marktangotango

> It seems to me that this is a valuable skill to aspire to.

It's simple actually, the techniques in winning friends and influencing people is a good place to start. Most people love talking about themselves and their interests. In reality, for anyone seeking relationships and real connections, "tricking" people to talk about what they want is empty, hallow, and disappointing. It will almost never be reciprocated.

> the war I wage every night when I get a second rush of energy from mind-altering books

Two things I've experienced with this. First is that there seems to be a half-life on this activity. One day one may ask themselves, what tangible benefit have I gained from all these germs of wisdom and information I've gleaned over the years? Second is that invariably, outside of "hard" disciplines, there's nearly always a counter argument or viewpoint that can be equally compelling.

So for myself, the way two decades of intellectual curiosity manifests is the conversations I have with my kids. They generally think I'm a bore, but sometimes I relate something that seems to give them a spark.

Side note; what does a self described chemist do these days? Seems like Breaking Bad spurred a lot of interest in the field, but as someone who minored in chemistry many years ago, the actual job prospects seemed limited. And research seemed very stodgy (to me at least). If you don't mind sharing, what's your background and what types of things are you working on?

The worst part of being a developer in the midwest is the companies; banks, financial services, insurance, telecoms, insurance, banks. Did I mention insurance and banks? Of course there is more variety, but I think most would agree there's not a lot of cutting edge stuff going on "here" generally.

Growing remote oppurtunities do mitigate that, but the number of companies trying to "modernize" their infrastructure is... depressing.

I found Peace War very interesting on two axis. First, the exploration of human intelligence augmentation and second the commoditazation of nuclear weapons impact on politics and "state" ie when the state no longer has a monopoly on violence. I personally did not enjoy Rainbows End much, whatever that's worth.

> However, we do expect that everyone is putting in similar amounts of effort to their peers.

I think there's a distinction here between two types of "work" (at least). Work that moves the product/business forward in tangible ways, in addition to just adding features (decrease down time, reliable repeatable deployments, reproducible, easy to understand configuration, fast bug remediation) and work that doesn't.

I think we've all experienced teams who switch frameworks and libraries at a whim, or worse yet, adopted entirely new languages "just because". They usually don't ask permission, or if they do the sell the decision makers on some hula balu about "increase productivety" or whatever when they really just want to use new cool X. Or howabout the frontend teams that switch naming conventions, and never rename the old stuff before starting another naming convention?

The point being there are a lot of developers who waste a lot of time "working" on things that just don't matter. The business never asked for it, it serves no purpose or real need other than to scratch someones itch (or build their resume). I maintain if wasting time doing nothing is "stealing" from the company, then so is this.

> I feel insignificant just by reading the first phrase.

I often wonder about the intentions of those who post of these types of comments. Being charitable one might suppose the parent is offering a backward sort of compliment to the authors. Something like "Great job, beyond my capabilities, I'm glad someone is working on these things".

There are a lot of less charitable formulations; why should other readers care about parent commenters insecurity? Does parent commenter not appreciate the work that goes into studying these topics? Was parent commenter told they were "smart" to often as a child and never learned to exert themselves academically? Etc.

Although this post is mostly in jest, I really am curious what prompts these comments, comments of this type are quite reliable.

> prototypical example of the "stupid and dilligent,"

I think stupid is too strong here, and misleading even. It allows those who are clearly not stupid from realizing they can fall into the same behavior. Simply not caring is sufficient.

> documentation for the SoC and other components

Exactly; they're basically reselling discount (or below cost) Broadcom SOCs. I'm pretty sure Broadcom will not continue that arrangement!

> It looks to me they could have kept their ORM for the 80% cases it works great, and hand tune the 20% that could be problematic. Just like any other optimization problem.

It doesn't make for "good" blog posts I suppose. Personally I find these discussions to be tiresome and depressing. Take for example this seven year old post from the creator of Hibernate[1]. Predates a lot of todays "seniors". This field is clearly stuck in local maxima on this and a few other areas. Will there ever be anything more than this endless trial and error?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2cnw8x/what_or...

I once shared this outlook, but when one considers their own ideas about the lifestyle "wealthy" entails, and run some numbers, specifically determine the annual spend for that lifestyle, one will quickly realize the truth. A million can be blown in a year, or SWR'd (safe withdrawal rate) at $40k a year indefinitely. Can you retire on $40k a year? Would you want that level of income and lifestyle?

Of course this depends on location and cost of living. I am referring to someone in the US.

Edit: Specifically, does anyone (in the US) consider a $40k year income to qualify as "Wealthy"? Since that's what's being discussed here.

> would easily bring you 1M total investments.

I think this is the disconnect with GP, $1M isn't what anyone can really call "wealthy" nowadays. Yes, it's a lot of money, but does not allow one to live what most people consider to be a rich lifestyle.

I'm curious what this statement is based upon, does anyone have specific references?

This is so true, I was once burned by an unfortunate mis-characterization of an acronym for a service I had created. It benefits us all to keep in mind that sales/marketing types prioritize different things than technical merit or clear naming!

I recall the 1980 film inspired by the book to be "not bad", but it's been decades since I saw it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dogs_of_War_(film)

Congrats to the authors for publishing this, it's really impressive!

That's the optimistic outcome, the pessimistic outcome is the miners will fork "eth-classic" and keep going. It's up to the reader to decide which is most likely, or both.

Who does the work is immaterial to a lot of people. When Oracle bought Sun, literally everyone knew they'd move to a paid commercial license eventually. Which they did. I personally am amused at this sequence of events. It happened to other Sun products as well; open office, and mysql primarily. Commercial licensing didn't work for those open source projects either. What did Oracle actually gain from the Sun acquisition? With this news it seems like nothing. No tears shed for Larry.

For a spacefaring civilization reliant upon chemical rockets, less gravity is better. Point being Mars is a better place for such a civilization, not earth.

My dream device for clustering is dual core 1Ghz+, 1GB ddr4 (ddr3 in a pinch) and wired Gb ethernet. In bulk (where bulk ~ 100) price $5-10. Some of the allwinner and rockchip based pi clones get close but price is a lot more.

Gobi desert doesn't have 1/3 earth gravity.

That doesn't really hold up though. California has a lot desert and was sparsely settled until the gold rush for example. Also, in situ resource utilization is an area where technology and innovation are certain to provide advantage.

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

Spacex is building the transcontinental railroads of the solar system. There is mind boggling upside for them. I'm kinda disappointed Blue Origin seems to have fallen in a rut. I'm sure Musk will be happy to provide transportation for Bezos space colony construction projects!

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

Edit My point isn't to disparage Bezos, but to highlight the fact that anyone with grand aspirations in orbit/solar system will have to go through Musk and Spacex until a competitor does appear. RE space colonies, I believe the natural sequence of events for space tourism is: sub orbital, oribital, long term orbital (a small space "hotel") culminating in orbital habitat ala O'Neil Cylinders. Cheap kg to orbit enables all of that.

> I was extremely wrong and even felt a little guilty that I didn't bring it up sooner since they can and should be making more.

That's considerate of you, but I don't share your concern for two reasons. First data is readily available, so if they want to know they can. Secondly I've found that in general people value familiarity and stability more than maximizing salary. This is a personal choice they make and it's fine. In fact it's well known phenomenon that's been written about extensively [1]. In my personal network, very few are prone to "job hopping", many stay at the same company on the same apps for 5 or 10+ years. In these cases developers risk skill atrophy, which is a closely related concern.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F

Where would one learn more about these exotic parts?

Dreamcast hardware did this sort of "tiled" rendering if I recall correctly.

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/dreamcast/#archite...

I'd also add as a bystander, that fpga providing onboard hardware for things like DDR3/4 and PCIe seem like significant development. Really tremendous performance is available in these devices.

Ha, I had not heard of orbital rings yet, thank you. My comment there is "who will think of the children/astronomers" parodying the simpsons. Although that applies space elevators as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RybNI0KB1bg

> I firmly believe that space-based solar power collection is our most likely future.

Isn't this the same capital expenditure analysis your post starts with though? How many billions does it cost to get the solar panels to orbit in sufficient quantity? And ground stations to receive the energy beams (microwave presumably). This is where Musk/Spacex push for cheap kg to orbit really matter. Even in the 70's they worked out that mining the moon for raw materials to build space based solar was much more economical.

One thing I've noticed is that the perception of reality varies by scope of the viewer. An example I've lived a few years ago; from a high level (c-suite) an acquisition can have subsidiarys that aren't aligned with the main business and will never meet the profit margin required. Thus if the low margin subsidiary loses customers and whithers away, it's not really a big deal. In fact it's probably favorable to the bottom line for the subsidiary to do the bare minimum to keep the lights on. Ideally the subsidiary can be sold or spun off. Sometimes that's not possible.

I lived the smaller scope as a software development manager in the subsidiary. Merit increases were minimal or non existent, annual layoffs were normal. My peers were passionate about the customers and continuing to support them even though it was clear from the C-level actions they cared nothing for the business. At my level there was a lot of anguish and consternation about the customers and business. As expected, the subsidiary started seeing a lot resignation as the most experienced people left, accelerating the decline. My team saw 75% attrition in 6 months. Customers started leaving.

The old saying "perception is reality" has some bearing here. I still ask myself, is this not the outcome the executive sought in this situation? I personally believe it was, no one could be that incompetent, could they?