engineeringwoke

We are fourteen years into an extraordinary boom in asset prices and fourty years into the bond bubble because boomers are frankly greedy and want to pillage as much of their respective country's wealth before they die.

However, the only thing stopping them, the only boomer boogeyman that has ever existed (other than maybe WWIII) has come out of the woodwork: inflation. And now it is somehow still "bears are wrong lol cassandra lol" or whatever? You have to be kidding me.

I've worked in US and northern EU and in the latter there is basically no funding (relatively) and no talent feeders like FAANG. Senior engineers are also enamored with unnecessary complexity and founders still want to treat technical folks (even very senior) like cogs in a machine.

It's not a grey area. It's simply not enforced. If you're an investor and you find out that the co-founders gave you bad numbers to juice the next round (this is common to the extent that I have personally seen it multiple times), you have no incentive to get the law involved. You would lose your entire investment, instead of just some of it.

And oftentimes, the extra juice gives them enough runway to make things work. Cheaters win, that's the way it is.

Why do you believe any of that marketing? Rogue states? Terrorist groups? It's about power. If the US government cared about its people, then there would be real regulation to protect them. There isn't any because it's profitable to exploit them, not because of any libertarian ideal.

Meddling in the affairs of any corporation that handles just a single US dollar transaction is the opposite of interpersonal freedom. I am not sure how you can get this far into thinking about the subject while holding such a bizarrely cognitively dissonant belief.

What about meddling in USD transactions across the globe? Did they get that part right?

Sounds like successful bureaucracy to me. At some point, change is difficult for a large organism. It became large by doing what it is doing and doing that well. The reality is that change is oftentimes destructive; what is so much clearly "better" to you is not clearly better to the organism. Slowing things down, getting many people to consider the new, is all purposeful and quite useful in reality.

I'm not sure if you care or whatever, but this could be helpful advice. In general, those in academia and engineering (especially) don't have the social skills to tell apart a charlatan from someone with "true smarts".

There is no amount of "smartness" that will allow you to tell the difference... they will flatter you, shadow you, mimic you, and hide behind esoteric jargon. And chances are, you will be none the wiser.

Beyond pedantic. Very few people are in positions of legitimate control in early stage situations. It is generally good advice to not give more than you are worth.

Why would an individual have to defend themselves against disasters when they are so simple to mitigate against collectively?

Why? Perception is reality in engineering. I'm not incentivized to be anything other than slightly above average... people have horrible memories and velocity is very arbitrary. Engineering is a charlatan's paradise full stop; sounding smart is easy. In sales (especially) and marketing, there are real numbers that you drive. Everyone has bad quarters but if it continues, you will be let go.

> debugging hairy, nested, imperative conditionals with for-loops that are off-by-1

Isn't this just a complicated case of ifs and fors?

Right. And I'm saying that is because engineers don't want the responsibility that they often request because the entire point of PM's existence is offloading that responsibility. They seem more than happy to complain about it though

A product manager's decisions go unchecked most of the time because engineers and responsibility for business concerns are like oil and water. That's why PM exists, no? If engineers could just talk to marketing, sales, etc. then there wouldn't be a need for them, but alas, that is not the case.

and then your product manager smiles during the meeting when you say this, and then bursts out laughing when the call is over

What kind of competent investor does a debt deal that doesn't place them higher in the cap structure?

It takes a whole lot of alcohol to get the equivalent of that G zombie look. And the latter can easily kill you. GHB is not a panacea. It can turn people into animals.

No, it's because primates have been eating rotten fruit for tens of thousands of years to get high, and primates can't run a chemistry lab.

I can think of few stranger things that I have experienced in my life than being around a group of G hounds. It's like the Twilight Zone, and no, G is not safe and the effects are quite different than alcohol. It would never be widely popular to do a drug that so easily creates lapses in short-term memory... I think it is well-known why that is.

There's plenty more content to watch from Strong Towns if you want to convince yourself that you aren't being attacked

> Very much this. There is no cabal of homeowners opposed to lower prices despite it being often repeated.

Then let's raise interest rates to 5% again. It's some coincidence that we "need" zero-interest rate policy and quantitative easing when the boomers are in control... even worse in Japan, which is even more boomer dominated. Sure... just lots of coincidences.

Congrats on the post Gagan :)

People on this board love the idea that anyone who isn't an engineer is an idiot and everything that everyone else does that isn't writing code is somehow worthless. In broad strokes, they think that all people who do people-facing work are charlatans that are constantly trying to hide how worthless they are because talking to people, etc. can't possibly provide value. Then, they (like so), ask you to break down your arguments so they can pin the tail on the donkey that is the logical fallacy that they will use to discount your (almost certainly correct and informed) opinion.

Unsurprisingly, those people are wrong and marketing works.

> This was very much unlike the post-war period, where US industry was running on borrowed time, making increasingly burdensome concessions to unions that led to huge bankruptcies and retrenchment in the 1970s in many industries.

You mean the adjustment from the post-war period of 1945-1975? Just like the one you referenced from 1870-1900? The post-war boom in wages here, that you can see many times in history, occurs due to demographics. You are essentially arguing to the contrary of your point, that large-scale wage increases for average people translate to better outcomes for all. Higher velocity of money, more innovation. You do realize that society as a whole is a large union, correct? And if suddenly there are far less people for work, then it has the same effect as a group holding out for higher wages? That is functionally what a strike is; it's as if a large portion of the young population is all striking at once (they're in fact dead).

> massive deadweight loss from greater unrealized production/earnings

And what does this deadweight loss thing mean exactly... coming from someone who studied economics? This is completely made up, more casual libertarian groupthink from people who got rich and conveniently stop believing in society. Can we stay grounded on this board please?

Polder culture is very much about swimming with the majority, doesn't surprise me that the subreddits would reflect this

First set of crowns on the phone, move fast. Second set on desktop, completely type the answer. Weave in stories once you feel like you have a foundation. Add immersion from live streams/Netflix. This takes you to at least B2.

There's an unsurprising amount of ignorant responses and strawmen in the thread, kind of sad.

Similar story. I was a heavy smoker for ~10 years and was all for it, but I've since quit and realized how destructive it can be at high doses for long periods of time.

The discourse around how destructive it is encourages this thinking, similarly to how Americans struggle with alcoholism while Italians do not, despite the latter's culture of continuous exposure at young ages.

What makes you say that? Mass media, especially English speaking mass media, have been EU polyannas since its inception. It's bad for their status quo.

I was quite involved in the project around 2017-2018, and this is just what I feel, but I think the API is pretty much hardened at this point. Context was a disaster. Hooks are useful but more difficult to reason about compared to classes. They have said straight out that JIT optimizations don't work well when the main pattern was to heavily manipulate a singular state object, and that was a culture that I think they failed to change with Hooks.

If Facebook comes up with something else, I think it will be something new. Maybe that is Reason, or something that abuses WASM/Rust in the core architecture. Who knows. The project has a lot of tech debt, and the ecosystem has changed quite a bit as well.

I agree that the support for east Asian languages is horrendous, but Duolingo is optimised for romance languages, as it should be. The average person just wants to learn a little French as a hobby, and that's okay. I personally love the app and have used it as a stepping stone twice to get to content on YouTube or Twitch where you need an A2-ish level to start participating.

Too many programmer types lose the forest for the trees. They think purely in terms of their definition of "better", not their customer. Flashy UI, marketing, and gamification are what most people want.

Huh, I had no idea there was a real difference