Mizoguchi

We had a sales pitch by a MS partner and they made it sound like provisioning/ migrating services to gov cloud was seamless. It makes sense there is overhead involved from compliance. Two years to pivot seems pretty crazy though.

Doesn't Azure have a separate cloud exclusively for the US goverment? If so why would they use the commercial one?

Indeed

As part of the settlement with the US over the emissions scandal, Volkswagen agreed to invest in developing Electrify America.

What they did was to subcontract with multiple vendors who could not agree on integrating their sloppy systems, so we ended up with unreliable EV charging stations running on different hardware and software managed by multiple companies with complete lack of oversight by the federal government who now wants to throw another $100M at it so the money can be stolen again.

Here https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1817407116

Considering the hostile takeover of Twitter, the layoffs, lack of leadership and Elon pulling cables out of servers, the platform has been working exceptionally well, at least in my experience. Either it was built like a tank or some of the people working there are extremely competent. To be fair is not like Twitter has never been prone to issues. I'm an old enough user to remember the fail whale and many of the great outages of Twitter's first decade. It didn't became stable until maybe 5 years ago and even recently just prior to Elon coming in they had another hours-long downtime.

Lack of domain knowledge usually increases the amount of management you need too.

In software development for example your teams become much larger because you made the wrong decisions by not understanding the scope and requirements, selecting the wrong stack and tools and hiring the wrong people.

So now you need more management all the way from HR to procurement, engineering, support and legal to brute force your way into delivering.

And all these salaries and benefits need to be paid which means now there's less money to hire and retain qualified engineers and to invest in improving your products and services.

Once an organization falls in this cycle is very hard if not impossible to change, it becomes part of the culture.

"The right side version has extracted functions from an arguably worrisome implementation on the left"

Not amount of linearity and abstractions, or silly comments, can make bad code readable. I see this stuff at work all the time. To my team's defense I deal with a lot of chemists and physicists who like to write their own algorithms.

Comments are meant to pass information to readers about rare cases that may not make much sense at first but have a reason to be.

This is to avoid the introduction of bugs by tempting someone to refactor or "fix" your code.

A properly written code, with good naming conventions for parameters, variables and functions should be easy to understand without comments.

I should not need anyone to tell me the next few lines will

//Heat oven

That should be self explanatory by just looking at the code itself.

Let's heat up the oven then check if the pizza is baked.

Reminds me of Ep 123 of Darknet Diaries.

The way some diamonds (say a 2 carat round VSS1) refract light is pretty damn spectacular, no other rock or material can match it, so that may be a reason why some people want them.

"Do We Really Know That Cats Kill By The Billions? Not So Fast"

https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we...

As a once H1B holder I can confirm this is actually a common practice not only a FAANGs but pretty much any large and medium size tech corporation in America.

The visa is not the actual problem but the green card promise and process.

It took me 6 years to be "free" and that's considered pretty fast compared to my Indian colleagues many who are still waiting more than a decade later.

One of the teams I work with today is about 90% Indian, most from great schools like CMU, many overqualified for the job they do, all trapped in the green card promise making 1/3 of what they could be making somewhere else.

If something is banned by Meta it must be criminal or at least unethical. Meta, the paladin of data privacy.

We already have very good therapies and drugs to successfully treat addiction. The problem is you need to force an addict to seek treatment and once in make sure in completes it, which can takes months and years. This is a monumental task for someone with the resources and caring, supportive family/friends. For someone sick, broke and living alone on the streets is just not possible and psychedelics is not going to change that.

This would only be possible if you are treated by professionals. An addict whose brain is soaked in nasty chemicals will never voluntarily seek treatment even if it was freely available, let alone come up with a plan by themselves to use psychedelics to sober up.

Growing up in a communist regime I'm all in for democracy and freedom. Having experienced drug addiction while having a graduate degree I also believe regulation of drugs and alcohol is necessary. You think you are in control until that one day when you take it too far. If you don't have a strong support system of relatives and friends and access to good health care, there's no coming back from that hole.

This is exactly the type of policies you need to address a drug epidemic.

With China and India successfully launching space missions a permanent human presence in the moon and possibly Mars is a matter of time, likely happening in the next decade. This is critical for both science and national security, anything from future interplanetary exploration, mining and development/testing of new materials.

People in underdeveloped nations are also unfit. Mexico has chronic obesity among children, among the worst in the entire world. 1/4 of the Brazilian population is obese. Almost all islands in Polynesia, Micronesia and the Caribbean have more than half of their population obese. There's also a lot of anxiety and depression in underdeveloped nations where you have to struggle to get the most basic things like water, electricity and food, deal with crime, gangs, brutal dictators and war. Just because you don't see mass shootings and suicides it doesn't mean people from many of these countries don't deal with extreme levels of stress, anxiety and mental disorders on a daily basis.

As member of an underrepresented group I would say stop over thinking about how you can help us. Just treat us equally, not worse not better. I personally cringe at people trying to make me feel "represented". I get it, you are trying to do something positive for me (and for yourself, let's no pretend it is not about you also) but if you are not careful you may end up annoying me and even doing/saying "racist" stuff, and 9/10 times you will. Like this super nice dude at work invited me to eat spicy food because he thought all Latinos like spicy food like Mexicans, or these guys at a bike shop near my home giving me a discount for being brown so that I could afford biking, despite the fact that I have a little fortune in pro mountain bikes in my garage.

Expecting to pay as low as $80K for an on-site senior engineer at Anduril (author is a Co-founder) is not helping the cause to drive the brightest to pursuit good quests.

If the recall is more expensive than the possibility of mass lawsuits, then Tesla will leave the owners deal with the issue.

To be fair, this is typical behavior of any automaker, not just Tesla.

I myself had my ordeal with Honda over a poorly designed auto braking system on a new $40K vehicle that almost got me killed.

The response I got from Honda both the dealer and service was pretty much the same, we checked the computer logs and didn't find anything wrong with the car so it is safe to drive.

I decided to trade it in for a Toyota and take a $10K loss.

A couple of years later there was a class action lawsuit for the same exact problem I had and eventually a settlement, obviously Honda never acknowledged any wrongdoing.

Shortly afterwards my Toyota got recalled for the airbag malfunction after many people got killed or badly injured.

First buyers I believe got autopilot for free in some versions (I know for sure the X owners did) as well as unlimited charging. Still even those who paid for it, $15K isn't a fortune for everyone, particularly those throwing $80-100K on a car.

That's true.

However that means you also have a lot more opportunities that better fit your skills and experience.

We should also not underestimate the value many people give to life quality.

I personally find commuting extremely stressful and unhealthy and there's no realistic amount of money anyone could offer me to drive 40-60 hours every month to go to an office.

Even if the money is good I would rather take a big pay cut and remove expenses, eat more at home, buy less clothes, downsize my home, etc.

Of course for many, particularly those jump starting their careers, this may not be an option as gaining experience and paying loans should be their number one priority.

Personal observation.

1/3 of my network is not going back to the office with their current employer. They got rid of their leases and invested in infrastructure to support remote work for the next decade.

Another 1/3 are a mix of wfh and hybrid, with the wfh group already being notified they should expect to be hybrid in the near feature (my wife included).

The last group was already given the order to return to office or get fired, some did but some remain defiant, this includes a couple of friends from Amazon thousands of miles from Seattle who are expecting to be axed any day now, although it may never happen.

So I believe at the end about half of my network will be wfh permanently.

That seems to me like a critical mass to trigger a "revolution".

How could anyone stay at their current job having to commute to an office knowing half of the people they know don't do that?

This is like being ok at your current job when they don't offer something as basic as health insurance or PTO.

I would be constantly looking for a new job that allows wfh and eventually I will find it.

A LTO8 30TB tape with 30 years archival life is $60

A 5GB gold DVD with 100 years archival life is $10.

A safety deposit box in one of the largest banks in America can be as little as $30/year.

IMO, both the bank and the data in the dvd/tape have more chances of survival in 100 years than WordPress.

Working as a consultant means I literally have no days off. I also don't like to carry customer laptops with me when hiking somewhere in Patagonia. So my ultra light travel workstation became my Samsung Galaxy S22 phone paired with an Anker USBC hub with HDMI and a Planck by Drop (and a few cables). All I need is a TV which I usually find anywhere I go. With Samsung DEX I have a full desktop experience with functioning keyboard and the phone itself becomes my mouse. From there I can VPN and launch a RDP session to access a development environment. Outlook and Teams work natively in DEX.

I used to stand on the front seat with my mom driving (she was a terrible driver btw). She also took us kids once on a road trip around the mountains at 12000 ft elevation, lots of snow and exposed roads. This among other negligences unrelated to driving. A true miracle we made it into adulthood.