fuck up your life if they felt like it. Now I'm a grown-up and live in a nicer neighborhood where the cops are pleasant and helpful, but I never forget that they're not all that way and I'll always be wary.
Slightly diminish a band: Kilodeath
Power has two interesting attributes: * It's illegible until it's used (people may ignore your orders) * It can be used only to make people suffer (ordering someone to have fun is unnecessary) People need to make others suffer as a check-in to make sure they still have the power they think they do
Idiocracy, which I saw at a screening and talked up to my friends for ages until it came out in six theaters and vanished before anyone else could see it
I learned this lesson when a system I designed with good intentions and great care nevertheless got a thousand empathetic upvotes on reddit for somebody complaining about how horrific it turned out to be
I learned this lesson when a system I designed with good intentions and great care nevertheless got a thousand empathetic upvotes on reddit for somebody complaining about how horrific it turned out to be
There has never been a better time to draft language for an amendment to the Constitution for the complete public funding of campaigns, with the campaign premised on the promise that no one will ever be asked to donate another penny to a politician ever again
Number one, Ninjas are mammals; Number two, Ninjas fight all the time; and Number three, the purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.
My kids have been watching let's-plays of The Stanley Parable for a couple of weeks now. I would have thought they'd have gotten bored by now, but apparently not!
Mine is short: dignify every life. No people get chewed up and thrown away by the system, nobody is forced into an untenable situation through no fault of their own. A society that recognizes and cherishes the value inherent in every person and is aghast at the idea of failing even a single one.
The sign of the very best relationships is when you both think you're the lucky one who married up
Nobody on either side is going to win on "vote for me so nothing changes" again for a very, very long time
do you have thoughts on how to ramp engineers up on debugging unfamiliar systems? maybe even Strong Opinions™? @honeycomb.io is researching this right now, and i will hand mail a packet of our famous snarky systems stickers to anyone who can pitch in for 45 min. 🌈✨ app.lyssna.com/apply/604a21...
Literature of Modernization (computer science major). Complete left field, but I learned so much about both the history of automation as an idea applicable to CS work and the ways culture reacted to the Industrial Revolution that I see echoes of even today.
I think of this as having four parts. You have to own your mistake, figure out why you made it, figure out what _else_ you're still wrong about because of step 2, and then fix those beliefs. Saying sorry means nothing until you fix what was wrong with your heart that mislead you in the first place
I think it's a little like "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"; if they follow polls and get bad outcomes, their actions are justified and blameless, but if they go against polls and get bad outcomes, it introduces agency for which they can be held accountable.
I'm not sure it's possible to build a big new brand anymore, so buying existing ones and slowly bleeding off the brand equity is the only thing big money can think of to do. See also: Disney buying every entertainment IP, billionaires buying newspapers and media conglomerates, all private equity
I'm not sure it's possible to build a big new brand anymore, so buying existing ones and slowly bleeding off the brand equity is the only thing big money can think of to do. See also: Disney buying every entertainment IP, billionaires buying newspapers and media conglomerates, all private equity
This thread is pure, beautiful, cursed knowledge that no one should have to know. 🥹
Only people who have money and have a track record of giving it to campaigns are worth courting, you see
theeggandtherock.com taught me about cosmological natural selection theory which explicitly says that black holes are the birthplaces of child universes (and which thus implies that our universe is itself such a child)
My semi-regular reminder of a really important reality about cities, density, services and taxes. Any questions? Graphic recently cleaned up by @kathrynmathias.bsky.social. #CityMakingMath
Cory Doctorow's The Lost Cause is right up that alley, if you're interested
It's not an all-in-one, but perhaps you could get a Boox e-reader (which run Android, so you can use whatever apps you like) and pair it with a bluetooth keyboard?
To be honest, I haven’t trusted Stephen Colbert ever since he conveniently abandoned all his right wing views as soon as he got hired to host a network talk show
Plus, he's well known for teaching Sunday School
It seems pretty straightforward to me. Folks who believe everyone deserves dignity vs. those who would crush others to let themselves stand a little higher than everyone else. Peoples' contributions to society can be more or less valuable, but dignity is inherent, inalienable, and must be protected.
Cory's identified a key need. "This coalition needs a name [...] Almost all of our definitional terms are "anti-something," from "antitrust" to "antifascist." We have no end of words to describe what we stand against [...], but we still lack a word to express what we're for." I think it's Dignity.
Wrote a new blog post about what motivates me in my career, inspired by Charity Majors' far superior post about her own.
Wrote a new blog post about what motivates me in my career, inspired by Charity Majors' far superior post about her own.
We should be putting a gargantuan amount of money into solar and storage. War economy levels. It should be free to have a guy from the government solar your house up. Electricity should basically cost nothing.
sociabilitymaxxing
I think the management always hated having to treat tech folks with something besides utter contempt. The end of ZIRP meant they didn't have to compete on salaries with VC funding anymore, and the perks and facade of goodwill evaporated at the exact same scale and pace that new startup formation did
When a schoolteacher wants to show a video clip, it still takes ten minutes to fight with the tech, it's just YouTube now instead of VHS tapes. No central school video service, no integrated monitors, no AI, just an overburdener teacher trying to figure out which button makes it go
Whoever runs on the platform of "every company is legally obligated to have a prominent customer service phone number that must be answered within three rings by a human, no exceptions" will get approximately 113% of the vote
Even if the product doesn't support specialized forums, Life Finds A Way
Age verification? I had a favorite BBS and I still remember its phone number
I think there are two parts to programming: making a mental model of a problem that can be translated to computer instructions, and doing the translation. There's other ways to express that model than writing code; writing docs, talks, PR reviews. I wish we measured the modeling instead of the tasks
It doesn't matter if they are ever coming for you. It was always ever already too much that they were coming for anyone.
Get things done for people and make sure they know you did it. The modal representative _can't_ get things done anymore so all they have left is posturing. I'm proposing a model where reps _could_ get things done, so then they could do that. It used to work! In our lifetime!
I've come around to the idea that earmarks and other pork-barrel spending gave Congress a concrete, legible way to support their districts, and without them, all reps can campaign on is vibes and doubling down on intransigence. I guess bring back horse trading and bridges to nowhere?
Similar to how Patrick McKenzie says "the optimal amount of [credit card] fraud is non-zero", it turns out the wheels of governance need a little grease or else they grind to a halt (as we have observed)
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary" necessarily implies that government must account for our non-angelic nature. People are going to look out for themselves, and whatever we build has to accept that instinct and channel it to positive ends instead of pretending it doesn't exist
No better use of my time than helping other people acting in good faith. It yields compounding dividends (if folks I help can better help others, who can themselves better help others, the cost of my initial effort is dwarfed by the net benefits)
With earmarks, reps could provide concrete benefits to their districts and had reasons to negotiate. Without them, they can't actually deliver anything except vibes. And the only way to win a vibe war is to escalate your rhetoric (and there's no opposing force that encourages reps to back down ever)
Absolutely! I'm happy to ramble at length about basically anything. 😄
With earmarks, reps could provide concrete benefits to their districts and had reasons to negotiate. Without them, they can't actually deliver anything except vibes. And the only way to win a vibe war is to escalate your rhetoric (and there's no opposing force that encourages reps to back down ever)
In the mid 00s, earmarks fell out of favor and were mostly banned. They gave reps a way to provide concrete benefits to their districts. Without them, all reps could offer was rhetoric, and there was less reason to negotiate mutually beneficial compromises. This article explains in greater detail.
Turns out that earmark-level corruption was load-bearing in our system
If you ever think English isn’t a needlessly complicated language just remember that read and lead rhyme and read and lead rhyme but read and lead don't rhyme, and neither do read and lead.
It celebrates those people all those years ago, who in the face of impossible odds, gave to each other and their fellow citizens that grand and solemn promise: that a new and better nation would one day soon be born in that intolerable place, and by their own hands, and in their own lifetimes.
Elite journalists wriggle & wriggle & try & try but they can not escape the fundamental dilemma: journalism is, by its nature, supposed to be on the side of accuracy, against lies & liars, but the GOP is lies & liars top to bottom. And for reasons of power & access, journalism can not say so.
BILLIONAIRE: Lying Zohran Mamdani says that the rich have too much power. Here is the politician I have personally selected to be mayor instead.
I played sports my entire childhood and yes, there's a lot of people who consider someone else being better than they are to be a gross insult and incredibly unfair. On top of that, the more someone coasted on raw talent instead of putting in the work, the angrier they were when this occurred
American popular culture valorizes people who work with their hands and denigrates people who work with their brains. Anything the work-with-their-hands people value thus inherits that valor. It used to be stoicism and independence, now it's victimhood, but the mechanism of valorizing is the same
📢 GIVE PEOPLE SOMETHING TO VOTE FOR AND THEY WILL 📢
And the soundtrack and cinematic DVD, too! That was a great buy
There's actually a book about this (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superma...) and it _does_
But as things stands, this means that all other infill housing, from single-family homes on up to five-over-one apartments, are exempt from CEQA, without all the usual caveats or burdens. It's hard to overstate how much easier it could soon be to build housing in California.
“i’ll vote for trying any day of the week” is exactly it. this is, essentially, all people want. not empty statements about “working tirelessly” but evidential effort, even if it fails.
I think what establishment democrats need to understand is that most of us hate them all very much for being so persistently useless and shitty in our time of desperation and it fills our hearts with hope and joy when someone who might not be those things beats them.
crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their consultants
An edible, but you missed