doublement

I agree with much of what you said but the religious ideology attribution is a non-sequitur. The Bay Area and Los Angeles are pretty much the opposite of hotbeds for piety, yet they have the most severe homelessness problems.

The first sentence of the piece says that "Any point source which spreads its influence equally in all directions without a limit to its range will obey the inverse square law."

A laser beam has a direction, as such doesn't spread its influence equally in all directions.

There's a huge difference between an average person in a random place investing $10K left over after their bills are paid, and an SF tech employee working with at 5-10 times that amount.

You are moving the goalposts. A moment ago you were saying it wasn't happening in SF, now you're saying it happens everywhere.

I would estimate that the typical software developer working over that 10-year period and putting the money into either S&P 500 or a house saw an increase of $1M in their net worth.

> Prices changing alongside supply and demand is not inhumane.

It is. It is inhumane.

I agree with you that policies which artificially constrain the supply bear much of the blame, but an outcome can be inhumane in and of itself, even if it emerges from "supply and demand".

People getting thrown out of their homes because the value of their labor no longer covers the cost of their dwelling is bad.

At least we're not getting evicted.

To me the evictions dwarf every other concern. It's a result that's straightforwardly inhumane, and I don't think any reasonable person would disagree.

Personally, I'm inclined to blame NIMBY San Francisco homeowners for this, but of course they would blame me and other "tech bros" for moving here. In the meantime, those hardest hit, low-income renters, are a member of neither bickering party.

If I'm reading it correctly, it's introducing a possibility that Crick hadn't considered: that materialism might be correct (as he thought), but the generation of consciousness isn't specifically located anywhere.

I know that was the intent, but the reality is that eschewing Twitter gains a politician nothing, and costs them an audience.

I think they all do now. You have to engage with people where the people are.

> ...no one in their right mind would look there for job postings

I'm not sure if it's quite the same thing, but 6-7 years ago I saw an employment ad from a well-known tech company in the local Craigslist, with only a postal address listed and no phone or email. I sent a paper resume to the address. They got back to me after a long delay, when I'd already found other work.

Agreed. These days it's impossible to select a site and begin demolishing the neighborhood within the same month.

> [T]he Sausalito site selected on 3 March... construction began on 28 March.... Construction start was delayed two weeks to allow the 42 families living on Pine Point, which was scheduled to be demolished to build the shipyard, to move.

Or how about just letting your data vanish, except for items you've made a specific effort to save (e.g. your own original writing or musical compositions)?

Technologists seem preoccupied with creating perfect recollection, seemingly without realizing that people who have this ability innately often find it burdensome.

Given my druthers, I wouldn't retrieve my data from a service, I'd purge it.

I guess the pen was not mightier than the sword in this case.

A short period of renewal would mitigate the problem where every employee on the notification list has become a former employee / invalid email by the time the actual expiry occurs.

Disappearing content is a blessing, not a curse. Let it all be replaced by new people doing the same things slightly differently, instead of constantly having to confront prior art.

In my professional work all of this is someone else's job, but I've experimented with Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and Digital Ocean, and only with Digital Ocean did I feel confident I wasn't going to make some kind of costly mistake.

Every time I have to update something on GCP App Engine, I end up creating a billing account so I can use Cloud Build for a Node.js app, then blow the billing account away after the app is deployed. It scares me to create a way to be billed when everything I'm doing is at the free-tier level.

On AWS I discarded my account entirely after I got a bill for a few cents when I wasn't (knowingly) using anything at all.

Indeed. I generally agree with Greenwald in who he targets for attack, but what he chooses to defend is too broad, to the point where I wonder if some self-deception is involved.

If I recall correctly he was also defending Wikileaks against the charge that it timed its releases to hurt Hillary Clinton. Even if you agree with Wikileaks' general agenda, it's obvious they were timing things for maximum impact.

It's the same with Russian interference. It's actually their job to interfere, and it would be easy for him to acknowledge that and still maintain his criticism of targets.

I don't see any NIMBY-ism in that statement.

His goal is reducing evictions, and if there's less money providing an incentive for landlords to evict their tenants, then that reduction is more likely to happen.

Whether or not it's the result of a bubble bursting is a matter of opinion, but if the luxury dwelling builders are wondering where their tenants are, it's fair to say there's at least some air coming out.

I work with JS as a low percentage of my total work, and recently tried to bring a 2-year-old Vue-based project up to date with the latest versions of everything.

I failed in my task. With these frameworks, given enough time, there ends up being a lot of "deprecated boilerplate" code, either directly or via dependencies. E.g. Vue is closely coupled to Webpack, and Webpack deprecated so many things between versions 2 and 4, that there's essentially no mechanical way to migrate the code. One must figure out every detail of the auto-generated Webpack config from version 2 and figure out how to do the same thing in version 4. (I'm looking at you, CommonsChunk and splitchunks!)

Legacy applications from the days of yore didn't "bit-rot" like this.

You can't move your bitcoins if your electricity is off or if a totalitarian system physically has you and your possessions.

You can only vote with your feet so many times, and if the choice is always to flee instead of demanding accountable government, eventually there will be no place to go. By providing a workaround for government non-accountability, Bitcoin encourages people to avoid the issue instead of engaging with it.

To me it seems mired in contradiction. The use case for cryptocurrencies is motivated by (though perhaps doesn't require) the assumption that accountable government is a lost cause; yet it also assumes that society provides enough stability for the protocol to operate, instead of devolving toward anarchy or totalitarianism.

> Writing a complex architecture without prototyping. Often your prototype will tell you what you need.

One million times yes. In my experience using a prototype as an input to a specification works much better than the other way around.

> Complex, hard to mentally map, build systems (e.g. CMake).

Also yes. It's almost to the point where one has to understand every detail of how CMake works to get it to do one (1) specific thing you need in your build process.

Every company should question the businesses they're in periodically. But having that discussion leak to the public is disastrous. Trust in executive decisions at Google must be extremely low if all their internal business keeps becoming public knowledge.

Commutes to SF via BART train are fine from the denser, inner-ring suburbs. Commutes from the sprawl area in Contra Costa County are horrendous.

San Francisco isn't even as dense as Queens, and isn't anywhere close to Paris or Barcelona. Its problems aren't a result of density, but rather economic stress.

Moreover leaving a few trees up in a lower-density development isn't a way to respect nature; whatever trees are left are there to decorate human properties.

We need new cities designed to be high-density from the start, and we need higher density in most existing cities. When humans live in urban areas, nature can be left alone, and you don't have to go 100 miles outside the city to reach undeveloped land.

Cities intended to be big cities from the start, we do need.

The trouble with small cities is that no one wants to see their character changed. In New York they built the subway ahead of development, making high density possible immediately, and regularly bulldozed existing properties as demand increased to make them even higher density later.

I don't know why it's falling away from the front page, but as far as skepticism goes, numbers that surprising raise more questions than answers. Your anecdotes have been very informative by the way.

Considering that the overall category is "software engineering compensation", many people will be senior/staff engineers, unless people are constantly washing out in less than 5 years time.

It would probably be an interesting article to delve into what accounts for the difference between the Bay Area's $227,000 median (which sounds about right) and the $400K-$500K that 5 years of experience gets at the top of your list. The difference is striking, essentially paying double the median amount for moderately experienced employees.