jjfoooo4

On the path to bankruptcy the boring way, not being able to turn a profit

The essay leads with the assertion that there has been impressive housing progress in CA. While I’m happy to see the optics around Nimbyism change and positive legislation get passed, let’s not celebrate CA too much.

The relevant metric is how much housing gets built, not how much red tape gets snipped away, and by that measure CA is still doing very poorly.

$8 won’t necessarily price out spam accounts. As a counter example, on Tinder there are many fake/spam accounts with premium membership.

I think it’s more that unlike in video games, real football players cannot see behind them without turning their heads and slowing down.

There any many examples of players who thought they were in the clear and celebrated early, only to get tackled and fumble.

Musk stands as good a chance of withholding the golden parachute pay as he did getting out of the acquisition.

This is a kind of poor engineering writing in which the author finds a product to not be tailored to his precise tastes and concludes it is because the company is user hostile and/or doomed.

The bit about Snowflake not being incentivized to care about costs are trivially untrue. The rest of the article perceives trade offs as simple feature gaps.

For example, Snowflake gives the user more latitude to distribute workloads among “warehouses” than other offerings. With poor distribution the author will experience the workload provisioning issues he describes.

Sure but to not even mention churn as something Snowflake is worried about is pretty silly. With the funding environment taking a dramatic turn they (and every other SaaS company) are going to be deeply concerned about price competition and churn

The person to person interaction went back to messengers because most people don’t like the exposure of all their social interactions being laid bare for all to see.

Why exactly do we think Balaji is a genius mind? He strikes me as someone heavily invested in a maximalist version of something he’s seen as the at the forefront of, but I’ve never really found any of his writing or ideas compelling.

I think examining the incentives of the managers is far more likely to be informative than looking at IC engineers. The best security engineer in the world probably couldn’t have prevented this hack if management doesn’t listen to what they say.

It’s a demonstration of the societal value of bad businesses going under. There are certain ideas that people just cannot be swayed against by evidence, especially if they have skin in the game.

The real destructiveness of crypto is the other ideas that have been starved for oxygen during this bubble. I am glad it looks like we are beginning to move on.

If you’re arguing the auditing firms can be games and Tether can’t seem to pass an audit by them, that seems worse

The ins and outs of version control solves a problem that has not yet existed for an intern. It’s not that big a deal to train them on the job, industry practices probably don’t map well to academic settings anyhow.

Not to mention that git is plagued with, as a general rule, utterly confusing defaults for a newbie (and for me, when setting up a machine without my config files!)

The supreme confidence and comfort with presenting evidence free arguments is very much in step with most of his writing

The bad look is that major exchanges are freezing up with these drops

Their employees are also shareholders

Lots of comments decrying the post-war massacres of French on the island.

Say you lead an impoverished country with no international patrons. You've just ejected slaving colonists from the island, but they do not recognize your independence.

What do you wake up each morning worrying about? Re-invasion. A local French population lobbying France to return and restore their property rights is not a minor inconvenience.

War is cruel, especially colonial war.

War is cruel. I’m not seeing anyone saying the individuals who lost their lives deserved it.

But what are you cooking where there’s no other related prep? If you’re using a pan and not a microwave surely there’s a minute or two of work to do.

An evidence free statement by Paul Graham - why should we consider him an expert, other than his wealth?

The limitations of this theory are playing out in the Bay Area (where enforcement is so lax drugs are in effect decriminalized) in real time. There are absolutely large negative externalities from drug addiction, independent of the enforcement regime.

It’s difficult because the minimum effective dose is quite subjective. My doctor even suggested my continuing to increase my dose without prompting, but I’ve paused at 15.

The pitfalls are real but personally, being 3-4 months in, it’s been such a game changer in my temperament and quality of life.

I appreciate how once installed I just don’t have to think about it at all. If I fly somewhere, it pops up and confirms where I am, but otherwise it simply works flawlessly and entirely in the background for years on end.

I’ve found it very helpful to take a bit more “forced” approach in maintaining relationships, especially as I am very poor at remembering names and biographical details.

I just have a notion doc called “people.” At first people have just a name and a physical description, along with where I met them. That just helps me remember names.

But with my partner, different subsections have emerged, with gift ideas, movies to watch, fun things we could do.

The approach outlined in this doc seems to focus on scaling the number of people you can keep in touch with. I struggle to see how this is different than traditional social media - eg the impersonal happy birthdays we’ve all come to ignore in Facebook.