flak48

As someone with very little music theory knowledge is there a better alternative to getting into music theory to be able to write music, than the western system, that can be recommended?

Like how it would feel to grow up learning in metric instead of imperial units for example?

Sorry if I didn't understand what you and GP were trying to say

> But for everyone else, internal expression wasn't squelched out of fear of external forces.

I recall my reaction when doing that training; it was less a feeling of internal expression being restricted by force. But rather a vague feeling in the back of my mind, that if I care about the value of my stock comp, it probably makes sense to avoid putting my company in trouble by mistake.

I'm not saying that's the most rational reaction but that's what I recall feeling anyway (this was a few years ago). A slightly cynical take would perhaps be that my company bought my complicity for a few RSUs. :shrug:

I had read the book, but not the Wikipedia article.

I don't work at Google but I had to take similar training too, where using words/phrases like 'dominant', 'market share', 'leading in a market' etc were discouraged. Specifically because the 'market' can be interpreted in a zillion different ways, especially for tech companies.

Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking.

Peter Thiel in Zero to One also gives examples of how a company can be considered a monopoly and not a monopoly by simply increasing the definition and size of the market that the company is operating in. (And how companies will generally try to avoid being classified as monopolies this way)

e.g. Google is a monopoly if you consider online advertising as the market, but if you stretch the market to all advertising (including print, radio, TV and billboards), Google might not be considered one.

Similarly Amazon in the e-commerce market vs general retail.

Compared to just opening 'Ringtone' in settings and just choosing any file I want, I would hardly describe having to Google for 10 seconds and then having to go to iTunes (on a different device?) to push a ringtone, as trivial or convenient.

Just read your post and just wanted to say I'm in absolute awe!

> What would your opinion be on that matter, answering your own questions?

I'm honestly perplexed. Maybe I should study what those fields did, if they made any conscious efforts to address diversity mismatch (compared to demographics of the general population) . Or if some other barriers came down that allowed male dominance to reduce in these fields(in some cases to be replaced by female dominance).

Firebase offers email login (passwordless) as an auth method. Where you are emailed a new URL that logs you in, each time you wish to.

It also offers SMS based login in a similar manner where no passwords are involved and you just copy a 6 digit or so number from a SMS you receive upon clicking 'Login'

In India this SMS based login method without passwords is the norm for almost all locally developed apps I've used (despite SMS as the sole authentication factor being not really secure due to the possibility of sim swapping, etc).

Disney Plus (Hotstar) in India has recently started mandating users to switch to such SMS based single factor auth (from password based login), presumably to add friction for account sharers.

How did other industries that were once historically male dominated overcome this 'identification problem' atleast in terms of gender if not race? (Professions like biologists, psychologists, forensic scientist, vet for example all of which are around 75%+ female today, except for biologist which is bit more even)

And why haven't we seen the same pattern in tech?

On the other hand tech is one of those industries where someone from say even a journalism degree can get a job after a short bootcamp (and there are many free ones if you are a woman or minority)

> A simple fix is to just use the previous power value if ever: the cadence is non-zero and the previous power is non-zero and the current power is zero. A slight improvement is to keep track of the slope and factor it in when calculating the predicted value.

Looks like somebody rediscovered the Kalman filter without realising it :)

I recall implementing one for an IoT device, to de-noise gas sensor readings a few years ago.

Pretty fun read. Makes me wish I could gather the courage and patience to get back into hacking on embedded stuff

I think Google blacklists you after 3 failed onsite attempts.

I had a similar question once, someone had mentioned https://www.unshackledvc.com/

I would assume the comment you're replying to means things like resource usage patterns and costs to estimate a client's profits for example. Rather than reading actual data from S3 or a database.

I would argue most people in a organization actually are fungible, especially the more junior they are. At least in software.

It's not a coincidence that conversations around the number of engineers/designers required for a project commonly end up referring to them as 'resources' in most companies.

Since algorithm interviews are the current norm for filtering, there are a huge swathes of people who are just as good at beating such interviews but never got the chance due to their location.

I guess as it becomes more obvious to people that the logical next step for a fully remote company would basically be to lay off staff in higher cost of living locations (I'm sure we are starting to see this), more people will internalize this reality.

The most amusing aspect of Gitlab's location based compensation is that they spin it as employees in higher CoL locations should be paid more (while carefully choosing to ignore the corollary implication that employees in lower CoL locations are paid less for the same work).

Cost of living in terms of rent or expenses is not everything. If I work from India, I also pay in terms of reduced life expectancy due to higher pollution, greater chance of dying in a road accident and what not. If a perverse sense of 'fairness' (or a facade of it) is so important to companies, I would love to see these factors being considered too.

> used to display a dolphin

Ah, the retired fail whale

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-s...

It's going to be interesting to see how FB & Google's investments in Jio will end up shaping the bill.

If not a way to nudge regulators to be lenient, this investment is perhaps a hedge.

Maybe we are underestimating the power of their relations with the present government, in terms of an ally that can be used to threaten or harm competitors both Indian and foreign.

Just like TikTok can be banned, other services can eventually be banned too, under the garb of nationalism or whatever and India can potentially go the full China way with Reliance as the Indian Baidu or Alibaba, or at least as a major rent seeker in the ecosystem.

With enough protectionism a local company need not try to be a quality alternative to FB or Google.

For example of some Indian Government protectionist whimsy that affected Amazon and Walmart owned Flipkart take a look at [1]. Which 'coincidentally' came the same week that Reliance had announced plans to launch an ecommerce website in India [2].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/27/amazon-walmart-india-e-com...

[2] https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/asia-s-richest-man-o...

Amazon has teams with global and local impact, with the work somewhat on par with their US counterparts.

Google generally has a bit of the shittier work in general (the permanent curse of India offices of US companies - local managers/directors having to beg and dig for work/charters). It's changing since Google Pay is run from India and other India specific teams are also coming to India. Google used to have the GSuite team in India that I think was shut down 3 years ago.

Apple I think has a maps and small App Store/itunes team. (They are the exception since they don't seem to be seeking FANG like talent at least in India in terms of pay and candidate backgrounds)

FB and Netflix don't have tech teams in India.

All of FAANG have ops/business/sales team in India.

Exactly. Many people I know, myself included see the 'investments' being routed to Jio as buying assurances from the government that regulations like data localization and other pro-privacy, anti-west measures are halted or watered down. A shakedown, in other words.

Yep if anything I hope the Ambani family's escapades with Jio doesn't whitewash their deserved reputation as perhaps the most corrupt company in India.

For those not aware, Jio itself came into being via a scam. (That the comment I replied to is alluding to). The TL;DR is Reliance acquired a company that had only managed to win an Internet Service Provider license auction (that too in a dubious manner [1], [2])

Then Reliance 'convinced' the government to let them convert the license [3] to allow them to provide voice services as well, for a paltry fee (the amount they paid was set in 2001 and did not account for inflation over 12 years - which is pretty significant in India). Thus Jio was able to become a full blown 4G cellular provider at a fraction of the cost of competitors like Vodafone, Airtel etc.

[1] https://scroll.in/article/802277/why-its-crucial-for-apex-co...

[2] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/telecom/dot-re...

[3] https://scroll.in/article/802282/how-many-committees-does-it...

Me too, started to wonder what they could have done wrong

I've flown on the 747 only twice.

The last time was just this year before COVID hit, when a Storm Ciara shut down down London Heathrow for 2 days. I 'volunteered' to postpone my flight without making a fuss, since I absolutely didn't mind extending my v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ business trip by a couple of days.

Though I was half expecting, half wishing for it, BA bumped me up to business class and that too on the upper deck. I like to think they did that because of the inconvenience they thought they subjected me to. It wasn't a window seat but I couldn't care less. There are only 5 rows of seats upstairs, so it really did feel like being in a private jet, with 2 attendants just for those 5 rows. Especially since the upper deck is a comfortable 2-2 configuration with an extra wide aisle, as opposed to the packed 2-4-2 configuration on the lower deck, even for business class. [1]

That was my last flight this year and I'm grateful that I could have been lucky enough to experience this before the 747s were retired; now I'm left wondering how flying again in economy would feel like having experienced this.

[1] https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/British_Airways/British_Ai...

Companies tend to keep track of the onsite success to failure ratio and then if it's too low examine if the bar raising is too aggressive.

Which ends up going in the direction of meetings like "Should we standardize on what questions we are asking in interviews?" or "Should we standardize what pass means or fail means for a particular problem?"

The general approach to dealing with low diversity in a team seems to be to increase the percentage of phone screens being allotted to diversity candidates (which on the other hand reduces the number of non-diversity applicants that get a phone screen).

And not actually lowering the bar during an interview / hiring committee meeting.

Don't mean to sound facetious, but isn't self hosting also technically hosting somewhere ? (Unless you mean actually having access to the physical server where it's running from)

In other words are we just assuming Digital Ocean/Hetzner or wherever one 'self-hosts' is less likely to auto ban you for no reason? I would say yes, but I hope others are atleast considering this aspect when comparing this moving to Gitlab or whatever

Yep, since he didn't seem to care if our Digital Ocean account would get suspended.

And the fact that the intern didn't care/foresee we would suffer downtime or at the very least a major inconvenience if our accounts were suspended as long as they could finish their personal task.