Not the OP, but being a former follower from him he is a big fan of Nassim Taleb that made some changes in the ergodicity concept to the everyday life in some of his books[1].
[1] - https://medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of-risk-taking-107bf410...
1,234 karma · joined May 14, 2020
[1] - https://medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of-risk-taking-107bf410...
One very underestimated aspects of the logistics business is trust. Specifically trust in your carrier/forward-freight/etc company.
The least thing that you as a SME and/or a BigCo. wants is to have one of the companies that deliver your physical goods (that implied some manufacturing and other resources in advance) being carrier for some unstable company[1] in terms of cash with financiers (e.g. Venture Capital) that characteristically has the reputation to make it or fail.
[1] - Of course airlines and some other companies has those two issues, but differently than most of VC business, in some cases the government and/or the market will come for a bail out.
I do not know if others have the same experience, but comparing Psycopg2/3 with SQL Alchemy I think the latter is way more robust and more developer friendly, but coming from a DBA background Psycopg sounds way simpler, even for the sake of writing pythonic code.
I think we’re heading to the no return point related with neutrality and/or objectivity on social platforms; and maybe the best heuristic as media consumer could be go to the 2 standard deviations on whatever the message it is and think critically on the between.
Of course software isn't a dogma and it's beautiful is that you can change it forever; but I believe somethings it's hard to sacrifice for the sake of ergonomics and/or safety.
...
Some years ago I met a person who was responsible for firearms design, mostly doing some due diligence for police forces about firearms ergonomics and safety.
In the words of this person, one of the biggest mistakes in the Brazilian army in terms of the bidding process; was the manufacturing/acquisition of a firearm called Imbel [1] that due to safety concerns a firing pin lock (PT-BR: percussor lock) and handle lock (PT-BR: lock of fist). With those 2 devices the chances of some accidental shoot drops dramatically; in some cases you can drop a loaded gan that it will not shoot.
However, with those extra safety mechanisms that prevented accidental firing, at least 2 severe compromises were made, one was that this firing pin lock had an entire mechanism that had another tree failure that was not calculated, and guess what started to have some issues; and, due to weight restrictions the pistol had half of the ammunition (from 15 to 7) and for operations that you had some intense cross-fire this firearm is not suitable.
[1] - https://www.cayanarmas.com.br/produto/armas-de-fogo/pistola/...
For me this was the biggest moat for Quora.
Back in the day, you could have someone who has a legitimate background in geopolitics chiming in a question and answering it with politeness and bringing sources for further in-depth reading.
And this was about in most of the categories of the site.
Looking at Quora now, I can see the same level of questions and answers as Yahoo Answers, but with the aggravation that you have "power responders" that use LLMs and lazy Wikipedia copy-pasting to chase clout in the platform.
I do not know the context of replacing content moderation, but I believe that was a not-so-good decision for the platform.
If Quora was a fountain service that serves water from several clean/reliable sources, the _only job_ that the platform should do is to ensure that people do not take a piss in the upstream water.
Despite of what happen in Brazil politically this is a very serious process that if a judge misjudge that it could open a huge precedent for a lawsuit against the state.
It's hard to agree on this one.
Personal anecdote: In 2010's I worked in a micropayments broker linked with all telecom companies.
The whole thing was: that NSFW creators used a shared SMS shared code (i.e. a SMS number that receives messages for several creators and the code (for instance HNCODE25) was used to move money to a balance account) and for each of the payments that people used to do with them the telecom company got 15% slice, and the rest the telecom moved the money to the broker.
Another point: In Brazil due to the PIX [1] almost all of those payment platforms (Paypal included) are becoming irrelevant because you can generate random tokens that can be hard to trace, and all the payments occur instantaneously giving enough time for withdrawn before any attempt of censorship and or any policy change. [2]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867120 ...
About the article itself, it's surprising to me (and I assume some sort of intentional ignorance here) that even in the current state of technology we do not have a "dumb pipe" payment system as before and we're still relying upon those middle man actors or not-so ergonomic alternatives as P2P crypto.
Maybe I am overreacting but when I worked in way more critical industries if someone with no credentials or track record came up and say that is a “Financial Safety” to people in Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank or Ing people on those places would call those charlatans out in less than 10 seconds.
I noticed that also in every city in the Central and West Europe; in comparison with America (specially central and North America) the cops here has a complete different patrolling doctrine that is not prepared for that kind of ostensive preventive/remediation repression.
During some events of the summer 2020/21 I was surprised that in some situation of confronts or ostensive patrolling they lack some basic things like tactical formation (and it’s variations), non lethal options only pepper spray for small units (no teasers, no batons, or precision options), lack of non-characterised units, and an unnecessary gear (guys carrying several keys in a big keychain) and loose gear (pants that are not fit for running, heavy boots with inappropriate shoelace).
And on top of that a concerning lack of situational awareness.
Of course we do not have the issues from America policing (truculence, lack of de-escalating skills, less intelligence backed and more confrontational) but I think it’s time to change if they want have any success against those gangs.
From what I know, back in the day (more of less 10 years ago) MSFT had some Premier Field Engineer (PFE) that operated more or less like this, at least in some places in America.
For databases, I saw some of those folks fixing quite complex scenarios of corrupted log shipping, spin locks, disaster recovery, fixes of corrupted of hundreds of GBs and so on.
I did not had access but I read in some docs that MSFT used to charge almost thousands of dollars for that kind of support.
But I think the counter argument here would be that for every bad cop/teacher that get away with something due to some shenanigans of a Union, there’s cases also that the same Union provides a platform for someone innocent to not get fired.
Let me place another perspective regarding why some unions are necessary that is for airline pilots.
This is a classic case where you have a monopoly of workforce (qualified pilots with specific knowledge with low job transitivity) and workplace (exists in some specific location just a few airlines).
In a hypothetical situation where the airlines start to enforce increase in working hours, reducing rest, and place strain on the workforce; the Unions has the organisation and power to balance that relationship and in some of the cases to help to shape the minimum regulation for the work conditions.
In those situations with dual-monopoly and low job transitivity of the workforce I think make sense to have Unions.
Not for this _single_ reason. The decision for offshoring/nearshoring is a multifaceted one.
Companies that have the risk to be locked in a workforce monopoly and does not have the capability to offshore/nearshore work positions, will fight with nail and tooth attempts for uniontization
Not correct for the whole Europe.
In some places in Central Europe you do not have a Union but instead Work Council that intermediates and oversees the management and acts in the interest of employees.
Personally I like the idea, but at least in some counties it became an instrument of job protection for old employees that sometimes has a different agenda than other employees.
I partially agree with the statement that unions work. From what I see Unions are great and the current model works in situations where there are 2 monopolies, a monopoly of a work place and monopoly of workforce.
In this case the WGA is the monopoly of workforce and the Hollywood is the monopoly of workplace.
Along the history I saw that this dynamic worked and got advancements for the workers (especially during the industrialisation phase of several countries).
However, when this dynamic is broken what happen is that the “losing side” in a negotiation will start to see alternatives to reduce the dependency of this monopoly.
One clear example is the automotive industry that invested in high amount or automation, offshoring, and in a streamlined supply chain to reduce that exposure. I do not have any number but I would bet that Tesla today can have a high operational margin in comparison with Ford or GM.
For IT I think several companies, specially in this down market, are starting to do the same thing doing offshoring or nearshoring of SWE, hiring folks abroad to avoid the risk of unionization due to the fact there’s no monopoly of SWE as a workforce.
[1] - https://ryxcommar.com/2021/11/06/zillow-prophet-time-series-...
Indeed.
In this Mid-cap company that I mentioned, I used to participate in the earnings call; and the difference in tone and posture of our CFO and CEO with investors and with us employees were abysmal.
The scenario was: during 8 months the company went from U$ 160B to U$ 11B.
With us employees in the all-hands was all positivity, mental health tips, a bump in the road, keep pushing for the objectives, and even a Christmas dinner.
During the earning calls, promises of cutting costs, flattening, hiring freeze, and institutional investors openly calling for layoffs.
2.5 months later first round of layoffs, months later a goal to reduce 25% costs in GCP, and after 2 months another round of layoffs and RTO of 4 days a week.
Ex: _You worked here for 1 and half years. Why did you leave?_
In this case, if I get evasive and put some personal circumstance around it as relocation, new moment of life, etc.; the interviewer will try to wrap it die to the fact that this does not bring any potential signal for the position.
However, saying that I was laid off, at least will raise some downstream questions like "Why have you been dismissed?", "Tell me about the relationship with the team?", "What's the feedback that your boss gave to you?"; and the sad thing is that some of those questions are not specifically to understand circumstances and have a clear picture, a bit at least will serve as a signal and in a worst-case as an eliminatory.
2. I became almost obsessed with company performance in almost all aspects to see early signs of something off. Another thing is that I worked on all of my weaknesses to be more employable (I am a SysAdmin by craft, but I navigate in SRE/DevOps/Operations nowadays).
3. At the time that I was fired some time ago, in my internal circles I was completely open about it, and most of the folks were super supportive. For new job opportunities, I would never place this reason because companies have this kind of stigma and consider you as "undesirable" or "leftover".
All those times I created some excuse like I needed to change cities due to family reasons, the company closed the operation in my city, I changed country, I was doing consulting, etc. This is something, in my experience, that you never open to potential employees.
First because of the stigma already said, second this transfers your leverage in terms of negotiation because the other side knows that you need the work and it incites the other side of the transaction to lowball you financially speaking; and during the job they put you in more pressure to deliver.
At least for me was more or less felt less about an employee in the sense of not having a lot of Kool-Aid as a VC/larger company, and more about having a clear boundary that I was selling a service in a stable for-profit company in a specific niche.
From a pure employment perspective, what are the clear unique advantages of working in some of those bootstrap businesses?
Assuming that the original Twitter thread folk is not doing LARPing, this one bit summarizes the entire point why institutional investors like TCI [1] were demanding layoffs due to dilution via SBC [2].
I would prefer a precise definition from SEC regarding on how SBC is declared [3] (it it's Cash Expense or not) and establish a clear guidance for all investors to remove this generalized anxiety that put pressure on workers.
[1] - https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/... [2] - https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2014/02/stock-based-emp... [3] - https://www.eigercapital.com/stock-based-compensation/
City one here several corporate developers can see how a raw and crystalline feedback from the user is: attention and money. no fluff, no Hippo, no assumptions of what a customer is. Well done an we salute you.
Another city has people that is tired with that renaissance of this dollar-menu version of the hustle culture, that as a stubborn Phoenix always reappears and now fuelled with social attention.
And here I am not talking about people doing important things to the world, but my message is for the several clout chasers from Twitter that their “product” is selling courses to build products, how to hustle and show stats in social media, and generate twitter impressions as “qualified leads”.