Zanneth

This is a truly horrible thing to say about another human being.

Not a fan of renewable energy?

Still mostly staying in Silicon Valley. Plenty of companies are still hiring. Laid off Meta employees with good skills will not have problems finding another job in the same area.

My latest passion is cheating at solitaire.

One of my favorite hobbies is reverse engineering and modding video games, old and new. Zachtronics recently released a bundle of solitaire games collected from all of the wonderful games they released over the last couple years. I built a program that injects code into the game, reads the game's memory to find the board state, and passes that into an automated solver. I also figured out various ways to trick the game into thinking that the board has been solved.

Reverse engineering games is incredibly fun, and you can learn a lot as well!

> They laid off 25% of the workforce so at least 25% of Twitter will be affected.

That's assuming that those 25% were actually putting in work at Twitter.

The problem was that these medical officials were complicit in the economic destruction. They recommended to policymakers that the country take an extreme position on the virus and shutdown nearly everything. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but now it is becoming clear that such an extreme reaction was not necessary, especially when comparing with countries like Sweden who focused on protecting the elderly and vulnerable and more or less left everyone else alone. So, they made a mistake, and the fact that they also profited from that mistake is where we should be worried.

Because they don't have to suffer in public and deal with the shame.

I'm saying that it sounds like they are suffering equally in both environments, so living in a place where it is hidden is a net benefit for everyone.

"Hiding the poor" versus "letting the poor suffer in plain sight" doesn't seem to matter, then. If it was true that oblivious poverty resulted in more action being taken to help those in need, we wouldn't have a homelessness problem in San Francisco. Clearly that is not the case, so I'd much rather live in a place where it is hidden.

Whether they exist or not, the fact that the normal working population don't have to see or deal with it sounds like a significant upgrade.

Where in the article did it specifically criticize China?

I really like the work being done on this project and I want to keep up, but the voice is like nails on a chalkboard to me. I can't listen to more than two seconds without closing.

Can’t be worse than “Rustaceans.”

There are so many sad, defeated looking people walking around SF. Lots of people still wearing masks, not going out, role playing like we are all still in 2020. This isn't the case in practically any other city in the U.S.

SF needs to adopt a positive attitude change in order to rebound like NYC did.

There is a huge problem with productivity at my company. Unfortunately too many people just took advantage of the flexible work arrangements offered by the response to the pandemic. What is even more frustrating is that people refuse to own up to it. Most of them pretend to be busy and overworked while conspicuously putting in the bare minimum every day.

Remote work obviously has its advantages but I’m starting to believe that it is a privilege that should not be granted by default to the entire workforce. Perhaps it makes more sense to only grant it to exceptional employees who have already demonstrated significant value to the company.

Swartz recommends reading books or long-form essays instead, and I agree. It doesn’t even matter if they were written recently. Like I said earlier, barely anything about the human condition has changed in the last hundred years. For example, I recently read “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius. Even though it was written over two thousand years ago by a Roman Emperor, you could almost mistake some parts as being written two days ago by a millennial. There is an infinite amount of wisdom and knowledge to be gained from some of these old works that is impossible to earn by just reading the news every day.

Aaron Swartz wrote a blog post about the news[1] and just how terrible it is for the brain. Reading his post had a major impact on me—since then I have always thought differently about the time I spend online.

It’s interesting how people, including myself, try to justify various addictions. How am I supposed to stay informed about important topics without the news? How do I know how to help people in need without knowing what’s going on? There are much, much better ways than reading CNN/NYTimes every day. Also, there really is nothing new about the human condition today compared to a hundred years ago.

[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

Wikipedia's "Portal:Current events"[1] page is a relatively good source of news that is boring/balanced.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

> If I would by the new M2 with the new MacBook Air: Same problem would doom the complete hardware. And I would have been stuck with the OS that Apple deems I can have.

There is nothing preventing you from installing an alternate OS on AppleSilicon Macs. Apple supports this officially via something called Apple Secure MultiBoot.

I had the same reaction after listening to his interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast. He actually seems like a humble and thoughtful person.

Seems like an intuitive correlation, but some of the most productive people I know use just a laptop with a small screen.

Do you think it is better for the environment for all of Apple's tens of thousands of employees to heat or cool each of their homes individually rather than in one large eco-friendly office? How about everybody preparing their own meals for lunch, using natural gas or electricity, instead of using the company cafeteria?

I don't think you can definitively say that remote work is better for the environment given all of the other variables.

As someone who was born in the U.S. nothing makes me more grateful to be a citizen than hearing stories like this from my colleagues. Fascinating story, and a wonderful happy ending!

Commuting is not the only part of work life that has an impact on the environment. It is dramatically less efficient to heat/cool thousands of separate homes throughout the day as opposed to one large office building. Remote work could actually be much worse for the environment.

A majority of the work on M1 was completed before the remote work arrangements started.

(Source: I worked on that project at Apple.)

He is a big source of inspiration for a lot of people, especially those in the science and tech industries. Not just anyone can build multiple successful companies, let alone ones that work on hugely ambitious problems.

Maybe you don't fully understand the issue then. If you did, then you should be able to argue both sides thoughtfully.

I have a print of one of Liam Wong's photos[1] hanging in my living room that was taken at a place called Kawasaki Warehouse. It was a giant multi-story video arcade in Kawasaki that was themed after Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. Unfortunately it closed a couple of years ago, but it was by far the most surreal and cyberpunk place I've ever visited.

[1] https://www.liamwong.com/neon-warehouse

In the U.S. public schools offer students all kinds of extracurricular activities that cost the families either very little or nothing at all. I attended a low- to middle-income public elementary and middle school where I was able to practice violin for several years, and it didn't cost my family anything.

Most of the studies I've seen that evaluate productivity are based on surveys given directly to the employees. I imagine workers have a lot of bias when asked to evaluate their own productivity, especially when there are significant personal benefits from working at home.