afarrell

It also can be actively harmful to accomplishing the mission. It removes the sense of proportion needed to wisely weigh tradeoffs.

It suggests that people play out roles in the Drama Triangle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovrVv_RlCMw) instead of focusing on building things, solving problems, and helping each other learn.

In most cases, yes. Most.

As noted elsewhere, most of the money wasn't transferred via dogecoin. But reasonable financial transaction systems don't attract the advertising attention that this was able to.

Does that make it a good financial system? To the degree that a clown car is a good public transport system.

> Everyone deserves safe and clean public spaces.

There is a cost to this and that cost includes the coercive use of force to prevent that behavior.

> emblematic of many of the problems the US faces - "it's too hard to fix $problem_with_well_known_solution because of entrenched interests, so let's create this absolutely awful parallel system that creates a whole new world of entrenched interests who will in turn block any innovation".

This is what happens when you build a country with a disproportionate number of the sort of people who are willing to say "Fuck it. Building a decent living in my home country is too hard. I'm going to cross an ocean in a steam ship and start a new life on a new continent where I am a complete stranger."

I say this as an American who has made similar choices of questionable wisdom.

I have found one: Sending the Jamaican Bobsled team to the olympics. I highly doubt that this could have been done based on Postgres. Postgres is too boring and stable to attract the necessary attention.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/22/265060754...

People can have multiple motives. I have a two cousins who joined the army national guard. It is simultaneously true that they:

1. Enjoy shooting guns and driving fast.

2. Have an interest in protecting the US.

Oh I'm sure bad acting does occur. That is not the question at hand.

The question at hand is: Is a recommendation to use memory-safe programming languages evidence that those languages are less safe than we previously thought?

There are two competing notions:

A. This being announced now is evidence that the NSA has recently succeeded in finding a way to subvert the security guarantees of rust.

B. This being announced now is evidence that the good actors (or actors who want to appear good) in the NSA have finally gotten through the red tape to do what is nominally their jobs.

Thank you for translating the analogy.

You have far greater faith in the ability of a leader to create organizational alignment than I do. Are you sure there isn’t some part of the NSA which is on an ego-driven mission to prioritize national security?

It seems like the lesson is that if the company and its workers know that there’s always another project to work on next, then there’s no incentive to drag out this one.

The trick is to have a living room and a regular habit of hosting something like “Monday night in” where people come over and just hang out.

It is bad because it takes a problem and makes it much worse.

Focus on building relationships with people and mentoring them. Identify future potential cofounders.

Invest in other areas of your life.

That only works if you assume high-quality objectively-understandable information.

One thing that can help you articulate that part of you wants to say yes because X and part of you wants to say no because Y and part of you wants to still say yes because Z.

Writing out things into a journal is good because you can write things that wouldn’t make sense to someone else and therefore you can see reality more clearly.

The most frustrating thing about this discourse is the missing sense of proportion.

1. Starting things and setting them down does not make you a phony. It makes you easily-excitable. Thats okay.

You’d be a phony if you deceived someone, including yourself. You’d be a phony if you bought a domain, told someone “I’ll definitely have this site built by next Thursday” and wasn’t honest with yourself or others about your time-management error. Time management errors are okay, especially in hobbies. You’d be a phony if you were so unwilling to accept yourself that fear and pain pushed you to deceive yourself.

The emotion you’re feeling when you look at those 27 unused domains isn’t called “being a phony” it is called “embarrassment” and it is a normal human emotion. Avoid deceiving yourself by using emotion words to describe your emotions.

2. Someone telling you that you are a rockstar does not mean you are a phony. It means you’re talking with someone who fails to understand the importance of humility or wants you to wear a heroic Tony Stark costume to play out the Drama Triangle with them. Anger is appropriate to feel if someone pressures you to play along with their comforting self-deception. In response, you have a choice:

A. Find better friends. A good friend is willing try to see you for who you are: A person with some skills and some skill-gaps and a desire to learn.

B. Argue with them on behalf of humility and your need to be seen honestly. If you need a working relationship with them then you need to care about what constitutes that relationship. If it is respect for who you actually are, then they’ll be willing to call you an engineer instead of a rockstar. If it is their self-deception then the relationship is not trustworthy. You have a right to trustworthy working relationships but that right comes with a responsibility to speak the truth clearly.

C. Obsessively check your workspace for brown M&Ms and get swept up in disproportionate rage or terror if you find any tiny flaw[1]. If you let your relationships rely on you being a rockstar then you’ll set yourself up with no room for yourself or others to make mistakes. That is a neurological block to learning and deeply unkind to all involved.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/

A video game is a puzzle and it is fun to watch someone successfully manipulate a puzzle.

Live sports are with people and people don't like watching others be manipulated.

No, but it is very close to creating an intellectually friendly atmosphere for smart people who want to design rockets.

Right. I can control the rubbish in the natural environment. I cannot control the rubbish in another person's worldview -- only my own.

“Leave someone better than you found them.”

It led to me staying faaaaar too long in an unhealthy relationship, trying to cure problems that I imagined myself responsible for causing. Sometimes you need to forgive yourself and move on. The Pottery Barn Rule and the Boy Scout Rule apply to things, not people.

No, what you are feeling is the natural exhaustion that comes from being absorbed in drama.

The reality is that the situation is not an emergency. It is a slow-rolling problem that calls for sustained creativity.

Probably. It seems like something a veterinarian would know about.

This is a question of whom you trust more:

A. Random websites who have something to sell.

B. Random strangers spending spare moments of attention on a website about startups and software engineering.

C. Someone local to you who spent years in veterinary school and is now spending focused time in-person to care for a particular cat.

> similar focus … as the allies devoted to winning ww2

Given a choice between diverting attention & resources to alleviate a 1943 famine in Bengal and keeping transport ships available for the war, Britain chose to allow the famine. As a result, an estimated 2.1 to 3.8 million Bengalis perished.

If you want people to take your vision seriously enough to follow it, you’ll need to engage seriously with the horrors of what you praise. Please consider reading the book Slaughterhouse Five.

Governments across the globe are run by people whom I hope remember to be humble about their intelligence and moral wisdom.

Speaking as the son of someone who runs operations for the a federal district court, every ounce of the “violence” bit is covered by pounds and pounds of cultural norms and a fair bit of ritual as well.

Our aversion to violence is not new. In ancient Rome, it was sacrilegious to bring weapons inside the pomerium.

> At the core, all social structure is built on the threat of violence

Cripes. Nope.

If this was true, how do you explain backyard cookouts, pool parties, trick-or-treating, or Christmas present exchanges?

How do you explain folk dance festivals, buskers, and non-royal weddings?

How on earth do you explain hugs?

Or at least raise the salary cap alongside seniority for roles beyond a certain level.

First, get yourself set up with sources of feedback that can let you play around with things safely and get rapid feedback. This could mean setting up a sandbox environment. This could mean finding someone more experienced and asking, “Hey towards the end of the week can I walk you through what I’m building and you let me know about the implications of things?”

For now, I’d argue they should be regulated by the people working on them. OP’s complaint should be ignored.

And yes, hammers are regulated by non-government adults to the degree that people cannot figure out how to handle the consequences of using them.

Paternalism is me telling you what to do with your work.

Those who are silent are largely humble or uncertain.