i_dont_know_

It's a very interesting problem with psychology and the locus of control -- I think, ultimately, it depends on what works for you and solves your current psychological funk at the time.

Some people think they control everything about their lives -- they do think that if they put in the time, effort, and energy, they can achieve anything. When they don't, they blame themselves endlessly. Sometimes, learning that it was something beyond your control (ie social forces were stacked against your particular endeavor) can be liberating and break the person out of personal blame an hopelessness and let them start again.

On the other end of the spectrum is feeling like an endless victim. Sometimes, it's easy to blame everything and lament how everything is stacked against you. This provides psychological solace but can prevent you from moving forward because you're convinced you won't be able to. In these cases, some of the stories of 'self-made' optimism can help get you out of a spot of hopelessness into action.

In this situation, though, what's medicine to one is poison to the other. I can think of times in my life where each view was helpful and warranted, even if they're hard to reconcile with each other.

In this case, the 'truth' isn't really knowable because we can't objectively observe a system we're a part of. So, until we know, I guess it's whatever view gets you where you need to go.

I had this issue before -- I spent a long time trying to figure out what my brain told me was 'clever' code. For me it was 2 things:

1. Code that takes advantage of a constraint in an unexpected way (if you know the input will always be 'a' or 'b', you can write 'if not a:' and do things that assume 'b')

2. Code that allows for reuse in an unexpected way (you know these because the explanation in code review is 'in case we switch to system-X, we won't need to re-do this part')

Both of these are really cool in an academic setting because they're bonuses. They're like plot twists, only with code. However, in the real world, these are both pretty bad.

1 is bad because you generally don't know what constraints are 'fixed' and what aren't in your business. 'not a' might mean 'b' today but might not in two months. Your best bet is to make very clear easy-to-understand, easy-to-predict code so when you do learn new constraints you can quickly fix or extend the code.

2 is bad because it's usually premature optimization. Honestly think back to how many times you or someone you know has added code in this way, adding an abstraction layer somewhere or adding complexity because it will allow for extendability later, and think back to how often the code had to be extended in the way predicted. Usually this seemingly clever piece of code ends up being a weird extra step you always have to remember later ("oh, then we convert it into an array of strings and back into ints")

So I would say you should look at the applications you're building and think about what 'smart' code really looks like in your day-to-day and if the people you're talking to are creating such code. I'd argue they aren't, and one of the problems is that part of you believes they are, so you're having trouble articulating why they should stop and why it's harmful.

The book makes a good and strong case for it... though it's almost a side-note in the bigger scheme of what the book is trying to show: that we had civilization (and not even in some relativistic 'you have to squint to see it' way) all throughout our history.

"The Dawn of Everything" by the Davids, Graeber and Wengrow.

It's a little dense and a bit meandering at times, but the core idea behind it: we have a strong bias in believing that civilization comes in stages. We believe we go 'hunter/gatherer/primitive' -> agriculture -> 'real' civilization. Basically, this is totally false.

Not only is it totally false, but one of the reasons we might have this bias is because, while the native Americans were being eradicated, Western thinkers and theologians had to justify why Western civilization was 'better', despite native Americans basically giving Westerners the seeds for individual liberties and social blueprints for the Western Enlightenment...

It really uprooted my deepest beliefs about human history, civilization, and (most importantly for me) what I believe "the future" should look like. Mind-expanding for sure.

I think many sciences understand that there's a dominant narrative that isn't always right... for instance, we've had a tendency to write and look at history as a succession of important, pivotal men. In this very outdated view, the reason the Tudor period in England was the way it was is because of Henry VIII and that's all that's important to say about it. More modern historians try to answer the questions about what life and society was like back then, and how that whole story of society shaped events more than just the politicking and daily lives of the most powerful monarch.

So, for history, you have a 'classical' approach of just focusing on the politics and intrigues of the most powerful, and you have a more 'modern' holistic way of going about it. I'd argue the latter is better, but to get there, there had to be some moments of open-mindedness and willingness to look at it from other angles.

My best guess is that many social sciences, including anthropology, are also undergoing some sort of 'classical' vs 'modern' approach, which I think is ultimately a good thing.

There used to be a time in the not-so-distant past where anthropologists would find, say, calendars that would count down 28 days and go "why would the men back then make a calendar that counts lunar cycles?" without ever thinking that maybe a woman made the calendar for herself. I think we're better off with a collective practice of anthropology that's capable of thinking those kinds of thoughts.

That having been said, though, I wouldn't want to be an anthropologist right now. It feels like they're throwing so many assumptions up in the air and questioning everything to the point that they can't really do studies of substance.

Like the whole bit about studying violence in native American cultures... doing such studies might impact the way those cultures are seen today, but surely there's a way to still study it in a way to mitigate those consequences? Surely it doesn't mean we can't even think about studying it?

I dunno, I think long-term we'll get a better anthropology practice out of all of this (I read a great but somewhat controversial book called "The Dawn of Everything" recently touching on some of this) but looking at it from the middle of the process without having any idea where it's going... it looks and probably is quite frustrating.

I think if the poll says 'yes' and he does truly abide by it, I think it will show some honesty around the whole 'public town square' and 'for the people' rhetoric he has espoused. I'd be quite impressed.

However, he has a history of noble intents on Twitter (eg the 'end world hunger' thing) followed by lack of follow-through, so I can imagine a scenario where the poll comes out 'yes' and he doesn't abide by the results by calling foul play somewhere (bot accounts, multiple user accounts etc.)

I strongly suspect prioritized handling or some other points-based system that classifies customers and the quality of care they 'deserve'.

I've had 1 or 2 issues before (things late, wrong things etc) and all of them were handled nearly instantly and pleasantly, where I got the benefit of the doubt and left deeply satisfied.

Fast-forward to a week or so ago. I had a shipment coming in, paid extra for 2-day delivery. It was late, but I really needed it by a certain date because I was traveling after. First rep I got said they'd pull some strings to get it routed earlier, offered some refunded shipping etc. Awesome service like I was used to.

I looked later and the updated shipping wasn't shown, so I wasn't sure it went through. So I contacted again the next day and got... slightly less good service. They actually said the rerouting might happen, and maybe I could get a pickup, but to check again the next day if it moved. I contacted them a third time the next day and this was the worst service I had ever gotten. The rep said there was nothing to be done... no discount for inconvenience, no expedited shipping, no early pickup options, literally nothing. They actually even kept the chat open after we were done talking so I couldn't leave negative feedback. I was floored. After years of amazing service I couldn't believe it... it didn't even feel like the same company.

In the end, it did come early (looks like the first rep did what they promised, just took a while to show up) but in the meantime, contacting them several times about the same issue downgraded me to "not worth helping" customer status.

I've noticed (like others mentioned) that the quality of goods available on Amazon has downgraded significantly recently, so I suspect that means more people contact more frequently with issues.

Rather than interpreting it as a quality-of-goods problem, I suspect they've interpreted it as a quality-of-customer problem; that is, they've decided more and more customers have downgraded themselves from "generally good customer we should keep happy" to "customer who will complain about anything -- not worth keeping happy".

Let's hope they fix their algorithm.

I've gotten similar things in recent years, but most of them promise some sort of discount or free tiny trinket from their store if you do it. I've never had the time or energy to follow up.

This looks like the next step in that rewards progression though.

Hopefully a useful observation for founders looking for their first employees

I agree with the message overall: impactful work might not 'look' like work, but I'm not sure what the author's deal is with conflating 'collaboration' with 'meaningless meetings'.

I guess I've just had different experiences, but for me, 'collaboration' means 'understanding that this project/task does not exist in isolation and looping in those relevant stakeholders early to make sure they decide with you as opposed to discovering roadblocks too late'. I can't imagine how someone can be against that.

From context, I feel like the author is using that word to mean 'gather people in a room and pretend to work'... is that how it's used normally?

This is honestly the exact reason I haven't tried to develop a facebook app or extension... I've heard that the smallest mis-step can get your account suspended like this. Not like a 'here's a warning' but 'you read a variable you shouldn't have, now your whole account is deleted'.

This isn't usually a problem, except Facebook has a pretty unique position in our society. It might be the only social media some of our immediate family have. It's the de-facto social media presence for some smaller community organizations (like parent groups) and hobby groups. A ban from Facebook is a lot more deeply impactful than being banned from, say, gmail or something.

I could understand if they sent the developers a cease-and-desist or initiated some sort of legal action with this as a potential consequence. I could even understand blocking the app until it was resolved. But actually searching up the dev team and banning their personal Facebook accounts for something they're building on Instagram...

This makes it so much scarier because Oculus is also Meta, and the community there is still heavily reliant on developers to grow since Meta has sunk so much money into it and it still hasn't quite found its footing in the market. Do they think more people are going to develop for it if a potential consequence is their facebook account will be perma-banned as a first-resort? Would you be willing to experiment on that platform?

Anyways, I'm no gazillion-dollar monopoly, but it seems vindictive more than good business sense.

I generally bill around $175/hr to make whatever technology problems you have work out :) (Note I'm based out of Europe, though, reading some of the stuff here I should probably charge more anyways)

That's my generalized rate when the person paying me is non-technical and the actual work involved isn't clear or known to them ahead of time. I spend part of the time coming up with a plan so they know what's going to happen, of course, and coming up with estimates.

If it's a technical person or the problem is better-defined, then I charge different 'specialist' rates that vary based on the task and the rough 'market rate' for such a task.

Sometimes, also, it's just an unusually fun task or a task for a nonprofit or something, in which case I work with their budget and my intrinsic motivation and try to come up with something fair.

I think the weirder implication here is that if a jury changes its mind, it will be interpreted as tampering, their votes will be discarded, and their new 'votes' will be approximated by whatever distribution they think their votes should have come from originally.

I think this is more relevant in the US... in party-based systems it becomes much more interesting to see what the party trends are... it's kind of the same types of information but it's even harder to get at because it's spread out over a party. But it's also a little easier to see because parties have to coordinate internally and artifacts of that coordination are pretty easily available through public channels. But yeah, no hope of monetizing so a hobby it will stay.

(https://nimishg.com/showcase/) though I recently migrated the site so I'm actually not totally sure all the showcase links work. All of the code is on github (https://github.com/nimishgautam) but might take a little effort to get working on your own

Thanks! (https://nimishg.com/)

Ah, cool! No, I wasn't aware of them... thanks for the pointer!

Visualizing political data :)

I've done various 'pet projects' over the years in this realm, from exploring political bias in word embeddings to simple voting maps showing regional shifts, to comparisons of actual crime vs fear of crime across various demographics. I've even gotten to partner up with actual journalism outlets.

I love doing this stuff but I'd like to collaborate with others (either with technical or promotional capacity) to make these kinds of tools more useful, relevant, and ultimately actually inform people better.

Now to put on my grumpy pants...

Programming nowadays feels more like an exercise in importing other people's code correctly. I feel like it's mostly writing something that takes data format X, converts it to format Y for library Z and then 'just works'[sic]. The 'heavy lifting' is usually not happening in your code, but in one of the libraries/full-on programs being pulled in, and your code just happens to be calling it with the right parameters.

This isn't all bad, in that it allows ideas to be tested and products to be created in a testable (and sometimes even shippable) form in a ridiculously fast amount of time, but then you're also far more prone to discover some library in your stack had a breaking change a few versions ago and you suddenly don't know when your upgrade will be delivered because you don't know if it's just a 'legacy=true' parameter that needs to be passed in or they redid their core somehow.

Or you try to profile your code just to find 97% of the execution is from the single 'load_thing_from_internet()' call and you have no idea if you want to fork and maintain a branch of that thing, switch it out for something else, or try to write your own. And you probably have dozens of these in the code you don't even know about because the libraries you import are just the same thing.

I think this whole process makes for sloppy, difficult-to-understand, and slightly scary applications -- and this is basically all applications running today.

So the "where the money comes from" part is a separate discussion (maybe another thread?), but I'll try to answer "how it (could) work".

So, let's say there's some amount X that is enough for a person to afford housing, food, reasonable transport etc. It's as simple as saying "everyone gets this amount now, rich or poor".

For a rich person, it'll be a drop in the bucket, but for a poor person it could mean the economic freedom to quit a bad job. A few quick points around this:

* inflation. People keep worrying about this. Wages have stagnated since the 70s, and whenever raising minimum wage is mentioned, people say it will cause inflation. My counter-question is, how have we stagnated wages and still have inflation as high as it is now? It kinda feels like inflation isn't a result of growing wages but tied to economic growth in general. If inflation will just happen as part of economic growth, why not cut poor people in on the pie a little bit? (I know why, I'm asking rhetorically)

* welfare. People think we're doing something like this already with welfare, except welfare comes with all kinds of random classist baggage. Should the person get welfare if they, say, try to buy some 'luxury' item that's not strictly needed to live but might give them a small hint of joy in an otherwise tough situation? This version just takes away the restrictions and qualifying conditions by saying everyone just qualifies.

* no one working. Of course people would still work. It's just they wouldn't be forced to do so under pain of homelessness or starvation. Imagine saying "I quit" and still getting your base needs met. What kind of working conditions would people have to give you to keep you wanting to work? What kind of job satisfaction would need to become the norm?

I realize many of these don't apply to many of the people in this forum, but it can make a huge difference in industries like food service, where working conditions and perks are... a bit different from tech.

I mean 4x8, but I guess 4x10 is also similar. Usually I negotiate for 4x8, and because it's 20% fewer hours, I accept a 20% pay cut, but I guess the 4x10 arrangement wouldn't involve a pay cut since it's the same number of hours.

Yeah, it's been important to sell it as a 20% cost savings and make it clear that you don't get 20% less output, but instead the same output with usually increased quality, because the person is more motivated, better rested, more focused etc. Usually it shows, but, again, takes a lot of work to get it set up in the first place.

Huh, this makes sense. I work in Denmark and the 'standard' package is centered around weeks, so taking less than 1-week units of parental leave is a little difficult.

Awesome resource! Thanks for making and posting it :)

The biggest resistance I get is around this "part time/full time" divide. They basically think that 4 days = part-time, which usually means a temp or entry-level person. They argue that the work isn't the kind of work that should be classified as part-time. It takes lots of convincing to say that this is still full-time.

I've been thinking of writing some sort of guide around all the various arguments I get and ways I've implemented it at previous employers...

I think there's also something to be said for passive processing.

Sometimes I'll know I need to write some code or some function and I'll just think about it in the back of my head while doing other things, sometimes for a whole day or two. Then I'll sit down and write it in like 20-30 minutes. Did I work 20-30 minutes, or have I been working for a day or two? I would say a day or two, and the 20-30 minutes was the time needed to produce the deliverable of that work.

I definitely feel bad for the guy, and I hope he got/gets the full help he needs.

That having been said, I think there's something about meditation traditions that come from and are part of monastic traditions vs. meditation techniques that have been removed from their monastic roots.

Basically, he was meditating at monk-like levels, and if he were actually in a monastery, he would probably have gotten help at some point beforehand. Maybe he was neglecting part of his health, or emphasizing one technique over another without being fully-rounded in his approach, or a number of other similar things that would have been caught by a community/teacher in a monastery. They literally have hundreds of years worth of meditation troubleshooting under their belts, though some of it is codified in ways that directly intertwine with religious beliefs/practices.

But when you try to remove the practice from the culture surrounding it, there's a danger that you left behind some important pieces. I find it kind of scary that he mentions there are recovery groups and such, especially for meditation teachers. I mean, it's awesome that they're supporting each other and recovering, but this seems like a red flag that maybe the a-religious form of meditation as it's being taught and marketed right now needs to go back to the source and figure out what monks are doing differently, or, even better, make sure they immerse themselves deeper into the source cultures to be able to troubleshoot adequately.

I guess it's like eating an olympic athlete's daily meal while ignoring the rest of their training regimen as "religious superstition" and getting drastically different results and being surprised.

I want to respond to you here because I think you've captured my point quite well in two ways, though maybe unintentionally. I really hope this gives you some personal insight somehow.

(Part I)

> I understood (and still believe) what I did was legal.

As you mentioned before, this work produced anger and fear, but you believe it was legal. I take that to mean that people in general understand what you did was wrong (morally) but the snapshot of the legal code at the time hadn't caught up with this intuition yet (as far as you know).

From a practical standpoint, I get why this is important to you. I don't have much to add on the legal side because I'm not a lawyer and I think it's focusing on a detail that glosses over the big picture of your actions. I feel like you're fixating on it for that exact purpose, though.

"I thought of violating rights in a way legislators hadn't even dreamed up yet! Violated tons of people's rights along the way, but the important thing is that I found a spot where those legislators forgot to dot the i's and cross the t's. That's what we should focus on". I wholeheartedly disagree. I think the focus is, and should remain, the people involved.

Whether you found a loophole or not is, in my mind, such a distant inconsequential second to the primary focus of your actions and their effects. You doing them in a possibly legally creative way is focusing on the wrong thing.

(Part II) > It is also undeniably art.

I assume this is based on me using "art" in quotes in another response, and you misunderstanding why I used the quotes.

So, imagine someone was punching people and the reason they gave was "boredom". I would use quotes there too, not because I doubt whether or not they were experiencing boredom, but because the word is being used as though it were a sufficient explanation of their actions. While it might be part of the explanation, it glosses over the most salient part of their action: the punching people bit. They also had a desire to punch people, and that desire is not encapsulated in the standard definition of "boredom", but they're using it as though it were in a way to gloss over it, even though it's the most important part of the whole thing. I think it's a sneaky trick to deny personal culpability so I'm putting the word in quotes.

Similarly, your use of "art" feels the same. Whether the end result had any artistic merit is beyond the scope of my comments. I'm saying that "art" as a motivation glosses over the most salient part of your actions: your desire to take something private irrespective of others desires to give that. The standard definition of 'art' doesn't adequately encapsulate that desire: I wouldn't say the most salient aspect of artists is that they behave in this manner. I think it's similarly a sneaky way to try and deny personal culpability by masking the most salient feature behind a more accepted term. But, to be crystal clear, what you did was take moments of people's lives they might not have wanted you to have and turned it into a spectacle for yourself... whether this resulted in art or salad is such a wildly distant second consideration it's practically immaterial (as far as me and others with similar reactions are concerned), let alone whether or not the resulting art or salad is legitimate... it's why your words echo the character in the movie saying "I was gentle".

For what it's worth though, I think it's nice to see you do sort of care on some level how your actions impact others, gives me a little bit of hope.

I'll assume you're asking this genuinely.

For the 'legal' part... you're generally not allowed to install whatever arbitrary software you want on other people's machines without some sort of consent, even in an Apple store. I'm not sure how much more elaboration this needs.

For the 'moral' part... he's taking a small intimate chunk of a person's life without their knowledge or consent and putting it in a picture frame because he finds it interesting and enjoyable. The reason he gives for this is "art". There's not even slight consideration of the people involved other than he considers that intimate chunk of their life and likeness to be his personal medium for "art", the same way clay or watercolors might be to a less terrifying person. Again, there are far worse ways he could create 'art' via nonconsensual intimacy, but my point is that it's fundamentally amoral to use people in that way in the first place.

What's interesting about this is that in this community we read about security researchers that do illegal (but generally not unethical) things, and about large companies that do unethical (but arguably not illegal) things. This guy does the worst of both and somehow people seem to be on his side.

This reminds me of a random, but chilling, scene in "Minority Report". The protagonist confronts a man he thinks is responsible for killing his child.

The man decides to reassure the protagonist by explaining how kind he was to the child, and made sure the child didn't suffer when he killed him. He's presenting it as though this is a legitimate defense for such an obvious violation. The part that sticks with me is the man's seeming sincerity in believing he's making a case for himself, "yeah I did this horrible thing, but I did it in the nicest way possible so it's really kinda big of me if you think about it"

This post fills me with the same chills. The author's utter lack of culpability for such a viscerally gross violation and strange attempts to spin it as though he's kind of a good person for doing it in a slightly less terrible way than he could have otherwise done it...

To be clear, he didn't go out and do a security research project with ethical standards in place. He made it clear how laughable he considers the concept of 'consent' (an ethical way to do this might've been to take people's pictures, then ask them if they were OK with sharing it right after. He doesn't consider such a process at all)

Instead, he thought of an amoral and illegal way for him to use people without their consent, for his own pleasure, curiosity, and amusement and decided to call it 'art'. There are more horrible ways he could have done the above, sure. But that argument to me sounds as hollow as the "but he didn't suffer" argument from the movie.

Him expressing his own sense of magnanimousness and ironic sense of victimhood at the end of it... it really is a scary glimpse into the mind of such people.

It's sad because it's very easy to misconstrue this as a "security researcher gets feds sent on him by apple" story, and I think lots of people are basically trying to frame it that way, but it's not that at all. To me, it's clearly "jackass doesn't understand consent, apple calls the feds, still a jackass, still doesn't understand".

[Note: yes I know the character in the movie is revealed as a bluff shortly after, the scene sticks with me because of the character's apparent sincerity at the moment]

[Additional Note: yes I know many of these companies also don't respect consent. Them not respecting it is not an excuse for everyone to behave the same way.]

So, this could be done in 1 of 2 ways:

1. There would be detailed ballot initiatives that contain full legal proposals, details of their execution, budget, etc. and voters simply vote "yes" or "no" to them.

We see this as referendums and ballot initiatives. When used sparingly for "big" questions, this works well, but when used routinely, it puts a pretty huge burden on voters to be continuously informed.

Take the California ballot this year. There was a ballot initiative about regulating kidney dialysis procedures. If it were the only ballot initiative, I might have had time to research it, discover the motivations around it (is it because of safety, or protectionism for an industry?) the consequences (does it need tighter regulation? do those regulation costs fall on the consumer?) etc.

But, there were like 20 of these things on the ballot. At some point, it becomes actual work to figure out all of them and research them thoroughly enough to know what the consequence of your vote would actually be.

Ideally, you'd have some sort of agent working on your behalf, sifting through the consequences and political motivations, and navigating the 'yes/no' votes in a way that aligns with your ideal outcomes. This is, theoretically, what politicians already do :)

2. Instead of exact legislation, you specify a general intent. Say that you were generally pro-environmentalism. All things being equal, you'd like things to go more towards environmental preservation, ending climate change etc.

Ok, cool, but now there's TONS of room for interpretation. Extreme case, as executor of this mandate, do I have carte blanche to do anything as long as it decreases the carbon footprint? Anything? Induce a famine to reduce usage and consumption of goods?

You'd probably need a more thorough statement of general intent and sentiment. Political parties (outside the weird US system) basically have this. They release a document, usually called a Party Program, which outlines their philosophies and intents.

Theoretically, you're voting for the party and the person you elect is someone who is ideologically dedicated to realizing the intents of the shared Party Program to the best of their ability.

This system works really well when there's a diverse collection of parties with different ideologies, different levels of concrete plans to realize these ideologies, and paths available for such parties to gain legitimate power and sway in the government.

The US 'parties' are missing quite a bit of the above, but I personally think having many parties and fixing our voting systems so such parties can eventually be in congress/the presidency would create a system where issues that people actually care about would be implemented (roughly) in ways they would approve of... at least much moreso than they are now in the US.