20,066 karma · joined October 10, 2011
British work culture: spend 7 hours at work socializing, 2 hours at the pub after
French work culture: spend 2 hours at work socializing
Japanese work culture: spend 12 hours at work with your head down not working, then 5 hours at the pub
But the reality is that more websites than not these days will send you many megabytes of JS, mainly for the purpose of tracking you and extracting money/time from you, under the guise of “user experience”.
So when I see some of those rare people who still actually care about quality, speed, performance, accessibility, etc I make sure to appreciate their work.
thank you
If you’re talking about the phenomenon of some species depleting the resources of their environment, harming their population in the long run, that’s not a phenomenon unique to humans.
Machine translation, to put it mildly, is utterly hopeless at context and nuance. I've had Google spit out very racist/sexist results from innocent source text. The fact that it's so confident about what it shows, and that the engineering teams working on these products have very little modesty, means that people treat it as a source of a truth.
A future where you have no clue if what you are reading is something written by a human as-is, or went through machine translation and might have nothing to do with what the original author intended, does not put me at ease.
Yes, some N64 carts are selling for thousands on eBay - but that’s not preventing kids from playing that game if they want to.
Alexey: Yes, I am not sure I don’t remember me saying it back in 2008, but I could sign this work now.
Matt: What do you not like about it?
Alexey: Basically, if it is just a very small piece of software which young guy need to show off came up and tried to please his friends, that is fine. It might be free, but generally the good games as the result of very hard work of several people, I just don’t understand why those people should work for free. It never happens in this world you know? So it is very honest and normal work, which doesn’t make anyone immediately millionaire or anything like that. it is a hard job, which needs to be compensated and the price of, and smile small price of the game should make it. I feel it is absolutely normal and proper way to develop this stuff. So people don’t, somehow people are rigid to pay kind of 4 dollars for small couple or few and then do it for 10 minutes, but they have trouble to pay kind of half of this price and get 3 or 4 hours of really good time with the game. That is ridiculous.
15 years ago, there weren't any "programming bootcamps" or "entrepreneurship workshops" or "become a UX ninja in 7 days crash course" to the extent that there is today, Harvard MBAs didn't give much of a crap about working in tech, computer science students were there for the nerdy stuff, not because they wanted to be the next Zuckerberg.
There just isn't much risk left in tech. The path is that now you start a weird crypto startup (which aren't even that weird anymore because there's dozens of them) while you're comfy at Stanford, you hope to get a fat check before you graduate, and if not you go work to Google. Or you quit Google, start your company, get some investment because you were at Google after all, and hopefully a few years later your startup gets bought by Google.
Tech startups just aren't weird and new and unknown anymore, as far as the money people are concerned. Does it fit their idea of what a company on its way to a billion dollar valuation looks like? If yes write a check, if not tell them thank you and let the next team in.
The fact that modern practitioners in your geographic locale of choice aren't as bigoted as their more literal brethren doesn't mean much, except perhaps that there is hope in undoing the more harmful superstitiousness of religion by raising quality of living (for all, regardless of faith).
They make money by selling you an identifier that gives you access to their network for ~$10-$20. They have 2^32 identifiers so they expect to make a lot of money.
Keep in mind that this identifier doesn't mean you "own" or "control" much, as it is folded under a parent identifier of which there are only 2^8, all controlled by the original Urbit creators/their associates.
The rest is a semi-interesting mix of distributed systems + crypto ideas as other commenters have tried to summarize; there are other, less indecipherable, projects with similar ideas.
They have 2^32 “planets” (a UUID that you can use to interact with the Urbit network), that they are each trying to sell for ~$10-$20 on a cute “exchange”: https://urbit.live/
(Of course you don’t really own anything when buying a planet because someone else owns the “star” and the “galaxy” and you can’t buy those unless you’re friends with them)
They even have a nice pyramid diagram for their not-pyramid-scheme:
https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/value-of-address-s...
I wonder if there are ways to design software such that we can get visualizations like this generated from the code "for free". It could definitely be really useful when diff'ing code, or even just for general communication in meetings etc...
Perhaps there are some academic/esoteric languages that do things along those lines?
Well, we can probably bring in foxes or something.
As a long time seller/buyer I’ve developed a set of heuristics around eBay (most of them obvious - avoid non US based accounts, descriptions where the photos are clearly not the actual item itself, etc) and I’ve only had one or two bad surprises in over 10 years. Both times customer support came through.
As far as my own body goes, I have no problem working and focusing while drinking a beer. For coffee, I may have to wait until the caffeine buzz subsided before I can really focus again.
The way you get better at this is by doing it, a lot. Every time you read such an article, or some one relays such information to you, run the math through your head as much as you can. Make notes of the things you don’t know that prevent you from pushing the thinking further, and methodically learn about those. Don’t think of yourself in terms of particular labels - eg “I’m not much of a physics person” or “I’m a software guy” - your job is to understand the world, solve problems, answer questions.
It’s a constant effort and it’s not easy. It helps to surround yourself with others with the same drive. It helps to teach, as it forces you to constantly reassess the fundamentals, and the common mistakes beginners make (see Feynman’s writing on that topic).