kelp

I think this is the better advice here, and fits with some comments I left elsewhere in this thread about people I know working at MSFT and putting in only a handful of hours a week and still getting raises and promotions.

It's easy to do little when everyone expects everything to take forever because of how heavy the processes are in the organization.

This is totally 2nd hand anecdote, but I've heard stories from several people who worked at MSFT (all 10 plus years ago, so maybe it's changed) who put in a handful of hours of work per week. Still got promoted. Spent most of their time doing what ever, things like playing World of Warcraft in a competitive guild full time.

In all cases, these people ended up leaving to go to highly demanding startups, because that's what they would rather have been doing. But the point is, even at large, high paying, very successful companies there are lots of niches where you can get away with doing very little.

I've only worked at tech companies, and mostly the kind that you want to work at. But basically every company I've worked at has some clause in the employment contract about outside activities. And typically having another full time job would violate the spirit, if not the letter of the employment contract.

That said, some contracting on the side is probably fine, as long as it's not at a competitor.

This reminds me of advice I got from the VP of Eng at my first real full time tech job. This was back around late 1999 / early 2000. Peak of the dot com era.

He told me what most people think of as job security is totally wrong. If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability. But if you're constantly teaching and sharing that knowledge you become incredibly valuable to the organization. That's when you have job security.

Since internalizing that advice, I always try to work myself out of job by ensuring I share anything I know. And I always pass this advice along to others. As you get more seniority in the organization, the way to have more impact and scale is to work through others by sharing your knowledge and helping them get better.

You are not the only person. I would be super happy if we just stopped this thing once and for all. It was kind of funny 20 years ago. It's not anymore.

I have some understanding of your view. However, it often makes me think of living in a museum. Wanting to make the whole city like a museum.

But museums are full of dead things.

Sprawl is probably worse for the environment overall. More driving, more land taken over. More density also reduces that.

For me the cloud is a selling point. Though one that I'm now reconsidering after all this news.

I have been a Ubiquiti customer and proponent for a few reasons:

1. I have two houses, and the cloud feature lets me easily connect to and manage my devices at the other house when I'm not there. Not a frequent use case, but it does happen, and this just makes it easier. Sure I could setup some other remote access options, but this just works out of the box. I also have their security cams and I can easily monitor those remotely, though the video is stored locally at that location.

2. They occupy a middle between consumer gear and enterprise gear. Giving you flexibility and features that you can't really find in consumer gear.They have a fairly wide and frequently updated product line. One house has ethernet jacks in every room, and for a couple of rooms, I replaced those jacks with Unifi In-Wall HD access points. These are great because they are out of the way, you don't notice them, and they still provide wired ethernet ports. So my office has strong Wifi but I also connect my desktop PC to Gig ethernet via the in-wall AP.

At the other house I use the Flex HD access points connected to MOCA adaptors (the one part of my network not made by Ubiquiti) and just tuck them out of the way.

3. They have a fairly well integrated set of products. I have routers, gateways, switches, and APs, all discrete devices, but managed from the same interface. Managed on the web or on my phone. If I add a new AP to a location, I can just adopt it into the network using the app on my phone, the firmware gets updated and it becomes fully managed, taking on the default settings for that site.

All that said, I still really like their product lines, but this episode made me lose a lot of trust.

At least for San Francisco, the seeds of the current shortage started as early as 1912 with the establishment of the planning commission.

See this amazing twitter thread with images of historical news paper clippings.

https://twitter.com/enf/status/753435745272995840

Later on, in 1978, most of the city was down-zoned, and in the EIR (Environmental Impact Report) written at the time, it was clearly predicted that this would result in a supply shortage and increased prices. Unless the city made a point to increase density and development in the industrial parts of the city. That didn't really happy to the scale the EIR said was needed.

See: https://twitter.com/enf/status/775185946941591553?s=20

So here we are.

Not a YC company, but Square was also founded on Ruby. There was a pretty large monolithic Rails app that AFIK, may still exist.

Though we hired a bunch of people from Google, who brought Java, and we went hard towards SOA. Around 2013 there was a Java vs Ruby war in engineering, with many upset people. It ended in peaceful coexistence. But most things in the main payment flow ended up Java.

I was on the boat in 2010. I got off it early when I decided the whole thing was a speculative bubble.

I don't really have a lot of regrets about that though. I have more regrets about selling other things too early, like stock positions I once owned.

Yes, and that doesn't really address the issue of proof of work blockchains wasting energy. With BTC specifically, the incentives are there to waste as much energy as possible as the difficulty and price goes up. Yes, you try to do more work with a unit of electricity, but the net incentive is to add more and more.

Then what? Do you end up with this problem? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26226470

You regulate exchanges like Coinbase and Gemini, so there are no legitimate ways to trade your proof of work cryptocurrency for USD (or your local gov backed currency).

Then the demand for the crypto currency plummets.

In 2010-2011, I traded BTC for USD in person, with a laptop on wifi. And via PayPal with someone I met on IRC, where there was a bot that kept track of your reputation so the BTC sellers would know if it was safe to sell to you.

At that time the price of 1 BTC was about $1 USD.

I think we'd see something similar, if there was an outright ban.

Yeah, when it comes to policy, I think you're right. I'd prefer a tax on the externalities than an outright ban.

Yeah, you're right on the definition.

A lot of datacenters provide substantial utility to others. Like the customers of the services that are hosted in those datacenters.

BTC mining makes the miners more wealthy. In service of the BTC network, which has what utility?

There are quite a number of criminal or at least grey market uses for BTC.

But what are the legitimate uses that are not as well or better served by the traditional payment networks?

Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone.

At this point BTC is a speculative bubble that benefits a very small group to the detriment of the rest of us.

I also have a lot of personal frustration with how mining (more of ETH and others) is impacting the global GPU supply.

A whole cottage industry has cropped up of sites, discords, etc that provide notifications when GPUs come into stock. Not all the issues are related to mining, but it certainly is enough of an issue that Nvidia has announced mining specific cards and is throttling mining on their 3060 series. AMD is rumored to be doing similar soon.

Edit: Replaced 'anti-social Ponzi scheme' with 'speculative bubble' to be more accurate.

This is what floored me when he wrote that essay. For years, a16z has been poring millions into pointless crypto related companies. And they just keep doing it. Yet Andreessen has the audacity to tell us all to build while he chases the decades most trivial investments and asset classes.

I’d imagine the pro would have a better screen. Intended for professional creative work.

Your 3rd point also jumped out at me as I read the post. Seemed like a classic case of someone arguing that a coming disruptor was too low end to be a competitive threat.

In California they are legally required to tell you the range if you ask.

A few things about this. Looking at your second link, I like Joe Fitz as a person, and I know he means well. He is a bit of a "progressive" partisan in SF politics.

The "Progressive" camp (I use quotes because their policies are often about stopping progress, especially in growing business and housing) would often bring out Ron Conways name whenever they needed a boogyman for rich tech who is somehow pulling strings behind the scenes.

I've seen a little bit of behind the scenes where Ron would donate some money to a cause and then just be supportive. But I didn't get the sense that he was some political mastermind behind the scenes like the progressives often paint him as.

Another anecdote. I was at Square when Jack Dorsey announced that Square would no longer be allowed at gun shows or for any other kinds of gun sales. This was around the time of a mass shooting, I forget which one, there have sadly been so many.

Several years later, I was at an small event and panel about gun violence and what would be done about it. Ron Conway was there to introduce the panel and he talked about how, a few years prior, he had gotten very passionate about the issue after some mass shootings. He got a lot of Silicon Valley CEOs and leaders together to both raise money but also see how they could work to reduce gun violence.

At that moment I put it all together. Jack Dorsey had been at that Ron Conway event and that convinced him to shut down gun sales with Square.

The most compelling argument I’ve heard in favor of continuing prop 13, from a good policy perspective is that it lets people stay in their homes. But couldn’t we achieve the same thing by means testing property taxes?

As it is now, the tax rate is set basically based on how long you’ve owned your property. I could be making $$$ and pay very very little. While my neighbor who bought more recently but earns less pays more. This seems deeply unfair to me.

Prop 13 also creates a very volatile tax base for local governments, contributing to the frequent budget issues we see in CA.

Means testing property taxes might make them more volatile than in states that don’t do that, but I can’t imagine it’s worse than the current situation.

Additional prop 13 sets up incentives so homeowners at all income levels are discouraged from selling and moving. And discouraged from allowing more housing supply because they only benefit from increasing housing costs. Taxes that go up with home value tend to blunt some of the benefit of that increasing value.

For better or for worse (I think to some degree, worse) I've found Slack has eliminated about 90% of my email use at work.

My work email is almost all automated emails, communications with people external to the company, and a small percent of internal communications. Nearly everything else is done over Slack.

So in my experience, it certainly is replacing email. Now, I'm not sure that it should. But it is.

Yeah, those are pretty crazy. However, that whole product line is clearly not intended for normal consumers. It’s for video editing, where most products are insanely expensive and that $1000 monitor stand is lost in the noise of all the other production costs.

When Apple releases a new product and it’s not understood why people would buy it, I’m always reminded of this quote from former Palm CEO Ed Colligan when the iPhone was launched:

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Since then I’ve not wanted to bet against Apple.

The reason people will buy these is because they are part of the Apple ecosystem. I have no knowledge of this, but I’m sure their out of the box pairing experience will be much like other Apple products. Hold your phone near it and it just connects. Far more seamless than most Bluetooth pairing.

Any audio controls are built into your phone.

And typically Apple has hardware and software designed to work together. They’ve done this with the iPhone camera to completely disrupt the digital camera industry.

It’s the ecosystem plus the benefits of hardware / software integration.

Clearly it's years of policy at the state and local level that got us here. I've read big chunks of the Environmental Impact Report for the major downsize that happened in SF in the late 70s. That EIR specifically called out that the downzone would make SF much more expensive in the future if we didn't shift to redeveloping much of the industrialized parts of SF.

That redevelopment didn't really happen, and now we're left with this result.

The really unfortunate thing is because of the artificially restricted housing supply (and commercial, thanks Prop M) it ends up creating these perverse incentives. I would think that normally if you have an industry that's growing really well, and creating tons of high paying jobs, you'd want them in your city. But, because we combined a strictly limited supply with great growth in high paying jobs, the reaction is to be hostile to those high paying jobs.

I another problem is this can also lead to not being involved in the local community.

In San Francisco, the collective "tech industry" has long been demonized for various things. IMO, some fair, some not. "Google Buses" taking space at MUNI stops was one for quite a while. Contributing to increasing housing costs is a long time favorite.

But a lot of these come from a culture where you build your company on top of the infrastructure provided by the local community and government. Then build a very successful business on top of that, but have minimal engagement with the local government and community. So you create a perception that you're just taking, and not actually part of the local community.

It seems to me that the Coinbase case just doubles down on this attitude.

In contrast, Salesforce has the largest building in San Francisco named after them, and a huge urban park. I don't see them getting dragged into the anti-tech sentiment. Because I think they've effectively engaged with the local community and given back a lot.

They have a culture of volunteer work, strongly encouraging employees to take time off to volunteer for local causes. They also donate to many local causes. Marc Benioff is certainly involved in politics, and advocating for specific ideas and policies. But because him and his company engage in various ways, and make substantial philanthropic contributions, they are usually respected for it.

This has never been a problem for me. But when I'm running Debian I mostly run testing anyway. Also rarely a problem there.

On Arch I run sudo pacman -Syu almost every day.

You could run something like this to get a warning if there is anything that requires manual intervention: https://github.com/bradford-smith94/informant

I also run my laptop with Snapper: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/snapper

I use a btrfs root volume with btrfs subvolumes instead of separate partitions. I have snapper setup with a pacman hook to take a snapshot before and after every pacman run. So worst case, if something goes horribly wrong, I can boot from an Arch install image into a previous snapshot and unbreak things.

I first started using Debian with 1.3 and even admined a substantial number (hundreds) of Debian systems in the early part of my career. I still find it very comfortable.

Up until a few years ago I'd never even looked at Arch, when I got into it, I went pretty deep and mostly used it for a year or so.

Then recently I tried going back to Debian for a while. I didn't even bother with stable, and installed a testing snapshot, because I like new software and Arch hooked me on rolling releases.

I was doing all this on a quite new Thinkpad which required some tweaks to get things working. I found myself ending up on the Arch Wiki over and over. The Debian wiki does have some good Debian specific stuff, but it's also full of really old and maybe outdated information.

And then Debian didn't have some needed audio firmware packaged, and Arch did, so I made the switch back to Arch. I'd at first resisted it, because Arch has such a higher upfront cost to get installed and going. Especially with my more complex btrfs on LUKS2 (no LVM) setup. (I also had this working on Debian, it took a bit of doing).

And now I'm probably going to stick with Arch (on my laptops), though I remain wistful about Debian. It was my first real Linux experience and a lot of my early career.

The things that strike me about Arch vs Debian:

They have comparable numbers of packages available, and if you count AUR, Arch has basically everything. But Arch has FAR fewer people working on it. By my count Arch has: 57 trusted users (they do packages in the community repo) https://www.archlinux.org/people/trusted-users/ 28 develpers (they do core and extra package repos, and other things) https://www.archlinux.org/people/developers/ 85 people in total

Debian's has: 1434 people on their contributor list for 2020 contributions: https://contributors.debian.org/ these can include bug reports and things. 978 uploading developers: https://nm.debian.org/public/stats/

So Debian has over 10x more people working on the project.

Arch is generally more up to date than Debian testing and unstable (a lot more than stable, but that's obvious) but not by a ton. Generally on Arch for popular packages you'll see a new version show up within 24-48 hours and you'll be rebooting into new kernels very often. Latest kernel.org stable kernel is 5.9.6 Arch is on 5.9.4 https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/linux Debian is on 5.9.1 https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/linux

I don't know the specifics, but Debian is probably even more conservative with the Kernel than they are with other things. That said, you can also run LTS kernels on Arch.

Arch rarely changes upstream defaults, so sometimes you have to tweak and configure things. Debian generally has sensible defaults and takes care of things for you, but does modify upstream more frequently.

I find apt, apt-get and dpkg to be a bit more intuitive to use. But under the hood Debian's package management system is a lot more complex than Arch's relatively simple PKGBUILD.

My last point, and something I've been pondering, is the results from their different philosophies. As an outsider observing and using the results of each communities efforts, these are some things I think.

Arch has a pretty extreme view on simplicity. But because of that, they have a rich, and fast moving ecosystem, with many many packages available.

Some of those choices and results:

rolling release - don't bother with releases, freezes, promoting from one branch to another, etc. This saves a TON of effort, and for desktop / personal use, works great. It's by far what I prefer. Even when I was using Debian, I just would run testing or unstable anyway, so would be rolling there too. I haven't come up with a non-insane way to make this work for production systems, but still pondering that.

no real installer - arch just gives you a boot image that basically lets you manually partition your drive and then some tools (pacstrap, arch-chroot) to get things setup and going. This is radically more simple, this also saves a ton of effort for the developers. So much less to test and maintain.

avoid modifying upstream - Also a massive time saver. Just package up what upstream provides and constantly track that.

wiki instead of doing any real setup or defaults - this is also a huge time saver for the developers. Just let people document how to do things and provide the most bare building blocks. Most arch packages just put files in place, and leave all the rest up to the user.

don't split packages - Arch generally doesn't split packages out like Debian does with the -dev packages, etc. This seems simpler and easier to deal with to me. At the cost of a bit more disk space for users.

All that said, everything I've listed above basically offloads a ton of work to each individual user. That may be the fundamental trade-off here. Debian tries to do a lot more for it's users. But they need 10x more developers to do it.