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Agree with you here. Some of the worst engineers I’ve worked with have been at Google, especially the younger newer ones. There’s a combination of impostor syndrome driving people to dogma (thus lack of thinking) as well as annoying arrogance towards anything that not orthodox.

There are of course many great engineers as well (especially the more OG ones) but the ability spread was way larger than any other company I’ve been at. I think it’s something about its cultural image and incentive structure...

The authoritarianism is a red herring IMO. The real issue is economic incentives trumping everything else. For example in Japan if you test positive the hospital gets quarantined losing tons of money. In the US, you can end up payong huge medical bills. The fear is the same.

The lesson from WW2 should have been that people are all the same when pushed to extremes. This includes the people who make up the communist party leadership in China and every moral philosoher in the west as well.

My armchair belief is that China has ended up absorbing at a global scale, all of capitalism’s externalities. It is an integral part of the world that gives us many things we take for granted like cheap iphones and many others. We do NOT have the convenience to look away and scapegoat one aspect without taking into consideration the whole.

This ended up kinda ranty but every time coronavirus is used to bring up something whose purpose is to draw an “us vs them” line between the world and China I want to throw something.

Have been inside google and have friends who have worked, work there. There’s some truth to the asshole thing. Though I think it’s more like snobbishness. That is, conditional super niceness if you demonstrate you’re googly.

I like this argument. At a less lethal level it works for guns as well. WW2 taught that you can’t drive countries to the point of having nothing to lose. A potentially positive spin is that we advancing to societies that prevent this from happening to individuals. Though the cost...

All behavior is selfish. Each level is supported by the lower level. Upper class has a smaller support of semi-elites below them they must appease. Many things are zero-sum so most actions at this level take from the majority for the minority. Thus unethical behavior baked into hierarchy.

At certain large tech companies it’s the difference between an all terrain vehicle and laying frikin tracks for a frikin train.

Do humans happen to get more cancer than other animals? There’s this weird idea, I forget the source, that a less efficient cell garbage collection mutation allowed increased brain development, connections, etc... but at the cost of increased cancer, depression, ego, etc...

Regarding the grow and thrive part, some of my Chinese friends mention that they feel China is unjustly cast as the villain as many of the economic issues in HK like the super small living spaces are a result of unchecked and corrupt capitalism. With China rising and HK having lost it’s monopoly as the doorway to China they don’t have anything to really drive the economy anymore. the gist is “Why don’t they go make themselves useful instead of blaming China for everything.”

Not commenting on its validity but thought it was an interesting perspective to share.

I’ve seen this issue at many “engineering” focused companies where many people write their own DSLs. for CSS in particular there are many people who just hate it and come up with many ways to not write it.

CSS however is very much like drawing rather than engineering. Some aspects are just not scalable. You can draw many things in vector by conbining shapes for example but a pen or pencil is still very necessary for many parts of both exploratory creation as well as something polished.

The same goes for HTML and Javascript to an extent. While it’s great to build railroad tracks, you can’t take a train everywhere... any abstraction has to also have the ability to easily break out of it to handle edge cases. Clean and Pure abstractions almost never have the grittiness necessary to reflect a fractally complex problem.

This feels so against so many "Modern" ideas like Redux (one giant source of data) and anti pub/sub. (message passing)

Is this the opposite of global state management paradigms like Redux?

Using the global state requires a lot of contortion on each user's end (bureaucratic hoops) for the safety of the global state. It technically empowers every individual user with the whole state but the combination of not having to think about messaging and just brute force contorting into the global state creates terrible code IMO.

Would recommend the book: The Courage to be Disliked.

Here’s a story of why China is a rather paradoxical state. It’s not pure authoritarianism.

Many people who can’t return loans have their name and id number shown on large digital billboards. The goal is to shame them into returning money.

Sounds dystopian right?

BUT the reason this is done is because these people can squat in their houses (which may bot belong to them) and the police and law can’t do anything. The social backlash of kicking someone out of their sole living space would be huge.

Some lenders do things like send thugs to harrass them or get a court order to freeze their bank accounts.

Yet the “core” of the issues is that “the law is the law” is NOT followed. It has flexibility rooted in human understanding. Often lenders have to meet halfway per a judge’s order b/c otherwise the lendee wouldn’t be able to make a living.

China is actually very liberal in that it believes the future must be better than the present. (Vs the present being the maximum with the future only having downside potential) Technology and new ways of thinking are embraced very quickly. (Unfortunately, the new cultures are only what the market can provide, consumerism)

Tradition and culture has too much negative associations for conservatist views to have much sway. (Great leap forward, cultural revolution, etc...)

I’m somewhat sad that there’s so much focus on HOW related improvements and less on the WHY. What I really like about Vue was that it was one of the first tools where it’s whole MO was to get out of the way of the process of creation instead of being very in-your-face about specific features and techniques . It was iOS while react was Android.

I hope that It’s initial success bringing it more mainstream doesn’t cause enterprise pressures to make the project lose focus on this core.

Not having to deal with weird tricks for certain types of data mutations is quite nice though.

Seconded. I don’t see anything bad with typescript itself, but naive but passionate usage of perceived silver bullets tends to create terrible things. there are many terrible coffeescript/backbone codebases, overwrought usage of redux, etc...

Many of such overcomicated systems come from trying to use the latest coolest thing without thinking about if it improved anything. the tools were never used correctly and the person just moved on, marking JS as a shitty language with a shitty ecosystem.

When there’s always something new on the horizon it’s too easy to assume the previous difficulty was because of the old tool vs taking the time to just learn the tool.

There are many developers who don’t really understand MVC for example and so much pain comes from trying to ham fist a jquery mentality into one.

The people can though. Centralization via the state entity can allow for efficient decicions (like corporate hierarchies) as everyone knows which direction to look for common consensus.

With a blockchain approach, rather than separate entities clamoring to be the source of truth in lieue of an ineffective state everyone can instead look to the blockchain. (Which theoretically has no agenda, distributed control, etc...)

Reminds me of during the world expo in Shanghai where people would push their older relatives in wheelchairs to skip the long lines in the hot humid weather.

Theres an interesting book about this “I am a Strange Loop” written by Douglas Hofstadter

Not saying it’s a good strategy but amazon seems to have done/is doing something similar. Each purchase is a loss when shipping is taken into account. But if the bleeding is slow enough the created ingress can be enough to shift the landscape so that there are new opportunities. Cultural lockin followed by price increases is a typical one.

Like the hub and spoke model of pizza shops. Basically bet that spoke opportunities will appear if the hub is engaging enough.

In the book “The Elephant in the Brain”, the author makes the argument that our consciousness is entirely the PR department of the brain, making explanations for the “company” but not truly knowing what’s really going on.

That is, all our thoughts are post-event justifications to make us feel good.

There’s this famous experiment where they show two different things to each eye of a brain divided patient. The patient would then follow instructions from 1 eye, but provide a justification based on what the other eye saw. Like a PR rep having to do the job but with email and communication being down.

The PR rep has to interpret things in a way that is in harmony to the external environment. Making the self seem self-less or hardworking or moral, etc...

Where it gets interesting is that the resulting PR effects affect the environment which then trigger new behaviors resulting in new PR spin. The PR rep has a degree of control over the system yet at the core of it, the PR rep is installed by language/culture/society and is somewhat of an outsider. Like an overly idealistic justice warrior sent to whitewash some corrupt company and being frustrated by the job.

Yea, even if the local working population can’t afford them, the bay area can still be viewed as a hot spot to be causing housing to go up because they represent scarce investments/stores-of-value. Pressure could then push salaries higher into a positive feedback loop.

A similar sentiment drove the technocratic elite to a centralized economy in communist china. It may not be beautiful or ideal but it’s fairly effective at coordinating large amounts of people, especially if they are at odds somewhat.

Doors trigger our minds loading screens. Memory is loaded from disk. Old context is ejected new is injected. The ego or “i” concept is allotted small attention/memory to carry over stuff. If attention is lost in the middle, the background swap can happen subconscioslu and something you thought you placed nearby can be moved.

I think the bias is against older people who are looking for jobs through the same channels as the younger people rather than having an established enough work history or a network that gives them an express lane.

Also may explain why they can be damaging to younger people. Like disturbing plants before their root system (filtration system) takes root tends to kill or damage the plants entire lifespan.

Philosophy i think is the same question and message repeated in each era in the language of that era. (Modern lingo and memes and such)

The question is “what’s the point”.

Philosophies that get overly powerful turn into religions. Original questioning rooted in science (refusal to look away from reality) can become dogma. Yin becomes yang and back again.

Dogma, while safe, doesnt evolve and eventually is disconnected from modernity. (Not using the right memes and lingo anymore)

The same message can be right or wrong depending on how it is said and in which cultural era it is said.

A strong belief in having already gotten the point or belief that execution is the only thing left leaves no room for philosophy which is about the wiggle room of constant flux.

The current era is a bit strange in that science itself has become a sort of dogma. “scientism” masquerading as true science is another way of putting it. There’s a belief that certain people, idiots and infidels hold back everyone. The yin blames the yang and so becomes it.

This strategy only works if you can effecticely build new habits that are sticky enough to persist when the friction increases. Even better is if the new behavior has interesting interactions with other things.

The reason enterprise tools tend to be “worse” is because the stickiness is arbitrarily enforced instead of being rooted in reality. Uber/lyft are non-sticky because theyre basically the same.

english is similarly a terrible language in many ways. Its only benefit is it is fairly easy to learn and start speaking with in a “broken” way but still gets its point across.

Which has led to a meta advantage which is it being used everywhere.

So while Esperanto speakers bemoan this, the rest of the world doesnt care too much.

The rest is disagremeent or agreement on the quote “If it’s stupid and works, it’s not stupid”

I think it helps to think of wine more as consumable art. Art, like the mona lisa has its value tied not in the intrinsic properties but its position within its cultural and historical context.

The trick being that this environment is a sub environment available only to those with a lot of time and money. Ability to appreciate indicates knowledge and belonging to this sub environment.

The mind actually activates more strongly when the context is known. Similar to how a certain degree of discipline is necessary for classical music or sailing to actually enjoy them.

But because the actual context is much smaller than the perceived context its also a ripe context to BS in. Similar to emperors clothes except that maybe perhaps once upon a time such invisible thread did/does exist.