4,479 karma · joined October 1, 2009
I used to work on making the robots that carry hundreds of humans around inside them safer. Which is another way of saying I worked on trains. Now I work elsewhere.
> the constitution to begin with.
Would that be this foreign corporation that is incorporated in the checks notes State of California?
https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/Document/RetrievePDF?Id=03...
(Yes, I know this is a company owned by the Beijing based ByteDance but that’s not immediately disqualifying of this US corporation run under US law being able to defend itself in a US court system as any other US company would.)
(Taiwan activated its health department epidemic operations center on January 20th. SF activated January 21st. If SF had been able to use state and federal powers, we probably would have had a much better shot at avoiding shelter in place.)
SF’s emergency operations center was active and running. The CDC was still making it illegal for anyone to test outside some unreliable and faulty test kits.
The fact that our federal government was obstructing anyone’s ability to build up a testing apparatus is very much the responsibility of the incompetent management of this crisis by the federal government.
Receipts please.
You are claiming that the timeline of SF matched other countries where deaths started much earlier and went much higher. Are you really making the claim that our hospitals were overlooking a couple hundred people drowning in their own lungs and unable to breath during the month of February?
Because that would basically have to have been true if we had community spread in early January.
> The shelter in place order means the city failed to anticipate and acted when it was too late. Like the rest of the Western world.
Your assumption is that the death rate being substantially lower in SF and California is luck and not preparation?
That stance doesn’t seem supported by the evidence.
This is silly. There are clear differences in response. Here’s just one example:
21 Jan - The city department of public health activates its operations center to prepare for a potential outbreak. 28 Jan - The city activates its emergency operations center. 25 Feb - The city formally declares a state of emergency to prepare for an upcoming outbreak. 5 Mar - The city confirms its first case of COVID-19. 17 Mar - Shelter in place order implemented.
This was a great timeline. And it comes from the local jurisdiction so many here love to hate: San Francisco.
There are absolutely lessons we should be drawing from this pandemic. And one of them is that the political movements who want to drown government in a bathtub are putting your own lives and those of every vulnerable person you know because of that ideology. And those that want functional government aren’t.
I’m all for more radical solutions too. But if you aren’t going to learn the lessons of the present you’re in a shockingly bad place to tell anyone what’s right for the future.
Also, we need to tone down the white supremacy and learn some lessons from the Asian governments who did well here too. My search space for good ideas isn’t confined to “western governments” and neither should that confine anyone else’s.
People count bodies much more reliably in pandemics. I don’t trust our confirmed case telemetry data much, but I do trust the fatality data. Unfortunately it’s about a two to four week lagging indicator. But the fatality rates also currently show this to be spreading much, much faster than it ever spread in Wuhan.
Wuhan is what happens when the curve is flattened. Not what happens when you don’t.
The estimate Newsom presented is credible.
I can see why some people just decide to be done. I came close a few years ago.
> than other people with the same years of experience (or
> less) is insane. I can admit that they're better engineers
> than me. That's why they get the big bucks.
Sure, and that’s just fine and sensible. But you might feel differently if they were in fact worse engineers than you. Which is the position that women are in, unless you think that sexism and gender bias doesn’t exist.
In a sexist and gender biased system, the pay gap is not “someone is making more who is better than I am” it is “I am making less than everyone else outside my gender group whose experience / talent matches mine and some who aren’t even as good as I am.”
Can you see why that might be a little less fun and why you might feel frustration towards a field structured that way?
The original poster I replied to suggested that if men pulled their weight in relationships wrt household tasks and childcare more often, women might have more time to devote to work.
You have decided to argue that women of course should spend more time in those areas, because they don’t spend as much time at work.
My claim was merely that women are in fact “responsible for disproportionate share of household and childcare related tasks” which is fully supported by all the data cited in this conversation.
You seem to be arguing that this is a perfectly fine thing. This completely ignores the possibility and frankly likely conclusion that the expectation that women do more of these tasks might have something to do with the fact that so many women aren’t in fact able to spend as much time focusing on their careers as they might otherwise.
To chose a concrete reason from too many relationships for too many women, if they don’t pick up the kid, then no one bloody will. So they don’t get to spend time to focus on work at the end of the day because they suddenly have to leave the workplace at a fixed time no matter what is happening or what thing they might want to spend a bit more time to nail down, because they are responsible for a disproportionate amount of childcare. Which then results in them being less able to be engaged and succeed in their careers, which can result in them opting for more flexible or reduced schedules, which then results in less take home pay, which then results in dudes on the Internet arguing that this is fully fair and there’s no mismatch whatsoever in response to a comment that merely points out that women perform a higher share of household and childcare tasks in an average relationship with a man.
What a mess.
Household chores:
--On an average day, 84 percent of women and 69 percent of men
spent some time doing household activities, such as housework,
cooking, lawn care, or household management. (See table 1.)
--On the days they did household activities, women spent an average
of 2.6 hours on these activities, while men spent 2.0 hours. (See
table 1.)
Men: 120 min * .69 = 83 min / day
Women dating men, on average have a share of household tasks is 161% of their partner’s.
Childcare:
--On an average day, among adults living in households with
children under age 6, women spent 1.1 hours providing physical
care (such as bathing or feeding a child) to household children;
by contrast, men spent 26 minutes providing physical care.
(See table 9.)
Men: 26 min / day
Women dating men, on average have a share of childcare tasks is 253% of their partner’s.
This is without even needing to dig into the crosstabs, on the data source you picked. Which supports the both widely accepted and studied conclusion that household and especially childcare tasks among heterosexual couples are absolutely not evenly distributed.
As for more studies, feel free to, I dunno... pick any of them?
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hous...
I really shouldn’t have to do the math for you on this. Your point is about as well supported by the data as climate denial and at some point you lose the right to ask other people to prove this to you and just need to go read basically anything on this subject.
You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to cobble together work during a downturn like that if I were to lose my primary job and be unable to find another. I would likely take the most fulfilling work I could find. Then when times were good I’d resume more fulfilling work. Just like I’ve done through out the time I’ve been in the field so far.
Given that we have been in a 12 year period of one of the largest tech expansions in the history of our industry, I don’t see why it makes any sense to argue that people shouldn’t be seeking fulfilling work now.
> Apple seems to be the easiest place to get away with slacking if you want to
You are the first person I’ve heard this one from! I’m almost pleased to see some balance? I worry we have the reputation of being too grindy too often!
I think this can be very org dependent. I wonder if most of the people you know are clustered in a specific part.
> I've never met anyone who talks about how ease it is to slack off at Facebook or Amazon.
Weird. I have. We seem to have very different experiences.
Also whenever I’ve talked to people who work inside Facebook I just. I just couldn’t. I’m certain I’d go stark raving depressed so quickly there. The froyo on campus is nice though.
(Also like, to be clear these roles aren’t all high paying if you’ve adjusted your life so that without 300k/yr you can’t function then like, I agree you have boxed yourself into a harder corner. That said, I currently have found a combination that is both impactful and lucrative. So that’s super cool when it works out. I am desperately trying to structure my life so I’m not boxed into needing this to be true in the future because meaning in my work is still more important to me than money from my work.)
If you want to coast, you generally don’t work on teams that ship new product. Apple’s a big place. There’s totally teams that are good fits for people who want to have less direct product impact and be off the critical path, but I wouldn’t say that’s the common case.
The best analogy I’ve heard is that working at Apple is a pie eating contest.
And the reward is—more pie.
Each person has different feelings about how much pie they want to eat.
1) I agree that this is often true! Code can be pretty boring. That doesn’t mean there are no interesting problems that you can tackle with programming. It just means most people work on incredibly boring stuff and think that’s all there is and totally fine. Find something that’s a better use of your time.
2) There is more and less difficult software engineering. If yours is really boring why wouldn’t you try something more challenging? It doesn’t always pay as well but it can be a lot less terrible to experience on a daily basis.
3) Most of the hardest problems in making interesting technology that touches the world isn’t in exactly how the code is written. Learning this is the first step towards starting to be equipped to tackle the actually hard problems in our field. Which you could work on directly, if you wanted.
None of this is to say that anyone has to do this. You don’t have to have fulfillment in your job. Though you and most others should frankly probably look around and make sure the code you’re writing is doing actually good things in the world rather than bad ones, that’s an ethical obligation but one that is pretty orthogonal whether or not you’re working on interesting problems. (If people optimize solely for money though, they bend towards writing code that makes that empowers companies over people and generally makes the world a worst place. People have a responsibility to evaluate this and try and avoid the ones that don’t.)
Mostly: it’s fine to make the choice to not work on something fulfilling. But stating that there’s nothing fulfilling to work on in this world is just nonsense, defeatist and mostly means you’ve resigned yourself and everyone who takes your advice to unfulfilling, boring and miserable work that doesn’t grow you worth a damn.
And that probably sucks. So why take that approach?
Pointer Authentication Code
It’s a form of pointer integrity checking that you can read about in the Platform Security Guide (this used to be called the iOS Security Whitepaper) released today: https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/security/seca5759bf02/...
Google’s Project Zero also wrote a post about this mechanism, including a detailed case study of where they were able to bypass it: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/02/examining-poi...
Boeing and Airbus don’t build their own engines. I don’t expect COMAC to try that in their first rodeo.
The metallurgy required to build a modern turbofan engine is incredibly exotic — outside of France, England, and the US it's simply not there.
If you’re betting on metallurgy to be the barrier to keep western technological advantage alive I think you’re in for a surprise.
Comac abandoned carbon fiber for the wings in favor of aluminum.
So they have gone back to using the material used to build every other narrow body plane on the market in this size category. I admit, a new design should use carbon fiber, but given that no one else is yet...
Sure they do. Network effects are huge with airliners. If your Embraer breaks down away from your maintenance base chances are you can buy / borrow parts from another airline. If you're the only one around flying, you're entirely reliant on the manufacturer — and Comac doesn't have any sort of international support network.
First off, airlines have purchased a ton of E175 family aircraft.
Second off, while a large international distribution is important, you don’t need to compete in the wide body market to get it.
Third off, COMAC can focus on the Chinese market to start and take it region at a time slowly expanding across Asia. From there South Asia and SEA is easy and both are big markets, Russia would welcome it with open arms and then they can take a whack at the middle eastern market and also be competitive anywhere Airbus and Boeing aren’t really playing that hard anyway. (Africa, etc.) All this well before getting around to Europe or North America.
If Boeing can deliver on a MAX replacement it's doubtful that Comac will move the needle much in the next 10-15 years.
Let’s see Boeing deliver the MAX again first.
I think it would be easy to win a bet that COMAC delivers C919 to commercial airline customers before Boeing delivers a new narrow body design to replace the 737 family.
Let’s also remember there’s a government entirely willing to subsidize the growth of a native product. Russia already has an 80 year history of taking wildly diverse and frankly oddball aircraft designs and turning them into things that actually fly. Anyone who thinks that them partnering with a Chinese company can’t build a widebody isn’t paying attention. Who knows if it’ll be any good, it may not be competitive. But will they be able to make something that flies?
I’d happily bet on it.
Also let’s be clear if the C919 actually works out they will be a serious competitor. The market for wide body aircraft is the one that captures all the imagination and attention but the narrow body sales are the bread and butter. They absolutely do not need to succeed in this market right away to put a big dent in the duopoly.
Unfortunately none of these models assume the presence of an attack or malicious entity. So they painstaking provide a model for making sure your bridge doesn’t fall down on its own but are generally pretty useless for ensuring someone can’t blow it up. This is considered fine in a lot of safety critical engineering work which is closer to reliability engineering than security engineering.
Malicious behavior in the “digital realm” (I hate this phrase but here we are) has such a low barrier to entry that every single one of these models fall apart there and a threat model which doesn’t assume potentially malicious actors and behavior is something we’ve come to realize is basically negligent. The pure explosion in complexity and states possible in the FTA when analyzing software security with actual adversaries makes them... not particularly useful. In addition the sharply binary outcomes (if you change the bit you just outright win) in so much of software design make it really hard to apply anything resembling traditional engineering controls or mitigations. Where with a bridge you can beef up some concrete and the numbers which affect the outcome change, in software you can’t really beef up security in a real sense by just removing some but not all of the software weaknesses.
We could decide that none of these things work well together, but I actually think the futility of trying to construct an FTA model for software leads to some very supportable and radical conclusions about how to actually build secure systems. Many of which involve just distrusting most software pieces entirely (or carefully and selectively trusting which tasks) and looking at high level FTAs to understand how to compose larger systems that maintain some key properties or state without ever trusting say, the entire codebase of an operating system kernel.