- rdiddlyJust going by their HN profile I'm betting it's https://allaboutberlin.com/
- Yeah, a blog isn't just a place to quickly jot things down, it's actually work. And because it's work, and it's optional, you sort of have to feel like it's "the work you should be doing," or at least part of or ancillary to, "the work you should be doing," or else it will just feel like busywork, and/or get postponed indefinitely. Posting on an existing platform is lower-stakes. But then again, if you end up putting lots of effort into posts on an existing platform, you're still doing most of the work, and one could infer that you care about it at least that much. In those cases I would recommend doing the initial setup of an actual blog etc., which is just a one-time operation pretty much.
- It gives me hope for the future to see the young'uns recognizing instances where progress isn't necessarily progress. If you oversimplify audio history as 70s=vinyl, 80s=cassettes, 90s=CDs, 00s=MP3s, and 10s=streaming, they've parted ways somewhat with the current moment and gone all the way back to the 70s. Ironically as an older fart myself, who once owned numerous records ("vinyls" is a newer term), and later cassettes, and later CDs, I guess I eventually decided I'd had enough authenticity and converted the whole lot to MP3s and stuck with that when streaming came around. So when I parted ways with the now, I only went back to the 00s, and that was mainly to retain control/ownership rather than having yet another damn algorithm mediating my experience. It's a sweet spot for me - maximum convenience while not giving up intentionality.
- As of 1816 UTC, every top-level comment here talks about Rob Pike. But read the footnotes: It's not about Rob Pike. I'm not accusing anyone, but the shallowness is consistent with and reminiscent of bots. And being so doggedly against Rob Pike in particular, reminds me of someone who has been betrayed. Did he betray you? Are you Google? Do you pay Pike and believe money can and should buy loyalty? Is the wrath of a thousand particularly sophisticated bots reserved for such traitors?
- Portland OR has "Vantucky" (Vancouver WA)
- It's all rather dumb, but your examples are really counterexamples, because a watt is sadly not something most people understand. One would at minimum need to have passed a physics class, and even that doesn't necessarily leave a person with an intuitive, visceral understanding of what a watt is, feels like, can do. I appreciate my older Samsung phone that just converts it into expected time until full charge. That's the number that matters to me anyway, and I can make my own value judgment about how "super" the fastness is. But I do agree with your point and would be pissed if they dumbed it down to Later, Soon, Very Soon and Super Soon.
Speaking of time and timestamps, which I would've thought were straightforward, I get irked to see them dumbed-down to "ago" values e.g. an IM sent "10 minutes ago" or worse "a day ago." Like what time of day, a day ago?
- I still don't see the problem. You can criticize things you're part of. Probably being part of something is what informs a person enough, and makes it matter enough to them, to criticize in the first place.
- What makes you think platitudes are always dishonest, first of all? Your writing sounds like fuckin' AI, so I wouldn't complain if I were you. "Beggars can't be choosers." Also, "You can't always get what you want." I will respond in platitude format.
1) Effort still correlates with outcomes, it's just that there is some random noise in the signal. Maybe moreso in these noisy times.
2) DID any of what she did matter? If she enjoyed it or found it meaningful, then yes. If it was just being "sensible" a.k.a. grinding and bald careerism, then no, even if she weren't laid off.
3) She's young. My first layoff, I took it hard too. By the third or fourth one, I would laugh and look forward to a small vacation of coasting on unemployment.
4) Ordinarily a post-college-age kid with a job is living on her own and you wouldn't have access to her crying moments. And another primary emotion alongside despair would be anxiety about making rent. It's painful to watch your kids suffer, but suffer they will and suffer they must.
5) Continuing from point 2, does she have a meaningful hobby? She needs to start one. If only to provide a break from the unhealthy amount of grinding she sounds like she's doing. Try music, a lot of engineers are good at music. I'm good enough at it that I was once able to support myself on it, and now see my day job as something I can leave, something I tolerate but am too good for. My genius is not defined by it. It's only work.
6) Celebrate Christmas the way all half-assed unprepared people do: Big feast at the Chinese restaurant tonight. Or Thai, I guess is the new Chinese. Pretending everything is okay? Who fucking died? Everything IS okay. A little perspective would go a long way and you're the one who needs to provide it.
- I want nothing to do with Waymo or any of the others, but they're all being forced on me. I think self-driving cars are one of the biggest and stupidest misallocations of resources and talent we've seen yet. And they're being developed using public resources that we all own (yet I never had a chance to vote on it) for the benefit of a private company that only those with enough disposable income can buy into. I don't happen to own any of their stock, so I'm not seeing any benefit. Why would I care how well they're doing? And they helped themselves to my roads as a testing ground; why would I afford them the slightest slack when they mess up? Meanwhile the people who can least afford to buy in, are actually living on the streets where these are being tested and are shouldering a disproportionate share of the risks. So it only takes mere inconvenience, or their mere existence, to bother and annoy me, not human harm. It's a machine designed to steal from the commons. And actually in tort law, theft IS harm. But physical harm to humans has also happened and will happen. Cars driven by humans: same, except also having a lengthy history that includes documented physical harm to humans. They too are machines for stealing from the public to advantage the owners. The things being stolen are clean air, climate, land/space, and safety/life. So my argument is fully consistent. There are exceptions in it for trucks, trains and buses, and even for some cars, in cases where the benefit offsets the harm, and the public has meaningfully approved it.
- Just stopped in the middle of traffic for no reason? Approximately zero.
- So this makes it desirable for someone's robots to block roads during an emergency?
- I was actually wondering more about the people whose streets they are. Didn't mean to indicate that I or anyone cares what HN thinks.
- I've seen plenty but about the wrong things.
- No one seems sufficiently outraged that a private company's equipment blocked the public roads during an emergency.
- Apparently school didn't already suck enough, and needed to suck more. With each passing year it's more and more like prison.
- Yes, that's how I solve all problems. I can't do anything now, because I didn't do anything before. It's my rule of thumb. Never start doing things!
- The point is that it's an ad. No company spends money on a joke just to make a joke. Not the end of the world, although it's interesting that all the end of the world stuff comes directly out of that joke and its universe as it were. Take the joke seriously and extend its logic as far as it will go, and you get the end of the world. It's a thought experiment, or that's how I read it anyway.
- None of those figures are what the engineer makes, they're costs. And they're illustrative, not literal. You won't pay everyone at the same rate either for example, and not all will be engineers either, and I totally left both those facts out of it. Oh no! And also omitted the fact that a company whose vision and ideals people agree with can hire said people for less money, which again brings us back around to the point that the vision might be more important.
- There are about 800 unique weekly committers to the Chromium project, so that's a start at gauging the number for that project. A little harder to find that same figure for Firefox, but Wikipedia says Mozilla Corp had about 750 employees as of 2020.
Anyway, if you have $50M, you can afford 500 people at $100k, or 250 people at $200k. So you simply declare, this is how many people it takes to make a browser, and set your goals and timetables accordingly. I feel like the goals and direction might be more important than the number of bodies you throw at it, but maybe that's naïve. But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.