195 karma · joined January 27, 2018
The rest of the point aside, you're trying to tug a heartstring based on a stereotype. This is much more condescending and out of touch than it is accurate with regard to the modern US Military.
And "pumping out kids" as you put it does this for many people. Sorry it doesn't for you, but saying that it isn't a "win" for some people is short sighted.
> You can do more. You can be more. You can experience more.
Many would say the same of those in their 30s and 40s with kids.
> Sad.
Again, many would say the same about your aspirations. Insulting, isn't it?
My point being, what makes you happy, doesn't make others, so don't cast someone who has kids at 21 with a home and ability to provide for them into a bucket of not "winning" at life.
I think it's pretty hard to argue this is true while literally making "life." Yeah you don't usually get a shiny new car and an unnecessarily large house having kids at 21, but the life you're talking about is a negative for humanity.
What does it matter when you're happy and have everything you need to survive and provide anyways? That's what a "win" is.
I think there's some confusion here on what and how the USDS works.
They embed into government organizations to improve services and systems, bringing expertise that doesn't normally exist in government, while not working directly for the organization they're embedded in.
USDS doesn't follow normal hiring practices either. They recruit directly for limited employment terms, max of 4 years. This helps offset the entrenched beaurocratic mindset that exists in a lot of USG organisations, and allows them to recruit current experts in a particular field.
From the Special Operations analogy this would be equivalent of the Military giving them direct hiring/recruitment ability from both the Armed Services and direct from civilian
#7 "Bring in experienced teams" isn't hollow, it's their core mission.
He doesn't know you from a senile person living in poverty. They'll steal your money regardless of who you are. There's no moral justification for that. They are evil.
These people are the lowest of the low, they prey on the senile and ignorant, stealing from them regardless of their economic status. There should be no pity. If I can end the conversation making the scammer regret their life decisions, or at least waste their time, it's a win.
There was an engineer on one of the user experience teams that didn't understand this and decided to rewrite a portion of our code to make it more performant in their UX. In doing so, this engineer introduced bugs into our feature that adversely affected other user experiences within the application, but was not apparent in their own implementation. Had our team known about this, we would have very easily 1. been able to point out the bugs 2. helped the engineer with a better solution.
This wasn't a small effort, the engineer's team received a requirement from their PM, groomed the ticket, architected the plan, assigned the ticket to the engineer to work, the engineer wrote the code, then had at least two reviewers on their team approve the change before merging it. So we're talking multiple points of failure, I don't blame the engineer individually.
The fallout came a week after the code was deployed when the UX team flipped on the feature toggle. They checked their UX, it looked good, and continued on. Meanwhile other UX teams started seeing crashes coming from our feature. (the crash didn't manifest in testing because it was toggled off, which was a failure on the UX team)
This wrecked collaboration and trust across our codebase in multiple ways and lead to increased overhead processes. We dealt with the initial fallout from UX teams not trusting our feature, which then evolved in to UX teams not trusting each other, UX teams not trusting feature teams, feature teams not trusting anyone, an no one trusting the procedures in place.
Yes there were multiple failures. But at the end of the day, this whole scenario could have been prevented with a one line message: "Why did you implement this in this way?" No one was emotionally invested in the code that was changed, it was for all intents and purposes crap code, but the crap code worked, the new code didn't, a simple courtesy check would have saved a ton of time, money, and trust.
If you have an intern or a Junior Engineer, they should have a more senior engineer to monitor and mentor them.
In the situation where a Junior Engineer gets blamed for a screw up:
1. The Senior Engineer failed in their responsibility. 2. The Senior Engineer failed in their responsibility.
A Junior Engineer should be expected to write bad code, but not put it into production, that's on the Senior. If I hit approve on a Junior Engineer's PR, it's my fault if their code brings the whole system down. If a Junior Engineer had the ability to push code without a review, it's my fault for allowing that. Either way it's my fault and it shouldn't be any other way. It's a failure to properly mentor. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that it's never the Junior Engineers fault when it does.
This is a side effect of Android's initial approach to it's open nature. Android allows a manufacturer to modify its framework for their own use case. Then the manufacturer can allow a specific carrier to input their own system applications and firmware on to the devices well (your bloatware etc).
This can lead to multiple firmware variants for a specific device. It's not uncommon to see over 20 variants of a firmware for a specific Samsung device for example. This can be broken down by carrier, by region, by OS, etc.. for a number of different reasons.
This becomes a problem when Android needs to post an update. That update has to be pushed first to the Android framework, then to the manufacturer who decides if they are going to make modifications for the update, and if the manufacturer decides to make an update, they push it to the carrier who then has to make an update themselves.
This leads to a web with many broken ends, where a specific phone on one carrier may never see an OS upgrade after purchase, but on another carrier, the same phone might get them regularly.
Additionally some manufacturers take a greater degree of liberty in modifying the Android framework, making updates significantly more expensive to implement, so they don't.
The good news is Google over the past couple of years has been making a great effort under Project Trebel to simplify some of the APIs in the Android framework. What this is leading to is less friction when it comes to implementing core updates. Unfortunately not all manufacturers have opted in to adhering to the standards and Project Trebel yet.
This is all in stark contrast to iOS, which doesn't have the restriction of dealing with multiple manufacturers, and makes it harder for carriers to customize the device for their own business cases. This makes security and updates easier to push, but on the cost to the user of being an expensive single stream walled garden. Nothing against iOS in the statement, as a flagship device they're very nice. However, they don't have the adaptability that Android allows, making them prohibitive in some markets.
Sorry for any grammar issues, I'm on my phone (a regularly updated Pixel 3).
This is the crux if the problem. Mass transit is very inefficient for short point to point trips in many cities.
Say I want to get from the Southwest portion of a city to the Northeast, 3 miles away. A bus is probably the most viable mass transit option for this in most places. But in order to take the bus, I have to get on one and make at least one transfer. If the bus runs every 10 minutes (which is generous for the city I live), that means I'll have to walk to the bus station (possibly in a different direction) spend up to 20 minutes waiting on buses given the transfer, then walk from the destination station to my end point. All this while trying to figure out what is the actual best route. Or, as the article suggests, I can just take an AV. What is more appealing for someone working in a downtown area?
Personally, as is right now, it's a toss up between bike, walk, or ride share. But ride share is expensive, walking and biking are physical actions, and regardless of what anyone says, biking in any major downtown area of the US can be dangerous. AVs are anticipated to solve the cost problems associated with ride shares, which is good, but as the article puts it, at the cost of 5.5% increase in traffic in downtown (other areas decrease) IF policies such as repurposing street side parking aren't inacted. To me, even at a 5.5% increase in traffic, the benefits of AVs seem to outweigh the cost. The benefits being less people owning cars (freeing personal finance of that burden), fewer parking spaces needed, and the ability to work and commute at the same time (or do whatever you couldn't do while driving) just to name a few things.
There's little to ponder, that's why I mentioned "entities" rather than "user data." Use unique keys to reference the data rather than sensitive identifiers. The nontrivial part is storing your backup of entities to be deleted in a way that doesn't get destroyed at the same time as the event that forces you to revert to a backup. This now requires a separate storage, backup, and retrieval mechanism to maintain compliance.
... unless you plan to use the backups.
Then you have to have another service that tracks entities to delete when a backup it's restored... and back that up separately.
> And while their efforts to "disrupt" the taxi economy have been "great" in all honesty they've only created room for their competition to benefit on this - Uber has simply managed to take a business (taxis) and run it to chaos while what would've been the logical step was to run a similar application by the taxi companies for ride hailing.
These two statements are contradictory.
While I'm not a fan of many things Uber does, this was something that was groundbreaking at the time, less than 10 years ago. If you lived in a big city before Uber/Lyft/etc you have fond memories of getting ripped off and taken advantage of, taking bad routes, dangerously manuvering through traffic, and either having to walk to a main thoroughfare or wait 30 minutes for the taxi that was supposed to be dispatched in 10 when you called for one. And good luck having anything come out of a complaint to the city over violations of passenger rights laws.
Now, regardless of what the complaints are against Uber, you can get a way more affordable ride, at a fixed price, on a mapped route, whose livelihood actually depends on how good they are (ratings), and know when/where your ride is almost as soon as you order it.
Even now where you'd expect taxi companies to take a stance to provide better services, they're devoting more resources to lobbying local government to control "ride share" companies. Mean while, all they'd have to do is provide a rating system, fixed prices over mapped routes, and an app to order a taxi and I'd be happy. Just enforcing that they use some direction service that can route around traffic would probably be enough for me. Instead, it seems they prey on locations full of non city tourist (like airports, train station, and attractions) that don't know any better.
Uber has undoubtedly done bad things, but to say they aren't a technology company and that what they did (and still are doing) isn't groundbreaking is wrong.
Maybe it comes down to brand loyalty (I know I'll never but another LG after my last experience)? Or maybe what your carrier provides? But I'm really curious, with the current state of Android, if you're going to get a flagship phone, why wouldn't you opt for a Google brand phone so you can stay on top of the latest updates?
It's one thing if you just want a cheap phone, but if I drop big money on something, I want to know that I'm getting the latest updates. Especially when it comes to security on the device that has access to my most importantly information. I hear too many Android users complain about how their phone is two whole versions behind. Wake up! That's your carrier/manufacturer putting you at risk.
Looking at the line up for Google I/O, hearing the rumors as we're about to head into it, and with the newest beta release, I'm starting to think Flutter is past the point of being abandoned any time soon.
The real question for me is when will it be stable enough so that I can put it into production without worrying about major API changes breaking everything on the best update.
I think you might need to look up the word "steal" in a dictionary. That or you're deliberately skewing the definition for your own agenda. I'm hedging my bet on the latter.
The first definition provided when Googling "steal": take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it.
If a good or service is provided that is needed or desired by either a group or an individual there is a cost regardless of whether that cost is absorbed by the individual or group procuring the good/service (as in Capitalism) or by society. The provider of that good or service should somehow be rewarded or incentivized to continue providing the service so as to keep that service provided.
You made a blanket statement that "rich are only rich because they steal from the poor...". That's wrong, true in some cases, but far from a universal truth, if I'm wrong please prove it. If you're good a something society deems valuable, shouldn't you be compensated adequately for that? Should a good jeweler be compensated well for producing a necklace of spectacular quality if someone is willing to pay for it? Should a good neurosurgeon who went through probably a decade of intense schooling be adequately compensated for extracting a tumor? Are either of these people stealing from someone? The answer is no. They are providing a service that the recipient or society (in the case of universal healthcare) willingly compensate them for.
This is in direct contradiction to your point of a "poor person \"stealing\" from the rich", which brings me back to my first statement. You used quotes around "stealing" which deliberately attempts to invert or misdirect the actual definition of the word. Taking something from someone without their permission is "stealing", not providing a service for compensation. In the case of the jeweler, that jeweler bears the cost of materials and time the spent to both learn how to make the commodity when their product is stolen. In the case of the neurosurgeon, when their product is stolen, it's very equatable to slavery.
It doesn't matter what economic model you prescribe to, if people providing a needed good/service aren't adequately compensated, the quality of that good/service degrades or becomes non existent. Unless, of course, you enslave or force those people to provided the good/service, which is not what anyone should be advocating.
This is extremely toxic for freedom of speech and information sharing and is a veiled gateway to censorship. It subjects veracity to the approval of an unknown group with unknown motives than you're assuming are righteous.
There are notably verifiable "fake news" stories that we can all logically assume are fake, but the matter of veracity is ultimately defined in opinion. Even if that opinion is your opinion on what news source to trust.
The only people that can truly verify information are those that are present when it's generated and we rely on those people to be truthful. You trust your source of news when you determine something is fact. Bob's Blog reporting "Obama sends troops to Texas to ensure 3rd term" will receive a notably different reception than NPR reporting the same thing. But ultimately that difference in perception is your opinion of what constitutes valid information. Unless you're in Texas, do you really know for sure?
If an article is 90% correct, but 10% unknown or possibly speculative, who makes the call on the validity of the news and story? What if that 10% of the information dramatically affects the context of the other 90%?
If a police investigation determines that a police officer lawfully killed someone in the line of duty, but someone disputes that with another story, who do we trust? Should one of the stories be suppressed because it can't be validated? Personally, I prefer to reserve the decision for what I consider valid for myself, not the overlords of the platform I use to consume the content.
Apple meanwhile is the sole manufacturer for phones carrying their OS and as far as I'm aware severely limits the ability of carriers to customize the OS. This means updates are more or less instantaneously available.
There are advantages to Android strategy though, primarily the cost to manufacture and field a device. Carriers and manufacturers can bundle their own ad/crapware into the device to offset costs. This comes at the cost of security and user experience. But, if you get a flagship "Google" phone, such as a Pixel, you get first access to updates without most of the compromises, however you're paying flagship prices.
Not to diatribe too much, but as much heat as Android gets in these arguments, I think the Pixel models are very competitive against Apple when it comes to quality.
As a developer though, the Android system is hell depending on what you're doing. We're on API 27 (8.1) and the amount of devices still on 21 (5.0) and below is nontrivial. Especially outside the US. The changes since 23 (6.0) are significant (and for the better), but to implement features across such a wide range of APIs leads to pretty significant bloat and maintainability issues. On the flipside, I have reasonable assurance an application I build right now will work on a device three years from now without modification, not so true with Apple.