logfromblammo

The vast majority of software development work outside of startups and the FAANGs is cleaning up someone else's garbage, usually without enough budget allocated to be really thorough about it.

It's a toss-up as to whether your management will be receptive to any plans for migrating over to industry best-practices or not.

If are an "A" employee, and you can't handle working with "C" employees, do yourself a favor, and ask to look into the code base at the interview, then decline if you notice too many bad smells. Otherwise, you will have plenty of future work teasing things out of the big ball of mud, fixing them, and then throwing them back into the blob.

Half of all code-writers are worse than the median. And the median coder will happily copy-paste the first code that works into six different places, rather than spare a thought for future maintainability. Then they move on, you get hired, and will have to discover for yourself that the same broken code is in six-different places, now with subtle differences due to lazy bug-fixes.

Most companies can't compete with FAANGs on salary and benefits, and can't compete with startups on coolness factor. There will be some cargo-culting. Your co-workers will be less skilled than you, but will also have more seniority. You may, in fact, be able to do all their jobs by yourself, in less time. Resist this temptation.

How does this sound? Do your own job the first 2 hours or less of every workday, and then slack off while looking busy for six. Repeat until retirement. Mediocre companies won't reward you for being a better developer. They just don't know how to measure it. And they don't have former developers with still-current skills in management. The way to translate your former expectations over to a different kind of company is to look for a CTO that comes from a similar background as you, and shares those expectations. Other companies don't even know what good code looks like, or how much it costs--even in 2020, after 40 years of software gradually worming its way into every other kind of business. They're probably still using the Excel spreadsheet created by the co-founder in 1992, with all the VBA macros in it, and source control faked by making copies of it with different dates in the file name. It works, so why not?

If those software best-practice process requirements are not enforced from the highest levels, all those sloppy, below-median coders that get hired will drag the company standard down to what they can handle, or, even worse, turn the practices into pointless cargo-culting. Those code reviews could be overly focused on tabs vs spaces, or ensuring that names are in camelCase rather than snake_case, and putting try-catch blocks around code that does not throw exceptions (to name some examples that may or may not be actual anecdotes from my personal experience).

Also frustrating considering that Republicans set their asking price at unalloyed, unmitigated evil, and allow themselves to be haggled down to merely abhorrent. Then Democrats give it to them. It's like trying to sell a banana for $100000 and agreeing to settle for $1000, then crying "but I already gave up 99% of what I wanted!" in order to justify taking $999 profit on a $1 fruit.

I would respect Democrats more if they had a "F.U. moment" and did something like arresting and imprisoning executive employees under the capitol building for contempt of Congress, for failure to produce documents necessary for oversight, that are required by law to be furnished on demand.

In the 2015 parlance of Back to the Future Part 2, they "got no scrote".

Please don't descend into strawman arguments and false dilemmas.

It is not a binary choice between the militaristic, public-hostile police we have now, and no police at all.

As it is, the police in schools frequently do inappropriate things, such as bodyslamming 40kg girls or putting children in handcuffs for acting up in class. A school security guard, charged with protecting the students and staff, with no authority to arrest or punish anyone, would do fine.

> "the new substance is crystalline, occurs in two-dimensional sheets, and could one day be useful in advanced electronics."

> "the material itself remains unstable and it quickly dissolves when the heat and pressure are relaxed."

So... advanced electronics that can only exist at 1.4 million atmospheres and 4000 degrees C? What are we building, here, computers that only work inside the sun?

By this insane standard, what material would not one day be useful in advanced electronics?

Sounds like a good reason to show your receipt... at the returns counter.

Is that a rhetorical question?

There is no reason to have police that don't follow the Peelian principles.

The expectation of the public is that police should prioritize deterrence and investigation of property crimes above assembling a massive show of force to deprive peaceful protesters of their 1st amendment rights to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition government for redress of their grievances.

Cops that are busy kettling up protesters for later official intimidation and violence are not available to respond to crimes happening elsewhere.

Business owners are better off with insurance, alarms, and dedicated private security that won't abandon their protective duties every time they feel like pepper-spraying a liberal in the face for no apparent reason.

For those not familiar with why cobras were mentioned above:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Long story shortened:

  1. British are ruling India
  2. Concern about cobras
  3. Establish dead cobra bounty
  4. Cobra population crashes
  5. Entrepreneurs breed cobras
  6. Bounty program halted
  7. Breeders release stocks
  8. More cobras than before

The source story is just an anecdote, but there are plenty of historically verifiable examples of the effect, not necessarily involving cobras, specifically.

Unrecognized item in bagging area!

See also farmers' produce stands that are often completely unmanned and run 100% on the honor system.

People take fruit and vegetables, and put the money in the box--or if the farmer is tech-savvy enough, through their phones. And even if a few people don't pay, they still get more money from their inventory than shipping it to a wholesaler or a grocery store. (As far as I know, direct to a local gourmet restaurant pays best.)

For an extra employee on the duty roster, you're probably paying minimum $7 per hour, every hour that store is open to the public--probably 16 hours a day, every day, for a big box. That's $41k per year, plus the per-employee costs for 2 or 3 people, which are probably another $60k, unless you're an employer that doesn't offer benefits (i.e. Wal-Mart).

The employee would likely have to stop $200/day of petty theft. That doesn't seem impossible, but the problem is that if you pay your employee minimum wage, they don't actually care that people are stealing from their employer, because they have no actual incentive to do anything beyond what is the bare minimum requirement to avoid getting fired, which may be just catching one shoplifter per day.

And then, after all, if one caught every shoplifter, every day, people would stop trying, and one might miss quota on later days. The person whose job depends on shoplifters has a perverse incentive to encourage shoplifting, just as cobra-catchers have an incentive to breed and release snakes.

So the problem is more that it's too expensive to hire someone at a rate high enough to make them care about doing their job well, instead of just keeping it indefinitely while gaming the right metrics.

Change of ownership happens at the point of sale. Toss them a cheery "no, thanks," and walk on by. They have no authority to detain you.

Same with Fry's. Not the same with Costco; there, you're subject to the membership agreements.

This has already been tried. I, personally, hated it so much that I just stopped using the self-checkouts whenever possible, because employee checkout was faster, even with the wait for customers queued before me. The weight check always brought the checkout process to a screeching halt, requiring an employee to come along and restart it, even with the smallest baskets in the best of conditions.

Instacart also manages to "lose" the meat products out of our orders somewhere between store and front door. And all they do is refund the price of the items.

So then you have to go out to the grocery store yourself anyway.

This lobbying occurring after licensing talks with the incumbent manufacturers had failed.

This is why I taught my kids to label units.

( 1 girl / 3 students at table L + 1 girl / 3 students at table R ) can't be added, because the denominators are different.

To fix that, you can multiply by the factors ( 3 students at table L / 6 students at both tables ) and ( 3 students at table R / 6 students at both tables ) so you get ( 1 girl / 6 students at both tables + 1 girl / 6 students at both tables ) = ( 2 girls / 6 students at both tables ).

To hammer it home, you point to the table that has 2 or 4 students at it, and ask someone how to add the proportion of girls at that table to the two already under consideration.

So, essentially, 230 was a gift by legislators to businesses running walled gardens at the expense of those being paid to patrol the bazaar.

In which case the inventor of the technology would be remunerated according to the consumers' choices, and not by the choices of a handful of manufacturer gatekeepers.

Perhaps at some point, shops that only use blade-stop safety saws would recoup that cost on lower employee health insurance premiums?

Licensing the technology does not mean it must be put into all models of saw! You don't have to buy the heated seats and built-in backseat entertainment center when you buy a car, either.

And how much was the seat belt actually worth while it was patented? How much of that value should go to the inventor of the seat belt?

Is 10% reasonable? Too much or too little? How much value should be captured by the consumers that wear the belts? How much by the manufacturers that licensed them voluntarily? How much from compulsory installations? How much value should be captured by unlicensed installations?

Should the value of raised speed limits count, or just the direct impact of reduced collision injury severity?

Are we discounting the possibility that the patent licensing fee demanded by the saw-stopping inventor was actually reasonable in the US, thanks to hyperinflated medical costs, and the saw manufacturers were basing their decisions on international sales in countries with sane healthcare systems?

I can't really get behind incumbent manufacturers failing to pay the inventor of a technology a significant portion of its value, which is, at minimum, the cost of hundreds of severely injured or completely severed fingers.

It isn't just that they wouldn't pay the license, it's also that they didn't develop the safety tech themselves in the first place. They presumably applied the Fight Club formula, to determine that the company's liability when people slice fingers off with one of their saws was not enough to justify the cost of actually doing anything about it (beyond writing into the operator's manual "let's don't cut any fingers off, mmmkay?").

If one of the incumbents had invented it, the others would have licensed or counter-patented incremental improvements and cross-licensed, recognizing it as a competitive threat.

But since an outsider patented it, that's a minor threat. What can a little guy do against a 100-year tool brand? And if he has to enforce, that means they're not playing by the rules, which are to pay the inventor's license, or wait until the patent expires.

Why are severed fingers part of anyone's business model?

I would absolutely argue that it's immoral to have more money than 500 times the median individual income. That means anyone with individual wealth (after liquidating everything to cash) of more than about $33M is a selfish, exploitative asshole. That's not illegal, of course, but I can still think ill of their avarice.

500 times median individual income allows you to pay your fiduciary manager 2.5x median while you earn 12.5x median for doing nothing at all, forever. That is without a doubt a permanent luxury lifestyle, firmly wedged in the upper class, with a dependent business that is infinitely sustainable with a single client. But it isn't so much that one couldn't spend it all on luxury consumer goods, with a bit of effort. It's enough for up to ten full-time personal servants, while eating filet and lobster every night. Six security guards, at two per 8-hr shift, one personal chef, one executive assistant, one driver, and one house-cleaner. Seems like plenty to me, but as a filthy prole, what do I know?

Spending the money back into the economy is the saving grace of the wealthy. Letting the money go, so that it can be someone else's to spend for a little while, is why it is okay for the rich to have lots of money (but not "too much"). They keep the yacht builders and golf course architects in business.

When someone has "too much" money, they can't spend it fast enough to avoid creating a wealth singularity. They mostly invest it and lend it, weakly throwing it out in a long elliptical orbit, but that money accumulates more money on its journey through apolucre and then collides back at perilucre. Only spending it can send it out beyond the event horizon, and permanently lessen the mass of the hoard, and possibly keep someone else's star from evaporating too small to sustain its energy reactions.

A billionaire can pay their fiduciary management company $5M per year, taking $25M per year in investment income (adjusted for inflation, forever). They can fund a personal servant army/entourage of 350 people, with an average annual salary of $70k, still leaving $500k to spend on their own. The Queen of all the Commonwealth nations has about 1000 servants in the UK, distributed over several palace properties. You literally have to be a national institution to have that many employees.

I don't think section 230 would be able to establish absolute immunity from liability that does not originate from moderation activity. If that were the case, it would be gamed to Hell and back with disparate legal entities and straw-man corporations, such that the immunized entity would book all the revenue, and the liability-exposed entities would be rendered judgment-proof.

If Google takes 30% of revenues from all apps on the play store, should it not assume 30% of product liability for the content found therein? It seems like a common sense rule, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is anywhere in law, or that civil courts apply it.

If you put up a paywall on your forum, and it is a platform for libel, you damned well should be liable, at minimum to the extent to which you profited from the wrongful behavior, and possibly lessened by the extent to which any libel is usually moderated away.

If the moderation in place is so strict that it is producing significant false positives, why should the false negatives be protected? Having both is a symptom of sloppy, insufficiently earnest moderation.

I would assume from the actions of Twitter that they implicitly endorse content from people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and I would assume from Facebook that they implicitly endorse misinformation campaigns. They are making money on their failure to moderate to their own published standards. Should that be legally protected? Section 230 presumably makes no exception for lazy, insufficient moderation.

A guy like that, you wonder how he can even poop, not having a gram of asshole in his whole body.

Clearly, you don't need to be an asshole to be successful. But do you have to be near one?

When Jobs was right there next to him, his body 8% anus by mass, being asshole enough for ten ordinary men, how do we know whether Woz's success was due in part to Jobs' abrasive personality, or in spite of it? Didn't Jobs pull some dirty business tricks to cheat Woz out of some of his ownership?

The pre-lithographic masks for chips are copyrighted (prior to algorithmic modifications for sub-wavelength interference features). The schematics for printed circuit boards are copyrighted. (But only to the extent that they were not produced by programs; robots can't author copyrightable work.)

The process for transforming a notional chip mask into one that can be used to actually produce chips on a fabrication device that uses a particular wavelength is going to be covered by multiple patents, unless the chip fab is more than 20 years old, so you can't copy the post-transformation masks, either.

The whole design of the hardware is only patentable, and only to the extent that the patent claims apply to it.

So if you take an entire electronics device, reduce it down to a block/circuit diagram, then use that to create a new schematic, and use the schematic to produce another electronic device with identical function, you have not violated copyright in doing so, nor are the schematics and masks derivative works.

In the case of the book that describes a process of manufacturing, the process part of it is like a recipe. It is only the supplemental prose that is copyrighted. So you would have to strip out the introduction, descriptions of specific applications, etc.

That is why map-makers used to put fake towns or streets on maps, beyond the borders of the area that is purportedly mapped. So on a map of Pennsylvania, they might place a town called "Fakesburg" in the greyed-out part of Delaware that adjoins Pennsylvania (a literal grey area), and put a "Trapsville" in the greyed-out New York, the Pennsylvania portion of the paper being presented as factual, and the margins as copyrightable creativity. But the courts called this out as bullshit, so the mapmakers stopped. Some elements of copyright still exist in mapping, but only to the extent that the map diverges from literal facts. For instance, if the widths of roads are exaggerated, and colors added, for the purposes of making an infographic for a traffic throughput data set, the creative combination of facts could possibly be copyrightable, but little prevents someone else from independently combining the same two sets of facts into an all-new (but similar-looking) infographic.

In the case of hardware, the lowest-level circuit diagram is the factual map of the device. But there are many ways to lay it out in physical reality, as to how many layers to use, where to route the traces, which subunits to place in the blocks, how to label the components with printed text, etc. So you couldn't make a photographically identical copy, but you could make a copy that does exactly the same thing with a redesigned PCB.

I stand corrected.

Does taking a third of the revenues imply endorsement?

Yes. They are partially liable if you went through them.

Censorship of any content implies approval of all remaining content. One can't be protected from liability as a common carrier if one is curating.

So if you have been provably harmed by anything Google has served you, you can sue the owner of the content and join Google as a defendant.

(Not a lawyer.)

I think the sticking point is that this method of acquiring money is only available to those who are already have more money than any one person could ever spend, and the money that is acquired often comes from those who do not have enough money to retire yet, via institutional investors that manage insurance, pensions, and retirement accounts.

That is, people who could retire now and live without worry for the next thousand years or more are taking more money from people who are toiling away to try to retire by age 70, and making it more difficult to accomplish that goal.

Capturing other companies' profits is just step 1 in the plan to put as much of that money in your own pockets as possible.

If you're willing to "steal" from other companies, why wouldn't you also "steal" from the owners of your own company? Why pay a dividend when you can pay bonuses?

Noncitizens are protected by the Constitution. It's just that those who are blithely violating the rights of noncitizens simply don't care about obeying the laws themselves.

A document without maintainers is dead.

The weather in Indianapolis is tolerable most of the year.

Their biggest problem is that they are on Eastern time, despite being way too far west for it, observe DST, and start public schools way too early.

Also, they have developed traffic circle cancer all over their north side.

It creates an incentive to establish legal domicile in a high-rent neighborhood and then always be somewhere else, "traveling", and taking care of all your business over the network.

So you can own/lease a broom closet or pied-a-terre in Expensiveton, maybe rent it out intermittently or to a "roommate", and actually work and sleep in Cheapsville.

If home address has an impact on take-home pay, it will be gamed just as hard as all the other metrics.