ahelwer

Prolonged periods of time spent without obligation to work for pay is one of the greatest luxuries you can have in this life. People shouldn't have to wait until retirement to enjoy it. Sabbatical, basically, although even sabbatical often comes with obligations for self-improvement serving the company offering it. A lot of discourse on working hours revolves around decreasing the hours worked per week. I would also like to see people talk about a right to take 6-12 months of unstructured leave after 3-4 years of service. Seems unrealistic? What is all this wealth and automation and productivity growth for, then?

The will of the majority of people in the military is irrelevant, because they don't call the shots. The military is not a democracy.

The purpose of the military is not to be an effective fighting force. That is, at most, a happy side effect. The purpose is to shovel as much public money as possible into the private companies comprising the military industrial complex. So your efficient-market-hypothesis-but-for-the-military idea is essentially just not even wrong.

You fundamentally approach social networks with a producer/consumer mindset. Which is great, for some social networks. Except consuming content isn't very social. People aren't friends with a performer on stage (I believe this relationship is derogatorily called "parasocial"). I like social networks that involve people I can viably interact with in a friendly way, not in a way that constantly requires them to perform for their audience. See popular twitter accounts complaining about reply guys or people trying to riff with them generally. There are plenty of these friendly interactions on mastodon, because you can literally have them with everybody! The platform doesn't suffer because self-styled creators don't use it!

> but understanding concerns of others (evidently) is not

Your concerns can be understood without being catered to. Not everything has to be fit for your purposes. The world keeps turning without your permission.

Look fundamentally this argument is pointless. If you like mastodon then use it; lots of people do, certainly enough to make it worthwhile, and arguing about whether it will fail is a pointless exercise in trying to predict the future. Whining about how it doesn't meet your standards doesn't matter. It isn't a product that a company loses out on profit by failing to sell to you. From our brief interaction here I can tell you the platform really isn't greatly diminished by your lack of presence.

Some people are fundamentally product-brained and fail to metabolize the concept of federated social media. That's fine, it's better without them.

> You can say "oh what a tragedy", but I'm easily in the top 1% of users on reddit with nonzero karma by either post/comment karma/number of comments/amount of text typed; so people like me are what keeps a platform alive.

I'm sorry but I audibly laughed when I read this.

Mastodon is where you go to hang out with friends, colleagues, and fellow hobbyists. You go there to have a good time and learn from others. People obsessed with building their personal brand or audience or upvote score embody much of what people hate about other forms of social media. The platform is much improved without them.

If choosing one of several instances requires too high of activation energy then that legitimately is a "you" problem. You've circumscribed your own abilities to such an extent that it limits you to centralized for-profit social networks.

> They lost me as a potential user

Since mastodon instances don't profit off of users (actually they cost money), this isn't really a tragedy. You're approaching mastodon with a customer mentality. This isn't a sale being made! Nobody is losing out on profiting off your time & attention! This is you choosing whether you want to keep feeding from the intentionally-insanity-causing trough of social networks that monetize attention.

Any indication that those who control the world's wealth won't voluntarily solve this problem implies that direct action, struggle, and hardship are required of us personally if we want a future worth living in. This is not a nice thought and it is understandable people want to look away.

Well, here's your more information: https://i.imgur.com/B2QBY6u.png

Fossil fuel investment has been climbing year-over-year. Fossil fuel companies aren't replacing existing infrastructure to taper out usage of fossil fuels. They are introducing and expanding with new infrastructure.

From the Bloomberg NEF 2023 Energy Transition Investment Trends report, which is incredible reading: https://about.bnef.com/energy-transition-investment/

As I said, money talks. I'd like to share a chart I saw a couple months ago that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was in the Bloomberg NEF Energy Transition Investment Trends 2023 report, which you can get emailed to you by filling out a form here: https://about.bnef.com/energy-transition-investment/

Since that's a bit of trouble, I've clipped this incredible chart for you here: https://i.imgur.com/OlMAKVd.png

This single chart completely inverted how I think about this problem and the leadership of western countries in world affairs generally.

One eye-opening fact I recently learned is that fossil fuel infrastructure being built today is expected to have a three-decade lifespan, after completion of its construction. So every time you hear about a new pipeline, drilling project, or refinery being built you know that the people sitting in the rooms authorizing billions of dollars being allocated to the project all believe it will safely be operating and producing profit 35 years from now; they wouldn't invest otherwise. This is what business as usual looks like. Every new fossil energy project is incompatible with a world that takes climate change seriously. Money talks.

"Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or a HN poster what they think we should do about the homeless in SF, Seattle, and Portland"

It sounds like all of these problems are completely invented by people who are not Cubans?

1. Cows, like humans, only produce milk after giving birth

2. These cows, in order to get pregnant in the first place, are artificially inseminated (and it isn't a very nice process)

3. What do you think happens to the offspring if it's male and thus uneconomical to keep?

The fact that these statements (which are incredibly obvious if you have an eighth grade education or higher) have to be spelled out is a testament to the power of the milk lobby that people think there are some bucolic scenes where farmkids go to milk Bessie each morning, who produces day in and day out without fuss.

Media literacy time, folks! Does the corporation have an incentive to lie about its reasons for closing this place?

> An update to our story on the REI closure: OB has learned that workers at the Portland store were actively working to unionize in recent months.

https://twitter.com/OregonBusiness/status/164849236952708300...

Alternatively, you can take this time to contribute to our lovely website's Weekly Homeless Hate Hour. I know how I'll be spending my time! Do you?

No, it would not. You avoid burnout by not having a full-time job in addition to whatever personal development you are pursuing.

There's no product you can buy that will make you a better software engineer other than time off from work so you can explore, learn, and develop according to your own interests.

Right! My original quip about children was more about financial constraints than anything. Not trying to shame you or anything, I think using the Amazon windfall to work on FOSS is absolutely the dream and one of the best possible ways you could have contributed to the world.

A lot of generalities don't really apply to you if you were one of the two other people building Amazon.com in Bezos' garage: https://www.wired.com/1999/03/bezos-3/

Sorry, I should have specified: my post was specifically concerning FOSS development. Of course people inside large companies developing proprietary software can attain a high level of knowledge about whatever field even if they have families, because they're working on it full time over many years and being paid for it.

Although it's unclear, perhaps you are talking about FOSS development (actually looking up Ardour from your profile, yes you definitely are). That's very impressive, then! So you did manage to juggle having a full-time job, FOSS development, and a family?

The key to understanding this world is that nearly everybody does these things full time for their own interest. Trying to accumulate this level of expertise on nights & weekends is an express train to burnout. On the other hand if your financial needs are satisfied (worked at FAMANG for a decade while being frugal, doing contracts for 1/3 of the year & being frugal, married a doctor, got into cryptocurrency early, donations if you're anomalously popular) and you're reveling in the joy of self-indulging exploration, learning, and tinkering without having to worry about giving an update at daily standup tomorrow, it's amazing what you can accomplish. Knowledge is cumulative. Within a few years many people could be at this level. This is part of why UBI is so popular within software engineering circles, because you really don't need that many resources to just be in it for the love of the game.

On the other hand having kids is basically anathema to being able to live this life. So you are choosing work (in a broader sense of term than conventionally used) over family.

Nobody in "the public" is losing faith in banks. FDIC covers everybody up to $250k. If you have more money than that and can't be arsed to split it up into multiple accounts that's on you.

I don't think it's nearly clear enough at this point to trust a politically-loaded statement like that, straight from the horse's mouth. There are a lot of ways to obscure this, through inflating the money supply or deferring costs for years or (most insidiously) moving risk around. The money is apparently coming from a special assessment on all other banks in the US; will the customers of those banks see themselves paying more in fees or earning less in interest as a result? Does this drain whatever reserves FDIC has, possibly requiring it to draw funds from the taxpayer in the future when something else bad happens? How does this affect the risk decisions made by other banks, knowing they will be backstopped by the public if, like someone with a bomb strapped to their chest, they promise to take everyone down with them? Apparently SVB was offering loans on very appealing terms to tech companies if they kept deposits at the bank. Companies made the decision to take those terms, accepting the counterparty risk in lieu of paying higher interest on loans from other, more stable banks. Over and over we hear that financial returns are justified because of the risks taken. So is that just a sham, then?

Well, the bar is in hell. Nobody should be using flat slab keyboards. They are objectively terrible for your wrists. Absent space constraints like inclusion in a laptop this flat design is a nonstarter.

I was recently bitten by this ghost of the past in the present day! Since the TLA⁺ project is trying to join the Linux Foundation, they've recently started enforcing Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) signing on all of the repos under the github.com/tlaplus org. The CI workflow started insta-failing on my PRs since none of my commits included a DCO. Fixing this isn't terribly difficult, github gives you a rebase command to run so you re-apply every commit locally with DCO signoff, then force-push. Then in the future you have to remember to run git commit -s -am "commit msg" instead of git commit -am "commit msg". The -s flag adds a DCO message to the commit.

Yes, I did evaluate an algorithmic approach similar to the grandparent's approach, although was thinking about it in terms of ruleset normalization (which I think is equivalent to the the algorithm described). I even put a good amount of effort into specifying the algorithm in TLA+! However, the SMT approach really was significantly easier. It also had wonderful second-order effects because learning how to effectively use SMT solvers has been very valuable for my career.

Oh hey, I worked on this a while back. At the end of 2021 I also did work for Teleport extending this same approach and applying it to Role-Based Access Control rules. This was interesting because it exercised Z3's string analysis capabilities, even checking regular expressions for equivalence: https://ahelwer.ca/post/2022-01-19-z3-rbac/

People get intimidated by the terms SMT or theorem prover but I want to emphasize this is actually a really simple process. Any time you have two sets of logical rules (often found in access control systems) you want to compare, translating them into Z3 is really quite easy. There are Z3 bindings in lots of languages, I used Python for the Teleport work: https://github.com/gravitational/rbac-linter

My friends and I have also used Z3 to solve various math puzzles. It's useful for checking whether a solution exists when you start modifying the puzzle to see how far you can push it. We used it for this puzzle, for example: https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Artic...

No, they say they do it for the change of scenery and nobody else is there.

You pay a few hundred bucks a month to rent a wework desk so that you have an excuse to commute somewhere?

I'm surprised that nobody here has yet pointed out that if you have the money for the alternatives, installing new long-lived infrastructure or appliances that directly generate emissions by burning natural gas is unconscionable. Adding new renewable energy sources to an electricity grid is significantly easier than replacing ten million natural gas appliances scattered around the country. And removing all of those natural gas appliances will unambiguously have to happen in a world that takes climate change seriously.

This holds true even if your current electricity mix involves coal or other things worse than natural gas. Those plants will have to be shut down within the lifetime of your appliance or neither thing matters very much.

They're predominantly owned by real estate interests, which is also why they bang on the crime & homelessness issue so relentlessly.