eunoia

I have a very similar crisis reaction. Acute crisis bring out the best in me. Unfortunately conversely, long slow simmering ones without agency break me over time.

Anectdote: I was very into “extreme” sports as a kid and into adulthood. I eventually took up skydiving and had quite a bit of fun with it. Met a lot of old timers with a lot of jumps under their belt. An observation really struck me talking to them: the people at the top of “extreme” sports are not really adrenaline junkies, but control freaks.

The “Internet scale” input-to-profit function is most certainly not linear.

Introducing linear cost centers would cut into the profit margins that essentially define “Big Tech” these days.

Yeah Apple retail and the Genius Bar in particular is an interesting case. Apple clearly invests a lot on the customer experience in those contexts. I would argue that’s a value add to their massive hardware sales. Apple is a much more “traditional” company than most FAANG in that sense. Its web services/ dev relations divisions have the same old modern internet scale company customer service problems though.

Edit: Apple’s text/phone support for hardware purchases is also excellent.

Because high quality customer service and support doesn’t scale well. Especially at the scale and (sadly) profit margins FAANG companies expect.

Eulalia!

> Has it occurred to you that the lack of people willing to pay for what you're trying to offer may be indicative that it's not quite as valuable as you perceive it to be?

This is how we end up with no art, no music, no culture, no raising of the future generations etc. If the only metric via which we value time spent and effort spent is money earned none of these (very important) things can compare even to the most useless widget making / admin job.

Do we even know what it is to be human anymore?

More anecdata: In over three years my Volvo has never phantom braked to the best of my knowledge. ACC is far and away my favorite and most used Pilot Assist feature too.

I’ve had both, been in the industry for a while.

The unfortunate thing I’ve discovered about great managers in big companies is that the work (not personal) relationship is temporary. There’s a good chance they get promoted/move on before you do.

Edit: I’ve also been a manager and even with the manager cap on I stand by my advice. I would not fault an interviewee if it turned out “Taking care of family health” really meant “Taking care of my own health”.

To me it’s no different than a company telling candidates how well funded and good the future prospects are, right up until the layoffs.

Ever had a private company recruiter show you a slide deck of how many millions your options will “surely” be worth in a couple years (via their non-GAAP proprietary metrics)?

Same stuff, it’s all a game. Loyalty is owed to individuals, not corporations.

I think this answer draws the right balance between truth and vulnerability.

A corporation is not your friend. The interviewer is probably feeding you less benign little lies about the company simultaneously.

Oops autocomplete. Incompetency should be idempotency.

Yup, and my understanding of the problem is that if you expose the heavy weight views to the state layer (structs) and allow direct manipulation, render calls lose incompetency, the structs are no longer the source of state truth and the whole abstraction gets terribly leaky.

Edit: once again I think it’s important to look at the limitations and advantages of prior work in this area and I believe React refs to be a good case study in that.

As I understand it, what you’re asking for is fundamentally incompatible with the paradigm itself (at least in a clean way).

The whole programming experience of declarative UIs is predicated on the fact that you’re manipulating lightweight structs (really just state representations) that are rendered into heavyweight views by the system only where necessary (determined by diffing the state changes).

React’s refs are an attempted answer to this very problem, and they get nasty fast.

Agreed about this middleman being particularly undesirable.

You may be interested in checking out some non-FB software around this concept. Something like: https://immersed.com/

Of course you’ll probably end up running it on FB hardware unfortunately…

I’m actually really bullish on this use case for AR/VR/MR. Digital professionals spend all day on digital platforms creating digital products (software being an example).

If you think of it like this, monitors and our current HCI paradigms are basically bandwidth limitations to productivity. A more immersive productivity experience could be conceived of in AR/VR/MR, a la Minority Report / Tony Stark’s lab. They’re have been some really interesting articles floating around of people already doing this.

I just wish it wasn’t Facebook pushing this forward.

Some random local context: Menver was a running joke 10/15 years ago, probably even before that too.

Great book! It’s available online, for free at https://www.pbrt.org/.

You can also find older, physical editions on EBay for $10-$15.

I moved to the valley for a FANG opportunity a few years ago.

Honestly, it’s not my cup of tea. Recently changed jobs to a company that supports full time remote so I can move somewhere with a better chance for a balanced (enjoyable) life.

Personal opinion, your mileage may vary etc.

I don’t think you understand how deep the Apple secrecy/paranoia culture rabbit hole goes.

Another example: Have you ever noticed how comparatively infrequently Apple is even mentioned in FAANG working condition threads?

Source: I am a former Apple employee.

My enthusiasm for corporate work may have dulled a bit over the years but I still really love to program.

Digging into new challenges, learning and creating still tick the boxes. I’ve found I increasingly need to partition work and “hobby” CS though.

Currently working through 3D graphics in the “hobby” category and having a blast.

Honest question, I’m very curious. Do you still classify React as closer to an OO paradigm than functional?

Agreed hooks are… something else.

Me too. HireRight was somehow completely unable to contact some of my previous employers. Situation resulted in me visiting old offices in person for proof of employment to satisfy HireRight.

This all occurred after I had accepted the job offer and took a long and stressful time.

Well a long time ago, came a man on a track

Walking thirty miles with a sack on his back

And he put down his load where he thought it was the best

He made a home in the wilderness

He built a cabin and a winter store

And he ploughed up the ground by the cold lake shore

And the other travellers came walking down the track

And they never went further, no they never went back

Then came the churches, then came the schools

Then came the lawyers, then came the rules

Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads

And the dirty old track was the Telegraph Road

Then came the mines, then came the ore,

Then there was the hard times, then there was a war

Telegraph sang a song about the world outside

Telegraph Road got so deep and so wide

Like a rolling river

Never thought I'd get to quote a Dire Straits song on Hacker News :)

The only use I’ve ever found for traditional cruise control is to reduce ankle strain on extremely long road trips. Not a big fan.

Adaptive cruise control is about my favorite “driver assist” technology though. Makes the constant speed changes of rush hour driving much less stressful when you use a large enough safety window. Also on open highways it is just wonderful as you basically never touch it (unlike traditional which constantly has to be disengaged for even a single other car in your lane).

Worth noting that my vehicle’s emergency braking system is distinct and active regardless of ACC status. Also I’m always ready to brake manually.

Honest question: is wrapping a home in a Faraday cage even plausible?

Or on a room level? How do you control for RF leaks? How do you handle windows and doorways?

I’m fascinated.

Oh nice, looks like we finally figured out the meaning of life, the universe, why we’re here, etc:

> a solid, practical job.

ffs

Edit to be a bit less flippant: As a holder of a “solid, practical job” for over a decade I definitely feel there should be more to life and don’t fault those who aspired for more than just practicality at the age of 17/18.

Refueling for what? The realities of orbital dynamics mean that Mars isn’t a convenient stopping place on the way to say, the outer solar system. I don’t have the numbers in my head but the delta-v requirements to intercept, match velocity and land negate any potential refueling benefit in my understanding. (Not to mention the added complexity vs a straight shot, this is a lot to pull off even in a sim like KSP)

You might be able to make an argument for refueling bases on Mar’s tiny moons with their negligible gravity wells for Martian missions themselves but that’s about all I can see.

What am I missing?

I was working heavily with amplify a couple years ago and to be honest it was an awful experience.

Common use cases weren’t handled well, deployment failures were common, overall architecture was actually less coherent when using amplify than just the constituent AWS services directly, etc…

It felt like a kitchen sink of functionality that no one was incentivized to actually make work well together.

Have things improved?

My 2019 Volvo XC40 pre-tensions the seatbelts and moves the seats like this.

I didn’t know it was a feature until I nearly got rear ended waiting on a left turn and the car went into rear impact protection mode. (Other driver veered off at the last second). It was quite impressive tbh.

Edit: For the curious:

https://www.volvocars.com/lb/support/manuals/xc90/2018w46/dr...

https://www.volvocars.com/en-th/support/manuals/v60/2017w17/...

Don’t listen! Denver is prone to harsh winters that weed out the weak. Yearly winter total population fatality rates average around 8%. If the weather doesn’t get you first you might asphyxiate from the extremely low oxygen.

I hear New Jersey has better nature anyway.

Source: sarcasm.

Out of curiosity what are your thoughts on Santa Fe?

Very similar situation, relocated to the Bay for work a few months before the first shelter in place.

It’s been rough. Don’t have any real advice, but at least know you’re not alone.

Edit: I think it’s important to focus on where we go from here. And at least to me that actually means more remote. I would rather be able to work remotely from amongst my existing support network than attempt to roll back the clock to a pre-COVID style of office work.

To each their own.