ihumanable

I wonder if this ends up being more like lockpicks in practice. It's legal to own lockpicks but some jurisdictions consider possessing a lockpick to be prima facie intent to commit crime.

That's a great way to put it. I'm always amazed at how small the bribes can be.

When I hear stories with some quote similar to "then the senator granted them the mining rights to an $800M mine on public lands for a 3-night stay at Sandals." I'm mad about the corruption, but I'm also mad at the politician for being dog shit at realizing how large their bribe should be.

An article that included statistical data to that point would not have received this criticism.

Instead this article is just the assertions of Charlie Munger.

> E.g if we plot the range of outcomes for two groups of people, one group embracing a victim mentality and the other not, we'd likely see two power-law curves. However, the curve representing those without a victim mentality would generally trend higher, indicating more positive outcomes.

What exactly is this based on? Because it _feels_ right? Because it aligns with your own personal beliefs of what makes someone successful?

The article's framing is very clearly "Successful Man has this advice to be successful" but there's no reason given for why this advice is correct in any meaningful way. So, like I said, it might even be good advice, but it's just an appeal to authority. Successful Man said it, and it sounds like common sense, so it must be true.

For all we know, people that feel victimized by a system might be _more_ likely to want to take action to reform the system. There's no data presented, there's just an anecdote about a time when he faced a hardship and didn't adopt victimhood.

How long could Mr. Munger have kept up this belief system had he not met with success. How important was this mindset when compared to the other incredible benefits he received, here's a leg up he had taken from the very beginning of his Wikipedia article.

> Through the GI Bill Munger took a number of advanced courses through several universities.[6] When he applied to his father's alma mater, Harvard Law School, the dean of admissions rejected him because Munger had not completed an undergraduate degree. However, the dean relented after a call from Roscoe Pound, the former dean of Harvard Law and a Munger family friend.

It is quite easy not to adopt a victim mentality when your family friends can reverse a rejection to Harvard Law.

Somewhat the height of survivorship bias. There are a many number of people that don't adopt a victim mentality, work hard, and try to get ahead and just don't. For every Charlie Munger there are tons of working poor that get up everyday, work hard for minimum wage, then go off to their second job.

My entire childhood I watched both my parents, who both had 2 jobs, work themselves non-stop to try to provide for us. They didn't drink or do drugs or consider themselves victims, and it didn't help one bit.

Asking the man who wins the lottery how to live a good life and be successful often ends up with them telling you to do whatever it is that they did. It might even be good advice, but it's a ridiculous appeal to authority. Charlie Munger got all this success and he did X, ok, did other people do X and not achieve this level of success? How many people did not-X and were perfectly successful?

It's subjective finger wagging dressed up in more appealing clothing for those that already agree with the opinions to point at and be happy about. Because at the end of the day, it allows us to blame people's misfortune on them, they've adopted a victim mentality and that's why their lives aren't working out. It allows the class that has the vast majority of wealth to deflect any critical examination of the power structure that perpetuates this state. You aren't underpaid, you just have adopted a victim mindset. You aren't exploited, you just haven't found a way to turn the challenge of paying your rent into riches yet.

As a taxpayer I'm fine with this, and I don't recall electing you to police how the courts are used.

I've been playing Starfield and it's been fine for me. Occasionally the quality degrades and you can see this very obvious vertical wipe as it syncs back up, but it happens rarely enough for me that I don't mind it.

I'm kinda curious what's so difficult about writing JSON. I imagine it's quite subjective, but I've found the explicit bit of JSON to be nice. My editor is going to spit out matching brackets, quotes, braces, etc.

I think, at least for me, when I'm writing JSON in a document I can just go "I need a map, type `{`" and "I need a list, type `[`" and I like that.

I think my biggest gripe with YAML, TOML, etc is that to save me a few keystrokes I often end up playing this game of "Ok now how will the library interpret this, I'm adding a line here, it's indented, let me scroll up, ok, the last logical thing that happened was X so it's going to interpret this as a list item..." and that feels so taxing to me.

I think you could probably just skip the awkward “I’ll be riiight back” stand up, flip the light switch and carry on. I mean unless the light switch is in another room you’d still hear whatever is going on and unless you are literally running the meeting I struggle to imagine what the purpose of announcing your action is.

Maybe I’ve become a crusty old man, in years gone by I would have thought that people would notice me getting up and wonder where I was going. Now though, I’ve realized that no one is really paying that much attention to anyone else, even if someone were curious about why you walked away for a moment, the room getting brighter and you sitting back down doesn’t require a brain surgeon to piece together what happened.

Once you remove the completely voluntary awkward part of that video call, fiddling with an app and flipping a switch are on a lot more equal footing.

There's currently an issue in Godot 4 where web exports on macOS just cause the browser to hang.

Their advice seems to be use Godot 3 or wait until it gets fixed in the browsers.

See https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/70691 for details.

They took the handle @x from him and moved all of his stuff to @x12345678998765

I’m not sure what would be more angering, losing @x or the fact that they gave him a 16 character handle 15 of which is nonsense.

It’s also just a weird new handle, it’s not even like they tried to replace it with something good, just a jira ticket that says “give him something new, it can start with x but should be clear it’s not associated with us” and someone just rolled over the number keys.

Sure you have records which compare the current facts with historical facts to see if what Phoenix is currently experiencing is normal or not. But the person you're replying to has anecdotes about how it's hot in the summer in Phoenix.

So we are at a stalemate it seems :P

So you might have an answer as to why you got a poor evaluation. Multiple people have had trouble following code, and for good reason, what's going on here?

    # - pipeline insures that the zincrby and zrank call happen atomically and prevents race conditions.
    # - zincrby increments the score on the string, zrank fetches the new score
    pipeline = redis.pipeline()
    pipeline.zincrby(URL_PATH_COUNT_DATA_STRUCTURE, 1, path)
    pipeline.zrank(URL_PATH_COUNT_DATA_STRUCTURE, path, )

    data = await pipeline.execute()

    # returns the path and current count that was just made.
    return {"path": path, "count": int(data[0])}

So you make a pipeline so that the zincrby and zrank can be atomic. But the zrank seems to be completely pointless, it does not, as the comment suggests, "fetches the new score." The reason the counts are correct is because you are pulling the first reply out of the pipeline which is the result of zincrby, which is the new score.

So if I were evaluating your code I would wonder

  - Why is there a pipeline here at all?  

  - Why is it zranking?  

  - Did the comment go stale and the candidate just has poor attention to detail?

  - Is the comment the candidate telling me that they don't know how zrank works and they don't know how pipeline works?

  - Why is the comment lying to me?

  - Does this super senior engineer think "insure" and "ensure" are the same word?

The above code seems to my reading to be identical to

    score = await redis.zincrby(URL_PATH_COUNT_DATA_STRUCTURE, 1, path)

    return {"path": path, "count" int(score)}

We could just appoint them until a given age, let's say 70 for example, and then guarantee lifetime benefits after that but they no longer serve.

It has all the same benefits of a lifetime tenure, they don't need to worry about retaliation, they wouldn't be _more_ likely to accept bribes since they will still have income and benefits for their retirement, etc.

Yep, every time a CEO goes on vacation they just shut the company down until they return. Bezos must be exhausted programming amazon.com and personally delivering every package.

I have an Ikea can opener too, I think it's going on a decade of quality service. It's mostly light blue plastic, I thought it would fall apart, but it still works great. One of those that cuts through the side of the can instead of the lid itself.

And yet still can't turn a profit, it's really amazing.

It would be one thing if I were sitting here going, "Well that makes sense you can't deliver a $12 hamburger for $10" but every time I use DoorDash it's "Somehow this $12 hamburger is listed as $18 and when I went to check out with service fees and tip it's going to be $40..."

The internet at large says no.

People won't run their own mail exchange, because it's too much work and too complicated.

People won't run their own blog, because it's too much work and too complicated.

The downside to doing either of these things poorly is that you can't send email / become a spam email relay / get hacked and lose your blog content.

Now tell those people that they can take on all the downside risk of losing all their money and the only thing they have to do to make sure that doesn't happen is practice perfect operational security, perfect transaction discipline, stay up to date on all known exploits and patches, constantly be on guard for irreversible scams and exploits, and the big benefit is, "you don't have to trust the bank."

Some huge percent of those people are going to look at you like you are crazy. Do all this work, take on this massive risk, and for what, a problem that most people in the western world have never faced. Most people have not faced any issue with transacting with the traditional finance system, definitely not enough to take on all the labor and risk of being their own bank.

If people won't run their own email, they aren't going to run their own financial institution.

Not the person you asked, I wouldn't say I have a visceral hatred for twitter but I do have a strong dislike.

One issue I find just generally with social media is that it incentivizes some inherent qualities in people that are detrimental to a functioning society. The nature of twitter encourages two behaviors that seem antithetical to constructive dialog.

Tweets are short. This makes it extremely difficult to have nuance in any conversation and makes it really easy for people to take a tweet that might be part of a larger thread or a series of replies out of context. There are lots of examples of a tweet blowing up someone's life and then you come to find out that the reality was, unsurprisingly, unable to be captured in 140 (or 280) characters.

Tweets are algorithmically promoted based on engagement. This really isn't just a Twitter thing, most social media works this way. The problem comes when you combine this with the first issue. "Hot takes" and things that outrage are pretty engaging and end up going far on the site.

So you take these two things together and what you end up with is a lot of content that takes complex topics and turns them into snappy hot takes. People then engage with those and our natural tribal tendencies take over and people fall into camps of either agreeing or disagreeing with the tweet. Now their agreement or disagreement might not be total, but in comes the format of twitter, it's hard in so few characters to express a nuanced opinion like "Well I agree with these parts of the tweet because of XYZ but I disagree with ABC and I think it totally misses the complexities of JKL."

In my experience a lot of twitter ends up devolving into a rabid sort of tribalism. But that's not universal, many people carefully curate who they follow and derive a great deal of value from the site. I think though when people have a strong negative reaction to it, they are probably considering what they (and I) perceive to be the majority case of people following popular twitter accounts (by definition they are popular because they have lots of followers) and taking part in the lower quality dialog trap I described above.

The most charitable version of "managing out" is the process of collecting up all the paperwork to cover your ass legally when you want to terminate someone. In tech that normally means putting someone on PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) with the eventual goal of them failing to meet the plan requirements and then you can terminate them and go, "We gave them a plan and they didn't meet our requirements."

People will tell you, well they could turn things around with the PIP and then we won't have to terminate them, but the term "managing out" makes it really difficult to believe that that's the desired end state. Normally those plans are set up for the person to fail or to make them miserable enough to part ways.

I saw a report somewhere that Teslas current customer base is pretty evenly split when it comes to political affiliation.

I don't think it was this CNN article I'm remembering, but this has the survey data in it.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/03/cars/tesla-buyer-politics/ind...

> Surveys by research firm Morning Consult show that in January about 22% of Democrats were considering buying a Tesla, while 17% of Republicans were looking to purchase one. And that gap has been closing — Republican consideration of buying a Tesla has risen about 3 percentage points just since December's survey. And Republicans are slightly more likely to trust the Tesla brand, 27% compared to 25% among Democrats.

Power and office are two different things. Someone can exercise a great deal of power in advancing or killing legislation while never holding office and allowing all the office holders to call them names on TV.

What matters is what policies are enacted. Here's a nice video on the topic that summarizes a Princeton study https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig

In this episode of Coinbase they learn that authentication and authorization are two different things :D

I was similarly shocked that the only control plane they had to limit access to sensitive information was literally terminating everything. They don't have any kind of access control that would allow them to keep an employee in their system but limit their access. How exactly are they running a "finance company" if they don't have these basic protections.

I could see if they were an early stage startup and just haven't gotten around to it, but they are multiple thousands of employees at this point. In every start up I've worked in, implementing access controls ends up being a priority around 100 employees.

I've never used Coinbase but this revelation makes me not want to ever use them in the future.

I see this argument constantly, that the streets run brown with human feces. I worked in SOMA for a decade, I would commute every day on BART and would walk from Montgomery Street Station or Embarcadero or Civic Center or 16th Street to wherever my office was at the time (different companies, different offices).

SOMA was always pretty clean, Civic Center a bit more hit or miss, 16th Street was generally a bit dirtier and rougher.

The number of times I encountered human feces though was very low, like not even a monthly occurrence. Now I'm sure there's parts of San Francisco that are worse than others, and the walk from 16th Street BART to Potrero Hill would take me past plenty of homeless people camped out on the sidewalks, but I rarely if ever encountered human feces.

But every. single. time. San Francisco comes up, it's the same tired line, "Oh I couldn't deal with the absolute deluge of human feces" which like cool, neither could I and it was fine because what the heck is everyone talking about. I'm not going to claim that every sidewalk and roadway is completely free of poo, but as someone that managed a team of people and would frequently go for walking meetings all around San Francisco, it was never my experience.

I think one thing that keeps me in the Bay Area is economic opportunity, although it remains to be seen how larger macro-economic forces will effect this.

For the last decade though, if you write code in the Bay Area, there is just this massive backstop of companies looking to hire. I've lived here since 2011 and worked for all of 3 startups that entire time, so this isn't so much about job hopping. Instead, because of all the competition for talent in the area you get to enjoy a degree of job security, high pay, and benefits that are pretty nice. It is also a major relief to know that if your company does have to let you go for whatever reason or you just get sick of the work you are doing and want to quit, there are a ton of other places hiring.

With remote work I imagine being physically close to the Bay Area is less of a requirement, but it seems like there is some amount of drive to get people back into offices, so we will see how long that remains viable.

This is really the main reason I stay in the Bay Area, I moved out to the Greater East Bay a few years back and was able to find a nice house in a nice enough area for a reasonable price.

Having easy access to so many employers provides a peace of mind and an implicit pile of leverage that's pretty great.

I'm trying to eat healthy, I'll take a large cup of protons please.

I don't see how this doesn't end with the government basically failing. The modern world is dizzyingly complex, if Congress can't delegate to dedicated agencies how does this all work.

Are there 435 people in this nation well versed enough to write detailed regulations on nitty gritty details about Securities on Monday, regulations on Agriculture on Tuesday, rules for calculating acceptable emissions for Coal Fired Power Plants based on service area, customers, and operating capacity on Wednesday and so forth.

The dismantling of the administrative state leaves us in a precarious position where we either end up completely unregulated (which I know some people would welcome, but as someone that enjoys not getting asbestos in my breakfast cereal, I think we need some regulations). Do we just end up with massive packages of regulations written up by ALEC and other private groups that then get handed to legislators and passed?

Sure an unelected bureaucrat sounds bad, but if the alternative of paying some guy $40k a year to think about these issues and draw up regulation is to let the person being regulated write their own rules, I'll take the former. I suspect the latter regulations will end up being whatever makes the most profit for the person being regulated, and if we all have to breathe lead because it makes some company's profits go up then so be it.

The government isn't always on the side of the common man, but neither are multinational corporations, and the multinational corporations are pretty up front about being in it for themselves.

There's a pair of kids that roam around our neighborhood looking for bugs and lizards and just generally having an adventure.

It's a safe neighborhood and my first instinct was, "Why don't those parents monitor their children" but then I thought for a minute and remembered my own childhood where me and my brothers would walk to the park, look for worms, ride our bikes, go on adventures.

Those kids are welcome to look for bugs and lizards now, everyone keeps an eye out for them, one fell and scrapped his knee and was crying outside our house so I went to check on him and carried him back to his house to get cleaned up. My wife is worried we will get sued at some point if they get injured on our property, but I guess that's the risk I'll have to take so that 2 kids can just play outside and have fun.

It's a losing strategy though, with whitelabeling of streaming services it's easy for a content holder to just stick their stuff behind their own label or play Netflix vs Hulu vs Amazon Prime vs HBO.

Content generation was a good move, but they seem to be pursuing a strategy of trying to always have some mega-hit. This causes them to cancel shows that could grow into valuable content anchors.

Consider "The Office." I'm not going to say that everyone loves The Office, but a lot of people like it and enjoy tossing it on the TV when they are just looking for some background noise or just want to binge something they find enjoyable.

How much of Netflix's content fits this mold though? If you take a look at their longest running shows https://screenrant.com/longest-running-netflix-originals-ran... they just don't run their series for very long. On the plus side this means that they can go invest in other series, but it creates series that don't have the same sticking power.

They also seem to have a real hard time keeping quality up within a series, so you can have a show start off really strong with a great season 1, then season 2 is meh, and then they cancel it. I think this fundamentally makes their catalog less sticky because instead of their original content being something you can come back to again and again, it is disposable.

I've watched my fair share of Netflix original series, but where other series have grown to hold a special place in my memory and I can watch them over and over (Deep Space Nine, King of the Hill, {fill in your favorite long running series here}) I rarely find myself rewatching their original content. With 2 or 3 seasons, the series end up feeling like long mini-series, and not a whole arc that you can sit down and enjoy again and again.

And when I compare Netflix today to Netflix of year's gone by, the thing I find myself missing from the external content catalog was more of those "old favorites" of just watching through Breaking Bad again or enjoying the episode of Bones where they somehow scan a computer virus off of a bone and into their hologram thing.

They also cancel stuff so regularly, it's hard to justify investing time into a show even if you like it because half the time it's getting canceled after a season or two with a shitty cliffhanger as the last episode.

When I look back at a lot of my favorite TV shows, many of them took a while to hit their stride. Even universally liked TV shows will have rough starts where people will go, "Yea, you can just sorta skip season 1."

Over time you just get used to thinking, "oh, this is a Netflix original on Season 1, I'll wait and see if they make more content" which probably fucks with the viewer numbers and they cancel it.

And because they aren't regulated, they can just decide not to provide any coverage at all.

John Oliver covered Health Care Sharing Ministries (often called Health Shares or HCSMs) a while ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFetFqrVBNc