TheMagicHorsey

I see decisions of the same type being made in the suburbs around here all the time, and the prioritization is identical. I think the issue is suburbanites and small-town folks generally have not experienced a walkable environment and don't understand how pleasant it can be. They are usually ensconced in cars and go isolated from one destination to another without actually touching the community at all.

I was trying to advocate for bike lanes and no-through traffic for a few streets near our small town's historic center a few months ago, and I'm sorry to say, to the community, I think I sounded like a weird European hippy. Even though I'm totally not a hippy and I'm American-born. I'm as capitalist as you can get. But I still think if the state is going to make design decisions on our streets, we should make decisions that make our neighborhoods better and ultimately more inviting and valuable.

The main opposition to what I was proposing was coming from neighborhoods that must commute from further beyond the city center to get to the highway that connects our town to the nearest major city. We have other, faster, wider roads to get to the highway from all parts of our town, but there are people that are adamant that during rush hour, they must be allowed to potentially commute through the historic downtown, and residential neighborhoods, to avoid traffic jams.

I was trying to explain that the bottlenecks are always the main streets that have the highway on-ramps, but to no avail. People like having many potential, fast routes to the highway, and they are deeply uncomfortable with you removing some routes even if they rarely use those routes themselves.

In other words, occasional car use is more important than daily, frequent pedestrian use.

And where were the pedestrians during this town-hall? For whatever reason there were none. Or if there were, they were silent. I was trying to understand why nobody else was speaking up when there are so many bikers, kids, parents with strollers, walkers with dogs, etc., using these streets that will be impacted by bad decision-making, and my conclusion is that young active people, and those with kids, have no time to go to town-halls. And the kinds of people that do go to town-halls are weirdos with design fetishes, like me, and extremely ornery and conservative people who see any change in their town as an assault on the AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE by perverted European-hippy Democratic Degenerates (into which category I have unfortunately been slotted it seems, though I'm embarrassingly capitalist and libertarian).

I would not suggest this will be the median experience in America. My town has a fair number of MAGA lawn signs, American flags, lifted trucks, Punisher stickers, etc., in addition to the tech community. So its a very specific kind of mix. I'm sure those of you in Berkeley or San Francisco will have much better luck.

My community has some of the strangest dynamics you have ever seen.

I'd love to read a post-mortem from a SONOS engineer about what happened here so we can all learn. Has anyone seen any blog or Blind posts about this?

The part of China that is innovative is not communist. They have the most free-market labor market, the most free-market regulations in everything except media (which is heavily controlled by the state).

China is the most brutally capitalist society in the world, with a dictator sitting on top managing it at the margins and ensuring media will never be free and threaten the communist party.

I agree with you so much. There's many advantages to declarative and reactive GUI frameworks, but, god, they have so much "magic" going on at all times. Its hard to understand how the declarations get converted to pixels on the screen unless you spend a month digging through blog posts and source code to try and follow the trail of breadcrumbs.

I've made four broad transitions in my career over thirty some years. First I was a hands-on coder for about 5 years. Then I transitioned into tech sales for about two years. Then into leadership/management for four years. Then I went to law school and was a lawyer for about a decade. By then I made enough money to retire in a modest way (and I'm very modest in my lifestyle), so I went back to programming without any pressure. But ended up having to manage a team after a couple years because the project I was working on in retirement grew and needed more hands.

I'm hoping to retire again. And then I'll just work on something like a video game where I don't need to hire anyone else (outside of contractors for art).

What I've learned over the years is that you should never chase prestige and the opinion of others. I did that for too long. What you should chase is getting money by the fastest means possible, even if its something with no title or career prospects, if you can buy your freedom from the wage wheel. If you can jump off the wage wheel then you can do your own projects with freedom. And freedom to set my own calendar is the only thing that matters to me anymore.

It's always been close. But now, finally, I think it's really close. As in, I think I may still be alive when the first fusion power comes into the grid, even if I probably won't be alive to see the full dream of infinite cheap energy come true.

Its interesting to think about how our economies will change if the price of energy drops by one or two orders of magnitude.

Desalination could then be used for agriculture and industry. Coastlines could become more valuable.

We could make huge amounts of aluminum for almost nothing. We'd probably end up with aluminum packaging for everything as it's much easier to recycle than plastic if you don't have to worry about electricity.

Second this. My daughter is in 3rd grade and loves these.

I wish I could be the kind of bicyclist that puts brakes on his bike in this game. I could survive longer. Maybe indefinitely.

This seems unnecessary. Google's search business is being disrupted along different axes already ... LLMs, voice agents, Apple Intelligence, etc.

they did the testing, but those lab tests didn't conclude walmart was the best. That conclusion was based on supply chain speed.

This article seems to lack common sense. Yes, the amount of Vitamin C will reduce the longer you store a vegetable or fruit in a fridge, but the amount of calcium and iron does not change. Nor does the the density of other minerals.

Why is the author nominating Walmart as the winner based just on their speed to market? What about the other factors like soil degradation etc., which reflect the amount of iron and other minerals?

How did Facebook determine that Schrems was gay? Do they even know he's gay? Just because they showed him an ad for something that gay people would find relevant doesn't mean they targeted him for being gay. Its possible he likes a lot of stuff gay people like. I get targeted by advertisements for institutions offering degrees in Christian studies or some such thing, even though I'm an atheist. But say I was a Christian, should I then deduce that Facebook knew I was Christian and used that information?

They are just spraying and praying with their ads on best guesses as to what is relevant to you.

How is this a lawsuit?

Fair response.

Looks really nice.

But sometimes when I see projects like this in other languages, I think, are you sure you don't want to use Erlang or something else on the BEAM runtime and just call Rust or C via their NIFs?

I used Erlang about a decade ago, and even then it was so robust, easy to use, and mature. Granted you have to offload anything performance-sensitive to native functions but the interface was straightforward.

In the Erlang community back then there were always legends about how Whatsapp had only 10 people and 40 servers to serve 1 Billion customers. Probably an exaggeration, but I could totally see it being true. That's how well thought out and robust it was.

Having said all that, I don't mean to diminish your accomplishment here. This is very cool!

Salaries without skin in the game leads to failure. People just trade for their own benefit within and outside the system.

This is why institutions break down in the long run in any civilization. People like you, people of principle are drown out my agents acting exclusively in their own interest without ethics.

It happens everywhere.

The only solution to this is skin in the game. Without skin in the game the fraudsters fraud, the audience just naively goes along with it, and the institution collapses under the weight of lies.

They can "tell" employees all they want, but the engineers who really get stuff done are not going to get fired for working from home, and a bunch of them are choosing to stay remote ... or paying lip service to office days by promising to come in and then not showing up.

What are managers going to do with critical engineers who are delivering? Fire them? They will have another job doing their individual contributor work in a week. There's a real shortage of individual contributors with skills and the ability to deliver consistently.

On the other hand, if you are in one of those political mid-career positions that mostly involves communication, coordination, impressions, etc., then yeah, the org doesn't need you as much as you need the org so you better haul your ass back to work.

Not really. The utility of credentials is falling fast vs recommendations, networking, and work experience.

If you want to learn some deeper technical things, I suggest online one-off courses or online mini-certificates.

On the other hand, if you are still in one of the few remaining societies where credentialism is still rampant, then you may want a Masters for the prestige.

When we are talking about the elite 0.01% of students the professor is irrelevant for regular coursework. They are almost uniformly autodidacts. A mentor is of course useful at the very boundaries of knowledge that textbooks and papers don't cover. But by the time you are in that range of work, you will be recognized through your performance, and you can find mentors by reaching out to them with links to your work.

Generally, people are completely unaware of what top 0.01% of performance looks like because we are so rarely around these people unless we are in some very elite institution or working on some project which attracts such people.

I don't really think a Yale degree makes you better than someone with a community college degree. There's no magic at Yale. The education you get everywhere is pretty good now because of all the resources universally available to all students.

But Yale basically applies a filter function and attracts the top 0.01% of high school graduates every year (plus some less elite legacy students and DEI admits). When you hire a Yale graduate, that's what you are paying for. Not the Yale education. If you could find a similar filter function some other way, you'd hire that 0.01% of high school graduates via that filter function.

And in fact companies are always trying to get ahead of their competitors and find other, less well-known, filter functions to get high performers who others don't know about. In the 1980s and 1990s Microsoft was among the first to discover that Indian IIT graduates were products of an extreme filter function applied to Indian high school students (IIT grads are like top 0.0001% of Indian high school grads). For a long time Microsoft hired those engineers for cents on the dollar. By the 2000s though, the word was out ... hiring IIT grads is as difficult as getting any other high performing grads.

There was also a brief period of time when Google had an edge in recruiting by identifying high school kids who were good at programming competitions online and via contributors to projects in Google's open source projects. But now, that signal is well-known too.

So John's community college degree doesn't matter if John is an elite performer.

I did enjoy the article.

People forget how influential the architectures these guys came up with were in the industry a decade ago. Its great to read about the human factors behind the advances.

It depends on what stack you work on. There are thousands of these small shops with 1 to 50 devs, that just take on work from companies to do small outsourced IT projects.

From a Google search, these guys do Rust: https://ferrous-systems.com/

These guys do Flutter/Dart: https://flutterbountyhunters.com/

These guys do embedded systems: https://landing.witekio.com/embedded-software-development-se...

These guys do web stuff for corporations: https://pixelplex.io/web-development/

The way you get highly paid part-time work is by making a piece of open source software that's targeted at some niche vertical. Then you will get consulting/customization requests for that software and you can do that part-time.

Another option is to work for a consulting company that bills hourly. There are lots of those.

Is there an open, simple, handheld gaming platform that is cheap, and has good documentation so hobbyists and kids can make games for it?

I know people will say pick up a cheap Android phone. And perhaps they're right, but Android is not simple. It has so many things going on that you just can't write a C program and start playing with it. You have to learn a dozen Android quirks and deal with the Android operating system.

Is there something where you can just upload a program to flash and the device just boots into the program and you start playing?

As much as I love lisps, and I've written a fair bit of code in Scheme, Racket, and Clojure, I have to admit, when you are an immigrant in another person or organization's code, their specific abstractions, DSLs (macros), etc., can be very (VERY) burdensome to get up to speed on to even begin to start contributing to the codebase (much less debugging complicated issues).

On the other hand, there is a ridiculous amount of power in Lisps. Operating at a higher level of abstraction is like having magical powers. When you go back to programming in Go, you feel like someone chopped off one of your arms or legs.

On the other hand, to be fair to Go, when you are an immigrant in a Go codebase, everything is very easy. Turn this way ... oh I've seen this a thousand times before its an XYZ. Turn that way, oh, I don't even have to read that, I know what that is. Oh what is that ... oh its my greencard to this codebase, I can now fix bugs with confidence.

Coming from Adobe Lightroom, I found Affinity Photo to be unusable. But I eventually switched from shooting RAW to shooting JPG, and now I just use files straight out of my Fuji cameras. As a busy parent I can't be bothered to edit anymore. I just shoot and post or shoot and print.

Yo! This is awesome stuff!

I remember those days. I feel the same way as the author.

But I think the right place to find that same joy in programming today, is by building stuff with embedded systems. You can do a lot of fun stuff as a kid with an arduino, some components, and instructions from the Internet.

Yeah, maybe, but for the last 20 years there really weren't enough incidents to make it an activity that was too risky to do outside of some really security sensitive applications.

If China ever takes over Taiwan, America is so screwed.

Actually, there is such a scattered supply chain for semiconductor chips, that any war that disrupts international trade in a material way, would bring that entire industry to its knees. So many critical suppliers in the semiconductor supply chain are single companies, or single country oligopolies.