bambataa

That seems like a really odd conclusion to draw. I’m not aware of anyone arguing that psychedelics turned non-artists into great artists. Of course the competence comes first.

The Beatles were highly skilled musicians before taking drugs, but it seems reasonable that attempting to recreate the psychedelic experience on tape pushed them towards new sounds and techniques that they wouldn’t have otherwise tried.

Why? They can still go and watch all the football games they’ve paid for.

Being outraged that they’re not allowed to drink beer during a football match in Qatar is more an indication of their alcohol dependency.

Well shucks, maybe they should just cancel it then.

Isn’t the crucial difference with WhatsApp that it doesn’t store the actual message data? I thought that their servers just told what apps to send where. I may be completely off base here.

Why not do all that for one of your small ideas, spend a big of time making it configurable and repeat for the next one?

I can see that argument for the Twitter team but does it apply to the Facebook one too? Is it just that the research they’re doing is so far from being productionised that it had no real value to management?

Do you actually want to do this PhD or is it just the appeal of having a defined, long term target laid out for you?

From one perspective you’re in a pretty exciting position. You’d about to wrap up the study/formation part of your life. You’ve got a job that should offer long-term financial stability and a fairly clear career path.

You have spent so long getting somewhere. Now you’re there and you don’t know what to do with all the time you spent getting there. I think this “quarter life crisis” is fairly common among the graduate classes. What do you do when you reach the end of the process laid out for you?

The solution is to just do… anything. Try lots of stuff and see what you enjoy. Is there anything that’s ever tempted you but felt “not for you” or too scary to try? Now’s the time.

Sorry you’re right, it would have been Paredit.

I guess my point is that syntax that works very well with a correctly configured editor used by someone who knows what they’re doing is going to have a higher barrier to entry than a language that can be easily edited in Notepad.

If there were some shady connections between my trading firm and a paedophile ring, why do you think I would sneakily advertise that by using a similar logo?

I tried using Slime with Scheme when I was doing SICP. I’m sure it’s great when you know it well, but I kept pressing the wrong shortcut and moving things around in ways I didn’t intend and then it wouldn’t let me manually type or delete parentheses to fix things. I found it very frustrating and ended up turning it off.

Just another barrier and C-style languages seem much easier to write in comparison.

Why does using Amex stop you using YNAB? Syncs fine for me.

I’m sure it’s variable but mine are great.

What if moving to a FAANG means you work just the same as before, except get paid twice as much and are surrounded by competent colleagues?

By your logic, my promise to pay them back is what creates the cash? As someone upthread said, the BoE wrote a report on this: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...

I assume they would know.

Electronic music has a naming problem.

EDM is a specific subgenre of electronic music that became popular in the 2010s with Skrillex and those big mainstream American festivals.

The most general term would be 'electronic music', or 'dance music', but not 'electronic dance music'.

Similarly, if you say 'dubstep' to a person in the UK they would think of something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHRf9DNdkgY while an American would think of something terrible. (Good track for this discussion about bass, incidentally).

'Garage' is another one. Totally different genres in the UK and US.

Fabric is still going strong! I've never really noticed the effect of the floor that strongly though.

Dance music is definitely a lot better when the music is loud enough for you to feel the beat on your face and clothes.

UK salaries are low. Even lots of lead/senior devs working in London are on less than £100k. That’s high for the UK but not much compared to what junior devs can get in the Bay Area.

For a while now food has seemed to be getting more expensive very quickly so this isn’t a surprise. It’s very easy to spend £50 on just a bag or two of groceries (albeit buying some fancy stuff).

Cheaper items have gone up a lot. They are still cheap in absolute terms (55p for six pitta breads) but the price increase is very difficult for people on the breadline.

The UK’s inflation problem is compounded by the fact that wages have stagnated for over a decade now. Salaries are really quite low. Only 15% of income tax payers are on the higher rate (over £50k). That was sort of manageable during the period of low interest rates but I really don’t know what people are going to do now.

Aren’t you going to get a lot of survivorship bias here?

I am self taught, then went to a boot camp and now work at a FAANG. Things that helped:

1) Making challenging projects.

2) Spending lots of time reading CS books. Ended up writing https://thecomputersciencebook.com.

3) “Obsessive curiosity”.

4) Going to a top university (for non-CS).

5) Looking like a stereotypical programmer.

Gonna be weird when journalists have to start digging up stories rather than just reposting tweets.

How do you recommend identifying the good ones? I know to look for the more experienced ones and avoid people who’ve been bouncing around various sales roles. Also the ones hanging out on dev discords or mailing lists tend to be better. But it’s very hard to tell on LinkedIn.

What IBs have bad hours for devs? I worked in the markets team at a BB IB and did similar hours to you. I wasn't sitting with traders, to be fair.

What are hours like at HFs and quant firms? I’ve heard they can be bad.

That’s interesting about a pool compared to a lawn, though I was thinking about a municipal pool in a UK context (barely anyone has a swimming pool and lawns don’t need watering). Maybe we’ll reach a point where the idea of using that much water for recreation seems overly indulgent?

Are they being laid off on the Sunday so that they miss their 1 Nov vest date? I find a reprehensible way to treat people.

What’s really weird about Substack is that you seemingly can’t subscribe to a newsletter and read it in the app without getting every post emailed too. I just want to read in the app.

I like to ponder what future societies will be appalled by that we consider totally routine.

My guesses are something to do with animal rights or water usage. Maybe filling big pools with water just so you can swim around will be seen as disgusting waste.

Is any judge going to convict someone of lying to the FBI for getting the weather wrong? I find it ridiculous that the FBI are going around developing assets by tripping up people with inane questions like this.

I agree that many contractors were more or less perm. That in turn seemed to be a consequence of the pay differential, rather than an actual desire to be a contractor.

The focus on cursive seems to be very American.

I really don’t understand why people think that joined up writing isn’t useful any more. Don’t people note things down and want to do it faster that writing out each letter separately?